Why does it matter that President Obama’s defense of open government was framed as an attack on the GOP and couched within a campaign-style celebration of the achievements of the Democratic Party? Because while normal political conflicts within our democratic system—conflicts…
The populist wave now cresting across much of the world is sometimes described as a revolt against globalization: immigrants failing to assimilate the values of their hosts, poorer countries drawing jobs from richer ones, and so on. But the root…
We need a post-identity liberalism, and it should draw from the past successes of pre-identity liberalism. Such a liberalism would concentrate on widening its base by appealing to Americans as Americans and emphasizing the issues that affect a vast majority…
We cannot say that this firstly and even only emotionally authentic form of conservatism is not a conservatism at all.
The PC left and the alt-right exist symbiotically with one another: Working together to exacerbate tribal loyalties, to undermine the legitimacy of the state as a political unit, to question the idea that Western institutions can really treat groups of people with equal respect—in other words, to…
Vote for Trump! Or maybe suppress his campaign through violence! Anything other than, you know, just trying to elect Hillary Clinton. This may seem like a contradiction, but it is actually consistent. And not just because the most likely result…
How did liberals become so hopelessly illiberal? In “The Closing of the Liberal Mind,” Kim R. Holmes suggests that “the loss of historical memory as to what liberalism was is actually a key to understanding what it is today.” Mr.…
Would-be proponents of a liberal society would cease being liberals at all at the moment they ceased their opposition to “shutting down” discussion, and to the precise extent they did so.
Preliminary list supplementing a set of posts at Ordinary Times, whose publication I expect to occur shortly, and which began as a comment on the question of a “libertarian moment” in American politics – whether it ever occurred at all and whether…
Comments on “Islam is the rock on which the liberal order broke?”
History may instead record that what broke this latest “liberal order” (a typical contradiction in terms), as before and likely again, as inevitably, was the latest liberal order itself. Yet historians may alternatively – or also – someday record that it was liberalism that finally broke Islam or the Islamic Order, and, perhaps, in so doing repaired one or both – though it may always be too early to say so.