We like to believe we are Lockean, but we suspect we are Machiavellian or on our best days Ciceronian, and we are ever-insecurely deluded about having evaded Hegel and Rousseau.
Monthly Archives: March 2013
Thesis of Theses (re Samuel Goldman on The Religious Origins of Liberalism)
Posted in History, Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Politics Tagged with: American Conservative, Conservatism, Hegel, Liberalism, Locke, Philosophy of World History, Political Theology
chart/comment at Daniel Silliman’s “Religiously unaffiliated now at 20%”
Could be that the end of the Cold War, and the removal of the atheist enemy/competitor, made it easier for Americans in general to drift away from politico-theological prior commitments.
comment at ‘The Walking Dead’ Open Thread: We’re The Greater Good
founding the sacrificial state and the incipient civil religion, a system of mutual obligations justifying living, as well as killing and dying,
Posted in notes, Philosophy, Politics, The Exception, TV Tagged with: Civil Religion, Political Theology, Rawls, The Exception, Walking Dead
On the Neo-Imperial Interest
Posted in History, International Relations, Philosophy, Politics, The Exception Tagged with: Americanism, Anti-Americanist Conservatism, exceptionalism, Neo-Conservatism, neo-imperialism, The Exception
note on anti-Americanist conservatism in re Obama in Israel
Dismissing uncomprehended perspectives intuitively understood by others as “ridiculous” is ridiculous, and the habit of a vulgar ideologue.
Posted in International Relations, Philosophy, Politics Tagged with: Anti-Americanist Conservatism, Israel, Obama
Responsibility to Project (10 Years After #3)
If the implacable self-deception of that moment ten years ago produced a shallowly mistaken, embarrassingly unjustifiable, finally tragic assertion of a global regency and its prerogatives, the commensurate and necessary deception of this moment might be of a safe, simply chosen abdication.
The Iraq War “Imminence Debate” in Retrospect
Getting caught up on the terms of the discussion can be misleading when the whole point of the new initiative is that the terms of the old discussion are no longer adequate. That people fall into the old terminology constantly should not be surprising, but the fact that they do is relevant to the main questions only as evidence of their very novelty, and illustration of how difficult it can be to discuss and cope with them at all.
Larison’s Feaver
Larison himself is among those frequently and pointedly making the argument that Larison says no one ever makes.
Posted in International Relations, Neo-Imperialism, War Tagged with: Anti-Americanist Conservatism, Iraq, The American Conservative
Ship of State of Fools
…a residue or by-product of the same (world-)historical process realized as a nearly entirely dysfunctional passive aggressive national government care-taking the affairs of the passive aggressive polity that it passive-aggressively reflects, represents, and embodies, and that it is expected to preserve and to protect.
Posted in Neo-Imperialism, Philosophy, Politics, The Exception, War Tagged with: 4th Generation Warfare, Liberalism, Obama, The Exception, War