Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Social and Political Philosophy

  • Beware of Projecting . . .

    . . . your attitudes and values into others. Leader of the Stack. Excerpts: We are not all the same 'deep down,' and we don't all want the same things. You say you value peace and social harmony? So do I. But some are bellicose right out of the box. They love war and thrive on conflict, and not…

  • Voluntary Segregation

    Substack latest. Related: The Answer is Division. 

  • Christian Dictatorship Chic?

    Mark Tooley. I think one ought to be very skeptical of 'post-liberalism.'

  • An Interview with Michael Walzer

    Liberal Commitments.  Excerpt: Liberals are people who are best defined morally or psychologically; they’re what Lauren Bacall, my favorite actress, called “people who don’t have small minds.” A liberal is someone who’s tolerant of ambiguity, who can join arguments that he doesn’t have to win, who can live with people who disagree, who have different…

  • “All Men are Created Equal”

    I have claimed against certain alt-rightists that the above famous declaration in the Declaration of Independence is not an empirical claim about the properties and powers of human animals whether as individuals or as groups, but a normative claim about persons as rights-possessors. For if "All men are created equal" is an empirical claim about…

  • Lifestyle Rightism

    Sohrab Ahmari is against it. Clean living and self-improvement are no substitute for political action. One form of Lifestyle Rightism is Rod Dreher's Benedict Option which Ahmari dubs "the New Frontierism" and criticizes for its ahistoricity. Ahmari's article rehearses  one aspect of the old problem of activism versus quietism. Can one productively blend the two?…

  • Is Political Catholicism the Only Genuinely Political American Intellectual Movement?

    In Liberalism's Good and Faithful Servants, Adrian Vermeule spends eight long paragraphs out of ten explaining why "What passes for the American intellectual right is a sorry thing." He's a clever writer and his catalog of the varieties of epicene political quietism is of some interest. Only in the last two paragraphs, however, does he…

  • Does Classical Liberalism Destroy Itself?

    Joe Odegaard sends us to The Orthosphere where we find Classical Liberalism Destroys Itself. The opening paragraph is stylistically brilliant, especially the concluding sentence, and I agree with the paragraph content-wise, though not with the quotation from Dreher: “Classical liberalism detached from the Christian faith is what got us here.”  Rod Dreher, “David French: Not…

  • Thought, Action, Dogma, and De Maistre

    Substack latest

  • The Chinese Trial Balloon, Realpolitik, and What it Excludes

    Now this you should read. Excerpt: If I’m right, Beijing’s chief reason for floating a balloon over North America was to see whether it would elicit a response from the U.S. government and military, as well as from the American people. And so it did, judging from the subsequent uproar in the press and on…

  • The Constitutional Maverick

    Richard A. Epstein: The maverick takes issue with both modern liberals and modern conservatives because he alone refuses to abandon two key pillars of our classical liberal constitutional theory: limited government and strong property rights. The modern maverick thus works in the Lockean tradition that was ascendant during the founding period. This classical liberal approach…

  • The Militant Defends Trump and Our Civil Liberties

    I never thought I'd be quoting from The Militant! A tip of the hat to Tony Flood who writes, I could consider making a tactical alliance with one who signs off with "The fight to defend constitutional liberties is at the center of the class struggle today." This is classic Marxism, not Antifa terrorism. Populist…

  • Third Parties as Discussion Societies in Political Drag

    Substack latest.    

  • Three Axes of Conflict

    Antony Beevor in The Spanish Civil War (Orbis 1982, Penguin 2001, p. 279) writes that in the aftermath of the war both sides engaged in gross simplifications for propaganda purposes: As a result, the three axes of conflict (left-right, centralist-regionalist, and authoritarian-libertarian) have often been crudely amalgamated, leaving the ferocity of the war partly unexplained.…

  • The State under Leftism: Totalitarianism with Bread and Circuses

    Although the state under contemporary leftism is totalitarian and demands conformity and submission in matters of moment, it tolerates and indeed encourages the cultivation of a politically inconsequential individualism of private self-absorption. A people given bread (food stamps and other forms of infantilizing dependency), circuses (mass sporting events), dope (legalization of marijuana), HollyWeird pornography and…