The sanitizing of Thomas Jefferson has played a role in the crippling of public discourse. Nowadays, anyone who would discuss something so anodyne as political decentralization or states' rights has to walk on eggshells, lest he find himself attacked and stigmatized by enforcers of political orthodoxy. We should question an American political establishment that obfuscates [...]
More than ever, America is split between populist nationalism and left-wing internationalism, with little room in either ideology for anything like Wendell Berry's vision of local patriotic devotion. Whatever we make of his ruminations, with respect to this subject it is obviously the culture which has changed over the past few years, not him. The [...]
Niccolo Machiavelli may help modern man to think more clearly about power and prudence, and to remember that the world is a dangerous place where all is not as it seems. An argument can be made that Niccolo Machiavelli’s sinister reputation is unjust. This is not to gloss over the very deep flaws in the [...]
There is perhaps nothing more old-fashioned and tradition-minded than classical studies, which focus upon the dead languages, fables, and philosophies of bygone civilizations. So what could the classics have to do with cutting-edge science and technology? Quite a lot, according to Werner Heisenberg, who testified that “the sciences cannot but benefit from classical studies.” In [...]
Just as in the case of the head of a household, the heads of localities and nations must direct their minds first and foremost toward the common good of some specific, limited group of people. Integralism and the Common Good, Volume One: Family, City, and State, edited by Edmund Waldstein & Peter Kwasniewski (356 pages, [...]
It seems unlikely that we can properly understand Lockean liberalism, much less pass an informed judgment upon it, without first meditating deeply upon the nemesis against whom Locke reacted: the divine-right monarchist, Sir Robert Filmer. Patriarcha: The Complete Political Works by Sir Robert Filmer (318 pages, Imperium Press, 2021) By and large, establishment conservatives defend [...]
I know of no more comprehensive and reflective summary of conservatism than Sir Roger Scruton's "Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition." We should not expect conservative establishmentarians on either side of the Atlantic to pay it much heed, though, for the author has now been pushed into the ranks of the untouchables. Conservatism: An [...]
The real problem with the technocratic Charles Murray is his zeal for the pernicious “American creed” of radical individualism. Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race In America, by Charles Murray (168 pages, Encounter Books, 2021) Viewed from the right, Charles Murray is an almost tragic figure. A libertarian-leaning proponent of America as the first “proposition [...]
With the publication of "Homo Americanus," author Zbigniew Janowski has tentatively entered the dissidents' camp, and does so by following in the footsteps of Southern agrarian professor Mel Bradford, who warned us several decades ago about “the heresy of Equality." Homo Americanus: The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy in America, by Zbigniew Janowski (255 pages, St [...]
Thanks to feverish cosmopolitanism and globalism, many Americans have grown up rootless and hyper-mobile, so they have little in the way of local "patria" with which to connect. The American patriot increasingly looks like the Atlantean or Trojan patriot, forced to carry within himself whatever residual sense of home and connection to place and people [...]
Christians can respect George Orwell even if we cannot fully claim him. But “woke” progressives have no logical choice but to repudiate the secular liberal icon altogether for his skepticism toward egalitarianism, globalism, and political correctness. However he may feel about it, no honest and perceptive person will deny that the Overton window of acceptable [...]
Robert Salyer’s “A Primer on the Right” lays out the implicit foundational principles for the modern Right and Left. Whether or not the reader agrees with his definition, it is surely in everyone’s interest that we think more seriously about the fundamental divides which mark 21st-century politics. A Primer on the Right: The Challenge of [...]
After the War Between the States, there was a conscious effort at reconciliation on the part of many in both North and South. This postbellum reconciliation has mostly unraveled, in no small part thanks to conservative establishmentarians who for years have refused to raise a peep—or, in many cases, collaborated—during the leftist campaign against Southern [...]
As Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. rightly points out in his new book, there is no denying that there were other questions besides the issue of slavery energizing the air prior to the War Between the States, questions which cannot be entirely trivialized. It Wasn’t About Slavery: Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War, by [...]