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Search Results for: constitution – Page 7

Founding

Is the American Founding Christian, Secular—Or Something Else?

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In The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics, Kody Cooper and Justin Dyer successfully refute the still (somehow) influential interpretation of the American Founding as a secular-not-Christian project. However, they do so without successfully establishing their preferred alternative, the Christian-not-secular interpretation. There is a vast middle between these two extremes whose existence slips through the authors’ fingers again and again like a well-greased elephant.
Ancient Roman ruins of temple in Jerash, Jordan

After Postliberalism

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What would happen if we dropped that charged word “liberalism” from the conversation and got down to specifics? I suspect much of Patrick Deneen’s postliberal magic would disappear.
Democrats vs republicans are in a ideological duel on the american flag. In American politics US parties are represented by either the democrat donkey or republican elephant. animal shadows on flag

The Tribal, and Philosophical, Basis of the Left and Right in American Politics

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In The Myth of Left and Right, Hyrum and Verlan Lewis certainly succeed in proving to the reader that the pieces within each ideological bundle have shifted over time and do not inevitably go together, but they go well beyond that in concluding that each coalition’s bundle is fundamentally random. Though labels and coalitions may be quite movable, at any given time (including now) ideological identifications can tell us something intelligible about our politics.
statue of Plato in Athens

The Truth of Sensible Politics

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The coalition of the sensible is not a coalition of the soft, the weak, the “can’t we all get along?,” or the squishy moderate. This is not a mood calling for peace, peace, when there is no peace; neither is it compromise for its own sake or a winking cynicism about the possibility of moral rights and wrongs. The coalition of the sensible is statecraft, and the realization that statecraft is not found in imaginary utopias, dreams of perfection, or big, brash theories of politics, but in the actual details of human action.
Riot police clashed with the protesters.

A Coalition of the Sensible: What’s Wrong with “The New Right”

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The New Right’s embrace of the “politics of war” is utterly reckless. No amount of friend–enemy Manichaeism or state-of-emergency governance will transform American pluralism into moral unity.
Custom library

Leo Strauss on Greatness and Democracy: An Interview with Timothy W. Burns

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Leo Strauss was an extraordinarily generous writer, by which I mean that he went to great pains to present the best case he could for the arguments of a serious thinker with whom he disagreed, before offering any tentative critique of that thinker. One never finds in his writings mere polemic or straw men. He invites the reader to take seriously and try fully to understand and spell out the serious and deepest thoughts of those whose thought he is confronting, even if he disagrees.
Lincoln memorial

Lincoln and the Question of Self-Government

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Lincoln saw the fundamental problem in democracy as one single, monstrous question: “Can the principle that liberates all and produces self-government remain disciplined and restrained enough in practice to retain self-government?”
Regent Street with Union Jack Flags in London, United Kingdom UK

Reckoning with Colonialism

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As a moral framework for assessing regimes in an imperfect world, Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning has much to recommend it.
Photo of Ryan Anderson and Micah Watson

Ryan Anderson on a Decade of Debates, the Future of Conservatism, and a Time to Grow

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Micah Watson and Ryan Anderson look back on his Piers Morgan interview, how the debate on same-sex marriage played out, what that might mean for our debates on transgender ideology, the nature of political discourse in America today, the future of the conservative movement, and what to look for in the next decade.
Nietzsche

The Bookshelf: On Bad Good Books

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The bad good (or great) books must be read and taught in just the same way as the good great books. The teacher must be a wrestling coach, instilling in his students a readiness to grapple equally with every kind of argument, accepting nothing on which they have not tested their own grip.
Woman sad on bed

Stigmarketing: How Empathetic Advocates Capitalize on Bad News about LGBTQ+

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“Stigmarketing,” which is appealing to claims of stigma to motivate social change, has become the backbone of legal efforts toward that end. Stigmarketing capitalizes on gay–straight differences, and the way these disparities can be measured by the absolute surge in research on “minority stress theory,” or MST.
Jean-Francois-Millet-the-angelus

How Should Conservatives Respond to Revolution?

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We are attempting a struggle against a dehumanizing revolution—but we are all attempting to overcome the same common threat. City building isn’t pretty, and it isn’t all that calm. At the same time, in our efforts against revolution, we should not respond with our own revolution.
China's Great Hall of the People

The Law Under the CCP Is a Sham

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Talking about the rule of law in a place like China (more specifically, CCP-occupied China) is as absurd as talking about traffic regulations in the wilderness. The so-called law is the law of kings, wielded at whim. Only ending authoritarianism, establishing the balance of power, and respecting the rule of law will stop the government from being a tool of the CCP’s desires and evil aims.

