thoughts in and out of season
It’s a mistake for conservatives to stake their case on the appeal to freedom and equality as ultimate principles that is the stuff of political rhetoric today. The appeal is self-defeating, both for conservatives and for anyone intelligently attached to those goals. Their logic is innately unlimited, and the attempt to put them into effect … More ...
I reworded the poll so it no longer prejudges the extent to which the events have happened already. One could easily claim that Christianity was decisively driven from public life, and America stopped being America, with the universal adoption of PC and multiculturalist rhetoric during the Clinton administration. If Christianity can’t be viewed as anything … More ...
I wonder what Russell Kirk would think about Anne Coulter’s articulation of the Conservative Cause?
To be taken seriously conservatives should disown this kind of support.
Someone suggested in connection with my dialogue on liberalism, citing Norberto Bobbio, that the summum bonum liberalism proposes is validated by universal consent in the form of international human rights conventions. My response:
… More ...I can’t see international human rights law as a universal consensus on the highest good. The people who determine the policies
I’m sorry I haven’t been posting much recently. I’ve been busy editing things I’ve already posted and organizing them into online “books” in hopes of making them more useful. I hope to return to posting shortly. In the meantime readers might want to look at some of the golden oldies, for example The meaning of … More ...
Freedom—the liberation of desire from restraint by other people’s understanding of the good—is central to liberalism. It follows that liberalism is incoherent. The problem is that freedom has to be freedom to do something in particular, and goals conflict. As a result some particular goals, and thus some freedoms, have to be chosen over … More ...
The day Christendom died: Bastille Day, 14 July 1789.
Can Christendom be restored?
Every society is based on some understanding of man and the world that is comprehensive enough to define good and evil, moral obligation, the nature of the good life and so on. But that is just to say that every society is based on a religious understanding.
The issue then is … More ...
Communism, in its concrete sense as a political movement based on the writings of Karl Marx, has been one of the three main variants of political modernity. The others have been liberalism and fascism. As such it combined liberal goals (emancipation of the individual from restraint) with fascist means (struggle in solidarity against an enemy … More ...