Practical Freedom
At every pass we have absorbed laws, not of morality, which are liberating, but of etiquette, which is a curb on adventure and genius, and of security and sloth, which deaden the soul.
We Treat Our Dogs Better Than Our Boys
There is a kind of natural anti-mimesis when it comes to what boys see girls doing. The boy must accomplish a task that the girl does not have to accomplish.
Trust Across the Ages
What we’re after cannot be captured in statistics: some sense of how far our practical liberty extends, protected not by policemen, penal codes, or forensic criminology but by trust in our countrymen.
The Dirty Game of Influence Peddling
Washington is a fever swamp of dishonor, patronage, and protection, host to an occupying government using the constitutional government as its sock puppet.
Powerful Interests Always Align Against the Independence of the Working Class
Promoting the trades, in an effort to alleviate poverty and crime, and to strengthen the working-class family, will require in us a real counterrevolution, a return to common sense and decency.
John Hay, Love of Country, and Our Vagabond Age
John Hay’s life offers a glimpse of what love of country looks like. If we cannot understand it, we truly are aliens and vagabonds upon the earth.
No Common Love, No Common Life
What happens when a formerly Christian nation forgets the reality of sin and our desperate need of grace?
Lessons from Another World
Booker T. Washington believed that his work succeeded because it was in concord with immutable laws of human nature. But we now believe that there is no such thing as human nature.
Is America Even a Nation of Laws?
The sheer gigantism of the state makes it impossible for people to know what the relevant laws are, for most spheres of human action; and it is a short step from not knowing the law, to seeing that nobody else knows it, to shrugging and not caring what it is.
Scorch the Field
It is good for us to play sometimes, and not fight. In reality, people are united by what the political utilitarian cannot recognize: by play and song and worship.
Fascism 101 with Professors Vittorini and Solzhenitsyn
How can you tell if you have the soul of a fascist? If you are alive and breathing, you are in danger of it.
A Reign of Error
What we think about things can be as important as the things themselves, because it forms our moral stance toward the world. But what if our thoughts are in error?
Kangaroo Nation
We ruin reputations, we tear down monuments to our flawed benefactors, we destroy lives with a glee and a certitude that would make the old inquisitors blush.
Virtue Signaling Theater at the Mouth of Hell
The hypocrite is not the person who says one thing and does another. He is the play-actor, the man or woman who puts on a show of righteousness, to fool himself first of all, because he is his own favorite audience.
The Indispensable American Family
Someone may say we ought to live in open sewers, because filth and disease are subversive; or that we ought to cut ourselves with razors, because razors are edgy. What response can you give to him? He has placed himself outside of moral reasoning entirely.
The Expectations Abyss
On our side of the abyss, the 16-year-old boy is dying slowly of intellectual asphyxiation in school and online. On that side of the abyss, the biggest manufacturer of women’s clothing in Cleveland is advertising for a likely lad to come and do office work, with high hopes set forth for a well-remunerated career.
Resisting the Totalitarian Power of Politicization
The child who reads and cherishes The Lord of the Rings will have more of substance to say about how we should live than will the child brought up on political doggerel.
The Rule of Our Sophisticated Suckers
Modern art and architecture says “You will like this because it is for your own good, although you are too stupid to see it.” But some people do not have to be cowed into submission. They are the suckers of the age.
You Can’t Have Representation Without First Having a People to Represent
If we have no sense of this land, this history, this language, these songs, these heroes, and no love for them, what “America” is there at all? And perhaps that is the progressive aim, at last: that there should be no America.
The Battle Between Something and Nothing
There need be no cultural war when one of the contenders fails to show up, supposing that he still exists.