Category: Social and Political Philosophy
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Procedural Liberalism
The law ought to be both protective of rights and directive of duties. This requirement rules out a purely procedural liberalism.
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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…
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An Important Issue in Political Philosophy: Robert Barron versus George Will
For many of us who reject leftism, and embrace a version of conservatism, there remains a choice between what I call American conservatism, which accepts key tenets of classical liberalism, and a more robust conservatism. This more robust conservatism inclines toward the reactionary and anti-liberal. The difference emerges in an essay by Bishop Robert Barron…
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David Gordon Reviews Michael Anton’s America at the Point of No Return
Excerpts: Anton notes that the founders believed that the American Revolution was grounded in universal truths, “but they did not expect their declaration to revolutionize the world—nor were they under any illusion that it, or they, had the power to do so….America is—in the words of John Quincy Adams—‘the well-wisher to the freedom and independence…
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The Hyphenated American
One may gather from my surname that I am of Italian extraction. Indeed, that is the case in both paternal and maternal lines: my mother was born near Rome in a place called San Vito Romano, and my paternal grandfather near Verona in the wine region whence comes Valpollicella. Given these facts, some will refer to…
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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…
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The Main Threat of the Left to the Right
The following quotation from Rod Dreher receives the plenary MavPhil endorsement: . . . the “major threat of the far left” to us on the right — the major threat, not the only threat — is that in power, they will go pedal to the medal [metal] on a soft totalitarian “social justice” regime that…
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Vito Caiati on the Tension between Corporate Capitalism and Conservatism
Dr. Vito Caiati by e-mail (emphasis added): I am increasingly convinced that we on the Right are caught up in a set of contradictions of our own making, in that we wish to uphold, on the one hand, a particular political, social, and cultural inheritance and, on the other, an economic system, which in the…
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Who Am I? Personal Identity versus Political Identity
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…
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Democrat Extremism Has Deep Roots
Issues and Insights: While the Democrats’ lurch to port looks like a recent event, it’s been decades in the making. The party has been a comfortable home to closeted authoritarians for decades. Its big government agenda is a safe harbor for socialists, statists, coercionists, and sworn enemies of liberty. Democrats have a history of rejecting…
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Old Left and New Left
A succinct differentiation: The New Left retained the values and ultimate goals of the Old Left. They also retained elements of their philosophical framework. They then set about spreading their ideas throughout the culture by means of propaganda and institutional subversion. And they won. Aside from Cuba and North Korea, orthodox Communism is dead. Capitalism…
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If We Lose Locke, We Lose America
Ben Shapiro, Prager U, 5:05.
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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…
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Another Reason Why Defunding the Police is Idiotic
Government is by its very nature coercive. To be effective, it has to have the power to force people to do what they might not want to do, and to refrain from doing what they might want to do, such as drive drunk, loot, and rape. It follows straightaway that eliminating enforcement agencies eliminates government.…
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Anarcho-Tyranny: Where Multiculturalism Leads
Samuel Francis: Unwilling to control immigration and the cultural disintegration it causes, the authorities instead control the law-abiding. This is precisely the bizarre system of misrule I have elsewhere described as “anarcho-tyranny”—we refuse to control real criminals (that’s the anarchy) so we control the innocent (that’s the tyranny). The Francis article is from 2004. What…