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Ted V. McAllister

Ted McAllister is a native of Oklahoma, now living in Moorpark, California with his wife, Dena, and his two children, Elisa and Luke. He yearns for his own chunk of land and for those bits of nature that please him, but not for farming or for unnecessary drudgery of the sort that involves physical labor.  He is an aesthetic agrarian, not a practicing one.

Educated as an Intellectual and Cultural Historian at Vanderbilt University, he now teaches at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy where he pursues with his students the enduring questions rather than the particular answers.  His book, Revolt Against Modernity:  Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and the Search for a Post-Liberal Order launched him into the study of political philosophy, though his epistemological orientation is much shaped by his training as a historian.  Working presently on Walter Lippmann as well as a US History textbook, he expects soon to write a multi-volume history of the Baby-boomers.

Articles by Ted V. McAllister

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…
June 28, 2010

A Product of Speed

Nostalgia is, therefore, an index of alienation, communal decrepitude, and, at high levels, cultural patricide.
June 21, 2010

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. …
December 15, 2009

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…
November 9, 2009

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…
November 7, 2009

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…
October 23, 2009

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…
October 5, 2009

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…
September 29, 2009

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…
August 31, 2009

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…
July 31, 2009