A warning may be in order that our civilization is not in good shape, furthermore, that awareness of this fact and analysis of the disorder are among the foremost obligations of intellectual leadership. Both require a return to basic questions, such questions as are usually answered at the beginning of things. A thinking person should [...]
As I watch them in the park spry old couple, ninety odd hearts re-bored and tooled up with walking, hearing, seeing aids a twinkle even in the eye leaning close, holding hands these taller, longer-living things our ever-lengthening DNA string she blushes, he grins, I wonder who we must thank? The gentleman scientist medicine man? [...]
The tragedy of modern education, perceived with such brilliance by G.K. Chesterton, is that it has left us perilously ignorant of who we are, where we are, where we have come from, and where we are going. We are lost and blissfully unaware that we are heading for the abyss. Such is the price we [...]
Strong Constitutions: Social-Cognitive Origins of the Separation of Powers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) by Maxwell A. Cameron In this imaginative and readable book, Cameron (University of British Columbia) provides a learned defense of the separation of powers. While not disputing the importance of the separation of powers as a source of restraint in democratic theory, the [...]
The 2013 film “The Lone Ranger” presents a challenge to the nationalist myth that undergirds the American identity. It is to be hoped that the film will compel Americans who see it to think more deeply about what drove the settlement of the West, as well as at what price and by what means Americans [...]
The problem with Republican Party outreach runs deeper than a failure to offer policies tailored to ethnic interests, such as amnesty for illegal immigrants. The core of the GOP demographic crisis isn’t just racial, it’s generational and cultural: as Leon Hadar has noted of the Asian vote, “younger and more educated Asian-Americans are drifting by large [...]
As far back as I can remember, my mother always had new books to offer me. When I was just staring to read, she gave me Dr. Seuss and Richard Scary books. These were my favorites. As soon as I was old enough to ride my bike any distance at all, she had me get [...]
There is an old saying, that if Democrats were to propose burning down the White House Republicans would counter with a plan that would burn it down “better” for half the price, though it would take half again as long to accomplish. I have been reminded of this saying repeatedly over the past several weeks as [...]
As a civilization we have abandoned our belief in the archetypes—not just of man and woman but even of good and evil. We’ve been trying to chart our course without them. But they haven’t gone away, and an archetype spurned can be a dangerous thing. In his famous press conference on the plane coming back from Rio, [...]
In this video, Dr. Bradley Birzer of Hillsdale College brings his background as a Kirk biographer to bear on Kirk’s magnum opus: The Conservative Mind. […]
The present article is a reply to the recent piece in these pages by Timothy Gordon and Stephen Jonathan Rummelsburg, which in turn was a response to an article by Dr. Kevin Brady and me, again in The Imaginative Conservative. I speak here for myself, leaving my co-author to file his own reply if he [...]
The late Mel Bradford (d. 1993) was one of the leading paleo-conservative scholars of the South, teaching at the University of Dallas until his unexpected death due to complications from surgery. Bradford’s scholarly work was primarily in the field of Southern literature (his writings on Faulkner received particular attention), although he branched out from literary [...]
The fear, anxiety, and rancor that dominate contemporary politics would be inconceivable without reference to the New Deal, for the 1930s and early 1940s marked the last time Americans engaged in substantive deliberations about the nature and future of their country. When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, he promised to undo as much [...]
Sir Francis Walsingham The thought of a new book, from a proverbially establishmentarian imprint, on Elizabeth I’s spymaster is not one that immediately gladdens the heart. Anyone who has actually been expected to spend time in modern England – rather than simply viewing it through a Downton-Abbey-generated haze – knows perfectly well that [...]