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Ted V. McAllister

Articles by Ted V. McAllister

Civic Engagement and the “Native Country”

[This post is adapted with permission from “Making American Places: Civic Engagement Rightly Understood,” an essay in the anthology Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Civic Life in Modern America,…

In Search of the Real Coolidge

Our interest in historical subjects says as much about our society as about the subjects themselves.  The growing interest in the life, thought and presidency of Calvin Coolidge issues from…

Public versus Government Schools

In an essay posted at the law and liberty blog I explored how Progressives seek to rear citizens--to create the kind of citizens well suited to the Progressive administrative state.…

Whatever Happened to the Playful Ad Hominem?

Few things excited or engaged my mind as a child as much as Buckley’s playful ad hominem attacks, launched regularly at his guests on Firing Line.  The debates concerned heavy…

Nisbet, Austerity, and Progressive Community

Over at the Liberty and Law blog I am writing a series of essays in which I examine Robert Nisbet’s ideas in light of contemporary austerity.  In the first essay…

Cars, Individualism, and the Paradox of Freedom in a Mass Society

The automobile squared perfectly with a distinctive American ideal of freedom—freedom of mobility.

Rocky and the New Populism

Today we can easily forget how dark things looked in the 1970s and how much people feared that they might be living in the sunset years of our nation and…

Iris Chang and the Delicate Art of Remembering

A proper remembering requires more than telling the facts or chronicling the plunder, rape, murder in Nanking; it requires that one explain the event.

Can the Left Govern?

Recently I was asked to participate in a symposium on Michael Berube's "The Left At War" for the journal "Politics and Culture."  I took the author to be scolding those…

Allan Bloom and Homogenizing Nature

What is the purpose of education?

Liberated From Community?

Was Nisbet wrong about the quest for community?

Pale Liberalism

It is time to reopen the questions about human nature, about human autonomy, about the desirability self-creation. Liberals should, in brief, broaden their horizons to ponder competing views of human…

The Anti-Propaganda of Calvin Coolidge

In a wonderful little essay on Calvin Coolidge (Calvin Coolidge: Puritanism de Luxe) written in 1926, Walter Lippmann described the president as having mastered the “technique of anti-propaganda” by sapping…

A Product of Speed

Nostalgia is, therefore, an index of alienation, communal decrepitude, and, at high levels, cultural patricide.

Citizens of the World, Divide!

Moorpark, CA. We are told to be careful with our words, to be aware of how our words might make other people feel or of how we might be misunderstood. …

Diversity Industry

This week I received a directive (the precise source of the directive is not clear nor is the intent) to demonstrate that in my classes I teach my students to…

The Romance of Conservatism

Moorpark, CA.  This is the main body of a lecture I delivered at the ISI Spring Leadership Conference, Indianapolis, Indiana, April 14, 2007.  This conference focused on the work of Russell…

Progressive Liberalism Or: How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Big Government

American Liberalism:  An Interpretation for Our Time by John McGowan.  (Chapel Hill:  The University of North Carolina Press, 2007). Moorpark, CA. If the current administration is liberal, it matters what kind…

Political Splenetics

A colleague directed me to a blog written by a leftist friend of mine—someone whose views on everything from metaphysics to politics are radically different from my own.  We have…

Who Was Richard Blaine? Myth, History, and the Great American Conversation

Moorpark, CA.  The first time is not always the best, but it is often the most revealing.  The first time I saw Casablanca I brought a borrowed memory of seeing…

The Reluctant Southerner: Reflections on Home and History

Moorpark, CA.  In October of 1997 I attended the Southern Historical Association’s convention in Atlanta because I wanted to hear Paul Conkin’s presidential address, “Hot, Humid, and Sad.”  What I…

The Strange Lament of a Bohemian Conservative

“Half-knowledge is more victorious than whole knowledge: it understands things as being more simple than they are and this renders its opinions more easily intelligible and more convincing.” --Nietzsche Several…