Am. History & Culture
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The Intellectual Trump Optimists
Maybe the rest of you are ahead of me on this, but it’s only been in the last month or so that I’ve felt that my fears about what was happening have been confirmed. We’ve crossed the Rubicon, and there’s no going back. And so it’s interesting to me that Trump intellectual apologists are emerging
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Hazony’s Conservative Paradigm
Is Hazony a Continuist or a Discontinuist? I thought before that he’s more of a Discontinuist, but maybe he needs another category, say, Re-Contintuist. There’s a part of me that thinks that Hazony would be better off if he called what’s he’s talking about something other than ‘Conservative’, perhaps a Whig. I don’t think the
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Annunciation
This painting by Botticelli is, if you had to force me to choose, the one I’d pick as the Renaissance-era painting that I love the most. There’s so much going on in it, but the astonishing, gobsmacking beauty of it… It was brought to mind by the shooting earlier this week at Annunciation parish
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J.G. Herder’s Nationalism
Those in the traditionalist group, insofar as they have retained some sense of their living tradition, see modernists as the American Indians saw the white man–as people who have no understanding, people who have become crazy and disoriented, people who have lost their souls because in their uprooted individualism they have lost any experiential connection
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Dying Traditions
[I’m reposting this essay for a couple of reasons. First, it sets up what I want to say soon about Herder’s idea of ‘the nation’ or the ‘folk soul’ and then contrast that with Hazony’s call for a nationalist state. Second, I think it’s pretty good and worth rereading. It sets up much of what
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Hazony v. Klein v. Me
I listened to Ezra Klein’s podcast interview with Yoram Hazony shortly after posting “Taking a Step Back" yesterday about the Good Society. This is a very interesting conversation, and I encourage you to listen to it. Hazony and Klein in their different ways would find my ‘Rescuing Aristotle’ argument weird, so I thought it might be
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Epstein’s Revenge
And a project at the University of Maryland to track radicalization by QAnon found that 83 percent of the women who had committed crimes in the name of the conspiracy theory had children who had been abused by a romantic partner or family member. The QAnon movement doesn’t draw adherents online the way it once
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Have We Pinged Our Last Pong?
Thomas Edsall’s column this week focuses on the problems that Dems have with voters without a college degree, aka Populists. He talks to various experts about this. Most interesting to me were the comments of Michael Podhorzer and Herbert Kitschelt. Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and a founder of the Analyst
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How Significant, Really, Was Bill Buckley?
I’ve just finished the Tanenhaus Buckley biography. It engaged me on a number of levels, not the least because his life, 1925-2008, mapped to the lives of my parents, and reading the story of his big life helps me to understand their smaller ones. Like most good biographies, the story told is not just about