Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Social and Political Philosophy

  • Jonathan Haidt on the Age of Outrage

    Worth your time, but leftist bias is in evidence. The Democrats have moved much farther to the Left than the Republicans to the Right. Haidt seems quite oblivious to this. But he's young. Give him time.   The first comment, by one Christopher Conole, is on target (minor edits by BV): Professor Haidt is very late…

  • Juan Donoso Cortés on Never-Trumpers as Una Clasa Discutidora

    I have on several occasions referred to Never-Trumpers as yap-and-scribble do-nothings who think of politics as a grand debate gentlemanly conducted and endlessly protracted and who think of themselves as doing something worthwhile whether or not their learned discussions in well-appointed venues achieve anything at all in slowing the leftist juggernaut.  It now occurs to…

  • Paul Gottfried on Propositionalism

    Here: White nationalists are not really nationalists since they are engaged in a globalist enterprise. They are reaching beyond traditional nation states and seek to unify all peoples of a certain race, partly by demonizing other races. But propositionalists like Buckley and the neoconservative journalists are likewise involved in a global pursuit. They are not…

  • The Paris Statement: A Europe We Can Believe In

    Read it, study it, circulate it. Excerpts: 3. The patrons of the false Europe are bewitched by superstitions of inevitable progress. They believe that History is on their side, and this faith makes them haughty and disdainful, unable to acknowledge the defects in the post-national, post-cultural world they are constructing. Moreover, they are ignorant of…

  • Ten Political-Economic Theses

    Here are ten theses to which I subscribe in the critical way of the philosopher, not the dogmatic way of the ideologue. 1.  There is nothing wrong with money.  It is absolutely not the root of all evil.  The most we can say is that the inordinate desire for money is at the root of some evils.  I develop this theme in Radix…

  • Who am I? Personal Identity versus Identity Politics

    Preliminary note: what has been exercising me lately is the question whether there is a deep common root to the political identitarianism of the Left and the Right, and if there is, what this root is. Nihilism, perhaps? I wrote: . . . my identity as a person trumps my identity as an animal. Part…

  • Giles Fraser on A. C. Grayling on Voting

    Here, with a tip of the hat to Karl White: John Stuart Mill was another philosopher who believed something similar. In 1859 he published his Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform, in which he proposed a voting system heavily weighted towards the better educated. “If every ordinary unskilled labourer had one vote … a member of any profession requiring…

  • More on Dreher vs Buchanan on “All Men are Created Equal” and White Supremacy

    Dr. Patrick Toner comments and I respond in blue: Your piece on Dreher and Buchanan accepts Dreher's overall reading (or misreading, as I see it) of Buchanan's argument — you seem to accept that Buchanan actually means to somehow call into doubt the metaphysical doctrine of the equality of men.  This seems clearly wrong to…

  • Dreher contra Buchanan on “All men are created equal”

    Rod Dreher quotes Patrick J. Buchanan: “All men are created equal” is an ideological statement. Where is the scientific or historic proof for it? Are we building our utopia on a sandpile of ideology and hope? Dreher responds: With that, Buchanan repudiates not only the founding principle of our Constitutional order, but also a core…

  • Walter E. Williams on Secession

    I do not advocate secession. But in these trying times all options must be explored. Professor Williams' Were Confederate Generals Traitors? (HT: Bill Keezer) concludes: Confederate generals were fighting for independence from the Union just as George Washington and other generals fought for independence from Great Britain. Those who’d label Gen. Robert E. Lee as…

  • Is There a Defensible Sense in Which Human Beings are Equal?

    My brand of conservatism is personalist, which may help explain why I find myself at loggerheads with those on the so-called 'Alternative Right.'  And my brand of personalism is conservative which may help explain why I look askance at libertarianism and at 'mainstream conservatism' to the extent that the latter is libertarian and insufficiently attentive…

  • Chelsea the Vacuous

    One has to stand in awe at the intellectual power and wisdom of the leading ladies of the Democrat Party. I am thinking of Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren and now, Chelsea Clinton. The latter has recently opined that racism, sexism . . . and yes, even jingoism are not opinions. If you are…

  • National Security Agency

    I was joking with somebody recently about blog backup.  "Why do I need to back up my blog?" said I. "The NSA has every word." Joking aside, the underlying issue is a vexing one.  There is no true liberty without security, but a security worth wanting must make allowance for a large measure of liberty.…

  • Paul Gottfried contra New York Magazine re: ‘White Nationalism’

    Here: As for me, I can’t understand how my work of almost 50 years amounts to a “nativist strategy.” Most of what I’ve published is scholarship on various historical subjects and hardly a strategy for promoting whiteness or ethno-nationalism. What I have argued when writing political polemics is the following: States that are culturally homogeneous…

  • ‘America First’ and the Values – Interests Distinction

    I just read the following at The Atlantic: [Rex] Tillerson explained “America First” this way. It applies to “national security and economic prosperity, and that doesn’t mean it comes at the expense of others.” This defies common sense. Surely, if we’re first, someone else is second, third, and finally last. Not at all.  A perverse…