Wilfred M. McClay

Delightful as the season’s spirit is, it is a byproduct and not the thing itself. Continue Reading »

One of the most important things to be said about the New York Times’ loud but intellectually threadbare effort to recast the year 1619 as the date of the American nation’s “true founding” is that it was a missed opportunity. The year 2019, which was the four hundredth anniversary of . . . . Continue Reading »

I write in defense of memory. Not Memory in her gaudy mythological form, the Titan goddess Mnemosyne, mother of the nine Muses—but memory as the glue that holds our lives together and imposes order and continuity amid the blooming buzzing confusion of sensations, thoughts, and activities that . . . . Continue Reading »

In his thirty-year journalistic career, Tucker Carlson hasn’t changed. But his industry has—beyond recognition. Continue Reading »

Iconoclasts seek to assault the sensibilities of those they oppose, and utterly destroy all physical evidence that such views ever existed. Continue Reading »

The blow to Christian egos may not be such a bad thing. Christians, particularly those in the West who are heirs to many centuries of political and cultural dominance, must learn to contend with shrinking influence and growing marginalization, even vilification, where they once enjoyed a high, even . . . . Continue Reading »

Liberalism After Liberalism” is one of three addresses given to a symposium on “After Liberalism,” put on in late February with the support of the Simon/Hertog Fund for Policy Analysis and of Fieldstead and Company. Yuval Levin and James Rogers responded to this paper. The other two addresses . . . . Continue Reading »

It is not the kind of road you ever want to find yourself driving on in a hard rain or at night—or, if you are seriously acrophobic, at any time at all. To get to the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, you must drive about an hour north of Santa Fe, past the tiny town of Abiquiu and the . . . . Continue Reading »

Works of social criticism often do not wear well, and even the best of them tend to fade in interest by their fiftieth birthday. Either the tools of analysis change, or the conditions being analyzed, and very often both. Once-essential works become strictly historical documents, artifacts giving . . . . Continue Reading »

I cannot claim to have known the late Irving Kristol very well. But each encounter was memorable, and none more so than the last, in May of 2009. It was at a crowded and noisy reception at the Warner Theater, prior to Leon Kass’ presentation of the annual Jefferson Lecture for the National . . . . Continue Reading »