Political Philosophy
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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 vs. Neo-Marxism
I wouldn’t be giving Hazony this much air time if I didn’t think that it was important to understand what people on the Right like him are saying. He doesn’t fit into most of the cubbies that most Americans put someone who is MAGA friendly. As I said in a previous post, his team that
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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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Democracy and the Classical Tradition
I’ve been using terms like “original”, “Deep Real”, “Neoplatonism” in ways that I’m sure many readers here find obscure, if not objectionable. When I talk about Neoplatonism or about Aristotle, I’m really talking about the classical tradition, which is Neoplatonic through and through. I thought it might be helpful to excerpt from a post entitled
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Mordor, the Shire, and Freedom in the Public Sphere
[This post first went up in 2012 as a further development of a post entitled "Henry A. Giroux: Neoliberalism Defined", which focused on the way in which Neoliberalism has supplanted the older political idea of republican freedom with an idea of freedom as consumer choice. It relates to themes developed in "Ukraine and the Politics
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Republics vs Democracies
Some of the earliest contrasts between “democracy” and “republic” in Lee’s sense, according to Cornell historian Lawrence Glickman, came from conservative opponents of the New Deal. At the time, President Roosevelt sold his policies — both domestic and foreign — as a means of defending and enhancing American democracy. Some of his opponents, who saw
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Of Groupthinks & Cognitive Moments
All of us to a certain extent have slid into groupthink at one time or another. We all had to go through middle school, didn't we? We've all felt the pressure to conform our thinking to whatever were the group norms then or at other times in our life. So what is doing the thinking
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Contempt for the Liberal Class
Last week, with the Republican campaign robo-calls coming one after another over the phone in suburban Kansas City — at least a dozen of them every day, the right-wing super PACs’ version of a World War I artillery barrage — I picked out one phrase from the hailstorm of words: “Washington’s liberal class.” That phrase,
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Burke v. Paine = Right v. Left?
In a review of Yuval Levn's book The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Left and Right, Burke biographer Jesse Norman writes: But one might wonder if these categories can really be mapped onto the left and right of American politics today. After all, it was Ronald Reagan, icon of American