thoughts in and out of season
The collapse of the liberal regime into irrationality, contradiction and tyranny, and the inability of limited adjustments to restore it to health or even stability, suggest that a basically different direction is needed for our public life. Liberalism is an attempt to make freedom the ultimate principle of public life. The attempt makes no sense, … More ...
Here’s an edited version of a usenet discussion I had on immigration in a Catholic newsgroup:
… More ...Ille: In the US the government is discussing new rules on how to keep THEM out of the US.
Ego: What’s with the “THEM”? Disagreement on immigration does not mean stupidity and malice.
Ille: The THEM
We’ve had a little back-and-forth on the modern state and what to make of it, so I thought I’d put together some notes for whatever anybody can make of them:
A reader wrote to comment on my essay on Traditionalism and the American Order, saying that I overstate the liberalism and understate the traditionalism of the American order. My response:
… More ...I don’t think I said that the U.S. as it has existed has been basically a product of liberalism or that it was stable
There’s a recent piece at View from the Right pointing out that while the call of Harvard academic Noel Ignatieff to “abolish the white race” sounds radical, it is really no different than the usual liberal and even mainstream conservative position that we should all work toward a state of affairs in which race doesn’t … More ...
John Rao, whose NYC lectures on Church history I mentioned a while back, has a new website that includes his writings he thinks worth making public. They touch on some of the same issues I write about, the bizarre inversions of pluralism for example, but in a more outraged, partisan, stylish, distinctly Catholic, and … More ...
The smart guys say that since the Wars of Religion politics has been able to build solidly because it has aimed low, at stability and prosperity rather than any transcendent good. It turns out there’s a problem with the strategy: if the Good is excluded from public life the low eventually becomes very low indeed. … More ...
What is tyranny? There are obvious examples, but like other obvious things it can be hard to say what’s there when you press the point. Is PC tyranny? The patriarchy? Determinate being as such? All those things can seem horribly oppressive depending on which way you’re pointed. Like every other judgment, a judgment that something … More ...
A correspondent passed on the following comment by another reader of my essay “The Tyranny of Liberalism”:
… More ...I read the first part of the article, but I am not going to read the rest, though I did skim through it. It is so bad that it is not worth the time. The first part
I thought I’d post a couple of comments I made at Brussels Journal about the slow-motion war being carried out by European elites against their own societies and people. The first is more or less self-explanatory:
… More ...Just a minor rant on “multiculturalism”:
Naturally, it can’t exist as a situation in which several cultures exist intermingled