Michael Oakeshott Conservatism is the “ism” that came into being to resist the existence of “isms.” This makes for potentially insurmountable challenges: How to evince a political belief that avoids the rigidity of ideology? Can one take a political position without becoming a political program? Can the principled stand against a politics based [...]
Illustration by Michael Hogue The old kept us out of conflict; the new leads to empire. In 1765, John Adams unwittingly penned one of the proof texts of American exceptionalism. “I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder,” the young lawyer wrote in his diary, “as the opening of a [...]
Richard Strauss Richard Strauss: A Musical Life, by Raymond Holden. Yale University Press. The Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss, by Charles Youmans, Cambridge University Press. I am not a first-rate composer, I am a first-rate second-rate composer. —Richard Strauss I was never a revolutionary. The real revolutionary was Richard Strauss. —Schoenberg Richard Strauss [...]
Historians come in all different shapes and sizes. The well-known ones, those mass-market storytellers we invite into our homes by way of television or bestseller, display enough variety to suit most tastes. There’s David McCullough, courtly and urbane as a Renaissance bishop; Ken Burns, bearded and earnest in the required PBS manner; Michael Beschloss, bronzed [...]
Historians tend to dismiss conservatism as irrelevant to the American experience. Conservatism—dispositional as opposed to programmatic in nature—is often hard to see, especially for historians who tend to use the lens of “progress” in looking at history. Forgotten Conservatives in American History, by Brion McClanahan and Clyde Wilson (200 pages, Pelican, 2012) Is there a [...]
Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind”, remains a kind of liberation, an intellectually adventurous work written with a kind of boldness and even recklessness rarely to be found in today’s more politically correct and cramped age. But it rejected conservative impulses. One crisp morning 26 years ago I was walking across the campus [...]
David L. Schindler For the orthodox Christian, is doing one’s public duty more or less reducible to voting for the most socially conservative Republican on the ballot—and then shutting up about whatever misgivings one might have? Surely not. Yet for many election cycles, this has been often implied by the self-appointed guardians of [...]
Joseph Sobran: The National Review Years, Articles From 1974 to 1991, edited by Fran Griffin These are the times that try men’s scruples, especially the scruples of reviewers. Fact A: I knew Joe Sobran, from 2003 to 2008, well enough to sabotage such hopes of critical detachment as I might otherwise have retained concerning his [...]
An author too robust and significant to be wholly un-personned can still be marginalized. Consider this elegant pasquinade, which years ago won a parody-contest award in Britain’s New Statesman and which employs the same rhyme scheme and meter as Hilaire Belloc’s own “The chief defect of Henry King”: The chief defect of dear Hilaire Was [...]
How to revive the flagging fortunes of the Republican Party might matter to some people, but it’s not a question that should concern principled conservatives. Crypto-conservatives aplenty stand ready to shoulder that demeaning task. Tune in Fox News or pick up the latest issue of National Review or the Weekly Standard and you’ll find them, [...]
It is “dearest to my heart and dearest in my convictions,” the dying James Madison said, “that the Union of the States be cherished and perpetuated.” It was this Union, conceived, framed, ratified, explained, implemented, defended, and cherished by Madison, that Kevin Gutzman cogently and rightly sees as the essential “making of America.” James Madison [...]
Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius, by Sylvia Nasar, Simon & Schuster, 558 pages In December 1974, in the midst of the first energy crisis, Friedrich Hayek received the Nobel Prize in Sweden and confessed, “we have little cause for pride: as a profession we have made a mess of things.” He admitted that [...]
Nearly 30 years before he shocked National Review by endorsing Barack Obama for president, senior editor Jeffery Hart announced a divorce of a different kind from the American right. With “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to a Modern American Conservatism”—published in The New Right Papers in 1982 and previewed in NR a few months earlier—Hart split [...]
In late 2011 and early 2012, there was a fierce debate among several prominent economists on the possible ways in which government deficits today could impose a burden on future generations. Specifically, Keynesian economists Dean Baker and Paul Krugman were arguing that right-wing concerns over the debt burden were nonsensical, because (for the most part) [...]