thoughts in and out of season
Right-wingers are alarmed by totalitarian features of advanced liberalism: its insistent universalism, its theoretical coherence and simplicity, its resolute suppression of alternative principles of social order, its principled rejection of common sense, inherited ways, and the very concept of human nature. In the long run, they ask, how much difference can there be between “inclusiveness”—putting … More ...
Isn’t the claim that we have “democracy” a bit of a fossil? It may have been arguable in 1840 that the goal was popular rule, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense today:
What is “liberalism”?
Since I’ve been saying a lot about liberalism and its problems, a natural question is just what this liberalism is, where it is to be found, and why I think it’s so important. After all, the views I attribute to “liberalism” aren’t held in their totality by most people recognized as liberal, … More ...
I usually discuss the current situation by reference to fundamental liberal concepts like freedom and equality, and try to show how those concepts come out of the modern turn away from the transcendent and toward immediate experience and formal logic, and how they naturally lead, though various forms of modernity, to what we have today. … More ...
One issue raised by the current sleaze involving New Jersey Governor McGreevey is the issue of homosexuals hiring homosexuals. I have some slight personal experience of the thing, since an Episcopal diocese to which I used to be connected is run by a gay mafia that looks out for its own. Others have noticed it … More ...
The way things are today is novel enough that to get a grip on it you have to look at the grand sweep of history, and at basics like what people think about themselves and the world. Here’s an attempt:
Before the first cosmopolitan civilizations arose in antiquity, men lived in a world that seemed … More ...
In a way, it doesn’t make much sense to ask what was wrong in the American Founding that contributed to the pickle we’re in today. We’ve got our problems but other countries mostly outdo us. We invented PC, and first made abortion a legally enforceable fundamental right, but so far at least we don’t … More ...
Liberalism can be understood as a view that evolved and triumphed in a contentious political environment through a sort of philosophical jiu-jitsu. It wins all arguments by not arguing but rather using its opponents’ own force against them. Liberalism claims it has no points of its own to make, it accepts all your points … More ...
A view of politics that’s become quite old-fashioned but still pops up now and then is that it’s based on conflict between haves and have-nots. The view never made a lot of sense, because those in a position to make their influence felt in politics are always by definition “haves.” Hence the search for authentic … More ...
The ABA already has rules that keep judges from belonging to organizations that think there are differences between men and women that matter in personal and social interactions and that adjust their practices accordingly (that “discriminate based on gender”). Now they’re talking about extending that rule to organizations that believe sexual oddities and perversities could … More ...