Star Trek is a modern allegory and mythology for late Western Civilization. The series worked best when Captain Kirk stood for willful impulse; Mr. Spock for aristocratic reason; and Dr. McCoy for democratic passions… The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman (St. Martin’s, 2016) As [...]
Russell Kirk’s life and labors can offer a potential salve to the recent struggles of American conservatism, which is threatened by a pall of superficiality and cynicism. Russell Kirk: American Conservative by Bradley Birzer (University Press of Kentucky, 2015) In the two decades since the death of Russell Amos Augustine Kirk, American conservatism has struggled. National [...]
In a certain sense, Thomas Jefferson’s allies and enemies invented him in the years following his resignation from the Washington Administration. To the former, he became something akin to a Second Coming of the Savior, while to the latter, he seemed nothing less than a version of the Anti-Christ… Confounding Father: Thomas Jefferson’s Image in [...]
For the “hive” that is the democratic mindset, the very spirit of democracy pushes its adherents to surmount limits, and to behave as one man with the will of a god. Writing of France in 1790, Edmund Burke asked exactly how one might categorize the revolutionary government. Is it a monarchy of the democracy, a [...]
In 1962, a little-known professor of English published an important book that demonstrated how the experience of the twentieth century gave the lie to the misplaced optimism of the nineteenth century… From Utopia to Nightmare by Chad Walsh (Harper Collins, 1962) Almost no one remembers Chad Walsh anymore. Our loss. A professor of English at Beloit [...]
In addition to the brilliance of his thought, Friedrich Hayek left us the lesson of his example: to search using our imagination, but always to know that what we find we find in humility, thereby recognizing our limits as one life in the long life of man, one mind in the long line of minds… Hayek [...]
Friedrich Hayek’s individualism is not the Rousseauian individualism of the person stripped naked of all his relations and his history, but rather that of Edmund Burke, with each person both encumbered and liberated by the little platoons to which we all belong… Sometime during the early to mid-1980s, I encountered the work of Friedrich August von [...]
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 [...]