Alexis de Tocqueville 32

While in my current brief stint in D.C., I am often given a puzzled look when I tell someone that I am going back to the farm: “You’ve made it…

Daniel Elazar was emphatic that a “renewed sense of localism” was essential to America’s future. For Americans, this means renewed intentionality about our local communities, not merely living in one…

Rugged individualists need not be atomists; and there are compelling reasons why even Enlightenment liberals should be front porch republicans.

Add the past year on to this already disturbing trend, and such destructive realities have only been further exacerbated. The need for human sociality is not a deficiency, nor is…

Scotsdale, AZ. With a vaccine on the horizon, it is time to think hard about how our country should look when the pandemic ends. The state of America under the…

On the heels of a consequential election, and the accompanying commentary demonstrating the continued pervasiveness of race-thinking, Barzun’s message of honoring each human individual’s value while recognizing our shared common…

The rancor of this political season provides a diversion from the hard and serious work that must be done to reverse the great unraveling that America is experiencing.

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Last week the United States went through another one of our regular, mostly ritualized exercises in mass democracy. What did (or should) localists think of…

The resurgent debate between Christians that defend classical liberalism and those that critique liberalism tout court has been deeply instructive. This debate, however, threatens to obscure a deeply held alliance and…

Plato remarked in the Republic that if one wanted to know the health of a city, we could simply look at the souls of its citizens. In conjunction with Aristotle,…

It's already an amazon dot hell best-seller in political theory.

Hidden Springs Lane. Rod Dreher has recently been pointing out (for example here) the various ways that those who voice public opposition to certain positions (especially gay marriage) are routinely…

The word “culture” readily falls from our lips, but what appears on first glance to be a clear-cut notion becomes much more complex as soon as we attempt to define…

My review of Robert Nisbet's classic The Quest for Community was just published at the On-Line Library of Law and Liberty, whose stated purpose is "to bring together high-caliber conservative…

What would Sam Adams, Patrick Henry, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson say if they were transported to our day?

While there is much work to be done and there are no guarantees of success, we don’t have to look far for the foundations upon which to build. They are…

Shades of things to come?

“It enabled us to create our own vision for the future. That was the way I look at it then and now.” I guess part of that “vision” was Tammany…

It’s been almost exactly a year since the “Miracle at Polihale” occurred, and the answer to the “aloha question” is now clear: we are entering a “new normal.”

Bush's strong effort to restore the freedom of the church took the political side of this freedom for the whole meaning of the tradition. At the same time, his supply-side…

It takes a village - to keep the Feds at bay.

Amid Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings on revolution in France, there is a passage that rings true for those of us who have spent time in the countryside.  He observed that…

 Devon, PA. No observer of American culture grasped its implicit contents better than did Alexis de Tocqueville, and no one since has better grasped its potencies as they have actually…

Devon, PA.  I have had only a few hours to appreciate the spectacle of talking-heads devouring the carrion of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford's political career, but have heard thrice…