Conservatism
A quick note on conservatives’ view of businesses appears to be in order. In general, we do not believe businesses are inherently pure, moral actors. We do not look at the housing bubble and the derivatives market and defend them on the grounds that they were legal, so nyaa, nyaa, the CEOs got away with…
Lee Edwards’s review of Reappraising the Right: The Past & Future of American Conservatism, by George Nash, in the current National Review is certainly timely: Nash ends his thoughtful reappraisal asking “Whither conservatism?” and responding that the following points should be kept in mind. Modern American conservatism is a “coalition with many points of origin…
It’s a topic that comes up from time to time, as we define our terms or as certain folks reject the notion that labels of left and right have any utility at all, so readers may profit from a recent symposium in National Review on the definition of conservatism as “classical liberalism.” Yuval Levin may…
An interesting, if frustrating, conversation has proceeded from a recent post in which I suggested that libertarians and those who focus on civic and economic matters should not take their Obama-inspired momentum as an opportunity to jettison social conservatives from movement. The frustration derives from the difficulty in nailing down the precise notions that everybody’s…
Periodically, one picks up a hint from the libertarian quarters of the broader tea party movement that they see, in it, an opportunity to assert economic conservatism apart from social conservatism. As I noted while observing the size and diversity of the crowd at the marriage-vow-renewal ceremony hosted by the National Organization for Marriage –…
The Congressional race in New York’s 23rd District pits a Democrat against a Republican against a Conservative (New York has a Conservative Party), all of whom have polled around 30%. It has been an interesting object lesson in showing how conservatives aren’t automatically Republicans. In a nutshell, through typical back-room arm-twisting, the local GOP nominated…
Two well-placed articles — by virtue of their proximity to each other — in the September 21 National Review point to a necessary conclusion for a modern conservative political philosophy. The first item is an interior quotation by American Medical Association lobbyist William Woodward within a book review by Kyle Smith (emphasis added): The trouble…
The following is a sentiment that I seem to have been hearing in multiple contexts, recently, written in this case by George Cardinal Pell in a review of Peter Seewald’s book on Pope Benedict (emphasis added): … by his own account, the answers Seewald received “grabbed him by the scruff of the neck.” He started…
Like Justin, I read Michael Knox Beran’s piece about the loss of the marketplace (the agora) with interest. Beran contrasted the emptying agora (the town square or marketplace) with the filling up of castles both old and new built. Beran points to an upper class culture striven for by the modern day aristocrats (czars and…
Michael Knox Beran raises, to my mind, a cultural reality that conservatives would do well to address when he describes the effects that losing the local marketplace (the agora) has had: No civilization, even the most bovine, can entirely do without this cathartic machinery. Aristotle credited the poetry of the agora with forming the character…
