God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble” – James 4:6 The least surprising political decision of this century is Hillary Clinton’s refusal to take responsibility for her loss to Donald Trump. With the release of her campaign memoir, What Happened, the former Democratic presidential candidate has reemerged in public life,
The deal President Trump struck this week with Democratic Party leadership has sent the conservative commentariat into a rage spiral. Trump, snubbing the Republican “leadership” of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, agreed to raise the debt ceiling for three months. “Principled” congressional Republicans, in an act of
One of the most prominent clichés that passes for wisdom among the GOP Establishment and conservative intellectual elite is that the Republican Party is the party of Abraham Lincoln. But Donald Trump, as we are told ad nauseam, is doing his best to sever the electric cord that ties the Republican Party to Lincoln’s political principles.
At one of the big summer events that enthrall those who dwell inside the D.C. bubble, interns from Conservatism, Inc. square off against interns from Libertarian, Inc. at a debate hosted by the libertarian Cato Institute. The annual event, which occurred earlier this month, once again exposed a problem that has hounded conservatives
Modern conservative politics is largely divorced from reality, preferring abstraction and utopian schemes that wither in the face of the Left’s endless crusade against civil society. Conservatives also tend to have an overweening nostalgia for the past, which blinds them to the necessary re-thinking they need to do in order to resuscitate their
President Donald Trump’s responses to the violence in Charlottesville have garnered the typical reactions from all the usual suspects in the conservative sphere of influence. Luminaries such as David French, Erick Erickson, and Ben Shapiro took the field against Trump, trying to prove the Leftist narrative that he sympathizes with white supremacists. One
Writing think pieces filled with a mournful nostalgia for the conservatism of yesteryear seems to be one of the core requirements of being a member of the conservative intellectual elite. Though Yuval Levin has argued that a suffocating nostalgia was the foundation of Trump’s campaign, conservatives like Levin and others eager to write
The rise of Donald Trump not only highlights the fecklessness of the political class but also the blindness of the conservative intellectual elite. Conservatism Inc., the vast apparatus of thinks tanks, policy journals, and periodicals that have formed the intellectual foundation for the Right over the past few decades, has failed to deliver
Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska has become something of a lightning rod on the Right. Many movement conservatives are drawn to his erudite and scholarly manner and see him as a principled statesman in contrast to Donald Trump who, they argue—and quite rightly I might add—has abandoned what has come to be called
The arrival of a column by National Review founder William F. Buckley was almost always of some intellectual and literary significance. With his high command of the English language, Buckley would explore a vexing question of public policy or pillory an unsuspecting political opponent. He often made quick work of arguments that were
