“The False Promise of Liberal Order” and “Tomorrow, the World” provide a useful two-dose vaccine against the now-viral view that something ambitious must be done to repair and revitalize the fraying liberal international order. Both books counsel against doubling down on a postwar order that was more imperial than liberal. The False Promise of Liberal [...]
There is an effort to get Americans to hate fellow Americans. We see this unfolding before our eyes as violence is destroying the once-stable American order. The situation is hard to understand because we are all Americans. This identity, which we hold sacred, is what has always defined and unified us, despite our differences. But [...]
From the founding generation to the greatest generation, Americans sought meaning in one or more of the three operating systems that informed Western civilization: Judeo-Christianity, the Enlightenment, and Romanticism. The productive tension among those three operating systems defined the modern age. Three radically different world views—yet we moderns kept them suspended in a three-way polarity. [...]
It strikes me that all those who talk incessantly of “my rights” are acting pridefully, in the sense that they are making themselves the centre of their own microcosmos at the expense of their neighbours. If we want freedom, however, we must be prepared to pay the price for it. One way of gauging the [...]
Those who make too much of Representative Ilhan Omar’s statement, and who are happy to gain some short-term win by conflating legitimate concern over Israeli influence with anti-Semitism, run the risk of permanently connecting the two terms... I was sitting under a huge oak tree on my college campus reading a political science textbook when [...]
Two conservative authors have assessed Pope Francis’ pontificate with devastating results… Lost Shepherd: How Pope Francis is Misleading His Flock by Philip Lawler (256 pages, Gateway Editions, 2018) To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism by Ross Douthat (256 pages, Simon & Schuster, 2018) Five years into his papacy and poor Pope Francis is [...]
As long as words are left undefined, their meanings are vague and are left up to the listener’s or reader’s imagination. Many on the left have manipulated language in this way… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Shannon Holzer as he explores the nature of a definition [...]
Human nature exists, and we cannot deal with life in a sensible way without accepting that. So the question we face is how to overcome an outlook that categorically rejects the very concept and is deeply rooted in the way the people who dominate our political life understand the world… Today’s offering in our Timeless [...]
In The Federalist, Publius writes of “new” and “improved” “principles” of the “science of politics,” and he urges his countrymen to abandon the classical teachings concerning the possibilities of republican government over an extensive territory… Conservatives—American and otherwise—have always held The Federalist in extremely high regard. Virtually all would agree with Clinton Rossiter that it stands with the Declaration [...]
Contemporary liberalism provides solutions that only exacerbate current domestic and international tensions… The Cultural Defense of Nations: A Liberal Theory of Majority Rights by Liav Orgad (Oxford University Press, 2016) Liberal constitutional and political theory has increasingly defended the status of often newly created or invented minorities, defined more expansively with each new theoretical formulation, as [...]
Wilhelm Roepke’s work is an exposition of the essence of Western thought that can be summed up in the word “liberal” properly understood. Much of Wilhelm Roepke’s work can be understood as an exposition of the essence of Western, Occidental thought, a contribution to civilization that can be summed up in the word “liberal” properly [...]
So this astute and classy article by James Patterson explains why so many conservatives wrongly took the side of the Board of Visitors against University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan on the matter of her removal and reinstatement. Someone might say, though, that the conservatives who support the Board aren’t really conservatives. They’re more properly called [...]