From the Editor’s Desk: Public Discourse’s Monthly Roundup, March 2023

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At Public Discourse, we intend to play the role of moderation and calm. We know our society is in the middle of a Revolution—and not a good one—and we know conservatives are experimenting and fracturing in their responses. We try to read and understand all the trends, all the possibilities, and stay calm and reasonable as we host debate and conversation about the best way forward.
Silhouette of soldier in combat helmet and ammunition saluting on background of sunset sky. Army special forces fighter

The Military Depends on Virtues that Are Fading

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An explanation for the military’s recruitment challenges goes deeper than trends in the labor market. Ultimately, the civic honor on which voluntary service depends has quietly been eroding for some time, and is being replaced by an ethos of individual self-fulfillment.
Reflection of architecture on modern office building

America’s Commercial Republic, and Its Detractors: An Interview with Samuel Gregg

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Key Founders believed that America’s future was to be a polity in which free and dynamic commerce would play a powerful role in defining society, as opposed to, say, the priorities of aristocratic or feudal societies. The “republic” side of this political economy equation is that this commercial society would operate within the context of institutions and sets of virtues that draw upon classical, religious, and moderate Enlightenment sources.
Harvard_Law_School_Library_in_Langdell_Hall_at_night

James Bradley Thayer, Legal Realist?

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James Bradley Thayer sternly taught an iron discipline in constitutional judging of holding one’s own views—even one’s conviction that one understood the Constitution better than the legislature did—firmly in check. And he taught this because he believed it was the only approach consistent with the Constitution’s text, purposes, structure, and traditional interpretation.

How the Government Is Buying Our Submission

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Our Constitution’s carefully designed processes for democratic self-governance, and the means and mechanisms for ensuring accountability, are evaded and eroded. In his 2021 book “Purchasing Submission,” Philip Hamburger reveals the many hidden ways this evasion occurs—through spending conditions and contractual terms, yes; but also through “dangerously benevolent” nudges, incentives, intermediaries, accreditation, licensing, permits, and permissions.
Background image of voting booths decorated with American flags at empty polling station

Democracy Can Be Trusted Because Citizens Can Be Trusted

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What you think about democracy probably comes down to what you think about the nature of your fellow citizens. What are they like? Are they children of God, made in the image of their Creator and thus in possession of common sense and common reason? Do they have enough sense to distinguish between truth and falsehood on the issues that drive our current political conflicts? Or are they ignorant bumpkins?
Uniform buildings on a college campus

An American Tragedy: On the Suicide of Liberal Education

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Life’s biggest questions are almost never resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, and if we don’t study the differences between the Epicureans and the Stoics, between Locke and Rousseau, and between legal originalists and non-originalists, we are missing out on our own music: sometimes a battle of the bands, sometimes cacophony, always fascinating.
Silhouette of sad teenage girl looking out the window on a cold autumn day

Sending the Wounded to the Front

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The stories of Chloe and other detransitioners are the ultimate rebuke to the arrogant claims of activists and the medical groups they have captured.
The relationship between argument and democracy, however, did not begin with the American founding but with the ancient Greeks: there is an unmistakable tie between the agora (the birthplace of Greek democracy), and the development of rhetoric as a field of study.

To Be Human Is to Argue

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The modern story of “argument” might seem troubling to many. Debate too often seems emotion-driven, and laden with fallacies and quarrelsome noise. By exploring the significance of argument for both individuals and society, Lee Siegel’s Why Argument Matters reminds us why to be human is to argue—and why that is something to celebrate.
Digital painting of crowds cheering or demonstrating with waving USA flags in Washington DC, digital artwork with matte painting

National Conservatives for the Status Quo?

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By deviating from the American political tradition, national conservatives double down on rather than challenge many of our political ills.
John Witherspoon statue in Princeton

Damnatio Memoriae: Princeton’s Witherspoon Statue Controversy

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Aside from a certain gruff nobility, the statue of John Witherspoon in Princeton is not overly stylized; he’s human, which is to say, flawed. A hero in bronze he may be, but with feet of clay, Witherspoon is worth remembering as he is portrayed there.
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