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Introducing America After Dobbs: A Public Discourse Resource
Interviews
- April 20, 2023
- Sexuality & Family
- April 20, 2023
- Interviews, Marriage, Natural Law
Micah Watson and Ryan Anderson look back on his Piers Morgan interview, how the debate on same-sex marriage played out, what that might mean for our debates on transgender ideology, the nature of political discourse in America today, the future of the conservative movement, and what to look for in the next decade.
- March 17, 2023
- Business & Economics
- March 17, 2023
- Capitalism, Economics, Interviews
Key Founders believed that America’s future was to be a polity in which free and dynamic commerce would play a powerful role in defining society, as opposed to, say, the priorities of aristocratic or feudal societies. The “republic” side of this political economy equation is that this commercial society would operate within the context of institutions and sets of virtues that draw upon classical, religious, and moderate Enlightenment sources.
- February 20, 2023
- The Human Person
- February 20, 2023
- Abortion, Interviews, Medical Ethics
It’s very rewarding to practice excellent women’s health that is collaborative, integrated, holistic, and listens to their bodies. Children are not STDs. Fertility is something to be collaborated with rather than suppressed.
- February 2, 2023
- Politics & Law
- February 2, 2023
- Censorship, Christianity, Conservatism, Constitutional Law, Interviews, Marriage, Religion and the Public Square, Voting
“What I see in modern America is something maybe a little bit different than what other folks see. I think the nation vis-à-vis its laws is far more just than it has been at virtually any point in its previous history. Racial discrimination is outlawed de jure. You have an extension of the First Amendment to all American communities. You have greater religious freedoms in a concrete way than we’ve ever enjoyed in the history of the United States. We have a lot of problems, but we’re better than we’ve been.”
- January 19, 2023
- Sexuality & Family
- January 19, 2023
- Family, Feminism, Interviews, Sexuality
“Masculinity is more socially constructed than femininity. The script is more important. It has to be nurturing, not in the same way as mothers, but by being similarly other-centered. Creating a surplus, caring for others, sacrificing for others. The question then is, what are we going to build that script around? That sense of being needed, giving, other-centered? My answer to that is fatherhood.”
- December 8, 2022
- Sexuality & Family
- December 8, 2022
- Feminism, Interviews, Sexuality, Technology
The final frontier for equality between the sexes—the missing tech fix—was always, how do we deal with reproduction? How do we deal with the different reproductive roles between the sexes? How can we use tech to flatten those differences? So reproductive inequality is the final frontier in replacing the sexes with the atomized, sexless, liberal person.
- November 3, 2022
- Education & Culture
- November 3, 2022
- Education, Institutions, Interviews, Polarization, Religion
An ideologically captured university creates the illusion of consensus on questions that in fact are highly contested off campus. That makes public disagreement a puzzling and unintelligible phenomenon. It creates a cascade of resentment and negative sentiment throughout the rest of the elite classes towards any dissenting views in the public square. It shatters a society’s understanding of itself and its role in the world, of what social flourishing looks like.
- October 13, 2022
- Politics & Law
- October 13, 2022
- Conservatism, Institutions, Interviews, Polarization, Politics
National Review midwifed and nurtured the modern conservative movement into being. Conservatism today is in a very different situation from the one that Bill Buckley confronted in 1955. There is this vast conservative enterprise now; it’s kind of hydra-headed. But the basic need is, first, to think about the circumstances in which we find ourselves and how to apply conservative principles to them—or a conservative disposition, if one prefers—and second, how to build a coalition that is large enough to take these ideas off of the shelf.
- September 1, 2022
- Politics & Law
- September 1, 2022
- American Founding, Interviews, Nationalism, Polarization, Politics
We’re not born being patriots. It’s not something that’s inscribed in our moral DNA; rather, it’s something that has to be cultivated. It is love of country. But as Edmund Burke famously wrote, “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.” What does it mean to have a lovable country, and what should the honest patriot do or think?
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Book Reviews
- June 7, 2023
- Politics & Law
- June 7, 2023
- Book Reviews, Foreign Affairs, Politics, War
The Soviet regime is formally gone, but the legacy of its formidable security apparatus lives on. There was never a “decommunization” process in the wake of the USSR’s collapse. The vast majority of those who had participated in its structures and atrocities escaped punishment, and many of them created political careers in the post-communist era. People like Vladimir Putin were deeply marked by their socialization within that apparatus.
