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Founding Fathers 8

A Local Look at the Meanings of the Founding: A Review of The Nation that Never Was

After excluding less plausible interpretations like Roosevelt’s, I think the Old Testamentish version of the Founding is the most defensible: the Founders left us some good principles which later were…

Democracy’s Despotic Drift

A court decision that returns to the people the power to decide the pressing questions of the day could be considered fatal to democracy only in an age as Orwellian…
November 1, 2022

How Shall We Train Up A Child?: The View From One State

All education programs enculturate students. There is no neutrality here. The question is not whether education will form our students, but how they will be formed. Proverbs (22:6) says, “Train…
September 2, 2022

Reviving the Cult of Citizenship: Tony Woodlief’s I, Citizen

If you do follow Woodlief's advice, you'll need a thick skin and a dogged commitment to first principles. Self-government takes time and effort, and too many people really do want…
December 6, 2021

The Founding Gardeners

I’ve just finished Andrea Wulf’s beguiling book entitled “ Founding Gardeners, The Revolutionary Generation, Nature and the Shaping of the American Nation”. Published this year by Knopf, it delves into…
December 20, 2011

Washington, we have a Problem

We have for so long asserted that we are a force for good in the world and that our efforts are in the service of "democracy" that we can no…
February 1, 2010

Welcome to the Plutocracy

This will not last. Greed consumes everything, until it finally consumes itself.

When Lawyers Catch the French Disease

 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…