Politics
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Patriotism and the American Creed Last week I mentioned patriotism as one of three things (the others being religion and love of family) to which a person of conservative temperament naturally inclines. Thinking about the different senses which many people may give to the word “patriotism,” I thought I ought to say a bit more…
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The End of Temperamental Conservativism By “temperamental conservatism” I don’t mean a moody and irritable conservatism, but conservatism as a temperament, as opposed to a set of convictions or an ideology. And there has always been a touch of paradox in being any sort of conservative in America, but especially in being conservative by temperament.…
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Imagine No Delusions NOTE: EXPLICIT CONSERVATIVE CONTENT I include this warning for the sake of certain friends and relatives unhappy with some of my conservative views. Pop music fans may have noticed a recent bit of fanfare about Rolling Stone’s list of 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, as determined by a poll of critics.…
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Unfair, Unbalanced, Unrepentant I did not intend to emphasize politics in this journal, and, more specifically, I did not intend to write about politics again this week. But I find myself unable to stop thinking about the current presidential campaign. What follows has been bothering me for months; maybe I’ll be able to leave it…
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The Litmus Test Test My old friend Daniel Nichols, with whom I worked on Caelum et Terra is one of those relatively rare people who is genuinely conservative on social issues but tends to lean left on other matters. Though he’s vehemently opposed to the Iraq war (not necessarily a leftward position, of course), he…
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*-wingers I started noticing a few years ago that liberals and other opponents of conservatism seemed not to be using the word “conservative” as their preferred epithet for the enemy in the way they once had done. Instead, they seemed to be using the term “right-wing.” The most famous use of the term was Hillary…
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Ronald Reagan and D-Day To judge by most of the news reports I’ve seen over the past couple of days, one would think that Ronald Reagan had been a far more universally admired president than he was. But while he was president anyone who was at all left of center politically and culturally viewed him…
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The Progressive Steamroller Once the bandwagon for homosexual marriage got rolling at a really good clip, it occurred to me that if it became thoroughly established the result would be bad for heterosexual women. Why? (A): most women want to marry and have children, while most men are at least hesitant about, and at worst…
Light On Dark Water 