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

I get somewhat frustrated, at times, with the language of compromise, because it seems to me that if you are, in fact, acknowledging a degree of compromise with modern life, well then, that must mean you’re….willing to work with modern life.

What if we had more states?

Wichita, KS
I write a Christmas post every year. I’m actually quite fond of this year’s entry, with its reflections on ghosts and spirits and other things in the wintertime dark. But, inspired by the simple beauty given us…

Since Caleb wants to argue about it, I will comply. This is a post that I wrote back in November; nice to see it get some attention now…
Jacob Weisberg has taken on a difficult target in an essay in…

[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…

[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 the continuing argument over what should or shouldn’t be the responsibility of the government–and what government, whether local or state or national, should be responsible for it–there is, I think (or, at least, I hope) one thing most of…

There were several. But this biggest, I think, was:
The American party process….The New York state GOP by-passed the primary process, and got slammed for it. A third party candidate rose to the mainstream. Energized voters forced the hand of…

Jacob Weisberg, in Slate, says that the spirit of Prohibition is dead, and those laws which still maintain elements of that spirit–stopping gay people from marrying, stopping sick people from buying marijuana, stopping businesses from building resorts in Cuba–are on…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res]
Wichita, KS
So, Melissa has flown the coop, escaping to Washington D.C. for the next four days to hang out with friends old and new, and chat in person with many of her online…

One of America’s more interesting and less predictable feminist public intellectual voices, Arlie Hochschild, has a few things to say about the general topic of family life and child care in a consumer capitalist world (hat tip: Laura McKenna):
Over…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res]
Wichita, KS. No one, I think, has ever summed up the longing for a life with front porches–the localist longing which is this blog’s raison d’être–better than Christopher Lasch did, in this plaintive passage…

Adding to the many discussions thus far here at FPR about the ongoing health care debate, an open question, especially directed to Messrs Stegall, Medaille, and Iliff:
How should a distributist or localist or communitarian in America feel about proposals…

Wichita, KS
I just returned from my near-annual pilgrimage to the American Political Science Association’s annual convention…this year held, ironically enough, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I didn’t mind–it meant I’d be able to see some friends whom I haven’t talked…

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res]
Wichita, KS
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve written a few things on the current debate over health care reform. A couple of smart commenters on those posts got me thinking–or rather, forced…

Wichita, KS
[Cross-posted at In Medias Res]
Let’s pause a moment and be grateful that the job market for political theorists is so bad. Because if it wasn’t, Matthew Crawford, who received his Ph.D. from one of the most…

As so often seems to be the case, the Monty Python troop somehow managed to make Matthew Crawford’s point about the enduring value of working with your hands decades before the rest of us realized that a bunch of self-proclaimed meritocratic…