Liberal democracy is unnatural. It is a product of power and security, not innate human sociability. It is peculiar rather than universal, accidental rather than teleologically preordained. And Americans have been shaped by its framework throughout their history. History ended on October 14, 1806. That was the day of the Battle of Jena, the turning [...]
The more we dabble in “creating worlds,” the more likely we are to consider whether our own world had a Creator. The more we construct and tell stories, the more likely we are to ponder the possibility of our own Storyteller. Dear Mr. Dawkins, You’ve said lately that fairy tales are quite harmful. Your reason [...]
I recently reviewed Paul Gottfried’s Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America for the University Bookman. Paul responds to my review here. Note that in addition to Paul’s book being available as an affordable paperback, the Kindle edition is now going for just $12.49—if you’re interested in this topic, be sure to read it [...]
John Wayne’s politics can be summed up very simply: he loved America and he hated communism; he loved liberty and he hated dependency; he thought the movies were the best thing going and he didn’t want them turned into a left-wing propaganda tool. The star was a straight-shooter who refused to hold a co-worker’s creed, [...]
Last Saturday I had the honor of addressing the 50th anniversary meeting of the Philadelphia Society. The title of the meeting was “The Road Ahead—Serfdom or Liberty?” My remarks sought to suggest that conservatives should be more circumspect about their rote incantation of the word “liberty,” and that there may even be something to be [...]
Irving Babbitt did not believe that society could save itself by reform at the bottom. “All reform must start at the top,” among the leadership classes. For conservative thinkers the past 15 years have been a season of self-assessment. In moods of disenchantment, anger, and even betrayal many have staked out positions differentiating their views [...]
The Founding Fathers Guide to the Constitution, Brion McClanahan, Regnery, 262 pages The two key arguments against bothering with constitutional restraints on government are “who knows” and “who cares”: we can’t know what the Constitution means, and we shouldn’t care even if we did. In The Founding Fathers Guide to the Constitution, historian Brion McClanahan [...]
George Will In what for me illustrates the use of confusing labels, George Will recently complained about attacks of “cognitive dissonance” in trying to understand our political terms. Although Americans identify overwhelmingly as “conservatives,” many of them vote differently from the way they describe themselves. They lean theoretically toward Thomas Jefferson, who advocated very limited [...]
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 [...]
The Cost of Liberty: The Life of John Dickinson by William Murchison Few habits of speech and thought inhibit our appreciation of those who created the United States of America more than our tendency to refer to them as “the Founders.” Not that the Founders do not form an identifiable group, and not that they are undeserving of [...]
The conservatism that Russell Kirk represented stretches us by requiring greater acceptance of the ineffable and the mysterious and an appreciation of the magical and the supernatural. The Conservative Mind’s author taught generations to re-enchant the world. As an undergraduate, my first encounters with Professor Jeff Hart and The Dartmouth Review eventually led to my discovery of [...]
A friend once described conservatives as people who agreed about one important thing–that at some point in the past, something went terribly wrong. After that, conservatives splinter into untold numbers of camps, since they disagree ferociously about the date of the catastrophe. Most conservatives today agree that America has taken a terrible turn–that something went [...]
John Lukacs and Wendell Berry This is the best introduction to the historical craft of John Lukacs. History and the Human Condition does not replace the much longer Remembered Past, a wide-ranging selection of Lukacs’s works also published by ISI Books. But this work, a coda to the author’s career, contains just the right mixture of [...]
The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry, Mark T. Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, eds., ISI Books. A year ago, when my wife and I were waiting for a flight out of Logan Airport, a roughhewn man of about 60 was sitting a few seats away from us reading a book I would have been surprised [...]