For the Progressives, checks and balances were merely a hindrance to efficient government. How could it be wrong to act in accordance with the spirit of history? As “experts” replaced statesman, the whole idea of “the consent of the governed” became less important, even a stumbling block for the plans of Progressive reformers. Recently, Wyoming [...]
Just as all men recognize tyranny as the most oppressive regime, we should recognize a tyrannical soul as the most onerous. The tyrannical soul gets exactly what it wants, but this is a curse, not a blessing. Freedom from all constraint is actually the worst form of slavery. “A dream is a wish your heart [...]
We are in the midst of a revolution. To be sure, there has been only sporadic violence and chaos in the streets. But there is more sustained violence and chaos in the minds and souls of many Americans, which is where the revolution is taking place. A gradual change, imperceptible at first although still unmistakable, [...]
Georg Ratzinger in his childhood and youth had seen and experienced the consequences of secular fundamentalism at first hand. He was all too aware that there is precious little difference between the various shades of socialism. Big Brother, by any other name, is an enemy of freedom. On August 21, 2008, Pope Benedict described his [...]
While Robert Kagan basically dismisses church and community in the development of liberalism, can there be any sadder but more important concession than his own admission that “liberalism has no particular answer” for what can legitimize its rights? An essay is meant to be very, very important when it consumes four giant pages in the [...]
Following the recent attack on a mosque in New Zealand by a white supremacist terrorist, I was asked by a national TV network in the UK to appear on a live show to give my perspective as a former white supremacist. (I served two prison sentences for “inciting racial hatred” back in the 1980s.) I [...]
By the beginning of the Mexican war, even famed newspaper editor John L. O’Sullivan began to doubt his own expansionist infatuations. What would America do, for example, if she tried to incorporate not just Mexico but actual, honest-to-God Mexicans into the republic? Standing with his father as they watched the Battle of Bunker Hill in [...]
We have all seen the scene at least once, although some of us have savored it perhaps dozens of times. The handsome, dynamic, misunderstood, modernizing young king, with his slender physique, slender beard, and even more slender morals, strutting about the banquet hall knocking the plates and goblets off the table in a drunken frenzy. [...]
Western civilization has been gutted from within. At the core of this moral bankruptcy is a watered-down Christianity that lacks the conviction to defend itself… Today mankind enjoys unprecedented technology, but lacks the wisdom to regard technology as a tool in the service of life, and not an end in itself. The difference between the [...]
Tyrants—intelligent, charming men as they usually are—rush into politics without first examining their souls. Politics without wisdom is not politics. A recurring theme in Plato’s dialogues, including his Seventh Letter, describes the education of a young man who wants to achieve the highest things, which he considers to be achieved primarily through his ruling the [...]
President Obama’s Muslim and community-organizing backgrounds were both traditions that had almost nothing to do with what we once understood to be Western civilization, with its unique American gloss… In the sweepstakes for which of our presidents was the worst, the usual candidates are James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Warren Harding. When William Jefferson Clinton [...]
The rule of democratic tyranny, Tocqueville held, “reduces each nation to nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd”… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Patrick Deneen as he traces Alexis de Tocqueville’s argument concerning the American tendency towards majoritarianism [...]
Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor agreed that “tenderness leads to the gas chambers,” and what they were trying to get through our thick heads is that tenderness without truth is tyranny. As Rodney Stark has pointed out in The Rise of Christianity, the Roman Empire was a harsh, unforgiving, cruel, and relentless society in which [...]
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Tracey Rowland as she examines the dangers to the family if political leaders are allowed to act as God. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher When the Obama Administration began its Kulturkampf against American Catholics, my husband suggested to me that if the [...]