- June 1, 2023
- Politics & Law
- June 1, 2023
- American Founding, Book Reviews, Christianity, Natural Law
In The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics, Kody Cooper and Justin Dyer successfully refute the still (somehow) influential interpretation of the American Founding as a secular-not-Christian project. However, they do so without successfully establishing their preferred alternative, the Christian-not-secular interpretation. There is a vast middle between these two extremes whose existence slips through the authors’ fingers again and again like a well-greased elephant.
- May 29, 2023
- Politics & Law
- May 29, 2023
- Book Reviews, Liberalism
What would happen if we dropped that charged word “liberalism” from the conversation and got down to specifics? I suspect much of Patrick Deneen’s postliberal magic would disappear.
- May 22, 2023
- Politics & Law
- May 22, 2023
- Book Reviews, Catholicism, History
In Sacred Foundations, Anna Grzmała-Busse argues that the secular nation-state derives much of its structure from the Catholic papacy when it was at its peak in the Middle Ages.
- May 18, 2023
- Politics & Law
- May 18, 2023
- Book Reviews, Conservatism, Polarization, Politics, Voting
In The Myth of Left and Right, Hyrum and Verlan Lewis certainly succeed in proving to the reader that the pieces within each ideological bundle have shifted over time and do not inevitably go together, but they go well beyond that in concluding that each coalition’s bundle is fundamentally random. Though labels and coalitions may be quite movable, at any given time (including now) ideological identifications can tell us something intelligible about our politics.
- May 10, 2023
- Politics & Law
- May 10, 2023
- Book Reviews, History, Leo Strauss
Lincoln saw the fundamental problem in democracy as one single, monstrous question: “Can the principle that liberates all and produces self-government remain disciplined and restrained enough in practice to retain self-government?”
- May 8, 2023
- Education & Culture
- May 8, 2023
- Book Reviews, Censorship, History, Politics
As a moral framework for assessing regimes in an imperfect world, Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning has much to recommend it.
- April 26, 2023
- Politics & Law
- April 26, 2023
- American Founding, Book Reviews, History
Fred Kaplan’s new biography of Thomas Jefferson, His Masterly Pen, gives us the Jefferson we deserve: Jefferson the writer, the listener, and the aesthete.
- April 23, 2023
- The Human Person
- April 23, 2023
- Bioethics, Book Reviews, Medical Ethics
Farr Curlin and Christopher Tollefsen’s The Way of Medicine shows how doctors who are committed to the Way can practice medicine in a manner that restores them to this vocation of healing, even in our pluralistic age.
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Long Reads
- June 8, 2023
- The Human Person
- June 8, 2023
- Abortion, Long Reads
We will never offer our beloved sisters the ghoulish pseudo-compassion of the abortionist’s knife. We will offer, instead, the healing balm of genuine compassion, compassion born of love, compassion that offers, not a quick and easy, but deadly, “solution,” but rather an open-ended, open-hearted, self-sacrificial commitment.
- May 14, 2023
- Politics & Law
- May 14, 2023
- Long Reads, Philosophy, Polarization, Politics, War
The New Right’s embrace of the “politics of war” is utterly reckless. No amount of friend–enemy Manichaeism or state-of-emergency governance will transform American pluralism into moral unity.
- April 5, 2023
- Sexuality & Family
- April 5, 2023
- Bioethics, Long Reads, Transgender
Conservatives should oppose “gender-affirming” surgeries with a positive account of human freedom ordered towards the goods that make freedom a blessing rather than a curse.
- March 3, 2023
- Education & Culture
- March 3, 2023
- Long Reads, Philosophy, Polarization, Technology
Present-day Americans are a people consumed by anger—an anger that rests on deep pools of sadness, isolation, loss, and fear. In spite of his reputation for dry, unemotional logic, Thomas Aquinas has a great deal to say about the way in which disordered passions can undermine our capacity for getting at the truth. His work can teach us how to resist the vices encouraged by social media, pursue truth in concert with others, and achieve rational disagreement.
- February 16, 2023
- Politics & Law
- February 16, 2023
- Conservatism, Long Reads, National Conservatism, Nationalism
By deviating from the American political tradition, national conservatives double down on rather than challenge many of our political ills.
