Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Political Aporetics

  • Democrat-Run Cities: The Case for Letting them Burn to the Ground

    Marc Thiessen presents, without endorsing, the case for allowing the social experiment in lawlessness to proceed: Trump declared that enough is enough and that he and Attorney General William P. Barr will soon unveil a plan to “to straighten things out.” But maybe he shouldn’t. The genius of our federal system is that states and localities serve…

  • Which Side Are You On?

    A snatch of dialog in illustration of the aporetics of our political predicament: A. It's a war! Don't say anything bad about our guys! Which side are you on? Don't preface your defense of Trump by conceding that he has these and these negative qualities. Don't give ammo to the enemy!  In a gunfight against…

  • David French, Donald Trump, Christianity, and Politics

    David French maintains that Christians cannot, if they are to remain true to Christian teachings, support Donald Trump: The proper way for Christians to engage in politics is a rich subject . . . but there are some rather simple foundational principles that apply before the questions get complex. For example, all but a tiny…

  • Roger Kimball on Roger Scruton (1944-2020) on Tradition, Authority and Prejudice

    Here: Sir Roger wrote several times about his political maturation, most fully, perhaps, in “Why I became a conservative,” in The New Criterion in 2003. There were two answers, one negative, one positive. The negative answer was the visceral repudiation of civilization he witnessed in Paris in 1968: slogans defacing walls, shattered shop windows, and…

  • Why the Right-Left Divide is Unbridgeable: Three Reasons

    One reason is that we differ over values.  That's bad. Worse still is that we differ over what is true and what is false.  Disagreements about values and norms are troubling but not surprising, but nowadays we can't even agree on what the facts are. Worst of all is that we differ over what truth…

  • Democratic Socialism?

    The label smacks of an oxymoron. Essential to socialism is collective ownership of the means of production. Democratic socialists will presumably want to distinguish socialism from statism, which may be defined as state control of the economy, where the state control is not in turn democratically controlled. Historically, however, the tendency is for supposedly collective,…