Our current obsession with the politics of the moment rather than the wisdom of the ages threatens our ability to govern ourselves and to cause forever to be ruled by ideology.
No popular regime, it would seem, can sustain civic piety based on reason alone because too few will grasp the truth of it and even those few who grasp it will infuse it with error.
Leo Strauss and his student Harry Jaffa understood that once philosophical insights and political principles ossify into clichés, they are no longer meaningful.
A critical reader tries to make sense of a historian’s sweeping assertions about the Declaration of Independence, natural right, and national conservatism.
We are in danger of losing not only the habits and institutions of republican self-government, but our very ability to remember and understand them. It will be as if America never existed.
All thinking persons know, and evidence abounds, that libertarians with anti-statist mentalities are dangerous, ideological, illusory, and impractical.
The political power and influence of an Elon Musk or a Donald Trump, while superficially encouraging, is really a symptom of a flawed, poorly structured political system.
In recoiling from the fragmentation of values that characterizes modernity, MacIntyre has presented less an alternative to the depredations of liberal individualism than an escape from its challenges.