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Why the Founders Chose the Electoral College Design

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The Founders feared tyrannies, especially majority tyrannies. We remain free not because of the Bill of Rights, but because of the dynamic checks and balances in our national and state constitutions. 

The Founders’ Natural Rights Philosophy Does Not Entail Radical Autonomy

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It’s an error for conservatives to see the American Founding’s emphasis on natural rights as necessarily fostering extreme individualism in contemporary America. Eighteenth-century Americans would have viewed the notion that rights could be exercised contrary to natural law as ridiculous.

Vindicating the Founders . . . Again

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The political theory of the American founding is not quite the “cure for what ails us,” but, as Thomas G. West’s books demonstrate, it can serve as a kind of preventive medicine against the psychological sickness of radical individualism.

Don’t Blame the Founders for Our Civic Disintegration

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Leslie Rubin’s brilliant study argues that the fault, dear America, lies not in our stars but in ourselves—our repudiation in the past century of the moderate liberal philosophy of Federalists and Anti-Federalists alike, which was steeped in Aristotelian wisdom about favoring the decent republican virtues of a middle class.

Locke and the Founders Agree: The President Can Pardon Himself

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The pardon power is the most significant and strongest power of the president, and the Constitution places almost no limits on it. In using it, the president can unilaterally nullify the legitimate authority of the legislative and judicial branches.

The Founders on Lifelong Marriage and the Limits of Reason: Reply to Muñoz

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If there is one truth that the entire philosophic tradition—including America’s Founders—may be said to embrace, in spite of all its disagreements, it is this: reason teaches that it is unreasonable to expect people to act by reason alone.

The Urgency of Restoring the Biblical Values of America’s Founders

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Our nation was founded on biblical principles as a haven for devoutly religious dissidents. We forget our Judeo-Christian origins and the founders’ commitment to freedom of religion at our peril.

Making Sense of the Founders: Politics, Natural Rights, and the Laws of Nature

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It is often alleged that the American founders lacked a unified and coherent political theory. To the contrary, a recent book by Thomas West shows that the founders broadly agreed on a philosophy of natural rights, calling for both the protection of liberty and the promotion of virtue.
Public Discourse

We Must Preserve the Founders’ Classical Vision for Our Nation’s Capital

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The plan of our nation’s capital and the architecture of its core buildings and monuments must carry on the classical vision the Founders intended as the physical manifestation of America’s form of government and political ideals.
Public Discourse

Constitutional Disorder in the Era of Judicial Supremacy: The Founders’ Understanding of the Court

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Judicial supremacy is inimical to the separation of powers, to republicanism, and even to constitutionalism and the rule of law. The upcoming confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor should force citizens to reconsider the place of the Court in our political life. The first in a two-part series.

Contra Koppelman—What Mere Natural Law Was About

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Any system of jurisprudence must find its ground in these anchoring truths that we can reliably know, because they are true of necessity. They are the principles of reason that mark the natural law, the law that underlies our positive law. And any scheme of natural law built on these grounds then cannot be, as Andrew Koppelman labels it, a mere “theory” of the natural law. It would be the real thing.

Critiquing Hadley Arkes’s Not-So-Mere Natural Law Theory

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Law necessarily has a moral foundation. Exploring that foundation can help us understand what law can and should be. The project of finding anchoring truths is well worth undertaking, and the natural law tradition has something to contribute to that.
Supreme Court

Saving Religion from Incoherence

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It is past time to restore some semblance of order to the law of religion.
Constitution

The Ignoble Lie of Revolutionary Progressivism

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The transformation of the original Constitution into the living Constitution is revolutionary, not evolutionary, a bloodless coup deliberately launched by progressive intellectuals bent on undermining the founders’ Constitution.
drug use

The False Promises of Drugs: Joseph Ratzinger on True Human Excellence

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The problem with drug use is not just its grave danger to our bodily and psychological well-being, nor that it constitutes a radical assertion of self-will, but that it is a flight from the adventure of the moral life
Washington Monument

Gratitude in an Angry Time

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Those of us who think the stakes in our cultural conflicts are high, whichever side of those conflicts we are on, frequently find ourselves furious. But what are we angry about? Our responses to that question have to do not just with the latest news, but with deeper intuitions about the nature of the human person and its relation to the moral life of our society.
constitution

“Oh Say Can You C?” Compromise, Consensus, Consent, and the Constitution

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Each of these books presents valuable and insightful contributions to ongoing conversations about the role of the Constitution in contemporary American political life.
constitution

Human Flourishing and Constitutional Democracy

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Paradoxically, the progressive effort to overcome constitutional limits on government power—purportedly justified on grounds of efficiency—hardly seems to have enabled government to govern well. Instead, the unwieldy and often conflictual morass of agencies and officials in the administrative state has more often than not resulted in governmental paralysis, perhaps thankfully leaving Americans as ungovernable as we have always been.
Parthenon

Social Contract Theory in the Ruins?

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Is government by consent irretrievably lost? I maintain that the principle of consent is not lost and that we can rebuild a different sort of social contract theory from amid the ruins.
Church

Christian Institutions in a New World

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Smith's book is an excellent reminder that conservatives should never prioritize an idealized individual or nation. Rather, we must work to preserve those institutions that point us to better lives.
the US Constitution

The Constitution and Its Critics

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Rana’s history prompts us to reflect on how we ought to conceive of American identity and defend the Constitution’s anti-majoritarian checks and balances in the twenty-first century.
reading poetry

The Bookshelf: Waxing Poetic with A. M. Juster

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Our postmodern academy is never going to bring back traditional prosody on its own, so we should probably be thinking hard about how to use the Internet to bring the traditional tools of English poetry back to the people.
Summer camp

Summer Camp: An Ailing American Institution

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The original rationale for summer camp is more valid than ever. Young people are struggling with mental health, addiction to technology, disconnection from the body, isolation, and many other painful realities. Summer camps cannot fix these problems. But for many adolescents, the experience of traditional summer camps might help them see that life is about more than accomplishment, and that is a start.
Jerusalem

Dispatch from a Country Living Sanely 

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Israelis celebrate their writers, artists, scientists, jurists, industrialists, and statesmen who fought wars of life and death. And of course there are other ways to serve—caring for the mentally ill, for abandoned children, for the elderly and sick. I am grateful for all of these exemplars. But for me, it will always be specifically the young men and women who go to the army intending to return (many, alas, do not return) to their studies when their missions are done. These people go on to have families, large ones, and jobs of all kinds, and different hobbies and interests and vocations. Their commitments are ordered by a conscious dedication to the Lord of all flesh.
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