And it came to pass, when Pharaoh had let the people go, that God did not lead them through the land of the Philistines, even though it was nearer. —Exodus 13:17 For many decades now, America’s political life has been divided between people who call themselves “conservatives” and people . . . . Continue Reading »
Democracy will only arrive in the Middle East when families and tribes become much less important than they now are. Continue Reading »
One of the more intractable aspects of sexual politics today for traditionalists is the emergence of the courtroom as the arena for settling every debate. Even when they have a democratic majority, not to mention centuries of sexual-marital mores, on their side, the contrary will of one-to-five politically-appointed individuals can prevail. Of course, judicial activism is an old problem, undemocratic and arbitrary, placing monumental decisions in too few hands. But there is another problem, an indirect one that follows precisely from critics taking seriously the courtroom’s power. We could call this problem the “legalization” of debate, meaning not whether something is legal, but instead the conversion of moral, social, religious, and other dimensions of an issue into legal, or legalistic, terms, or at least the neglect of them because of a focus on what the judges will say.
Jed Perl warns in the August 25 issue of the New Republic of a new threat to the arts. Art for art’s sake has been displaced by a view of “art as a comrade-in-arms to some more supposedly stable or substantial or readily comprehensible aspect of our world.” Art is losing its “purposeful purposelessness” and is becoming a bondservant to “some more general system of social, political, and moral values.” It’s hardly news, Perl knows, when art is enlisted for some extra-artistic cause. The new danger is that many have drawn the conclusion that “art has no independent life.” Continue Reading »
America has “bad-faith open borders.” We limit immigration but we enforce those limits only sporadically. Fred Bauer argues that this “is a distorted hybrid of the United States’ tradition of ordered borders and of the transnationalist aim of entirely open borders.” The distortion is real, but it is not rooted entirely in transnationalism. It is also rooted in a certain kind of American exceptionalism that has a history on the right, but that conservatives don’t talk about very much. Getting past “bad-faith open borders” will require rejecting romanticism and looking to the facts of the American present. Continue Reading »
Our political leaders generally discuss education in terms of economic development and competitiveness. Adam Smith, arguably the founder of modern economics, did not. Continue Reading »
The inaugural post of Pseudoplotinus, aka Forfare Davis Continue Reading »
One thing that struck me about presidential elections in the post-1984 era was that, of the candidates who have serious hopes of winning their party’s nomination, the Democrats tried to seem more moderate than they really were while the Republicans tried to seem more radical than they . . . . Continue Reading »
Two National Review reporters have taken prominent positions in right-leaning institutions. This is good news for the country.Over the last eight or so years, a group of conservative writers (Ross Douthat, Yuval Levin, Reihan Salam, Ramesh Ponnuru and many—-though not enough—-others) . . . . Continue Reading »
I’ve been down with the flu, so not much from me this week,1. If I ran a national television news division, I would immediately hire Mollie Hemingway to do lengthy reported pieces.2. Imagine you are in your late teens or early twenties. You are in the top third of your age-group for intelligence . . . . Continue Reading »
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