thoughts in and out of season
An obvious lesson of post-election complaints by leftists is that highly-educated and well-connected Blues, including famous commentators on public affairs, simply don’t understand Reds. They haven’t a clue as to how most of their countrymen look at things or why they look at them that way. Hence the fear, loathing and fantasy.
Some explanation of … More ...
Someone sent this to me yesterday: The Only Vote Worth Casting in November, a statement by Alasdair MacIntyre on the presidential election. The statement is no longer quite topical, but it’s still worth comment because MacIntyre is a distinguished thinker and his views are in line with those of many Catholics who try to … More ...
Here’s some background on how the American Catholic bishops came to sound collectively like standard-issue leftists, except on the issue of abortion: Social Teachings at Risk in the American Catholic Church. The piece is a collection of notes and snippets from a book by Michael Warner, Changing Witness, Catholic Bishops and Public Policy, 1917-1994… More ...
Here’s an interesting analysis of the outlook behind recent Vatican policies regarding Church, state, democracy, human rights and whatnot: What Kind of Caesar?. According to the author, Russell Hittinger, traditional Catholic teaching assumed that the state has a necessary sacral dimension—all authority, after all, is from God—and naturally wanted that dimension to be Catholic. … More ...
A first-rate summary of why making individual autonomy the ultimate political standard doesn’t work: The Tyranny of Liberalism And Its Evil Root: Individual Autonomy as the End of the State. Sample quote:
… More ...“[N]o polity could be grounded in an ideology, which is nothing more than an aspect of a cultural inheritance about which one
I just finished reading The Long Truce: How Toleration Made the World Safe for Power and Profit, by A. J. Conyers. It’s a book-length treatment of a constant theme here at Turnabout, that “tolerance” as a principle—the demand that standards other than money, power and the like be treated as purely personal commitments … More ...
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 ...