Political theory

My latest at Catholic World Report suggests that secular liberalism won’t have the staying power effectually to suppress Catholicism.

I have another piece on the Windsor decision, this one at Crisis Magazine. It deals with the increasing radicalism, mindlessness, and intolerance of mainstream progressive thought.

That’s the title of my most recent piece at Crisis Magazine. It discusses recent developments in connection with the trend toward a single universal regime of contract and regulation in which no point has privileged independence.

I’ve got a new book out, Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It. It develops some of the arguments from The Tyranny of Liberalism and applies them in a more focused way to debunk our supreme moral principle, or what now seems to count as such. Since it’s published by a Catholic press I could get more specific about the principles for keeping the various aspects of human relations in balance other than attempting to suppress one or another of them because it might cause trouble.

Here’s another piece at Crisis, this one about the necessity of the Church as an independent institution in an age of Gleichschaltung.

There’s some more of my hand-wringing on the topic over at Catholic World Report.

My review of The Intolerance of Tolerance, a book by reformed theologian D. A. Carson, is available at The University Bookman.

That’s the title of my current column at Catholic World Report. Basically it says we have to drop out from a radically technocratic world.

My new column is up at Catholic World Report. Basically, it says that the American political order needs to adopt Catholicism as its ethos to restore what’s been good in it.

I have another piece on the Sixties up at Crisis Magazine. It orginally started with an epigraph from The Doctrine of the Mean by Confucius that got ditched because the site software couldn’t accommodate it:

“The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the empire, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge.”

The epigraph was the source of the “solid advice” I refer to about the middle of the piece.

My latest piece at Crisis Magazine explains the Sixties as a stage of modernization (not necessarily a good thing).

My latest column is now online at Catholic World Report under that title. It’s a review of After Tocqueville by Chilton Williamson.

That’s the title of my latest at Catholic World Report. For people in the thick of things it can look like enterprises like Obamacare would make a lot of things better, but the overall picture is more troubling.

Here’s another column at Catholic World Report, this one on the essential sacredness of the state. If you say “no, the state is simply practical” then some aspect of the simply practical will become sacred.

I have a new piece up at Crisis on the illusion and reality of the Sixties. What people expected to be liberation and soaring horizons turned out to be the rise to power of a severely flawed ruling class.

My latest at Catholic World Report is about left liberals, right liberals, and what to do about them.

On other fronts, Larry Auster posted a comment by me on a comment by Robert Spencer on a comment by Larry on a comment by Spencer on a canceled concert in Indonesia. How’s that for intertextuality? (The comment by me does have an actual topic, social understandings of the good.)

An old libertarian friend, Todd Seavey, posted an entry in his blog regarding The Works of Joseph de Maistre that complained about Maistre and mentioned me, so in response I posted a couple of comments that I think make sense even apart from the original setting. The point at issue, as you will see, was Maistre’s sometimes startling emphasis on the role of violence in human life.

I have a piece by that name (subtitled “some preliminary considerations”) up at the Liberty Law Blog.

The question seems important, since where liberalism comes from affects how we should deal with it and where it is likely to go. Many right-wingers, for example, think of it as psychological or instrumental: people are liberals because they feel this way or that, or because they want to get money, power, status, or whatever. Such views suggest that liberalism need not be taken seriously on its own terms, and will disappear when events shift the balance of advantages or put people in a different mood.