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Author: Daniel E. Burns (Daniel Burns)

About the Author
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November 21, 2021November 21, 2021Abortion, Sexuality, Supreme Court, Voices of Reason

What Happens If Roe Falls? An Interview with Ross Douthat

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The day you pass pro-life legislation, if you’re trying to win people over, should also be the day that you are passing new spending bills to support adoption, to support pregnant mothers—to support, not just crisis pregnancy centers, but crisis first-two-years-of-life centers! And that doesn’t have to mean bureaucratic welfare-state spending. But it means some kind of spending, in a way that I think many people active in the pro-life movement are comfortable with. Many people in the Republican Party institutionally are obviously not.

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May 1, 2021May 3, 2021Institutions, Voices of Reason

Our Post-Pandemic Institutions: A Conversation with Yuval Levin

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"If you look at today’s Republican senators, there are differences among them about the role of government that are very profound, and that are deeper than anything we’ve seen in two generations on the Right. But they take those differences as reasons to be publicly disappointed with each other, rather than as reasons to actually mobilize some bloc of voters (and politicians, and activists, and intellectuals) and try to negotiate about what the party should offer the country."

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April 19, 2021April 20, 2021Economics, Family

Government Handouts Won’t Reverse the Baby Bust: Three Responses to Gladden Pappin

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Should social conservatives embrace large-scale economic programs aimed at subsidizing family formation and childbearing? Is it more effective to focus on long-term economic growth? Are our declining birth rates really cause for concern, anyway? If they are, to what extent can the problem be solved by governmental family subsidies?

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February 20, 2021February 23, 2021Education, Institutions, Long Reads

A Time to Build Schools

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Our nation’s morally formative institutions are weak and weakening further, thanks in no small part to the enormously destructive effects of social media. The single type of institution best suited to resist these and other pressures of our times is the mission-driven, tech-skeptical K–12 school. The successes of our best countercultural colleges and universities, viewed in the light of Yuval Levin’s invaluable work on the nature of institutions, show us how the incentive structures of an excellent K–12 school make it the formative institution our time needs most.

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July 13, 2020July 14, 2020Politics, Public Discourse

The State of Social Conservatism and the Role of Public Discourse

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Public Discourse offers social conservatives precisely the type of forum that the particular challenges of our time demand. In the face of countless challenges to our familiar assumptions about politics, law, and economics, we need an honest and robust conversation among people who share the same basic moral commitments but defend widely different policies on the basis of those commitments.

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January 28, 2020February 24, 2021Book Reviews, Institutions

Institutions and the Culture War in 2020

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In order to alleviate our social crisis, we will need to improve the moral formation that our institutions provide their members. Yet the institutions best suited to lead in this task are those with a religious mission, which in turn are imperiled by the culture war that elite institutions are waging against them. The cause of institutionalism today therefore requires a forceful defense against the aggressions of the cultural Left. Part two of a two-part review essay.

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December 18, 2019July 1, 2021Philosophy, Politics

The Real Failure of Liberal Theory

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Conservative critics of “liberalism” are right to identify major flaws in liberal theory. But a deeper appreciation of those flaws should prevent us from blaming the American political tradition for them. Liberal theory is so erroneous that neither the Founders nor any other Americans could ever really put it into practice.

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