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Search Results for: conservative libertarian – Page 3

Photo of William F. Buckley

Where Does National Review Stand Today? A Conversation with Ramesh Ponnuru and Matt Franck

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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.

In Defense of Liberalism

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Francis Fukuyama offers a useful account of the pathologies of liberalism and argues that it still has the internal resources necessary to resist its critics. But his defense of liberalism seems designed only to appeal to likeminded centrists. Liberalism today should not be about splitting differences and seeking moderation, but staking out its ground and affirming its beliefs.
trump, rally, crowd

Conservatism’s Enduring Debates

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Matthew Continetti’s new book offers an authoritative account of the complex interplay between conservative ideas, politics, and policy over the past century. His telling of conservative history suggests that if we want to know the movement’s future, we should first look to its past.
joseph raz

Joseph Raz: Philosopher of Freedom

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Joseph Raz, the master of analytic philosophy of law who died in London last month, argued that law and policy should reflect a vision of the human good, with the good of personal autonomy—enabling people to be “authors of their own lives”—at its heart. He was a true philosopher, a truth-seeker: he had convictions, but he never sought to immunize them against criticism, nor did he allow himself to fall so deeply in love with his opinions that he valued them above truth itself.
family, parents, babies

Pro-Life, Pro-Family: The Challenge of a Just and Sustainable Post-Roe Future

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If a post-Roe future is defined by even deeper divisions and bare-knuckle election politics, and not by a cultural shift in our thinking about how to not only protect innocent life but to support the parents who give and nurture that life, then we will have failed—again.
popcorn, flag

Peter Lawler’s Tocquevillian Adventure through Pop Culture

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Peter Lawler was a great lover of pop culture because, though often inelegant, it reflects the democratic spirit of America and the complexity of human affairs. His engagement with pop culture, which was an important part of his public activity, expressed his belief in America’s restlessness, dynamism, and optimism.
family, sun, children

Three Tasks After Roe

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If Roe falls, there will be difficult legal and political struggles, but three other areas will demand our thought, effort, and perseverance—engaging with those on the other side of the argument, developing pro-family policy, and protecting parental rights. In this Featured Collection from the Public Discourse archives, we revisit some excellent articles on these themes.
Photo of ornate library

Wondering and Wandering: Peter Augustine Lawler’s Higher Ed Heresies

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A proper understanding of education means embracing the creation of small liberal arts colleges in which students have the leisure to study and faculty the leisure to teach them. As Peter liked to say, every human person is “wondering and wandering,” and higher education is where one wonders and wanders the most. To those bound up in standards of efficiency, wondering and wandering seems like a waste of time. But there is no other way for a person to learn.
peter augustine lawler

Commemorating Peter Augustine Lawler Five Years Later

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Genuine postmodernism—a real reflection on the failure of the modern project—would be a recovery of the idea that the lives of free and rational beings are really directed by purposes given us by nature and God.
flag, constitution

Calvinball Constitutionalism

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Adrian Vermeule’s new book, an attempt to rescue American constitutional law by recurring to the “classical legal tradition,” is undone by the author’s unreasonable attack on originalism and his inattention to the Constitution and its history.
Crowd in city crosswalk

The Forgotten Teachings of Luigi Taparelli

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For the nineteenth-century Italian Jesuit Luigi Taparelli, social justice is not about redistributive justice by government fiat. Nor is it linked to some idea of absolute social or economic equality, as in progressive parlance. Instead, social justice according to Taparelli must be grounded in the principle of subsidiarity and linked to a theological understanding of economics.
Plastic Mannequin

Our Plastic World—And Plastic Selves

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The collapse of traditional, external anchors of identity—perhaps most obviously those of religion, nation, and family—explains the attraction of the turn inward. The rise of technology feeds the notion that we can bend nature to our will, that the world is just so much raw, plastic material from which we can make whatever meaning or reality we choose. We no longer think of ourselves as subject to the world’s fixed nature, or of it as having an objective authority or meaning. We are the ones with power, and we are the ones who give the world significance.
Eberstadt

From the Archives: Mary Eberstadt on What Plagues the West

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“Post-revolutionary men and women are living in ways that are profoundly unnatural for the ineradicably social creatures that we are; and many are suffering as a result, at times without even knowing the name of what ails them. This preoccupation, and the desire to do something about it, continues to shape my work.”
Abraham Lincoln photo

The Soul of Politics: Harry V. Jaffa, Prudence, and Statesmanship

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In his recent book, Glenn Ellmers argues that the political philosopher Harry V. Jaffa can help us meet the manifold challenges of the crisis of the West. Jaffa’s teachings on statesmanship and prudence provide a path to reverse America’s decline.
Refinery smoke

Why Liberals Should Embrace (a Bit of) Social Conservatism

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When it comes to climate change, liberals are correct. Yet they fail to see how the same arguments they use for climate action—acting in the face of uncertainty, limiting individual choice for the common good—can also be used to justify a bit of soft social conservatism.
Daniel Burns and Ross Douthat

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.
Woman's mouth with tape over it

It’s Time to Oppose COVID Authoritarianism

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Safetyism and Wokeism are fellow travelers, joined at the hip in many more contexts than not. Both elevate people’s subjective and emotional experiences, so long as they point in a progressive direction, over what is biologically or scientifically true. It is time for both conservatives and traditional liberals to wake up to this reality, which requires more consistently translating our convictions into action.

The Impossibility of Absolute Academic Freedom: A Response to Robert T. Miller

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There will always be some limits on academic freedom, and it is better to be honest about what they are and who sets them than to try to wish them away. We need to formulate real-world standards, rather than retreating into the impossible fantasy of absolute academic freedom.
Young family

A Distinctly American Family Policy

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Borrowing a family policy prescription from Helsinki or Budapest is bound to disappoint. A distinctly American family policy platform must be seen as expanding choice, not constraining it, and working with our national character, not trying to reshape it, all while understanding family as the essential institution in society, one that stakes an unavoidable claim on our public resources.
Bookshelves

The Bookshelf: Who Is in the American Canon?

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Moving books home has turned my mind toward publishers that seem to be of high value because of the enduring importance of their books. One such is Liberty Fund, which specializes in classic conservative and libertarian texts in politics and economics. Another is the Library of America, which has a broad mission to publish (in its own words) “America’s greatest writing.”
Mask on a bible

Should Christians Claim Religious Exemption from Mask Mandates?

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Religious freedom is not a get-out-of-jail-free card that lets us evade whatever laws we dislike. Nowhere does the Bible hint that we have the individual authority to examine all laws, determine which are good and which are not, and select, à la carte, which are binding and which are not.
Christ as bread of life

Catholics Must Reclaim the Term “Social Justice”

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Although the ideas presented in The Concept of Social Justice are just a start, they provide a crucial foundation for the salvific and eternal work that Catholics must complete in the political arena.
Constitution

The Bad History of Common Good Originalism

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Common-good originalism’s historical understanding of the Constitution’s adoption is perhaps its weakest link. The Constitution emerged from a negotiated consensus of a complex popular sovereign—a fact that ought to reinforce a judge’s commitment to the written text.
Wedding Party

When Marriage Becomes a Private Matter

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My marriage is an entity with ramifications and consequences that echo outside our home. The same is true in reverse: what happens in other marriages can affect ours. A marriage needs friends, and it can likewise supply friendship to others’ unions.
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