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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.
In her recent book The Genetic Lottery, Kathryn Paige Harden makes flawed assumptions about the nature of moral agency and generalizes about how people value social status.
A new book details the progressive movement’s reliance on eugenics and race science as well as its effort to exclude the disabled, blacks, immigrants, the poor, and women from full participation in American society.
In an excellent new book, Mary Eberstadt argues that secular progressivism is not just a political ideology; it is a competing faith.
What threatens human flourishing today are governments inspired by authoritarian progressivism.
The claim that health care reform “made history” highlights how fully the political debate hinges on ideas of progress.
Interpreting the times requires a genuine historical sense as opposed to an unnatural amalgamation of philosophy and history exhibited in the modernist and traditionalist genealogies. This requires us to rediscover the Age of Enlightenment on its own terms. 
This is the conservatism we need: not nostalgia and anachronistic social conservatism, not progressive liberalism with better branding, but a bold conservatism of clearly articulated ideals for human flourishing.
The natural law account of parental rights is a substantively robust and reason-based position—one that must be defended for all Americans of all faiths and shades of belief.
One does not need to revisit the drastic consequences that ensued from COVID-19 policies to be reminded of the failures and mistakes of the progressive constitutional framework that issued them.
Political actors of all stripes fail to honor principles of public justification and mutual respect when they try to shame, bully, or force their opponents out of the public square. Movement progressives ought to remember this, and ensure that their political activities uphold such norms—even for those whose views they might find profoundly objectionable or immoral.
There was a fundamental failure of toleration for alternative points of view. I think some of it might be explained by the fact that it was a pandemic. For public health guidance to be effective, people have to comply. To that I would say fair enough, but it’s also equally important—or more important—to have confidence that the policies are sound. People complying en masse with unsound policies won’t do us a whole lot of good. That’s what open debate is supposed to address.
From a scholarly perspective, the Bud Light boycott represents one of the first battles in the adaptation of political conservatives to their continued cultural disadvantage. Conservatives still operate at a disadvantage in academia and entertainment, but they have created an alternative media system that allows them to have a place at the table and an impact on our culture.
Even if Catholic postliberalism is no longer the intellectual avant-garde, populism is poised to shape the next few years of American politics.
In their denominations and elsewhere in the church, some progressive Baby Boomers have been caught by surprise at younger people not sharing their cultural values. But should they have been surprised at this generational rift in the church? Looking at how different generations have been formed morally, socially, and culturally may help address this question.
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.
Many of the causes championed by the New Right are worthy ones. But a prudential calculation made in good faith, and which refuses to compromise on principle, is something quite different from the enthusiastic advocacy of positions that contradict principle entirely or the embrace of ideologies that are fundamentally anti-religious.
Conservatives, who sometimes can be seen as wanting to turn the clock much farther back than the last decade, will need to identify ways of applying core principles in ways that avoid falling into sheer revanchism. Old-fashioned liberals who wish to recover a circa 2013 version of the Democratic Party will have to lay out what, exactly, they would change to prevent the same cultural trends from playing out all over again.
If young people are taught to look at history only through the lenses of power and oppression, they will conclude that power and oppression are everything. Conversely, let them be introduced first to the genuinely great historical deeds, philosophical ideas, literary creations, and works of art of which humans have been capable. Then they will discover the ideals that moved our predecessors.
The attraction of subjecting oneself to ideological thought, then, is a new form of something very old: the desire to escape the limitations and uncertainties of the human condition of knowledge and action by availing ourselves of a greater-than-human power.
Is there friction between the social proclivities generated by our liberal institutions and the demands of Christian faith and teaching? It is perfectly reasonable to argue that there is—though there may be fruitful interaction as well, in which the politics of freedom and the virtues of faith foster one another.
The stronger the truth the Left seeks to counteract, and the more irrational the fantasy it promotes, the larger and stronger the government it requires. Whether it will achieve its ends remains to be seen.
Tom Holland raises many important questions about the connection between Christianity and contemporary Western civilization. All Westerners, be they Christian or not, would do well to consider his insights.
If religious believers want to protect politics from atheistic materialism, their political theory should presume at least that God made human nature good and free, and that evil comes rather from our misuse of nature. Genuine liberalism, Augusto Del Noce argues, is such a theory.