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The Walz Pick
In picking Walz, Harris has won me over. I assumed that she was a creature of the consultant class, and in picking Walz she signaled she wasn't. She signaled, to me at least, that she has the independence of mind to make what the "pros" see as a rookie move. And it shows that she
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Pro-Labor Republicans?
In a keynote address to the Republican National Convention last Monday night, Teamster president Sean O’Brien devoted most of his seventeen-minute speech to assailing corporate control of the economy and celebrating the muscle of independent, democratic trade unions. Far from conciliatory, O’Brien tested the audience’s appetite for anti-elite sentiment outside the GOP’s preferred targets on
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The Populist Intellectuals at ‘Compact’
According to Wikipedia— Compact is an American online magazine that began operating in March 2022. The magazine was co-founded by Edwin Aponte, a populist and founder of The Bellows, Matthew Schmitz, a former editor of the conservative ecumenical journal First Things, and conservative opinion journalist Sohrab Ahmari. When it was founded, The New York Times
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The Integralist Threat
Part 1: J.D. Vance, Heritage, and Vermeule’s Integralism It’s not surprising that, in a country where Catholics are a minority, Vermeule does not expect his integralist regime to take power democratically; instead, it will have to be imposed from above—or rather, from within. In “Integration from Within,” he argues that Catholic integralists should endeavor to
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J.D. Vance: Hero of the Fourth Turning?
Kevin Roberts, the President of the Heritage Foundation, has been in the news in the last couple of weeks. He’s been quite aggressive in promoting Project 2025 and in his predicting that Trump’s win in November will be a bloodless revolution if the Left allows it to be. He was also in the news Monday
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In Other News
Charles Taylor and Christian Wiman have come out with new books. As a prequel to the Cathedral Lectures, I wrote more than most of you wanted to know about Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. If you understood the argument I made during the Cathedral Lectures, you also understood how important Taylor’s work is for laying
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J. D. Vance, Ontological Dizziness–and the Coming Integralist Regime
Vance wrote this in July 2016 in The Atlantic: Though the details differ, men and women like my neighbor represent, in the aggregate, a social crisis of historic proportions. There is no group of people hurtling more quickly to social decay. No group of people fears the future more, dies with such frequency from heroin,
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The Scotus and Chevron Rulings
One has to ask, what's motivating these six judges? I can't believe that they are so naive as to think that this is just a theoretical exercise with no consideration for political consequences, and it's hard for me to believe that they admire Trump and want to protect him as an individual. I take them
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Chinatown
Ronald Brownstein's article, "The 1970s Movie that Explains 2020s America" in The Atlantic looks back at Polankski's Chinatown, which came out fifty years ago this week. It is worth reading. If you asked me when I was in my twenties or thirties what I thought the best movie ever made was, I’d say Chinatown. There
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The Limits of the Scientific Clerisy
Though [the adherents of the New Atheism} built an identity around being rational, they often based their unbelief on dogmatic appeals to institutional authority, rather than careful skepticism. We saw this in the way Dawkins and others claimed that science had achieved an absolute, unquestionable truth with the theory of evolution. Rather than engage with