Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Conservatism

  • Good Relations and Deep Relations

    Given the limitations of our postlapsarian predicament, good relations with others must needs be limited relations. Familiarity breeds contempt. Propinquity militates against politeness. Conservatives understand that a certain formality in our relations with others, both within and without the family, helps maintain respect. Formality helps keep in check the incivility bred of familiarity.  Reserve has…

  • A Groundless Stereotype about Stereotypes

    Not all stereotypes are negative; some are positive. And not all stereotypes lack a fundamentum in re; some are based in reality. I just made two distinctions.  It is a stereotype both negative and without a foundation in reality that all stereotypes lack a foundation in reality.

  • Political Observations

    The short statements below are from my Facebook page.  It is important to explain to the open-minded and politically uncommitted, in a pithy and non-polemical way, what American conservatives stand for.  The American conservative, as I use the term, is neither a throne-and-altar neo-reactionary, nor is he an alt-Right tribalist. His conservatism takes on board…

  • Is Patriotism a Good Thing? What is a Country?

    The following goes deeper into the issues involved in my Substack article Patriotism and Jingoism. I respond to comments from 'Jacques' from November 2015. My responses are in blue.  ………………………. I read your blog every day.  Quite apart from the high level philosophizing, it's a rare bit of political sanity and rationality and decency.  Academic…

  • Patriotism versus Jingoism

    A meditation for Flag Day, 2021.  Substack latest.

  • I Didn’t Start Out Conservative

    Like many conservatives, I didn't start out as one.  My background is working class, my parents were Democrats, and so was I until the age of 41.  I came of age in the '60s.  One of my heroes was John F. Kennedy, "the intrepid skipper of the PT 109" as I described him in a…

  • To Be Human

    To be human is to be flawed; to be conservative is to know this.

  • You Want Anti-Government? I’ll Give You Anti-Government!

    Contrary to the willful  misrepresentations of contemporary liberals, leftists to be precise, conservatives are not anti-government.  To oppose big government is not to oppose government.  The following passage from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851),  conveys a genuine anti-government point of view, one that I share, and one that…

  • The Conservative Mind

    Innovations are presumed guilty until proven innocent.  There is a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional beliefs, usages, institutions, arrangements, techniques, and whatnot, provided they work.  By all means allow the defeat of the outworn and no-longer-workable: in with the new if the novel is better.  But the burden of proof is on the would-be…

  • The New Right: More Combative, Less Conservative

    Culturally, the Left won; so what's to conserve? The Old Right, bow-tied and bespectacled, gentlemanly and erudite, has proven impotent to slow down, let alone stop, the Left's long march through the institutions and their subversion of them. Assembled in their well-appointed 'cucksheds,' the likes of George F. Will fiddle with ideas while the Republic…

  • On Transcending Tribalism

    Jonathan Haidt: Humans are tribal, but tribalism can be transcended. It exists in tension with our extraordinary ability to develop bonds with other human beings. Romeo and Juliet fell in love. French, British and German soldiers came out of their trenches in World War I to exchange food, cigarettes and Christmas greetings. The key, as…

  • President Trump’s Mount Rushmore Speech

    Roger Kimball appreciates its magnificence and writes about it brilliantly: The president was especially strong in challenging what is perhaps the most obnoxious manifestation of our petulant antinomianism—that species of politically correct intolerance that has come to be called “cancel culture.” In essence, cancel culture is the malignant inversion of liberalism’s defining virtues, openness and…

  • The Conservative

    A conservative is one who harbors no illusions about human nature. His is an unblinking view into the depths of human depravity, and especially the depravity let loose by those in the grip of utopian, world-transforming schemes.

  • A Note on Feminism and My Conservatism

    Although I am a conservative, I am not a 'throne and altar' conservative. Nor am I the sort of conservative who thinks that everything traditional trumps everything newfangled.  (The conservative's presumption in favor of the traditional is defeasible.) And of course it is silly to think that conservatives oppose change; it is just that we don't…

  • Why We Defend Donald Trump

    Replying to a young friend who loathes the man, Malcolm Pollack explains why so many of us stand with President Trump despite his manifold and manifest faults: I make no case that Donald Trump is any kind of a saint. He is enormously vain (as all presidents are, with the possible exception of Calvin Coolidge),…