Though he had passionately opposed Hitler from the very beginning and had striven to protect the helpless from the SS, neither Americans nor English shed many tears for Moltke when he was put to death by the Führer’s henchmen in 1945.

The prevailing model of local voting has deep defects, which often work against strong communities. The modern standard is one person, one vote, one place. While this standard is simple, it leads to outcomes that run against common sense.

That some “progressives” may be conservatives, while most “conservatives” are actually progressives.

A scholar suggests that Phillip Blond’s Red Toryism is just another word for conventional conservatism. He may be right about Blond, but he’s definitely not about the idea.

If Lasch couldn’t express a way for leftists and localists to speak the same language, perhaps no one can.

Teaching Wendell Berry to students today isn’t a thankless task, but the victories are small and far between (which, one might say, is all the best victories always are).

Rod Dreher likes the iPad. What does that say about progress?

Perhaps out of these fissures and the current populist turmoil, someone might be able to craft a new, more coherent, and more promising Christian and Democratic coalition.

If your religion–or at least your concept of the moral norms of the civil order–lacks a notion of grace, it therefore also lacks a notion of gifts; all it can say is that some people are lucky, not that some people are blessed.

But how can such plural sovereignty be realised under the circumstances of this century? Who will guard the guardians, so to speak? How will the stones of the arch fit together?

Harvey Mansfield and William Galston disagree about liberty; from the perspective that insists place empowers liberty, Galston has it right.

Natural disasters and security threats seem to beg for a response that is massive, coordinated, and centralized. If so, how can the consolidation of state power be tempered and the principles of localism advanced?

A homogeneous global consumer culture flattens its victims. And, perhaps in the same vein, our meanderings around the dying furniture capital of Yecla turned up nothing: virtually everything on display fitted what has become the decorative style of contemporary Spain: the sort of stuff one might find in a Copenhagen dentist’s office.

But as a profound poet trying to make a comfortable living I can’t really trouble myself about that fit audience though few. . . . Were I to start thinking about poetry in the social context, I’d be sliding down that slippery slope toward place, limits, and liberty. And then what? Localism? God help us!

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res]
Wichita, KS
The debate over health care reform in the Senate has moved into overdrive, with one possible compromise following another in rapid succession. The two crucial issues upon which the ability of the…

Michael Lind over at Salon suggests a disparity between populism and the “liberal left.” Given Sarah Plain’s new book, in which she continues to posture as a populist (see Rod Dreher’s discussion on her cultural populism) as well as recent…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res]
I suppose Front Porch Republic is experiencing growing pains, because all the talk lately is about “what’s next?”–what cause, what platform, what principles or agenda or policy, if any, FPR should support? The ideas…

In my misspent youth, I was a politician. And in my role as a politician, I did all the things that politicians do. Well, not all the things; I say that in case there are law-enforcement agents who read this…