Tag Archives | conservatism

An Era of Moral Crisis

Commentary by , September 11, 2019

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. A Serious Foreign Policy and an Unserious President President Trump celebrated the 18th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks a few days early this year by announcing that he had planned to hold personal negotiations with the top leadership of the Taliban–and to do so at […]

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Sohrab Ahmari-ism, Courtesy of David French

Feature Article by , September 6, 2019

The battle between the “liberal” conservatives—that is, those who still believe in free markets and civil liberties—and the illiberal nationalist conservatives has been out in the open ever since Sohrab Ahmari launched a broadside against “David French-ism,” naming the National Review writer as his avatar for the supposed cultural weakness of “classical liberalism.” So a […]

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Conservatives Lose Their Word

Commentary by , July 30, 2019

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. The Death of the Tea Party The Tea Party movement of ten years ago is now comprehensively dead. How do we know that? Because Republicans and Democrats in Congress just got together on a budget deal that approves deficits in excess of $1 trillion forever—at a time […]

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Declaring Independence from Independence

Commentary by , July 21, 2019

The big question about the impact of Donald Trump on the Republican Party is: will he be an aberration, a temporary departure from the normal rhetorical style and ideological composite of late-20th-Century conservatism—or will he usher in a “new normal,” a new baseline for what the party stands for and what it will tolerate? We’re […]

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The Futile Rage of the Illiberal Conservatives

Feature Article by , June 2, 2019

The right-of-center Internet has been lit up for the last few days by an assault by Sohrab Ahmari on David French and something Ahmari improbably calls “David French-ism.” Supposedly, this is about French, a lawyer and contributor to National Review, being too weak-kneed and polite because he is interested in using persuasion to try to […]

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The War on the Brains of the Right

Commentary by , December 15, 2018

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. The War on the Brains of the Right At the very beginning of the Trump phenomenon, I warned about a war on the brains of the right. Along with many friends and colleagues, I have found it grimly amusing to find myself dismissed as an “establishment” “elitist” […]

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The Psycho-Epistemology of Pathological Altruism

Commentary by , December 11, 2018

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. The Psycho-Epistemology of Pathological Altruism By now, we all know what to expect on college campuses, right? Here’s the latest: an Indian-American comedian and former Saturday Night Live writer was shooed off the stage at Columbia University—they literally cut off his microphone—for telling jokes that were offensive […]

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Salon of the Refused, Episode 2

Announcement by , November 23, 2018

The second episode of my video and podcast series, Salon of the Refused, is now available. Rob Tracinski talks with Charles C.W. Cooke, editor of NationalReview.com, on what it’s like to be an atheist on the right. The conversation includes: the secular basis for morality and liberty, how atheism is good for the right, Ayn […]

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Making the “Miracle”

Feature Article by , September 8, 2018

Several recent books on the Enlightenment have sought to celebrate its legacy but have been strangely cursory in their examination of actual Enlightenment thinkers, their ideas, and their influence, sometimes treating the embrace of reason, individual rights, and political freedom as a “miracle” that seemingly came out of nowhere. If you’re interested in the question […]

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Unfrozen Caveman Intellectual

Feature Article by , August 23, 2018

“There is no God in this book.” So begins Suicide of the West, Jonah Goldberg’s contribution to the recent flurry of discussion about the legacy of the Enlightenment. Unfortunately, there’s not much of the Enlightenment in the book, either. If Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now treated the philosophical movement of the 18th century as if it […]

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