The Stump
Responsibility as Destiny: Thoughts on the MAHA Movement
What exactly is health? What do we mean by that word? What is a proper understanding of it?
More Articles in The Stump
Stop Talking about Wendell Berry on Twitter
Editor's Note: Matt's piece kicks off a mini-symposium on the question of whether localists should use social media, and if so, how. As a Twitter user myself, albeit a somewhat conflicted one,…
Whither Liberalism?
We live, to borrow the title from Daniel T. Rodgers’s excellent 2011 book, in an age of fracture. Whether any time in history has been without fracturing is a point for debate, but,…
The Triumph of the Datum
The middle of the twentieth century abounded with writers who simultaneously analyzed their own times and predicted ours: Daniel Bell (The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society), Christopher Lasch (The Culture of Narcissism),…
What is Truth?
A year ago, as President Trump launched yet another salvo of tweets whose express purpose was to correct allegedly "false news" with a new variety of confirmedly false news, Time Magazine ran…
Why Anti-Liberalism Fails
The Failures of Liberalism The intellectual critique of liberalism is coextensive with liberalism itself, going back at least as far as Giambattista Vico’s dispute with Descartes. The term “liberalism” itself doesn’t designate…
What Wendell Berry’s Brush Teaches Us About Capitalism, Community, and “Inevitability”
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] The Art of Loading Brush: New Agrarian Writings, the latest collection of writings by Wendell Berry, isn't a perfect book, nor the perfect expression of his powerful…
The New Yorker’s Latest Contribution to Trumpian Populism
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. --George Orwell, Animal Farm This past Thursday, I opened my mailbox and saw a naked President Trump staring back at…
Identity and Ethnos in Socrates’s Athens: A Response to Jordan Wales
Jordan Wales has recently gifted the conservative movement a sober and justly-timed critique of Richard Spencer and the alt-right. Unfortunately, much of the analysis of Spencer and the movement Spencer has midwifed…
Technology and the Virtues: Scale Matters
When an autonomous Uber vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona, Uber suspended its fleet of self-driving cars and assured everyone that it was “cooperating with authorities.” Such “cooperation” probably just…
Communal Self-Reliance: A Tie to Bind Black and White
Two recent incidents have made clear to me how the culture wars can stultify the fecund complexity of our common life. Recently, my wife and I attended a lecture on James Baldwin,…
Learning from The Left Behind
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Robert Wuthnow's new book, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America, is the best book I've read on the rural-urban divide in the United States…
The Practice of Attachment and A Comprehensive Social Order
Shortly after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Columbia University professor Mark Lilla took to the pages of the New York Times to offer an edifying perspective as to why Trump won.…
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