thoughts in and out of season
I’ve been reading Moral Mazes, an account of life in the corporate management suite by sociologist Robert Jackall. At bottom, it’s a description of life at court. The desires of the powerful are what matter, responsibility exists to be shifted, an Act of God (recession, change in management, public relations issue, whatever) might change … More ...
Tradition makes us what we are. The institutions that are dominant today want to make us more manageable as human resources, so they destroy all traditions but those of consumerist careerism. The latter, of course, include pluralism and inclusiveness.
People usually don’t like it when things that are close to them are attacked for … More ...
Paul Gottfried has some comments on my post on shrinks and hipster liberalism that raise several interesting points: is the social outlook found among the modish half-educated young an organic development or an intentional construction? Can we can do something about it and the broader stream of advanced liberalism of which it is part? And … More ...
My comments on what an “alternative right” might be have provoked enough comment at Alternative Right to call for continuing the discussion.
Jack Donovan has called for a rag-tag alliance of right-wingers, Richard Spencer for a coalition against bad things. Both can serve a function, and I agree with the project. Still, the direction of … More ...
The respectable right is respectable because it accepts the principles of liberalism and can’t offer serious resistance to liberal conclusions.
That’s why a less respectable “alternative right” is needed. But what is the alternative that would do better? People have been looking for a good way to resist liberalism for a long time, and judging … More ...
Something I wrote, an analysis of liberalism, libertarianism, and conservatism, was enough to provoke a libertarian blogger (“larryniven”) to murder fantasies. I decided to address his concerns, but our exchange went nowhere. So I decided to reconstruct it, along with a short side exchange with a mainstream social liberal from Australia, into the … More ...
A friend sent me something he was writing on the political prospects for protectionist legislation. I sent him the following response, which I’ve edited a bit and relates to much more than protectionism:
… More ...In general, your discussion follows the interest-group, competing political party, voter sovereignty model of political life in a modern democracy.
I sometimes
There’s a longish interview with me at Ignatius Insight, the website of Ignatius Press.
Here is the text of a talk I gave at the H. L. Mencken Club conference.
October 31, 2009
The other speakers have discussed foreign policy by reference to specifically American tendencies. I will discuss something that I think is more general, advanced liberalism—the dominant … More ...
Yet another review, this one by Carl Olson in Catholic World Report. It’s longer than average (two three-column pages) and quite favorable:
… More ...The Tyranny of Liberalism … is the work of an imaginative conservative who offers frank criticism and expresses the truth about authentic values and the permanent things with notable clarity, unusual insight,