Thoughtful Conservatism
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The Neocon Nightmare World
[Ed. Note: While Neocons are not in the news so much these days, but they are waiting in the wings, and for reasons given in recent posts, it's just a matter of time before they make their comeback. This is a repost of a 2007 piece (slightly edited) that was a repost of a 2005 piece.
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Ross Douthat v. Pope Francis
Douthat argues in a recent piece that the Pope and church synod's can't just change doctrine. It can't, for instance, just say that Christological ideas that are virtually Arian can be tolerated. And then he says: Now you can make a case that my hypothetical is absurd or fails as an analogy because the proposed changes to
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Deneen on In Loco Parentis
Deneen's most recent post is about the Feds getting tough on colleges and universities regarding sexual assault. He makes the case that this is the inevitable result of abolishing in loco parentis rules on college campuses (I"m old enough to remember parietals), which have created a vacuum that the state, a la Hobbes, must fill: In effect,
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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
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What’s the Matter with Connecticut? (encore)
While Creative Class locations [BosWash, Silicon Valley, Seattle, and Austin] are successful in generating financial and creative capital, they are comparatively poorer in social capital. Bishop discovered that people living in non-Creative Class settings enjoyed “the comfort of strong families, bustling civic groups, near universal political participation, and abundant volunteering.” Creative Class cities, by contrast,
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Bill Buckley: Romantic Reactionary
If there is one overarching emotion that characterizes Romanticism, it's nostalgia. The Romantic hates modernity and longs for something lost, a lost age (or a lost childhood) when one did not feel so estranged, when men were men and women were women, where nobility and grace and chivalry were the rule, where the world was