A smart word, an attentive ear, and the quick gift of a book can change a person… I have had the wonderful fortune of writing a weekly essay for The Imaginative Conservative since its founding in the summer of 2010. A lot of words and a lot of ideas. Most of them, I hope, were [...]
When the second generation of Americans inherited the leadership of the republic, they must have felt, in equal measure, a mix of immense pride and a sense of dread… I often imagine how difficult it must have been to be the son of a Founding Father. Can you imagine trying to live up to what [...]
Even if one disagrees with the authors of Selfish Libertarians and Social Conservatives, they have provided a scholarly model for how the media and academia should act: in calmness, in restraint, but also with open vigor and manliness… Selfish Libertarians and Socialist Conservatives?: The Foundations of the Libertarian-Conservative Debate by Nikolai Wenzel and Nate Schlueter (Stanford [...]
Where today can we turn not for opinion, but for actual facts and events, names, and dates—unburdened by emotion and vitriol? Over the past year, I—like, I’m sure, most Americans—have found the official news outlets to be more than untrustworthy. When I was in high school, I became a news junky. Being involved in debate [...]
Because we Americans have become so infatuated with the power and person of the presidency, we have forgotten our republican duty to promote our sovereignty in legislative bodies… If you were interested in finding the single harshest and yet reasoned critic of the twentieth-century nation-state, you would not, strangely enough, turn to a libertarian. You [...]
The terribly fragile fabric of society has revealed itself all too frequently in recent months. Really, for a more than a year now, the social fabric of Western and American society has been rent by sporadic if not quite predictable violence at home and abroad. Whether it’s terrorists driving trucks into innocent crowds in the [...]
In its short, sharp life, “The Burke Newsletter” offered a model for all of us hoping to change the world through ideas, not ideology, through persuasion, not violence… Edmund Burke In “The Conservative Conspiracy of the 1950s” I had the privilege of writing about the alliance formed among Russell Kirk, Peter Stanlis, and other [...]
Why do conservatives conserve? And what is worth conserving? What is free enterprise? What is law? What is dignity? If these questions intrigue you, join Dr. Bradley Birzer as he explores answers to these questions.... This address was given at the Free Enterprise Institute’s 40th Annual Founders’ Day Breakfast (October 2016). Subscribe to our YouTube channel here. Books by [...]
Perhaps if we offer shelter to the poor and honor the wishes of our founders, we could end our abject imperialism and restore a foreign policy worthy of a republic. Is there a conservative foreign policy? If so, no one person has articulated it well enough to create a consensus among those on the right. [...]
That most overrated academic fop of the twentieth century, Peter Gay, spent a considerable amount of time and vitriol in the 1950s taking swipes at Russell Kirk, believing the duke of Mecosta a superficial romantic stuck in the past, fighting for the most worthless and transient of causes. In 1961, he finally wrote something of [...]
Mark Greaney understands this chaotic and violent world better than anyone currently in academia or, seemingly, in the media... True Faith and Allegiance: A Jack Ryan Novel (New York: G.P. Putnam, 2016) If I want to understand the things that transcend this world and inhere in all persons, I read Russell Kirk. If I want [...]
Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House revolves around three intrepid explorers who accept Professor Montague’s invitation to spend a summer living there, getting to know one another and getting to know—intimately—the workings of the house… Though she never made it past the young age of forty-eight, Shirley Jackson was known for two important things [...]
Whereas Adam Smith had warned that government must intervene in the economy from time to time, Edmund Burke believed any interference in the economy on the part of government to be a violation of the natural law… […]
Christianity, Edmund Burke held, is the great equalizer. Not only is it the first force in the world to recognize the moral equality of all men and women, but it allows the high and the low to become one in their equal desire for the good society… In a manner similar to Cicero with the [...]