- January 4, 2023
- The Human Person
- January 4, 2023
- Christianity, Long Reads
As our dependence on technology reshapes the moral imagination of our culture to see human beings as psychological wills that need not respect material limitations, so the old order that was built upon the vision of human beings as both body and soul will become increasingly implausible. The things that make Christianity stand out from the wider culture—belief in the incarnation, the resurrection, and embodied human nature as a real, universal thing with moral consequences—are antithetical to the terms of membership in the emerging world order.
- November 27, 2022
- Business & Economics
- November 27, 2022
- Capitalism, Economics, Family, Farming, Long Reads
An ethic of stewardship induces a person to acquire and care for property, and the ownership of property helps to stimulate an ethic of stewardship. When both are present and healthy, the formation of intergenerational wealth—in the form of intergenerational property—will naturally emerge.
- October 20, 2022
- Politics & Law
- October 20, 2022
- American Founding, Liberalism, Long Reads, Politics
Although social contract theory is a prominent feature of the American founding, it is both unsound and harmful to a proper understanding of politics. This fact presents a challenge to any form of conservatism that is based on protecting and promoting the principles of the American founding.
- September 22, 2022
- The Human Person
- September 22, 2022
- Abortion, Feminism, Human Dignity, Long Reads, Philosophy
Moral differences over abortion need to be understood as differences of vision. While pro-life advocates rightly appeal to fundamental human equality, they also must respond to those who have difficulty seeing early human life as fully amongst us. Overcoming this difficulty requires developing a sense of awe and reverence before the sheer fact of human existence, as well as addressing common ways of looking away from the full moral reality of abortion.
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Collections from the Archives
- May 27, 2023
- May 27, 2023
- Public Discourse
Nature has to be understood and respected for people to be happy.
- April 29, 2023
- April 29, 2023
- Public Discourse
Public Discourse continues to believe that a free and flourishing society is possible. But it depends on the hard work of strengthening our roots—marriage, families, communities, and institutions. We do this work not because we want things to be fixed in place, but because without healthy roots we’ll be thwarted in the task of lifting our sights to the true and the good.
- March 25, 2023
- March 25, 2023
At Public Discourse, we intend to play the role of moderation and calm. We know our society is in the middle of a Revolution—and not a good one—and we know conservatives are experimenting and fracturing in their responses. We try to read and understand all the trends, all the possibilities, and stay calm and reasonable as we host debate and conversation about the best way forward.
- February 25, 2023
- February 25, 2023
- Public Discourse
A lot of readers might wonder: what makes Public Discourse different from other journals? In recent years, a lot of publications have become foot soldiers in the culture wars. Their content is more about political messaging rather than serious thinking. We at Public Discourse aim to be a voice of integrity that readers trust most: we readily acknowledge when interlocutors are right, and we strive to give debate its due. We also think tone and conduct matter, which is why you don’t see our team engaging in Twitter crusades.
- January 28, 2023
- January 28, 2023
- Public Discourse
As we decide what habits to adopt or discard in 2023, it’s important to carefully sort through the advice on offer to see if it’s based on a sound vision of human nature and of what constitutes a good life. Thankfully, the Public Discourse archives can offer guidance here, as on so many other topics.
- November 19, 2022
- November 19, 2022
- Public Discourse
There’s a lot to commend about EA. It endorses good stewardship of resources; it recognizes the dignity of every human being; and it pushes back against the kind of presentism that disregards generations to come. But some iterations of EA should give us pause. Its core defect is its tie to utilitarianism, which is ultimately untenable as a philosophy.
- October 28, 2022
- October 28, 2022
- Public Discourse
In a republic such as ours, the people grant certain prerogatives to the state, for the government exists by the consent of the people. The people do not beg for privileges and rights from the state. Parents have by nature, by justice, the right to educate their children. The state does not have a similar right to educate children; instead, parents permit the state to educate children.
- September 30, 2022
- September 30, 2022
- Public Discourse
It is not only fraudulent physicians and deluded therapists at fault for mutilating our children—they too are victims, in part. They also have been deceived, subject to the disintegration and dissolution of reality entrenched in our moment. Too many people are not flourishing in our society, and they are damaged and being damaged with false visions of emancipation.
- August 26, 2022
- August 26, 2022
- Public Discourse
The state of the economy is on everyone’s mind. As you check (or avoid checking) your retirement account, the Public Discourse archives provide some excellent resources to consider the big picture of economic issues.
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