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Pitting as it does two different conceptions of popular sovereignty against each other, the debate over the Electoral College is a proxy for a more fundamental debate over what kind of regime should govern America. The history of French republicanism teaches that the closer Americans come to changing the way they elect their president, the closer they come to regime change.
Reparations for racial injustice are necessary, but they will be effective only on a local level, not a national one.
Critical Race Theory rightly calls us to recognize that the effects of sin can be magnified throughout the institutions and social structures erected by individuals, leading to social systems that embody unjust racial prejudices. However, by focusing on sin as embodied with or without intent in social systems, proponents of CRT lose sight of what makes sin so wrong in the first place: that individuals who bear a moral accountability before God break his moral law.
We often fail to see that business is a morally formative mode of solidarity even as it also serves as a means to prosperity. Aristotle might describe it as a “friendship of utility.” Respecting the communal form of the business firm, which is essential to its productivity, demands a deeper vision of the proper goals and just governance of businesses.
Nations have cultural and moral foundations, and religion is historically at their core. The secular multiculturalist fails to see why a Christian and a Muslim cannot agree to disagree and fall into peaceable line in a republic. This is because he imagines Christians and Muslims who do not take their respective faiths seriously. Only if neither adheres to basic principled claims of their faiths is it plausible to imagine all potential religious and cultural conflict between the two disappearing.
Free market dogmas are inapplicable to the managerial oligarchy. A politically coordinated cabal of opaquely owned companies is not private property in the way a local coffeeshop is. To do nothing while a managerial mob uses the wealth we have entrusted to them to seize power over us is a betrayal of ourselves, our nation, and our posterity.
"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."
The conception of the good life that W.E.B. DuBois discerns in the pattern of St. Francis of Assisi’s life straddles the secular and sacred. It can provide a starting point for a recovery and re-articulation of enduring longings in a secularized culture. The cultivation of those longings, in turn, is at the core of truly liberal education.
To understand the connection of freedom, law, and arbitrariness, we must return to our eighteenth-century roots in Montesquieu.
I have awakened on too many days with gratitude on my lips for the blessing of living in a peaceful, orderly, democratic, and free society to see such hard-won advances thrown away for political ambition. Those who realized our inheritance was at risk saw more clearly than I did.
The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof addresses the debate over abortion from an external point of view, for he has not attempted to understand or imagine the pro-life position from the standpoint of someone who holds that view. If he’d like to try seeing it from within, Mr. Kristof is most welcome to join us for dinner and conversation at the Witherspoon Institute.
The question that divides us is how we ought to respond to reproductive asymmetry: the reality that women carry disproportionate burdens due to our special role in human reproduction. What makes one a feminist is the view that this basic inequality at the heart of reproduction is one that deserves, in justice, an affirmative cultural response. We wish not only for maternity to be celebrated for the true privilege it most certainly is, but also for women to be encouraged and supported in other contributions they make. This requires that the burdens of childbearing ought to be shared not only within the family, but also across the wider society too.
For too long we have acquiesced to the political choices given to us, tried to figure out what the lesser evil is, and voted for that. Instead, we should demand a vision of the good that we share in our political space and vote for the party that espouses that vision: the American Solidarity Party.
Once we no longer care about the truth, our own deliberations become corrupt. When the positions we take and the policies we advocate are not restrained by truth, it no longer seems to matter how we bring about our agenda. All that matters is that we win.
In the past, disparate groups on the American right were united by their opposition to communism. Today, fears of the threat of an ascendant China, the growing boldness of cancel culture, and the enervating philosophy of the “woke” proselytizers form the basis of new right-wing coalitions. If Trump succeeds, the big government of the American right will be one that embraces American ideals, American history, and American religion rather than tearing it down in pursuit of some post-religious techno-secular utopia.
While both presidential candidates have changed their views on abortion over the past decades, their actions in recent years clarify the direction that they would likely take while in office. President Trump has maintained a consistent pro-life record in office that affects the regulations of various executive agencies and American leadership on the world stage. On the other hand, former Vice President Biden has moved to support his party’s current position of actively promoting federal funding for the abortion industry and cementing abortion as a constitutional right.
The republication of Jacques Necker’s On Executive Power in Great States is an occasion to consider that eternal conundrum: how to empower but also limit the executive branch.
Sixty years after its publication in America, Wilhelm Röpke’s “A Humane Economy” remains a model for engaging classical liberal economics with conservative insights into reality.
Senator Hawley should turn the tables during confirmation hearings and force Democrats to defend their abortion extremism. What’s more, he should act on precedents stemming from the days of Lincoln down to our own, precedents involving the authority of the political branches to counter at times and limit the holdings of the Supreme Court.
Abigail Shrier’s new book is an outstanding investigative report on the diagnostic craze of rapid onset gender dysphoria that has swept over adolescent girls in the past decade. It is an invaluable resource for parents, educators, church and community leaders, and anyone else who cares about the well-being of young women.
Christians are called not only to pray but also to act for justice, because faith without works is dead. Today, we are called to give new birth to the civil rights movement, to finally fulfill the promise of the American civil rights project for which so many fought and died.
The common good is the flourishing of a community qua community. Every community is built around a common end, which is simply that it excel, in justice, as whatever kind of emergently real community it is. The common good is primarily a practical idea, but if our starting point is too practical we are apt to miss the challenge that the common good poses to the modern political imaginary. On the other hand, a starting point that is too metaphysical will fail to engage the real questions of common life.
Through being a Public Discourse reader, I’ve made friendships I would not otherwise have made. The joy of any movement is the relationships it fosters, and my life would be less fulfilled were it not for the intellectual camaraderie that is enjoyed by many within the Public Discourse readership.
To be Catholic is to be completely comfortable in neither party. I know. I live this every day. If you really want to change the world, you must choose to be Catholic, and carry Jesus into the public square. Adapted from a May 2019 commencement address Representative Lipinski delivered at Ave Maria University.