Who expected it? A world-wide pandemic, recurring food and supply shortages, massive unemployment, widespread violence and lawlessness, deep political disagreement and distrust, feckless leadership, and a general breakdown of our political institutions. To many Americans, the current state of affairs seems surreal, if not apocalyptic. As we fret about the dangers of George Orwell’s 1984 our country is spinning towards…
Few people, I imagine, would deny that the political temperature, not only in the United States but elsewhere in the world, has risen of late, though few of us would admit to having been in any way responsible for this other, far more dangerous, kind of global warming. It is always the others who are unreasonable, never ourselves. We are…
Adrian Vermeule, constitutional originalism’s foremost opponent on the right, has again criticized the theory and its statutory kissing cousin, textualism. While he argues that positivism cannot provide a justification for originalism or textualism, he concedes that “substantive goods of political morality” might serve to provide textualism and originalism support. But, according to Vermeule, even such goods could justify only…
In 1975, the publication of Edward O. Wilson’s book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis provoked a debate over his proposed biological explanation of the social behavior of all animals, including human beings. He was attacked by both left-wing thinkers (like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin) and right-wing thinkers (like Roger Scruton and Wendell Berry) for promoting some undesirable “isms”: reductionism,…
Against innovators and radicals, Emerson remarked, “conservatism always has the worst of the argument.” “Always apologizing, pleading a necessity, pleading that to change would be to deteriorate,” conservatism “makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory.” Coming Home: Reclaiming America’s Conservative Soul accepts the Emersonian challenge, calling on Americans to retrieve their heritage from the…
Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called Nazism the first “great revolution” against Christendom. (Arguably the French and Bolshevik Revolutions were predecessors.) For this reason, among others, he founded the journal Christianity & Crisis in early 1941 to rally American Protestant opinion towards intervention against the Axis powers, and to reject their post WWI isolationism and pacifism, which he called a “cult of peace.” …
In today’s Manichean political world, coronavirus policy disputes often get portrayed as a conflict between scientific expertise, on the one hand, and invincible ignorance on the other. This is yet another variation of the riff we heard earlier on global warming, vaccinations, and more. While journalistically tidy, dividing the world into objective, dispassionate experts versus the anti-scientific horde not only…
Suppose that while browsing in the bookstore you run across a book called Great Left-handed Jurists in American History. Or maybe Great Bald Jurists in American History. These books will no doubt strike you as odd. What sense do these criteria make as a way of selecting legal figures for study? What does left-handedness, or baldness, have to do with…
The filibuster is one of the great bugbears of American politics. Democrats and Republicans have routinely blamed the infamous practice when the Senate fails to act on their policy priorities. In both parties, senators have denounced the filibuster as illegitimate when used by their colleagues to slow action on favored presidential nominations. And…
“There are no rewards today for uttering unpopular, but timeless, truths.” So said Justice Clarence Thomas after only a couple terms on the Court. Over 25 years later, Clarence Thomas’ moral and constitutional message of staunch originalism and ordered liberty is one that America needs to hear—perhaps now more than ever. “What He Made Me” Thomas’ message is rooted in…
