Reading “The Politics of Prudence” in a Time of Troubles

By |2023-07-14T16:42:09-05:00July 14th, 2023|Categories: American Republic, Books, Conservatism, Ideology, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Politics, Russell Kirk|

Russell Kirk would agree that what is happening these days is civil liberty (gone astray) prioritized over public morality. Kirk urged the rising generation to take up the defense of the moral order and the social order, the order of the soul, and the permanent things. It’s a faith worth fighting for. In  the opening [...]

Solzhenitsyn, Russell Kirk, & the Moral Imagination

By |2023-06-07T18:16:45-05:00June 7th, 2023|Categories: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Featured, Ideology, Moral Imagination, Russell Kirk, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

Alexander Solzhenitsyn illuminates the distinctive character of our age by bringing to bear a religiously grounded moral vision, and he filters this vision through his literary imagination. In the summer of 2003, I had to vacate my college office. With limited file-cabinet space at home, I had to lighten my files drastically. Reading and skimming [...]

Irving Babbitt: The Man and His Thought

By |2023-08-02T08:21:39-05:00July 14th, 2022|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Ideology, Irving Babbitt, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

Irving Babbitt was an eccentric, armed with both a brilliant mind and personality. While we ought to remember his thought, we should also remember the man. As the leader of the American humanists, Irving Babbitt (1864-1933) stood solidly and forthrightly in the American conservative tradition of John Adams and Nathaniel Hawthorne and drew upon the [...]

The Marxist Worldview Behind the Spending Bill

By |2021-11-28T14:56:00-06:00November 28th, 2021|Categories: Civil Society, Economics, Government, Ideology, John Horvat|

Government programs cannot restore broken families and shattered communities. Only a moral regeneration of non-economic values can do this. The ravages of loneliness, despair, and suicide must be addressed by filling the spiritual voids that haunt people’s lives—and not by issuing government checks. The fight over the latest spending package is raging. Democrats are intent [...]

Escaping Political Kitsch

By |2021-05-07T15:41:04-05:00May 11th, 2021|Categories: Art, Communism, Coronavirus, Culture, Ideology, Politics|

Communists know that the strength of their regime is measured in terms of ideological uniformity. This is what makes the pervasiveness of COVID kitsch so unnerving. The coordinated censorship of opposing viewpoints, both scientific and conspiratorial, is creepily reminiscent of 20th-century excess. Sabina, the headstrong artist in Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, is haunted [...]

Dostoevsky’s “Demons” Is a Novel for Our Times

By |2021-03-15T14:26:15-05:00March 15th, 2021|Categories: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Great Books, Ideology, Politics|

Dostoevsky’s “Demons” remains relevant more than a century after it was written as it invites readers to a melancholy symphony of self-reflection. The novel’s flailing revolutionaries are not caricatures of archaic belief systems but embody the very structure of human conflict. Dark, funny, and frenetic, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons is a startlingly accurate portrayal of possession [...]

“The Madness of Crowds”: How Identity Politics Has Replaced Religion

By |2021-03-09T14:26:15-06:00March 11th, 2021|Categories: Books, Ideology, Liberalism, Politics, Sexuality|

Into the breach—or onto the deserted ground—has marched a new metaphysics in the form of a new religion. In “The Madness of Crowds,” Douglas Murray explains this “religion” of identity politics. The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, by Douglas Murray (304 pages, Bloomsbury Continuum, 2021) A better title for this book might have [...]

Fighting Totalitarianism With Beauty

By |2021-03-10T15:13:20-06:00March 10th, 2021|Categories: Beauty, Culture, Ideology, Politics|

If we are to withstand the coming totalitarian regime, we will need resources that are not just political but beautiful. We must become reattuned to our past and look to a standard outside ourselves. Reclaiming beauty means acknowledging that there are good things that have come before us. When the stock market becomes volatile, people [...]

Schools Are Not Tools

By |2020-12-10T12:46:34-06:00December 13th, 2020|Categories: Education, Ideology, Politics, Truth|

Radicals believe schools are instruments of power, but such schooling is false and a corruption of the thing itself. Radical schools are not bad schools; they are ideological shams pretending to be schools. Genuine schooling is oriented toward truth and cultivates wisdom and virtue. According to Russell Kirk, “to the radical—communist, or fascist, or socialist, [...]

A Conservative Response to Cancel Culture

By |2020-08-21T14:01:18-05:00August 25th, 2020|Categories: Conservatism, Culture, Ideology, Modernity, Politics, Wisdom|

Today, conservatism finds itself in danger of losing its way. In an attempt to win what feels like an all-out war, young conservatives take on the common tactics of the day. When conservatives surrender their civility to the abrasiveness, they sacrifice a part of the tradition that makes them conservative. Young conservatives are faced with [...]

Is Conservatism an Ideology?

By |2020-04-25T03:15:59-05:00April 24th, 2020|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Conservatism, Ideology, Robert Nisbet, Senior Contributors|

In his excellent, short book, Conservatism: Dream and Reality, Robert Nisbet had no problem in identifying conservatism as an ideology. Whereas his friend, Russell Kirk, had repeatedly resisted defining the faith as anything other than a “way of being” quite contrary to all ideologies (in essence, an anti-ideology). Nisbet proclaimed it one of three ideologies [...]

The Revival of Socialism

By |2020-03-10T11:08:13-05:00March 10th, 2020|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Communism, Conservatism, Economics, Ideology, Politics, Progressivism, Senior Contributors, Socialism, St. John Paul II|

The evidence is more than clear: Communism, socialism, and progressivism have each made huge comebacks, re-entering political discourse. Even their titles have reacquired respect and a semblance of dignity in many circles of public thought. What happened? The West won the Cold War in 1989, didn’t she? I am fiercely proud of the fact that [...]

HBO’s “Chernobyl” and Solzhenitsyn

By |2019-12-12T01:56:31-06:00December 10th, 2019|Categories: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Civilization, Communism, Culture, History, Ideology, Television|

The new HBO series “Chernobyl” serves to warn us about the danger of persistent lies in a society that refuses to acknowledge truth. It would be a grave error not to take stock of our own tendencies toward deceit, as if our lies are radically different from those that underpinned the Soviet Union. Over several [...]

A Manifesto of Neo-Romanticism

By |2019-12-05T17:08:25-06:00December 5th, 2019|Categories: Communism, Conservatism, Ideology, Politics, Western Civilization|

He is thinking: “See how God writes straight on crooked lines.” —Machado de Assis What realistic form can a manifesto of Neo-Romanticism take in a positivistic age? How many people will even recognize it as such? In a time when life has been cheapened by the talons of radical ideology, those who cultivate a sense [...]

Go to Top