A funeral can sometimes seem like a going out of business sale, an occasion for taking stock, not so much of the deceased as of your friendship with him. It is strange that, presented with such an opportunity, pastors and friends usually do so poor a job of evoking the life of the departed. One...
267 search results for: Tocqueville
The Classless Republic: An Impossible Society
I cannot see the least possibility of recreating either an elite republican class (if, by “elite,” one means an untitled aristocracy) or the American Republic itself. The notion of a republic is a product of classical political thinking, which is now virtually dead in the Western world, and never appeared elsewhere. Not only has the classical...
What the Founders Didn’t Count On
“I assert that the people of the United States . . . have sufficient patriotism and intelligence to sit in judgment on every question which has arisen or which will arise no matter how long our government will endure.” —William Jennings Bryan As citizens it is fitting that we engage in acts of civic piety...
The Elusive Conflict
Of the making of Civil War books there shall be no end. There are so many, most of which cover the same bloody ground in much the same slogging way, without any new insight or contribution. To make matters worse, American historians have rewritten the war as a simplistic moral melodrama between the forces of...
American Piety, Then and Now
“All the good the Savior gave to the world was communicated through this book [the Bible]. But for it we could not know right from wrong.” —Abraham Lincoln “The Cosby Show is the greatest teacher of morals in American society.” —Sheldon Hackney, president, University of Pennsylvania “America was born a Christian nation. America was born...
Disappearing America
America’s British Culture by the late Russell Kirk offers a clear, insightful explication of key British elements in American culture, as well as an important critique of the current cultural climate in America. Kirk examines four major British contributions that have particularly shaped American culture: language and a common body of literature; rule of law...
Surprise! Surprise!
In 1988, I wrote in a review in these pages, “If there is any young historian out there who wants to know where the cutting edge is in American historical understanding, it is . . . the new and coming field of Northern history.” Complicity is one of a half-dozen or more books published in...
Revolution and Natural Law
To what extent (if at all) does natural law entail religious liberty? To put it another way, is religious liberty a natural right? An attempt to answer this question should elucidate the long and sometimes equivocal tradition of natural law. What, for example, is the proper relationship between tolerance and the truth? When does tolerance...
Once Upon a Time in America
One of the strangest rituals in the United States Senate is the annual reading of President Washington’s Farewell Address. The chore of recitation usually falls to a freshman nonentity eager to curry favor by performing what is regarded as a drudge task. The chamber is empty, save for the classical remnant: New York’s Senator Moynihan...
Dodging A Bullet
The U.S. Supreme Court, late in January, dodged a bullet by refusing to decide whether Maryland’s decision to close its public schools on Good Friday violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. State and local Good Friday closing laws have been with us for many generations, but recently they have been challenged in the federal courts....
The Democratic Religion
A half-century ago, a politically ambitious intellectual celebrity named Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., defined liberalism’s role as that of offering solutions to problems and solving them. Even in the heyday of the Vital Center, that was far from a complete representation of liberalism’s self-perceived task. Today, when “advanced liberalism” (the phrase is James Kalb’s) is...
A Mighty Long Fall: An Interview With Eugene McCarthy
Senator Eugene McCarthy is America’s senior statesman without a party. An Irish-German Minnesota Catholic who left the seminary for academe, McCarthy was elected to the House of Representatives in 1948 and the Senate in 1958. He was the link between the Old Progressives of the Upper Midwest and the postwar liberals; as time goes by,...
Can American Legal Education Be Fixed?
Something has gone radically awry with legal education and maybe even legal practice. For about a decade now, the loudest wailing over the state of affairs has come from Chief Judge Harry Edwards of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, who wrote a landmark article in the Michigan Law Review...
A Walk on the Dark Side
“Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity.” —Thomas Adams Conspiracy theories have found a ready audience in many countries in many different times. When cataclysmic events shock a country to its foundations, when people feel impotent before history’s tidal wave, when war or economic collapse or political disintegration mark the end of a historical era and, having...
Evil Lessers
If you had bet me six months ago that the grassroots disaffection in the Republican Party, as demonstrated by the “Tea Party” movement, would guarantee a responsive nominee for president, you would have lost. I am no prophet, just an observer with some historical perspective. I would have bet on Romney against all comers. The...
Hungary’s Stand Against the European Union
Western elites recently heaped scorn on the Hungarian government for passing child-protection legislation. The Land of the Magyars outlawed the portrayal of homosexuality and “sex reassignment” surgeries in school education material and television programs aimed at minors. Hungarians view the law as protecting children from radical ideologies about sex and gender, while European Commission President...
Crime, Punishment, and Civility
In 1777, upon the execution of the preacher Dr. William Dodd, Samuel Johnson produced one of his most memorable aphorisms: “Depend upon it. Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Six years later, he deplored the abolition of public executions at Tyburn, echoing St....