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Lawyers: From Mainstays of the Republic to Progressive Rent-Seekers
In earlier times, they had an interest in stabilizing our institutions and reining in our excessive political passions. Not any more.
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Wayfaring in America
Motorcyclist traveling on Route 66 in Arizona (Michael Urmann/Shutterstock.com).Americans take to the road because it turns out that Bruce Springsteen was on to something: democratic souls are born to...
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Trump, Tocqueville, and American Democracy
President Donald Trump speaks to the press at the Lotte Palace Hotel in New York, New York, September 26, 2018 (Evan El-Amin / Shutterstock.com).Trump in some ways represents democracy’s unsightly and...
View ArticleCollege Admissions and America’s Second-Rate Aristocracy
What quickly came to be known as the “college-admission scandal”—charges being brought against several score of people, including parents, for bribing their children’s way into admission to elite...
View ArticleCounterculturalism Rightly Understood
The subtitle of this book signals its countercultural thrust, as well as indicates its inspiration in the thought of the nineteenth century American Catholic social and political thinker, Orestes...
View ArticleWhat Distinguishes America?
This essay is adapted from the recently published book “A Constitution in Full: Recovering the Unwritten Foundation of American Liberty,” by the late Peter Augustine Lawler & Richard M. Reinsch II...
View ArticleDefending Religion as a Public Good
The Supreme Court’s ruling in American Legion v. American Humanists Association prevented a wrong, but missed an opportunity to do some good. The high court was right to thwart the aggressive...
View ArticleLawyers: From Mainstays of the Republic to Progressive Rent-Seekers
Lawyers played an enormously important role in the political theory and practice of the early American republic. The legal profession was regarded by the authors of The Federalist and Alexis de...
View ArticleWayfaring in America
Late in Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans live with a kind of restlessness unprecedented by European standards of the day. Driven by the desire for prosperity and...
View ArticleTrump, Tocqueville, and American Democracy
President Trump’s most strident critics present him as a kind of alien threat to our democracy: a fascist, a potential dictator, perhaps foisted on the country by the aid of a foreign, undemocratic...
View ArticleA War of Ideas?
Conservatives finally have something to talk about again. That is how I recently heard the current moment in American conservatism described. Indeed, uncertainty swirls around conservatism today. The...
View ArticleA Tale of Two American Journeys
Two days after Christmas 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont were traveling down the Mississippi River when they made the acquaintance of Sam Houston, the former governor of Tennessee...
View ArticleCapitalism Does Not Require Ever-Expanding Consumption
A notable chapter in Deirdre McCloskey’s 2019 book, Why Liberalism Works, presents her response to the oft-repeated belief that the sustainability of market capitalism requires always-increasing...
View ArticleFear and Faith in a Pandemic
Many religious people feel themselves to be under assault. Restaurants have been allowed to open; mass protests have been tolerated. But in the name of public health, many state governments have...
View ArticleThe Wrath of Gaia
There is a natural tendency among human beings to attribute major physical as well as personal events to divine interventions in the order of things.. Rationalist philosophers long aimed to eliminate...
View ArticleSuffer the Little Children
St. John Henry Newman advised in his Idea of a University that, if forced to choose, it would be better to abolish the classrooms and fire the instructors than close the dormitories and dining halls....
View ArticleAristocrats in a Democratic Age
What is “succession” to a democratic age? Over the last several years, the HBO series Succession has explored this question. Nominated for 25 Golden Globes this year alone, the series follows the Roy...
View ArticleThe Baby and the Bathwater
“Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” is a saying that seems to go back to 1512. We use the saying to warn a friend against a syndrome of erring: In jettisoning something bad, first separate...
View ArticleAutocracy in Russia
For much of his reign, Vladimir Putin has been working to put himself at the head of a “conservative international.” He wants to be seen as the great defender of Christendom, a champion of traditional...
View ArticleSearching for Character in Identity
A few years ago, I was teaching at an inner-city charter school, majority black, minority Hispanic. One Friday, over lunch at an all-day faculty diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training,...
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