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Pillar

Politics & Law

The third pillar of a decent society is a just system of politics and law. Such a government does not bind all persons, families, institutions of civil society, and actors in the marketplace to itself as subservient features of an all-pervading authority. Instead, it honors and protects the inherent equal dignity of all persons, safeguards the family as the primary school of virtue, and seeks justice through the rule of law.

Poetry and the Politics of Aspirational Conservatism 

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What It Means To Love Our Country

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Loving America well means taking her seriously—working to preserve what is lovely about her and to fix what is not.

How to Avoid Another Souter. . . or Stevens. . . or O’Connor. . . or Kennedy

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We can’t undo the past, but we can avoid repeating its mistakes. Here’s how.

Presidential Self-Pardons, the Framers at Philadelphia, and the Work of Originalism

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As the late Justice Scalia was fond of pointing out, the views of individual lawmakers in the midst of debate are not themselves the law we must interpret. Neither are the votes taken in a deliberative body rightly viewed as votes on anyone’s interpretation of the text under discussion. The text that they passed, not what they said about what they passed, is the law.

Filling in the Blank Left in the Masterpiece Ruling: Why Gorsuch and Thomas Are Right

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The majority’s refusal to address the free speech issue in Masterpiece explains the intractability of debates over the scope of its free exercise ruling because, surprisingly, the two issues are linked. Two concurrences implicitly address the free speech issue. There the conservatives’ case is stronger, and supported explicitly by Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor in dissent. In light of it, the Court’s Masterpiece ruling should provide robust protection for other creative professionals.

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.

Masterpiece, Marriage, and Bigotry: The Court’s Ruling Is More Robust than Many Acknowledge

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State officials and judges cannot comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Masterpiece simply by articulating facially neutral reasons for decisions that punish people for acting on the understanding that marriage is a man-woman union.

Free Speech, Ordinary People, and Ordinary Judgments: Hadley Arkes responds to Robert Miller

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In drawing on the older teaching of the courts, Hadley Arkes argues that it is far more tenable for the Court to teach again the difference between epithets and arguments.

Jonah Goldberg vs. Patrick Deneen: Is Liberalism a Blessing or a Curse?

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Jonah Goldberg’s new book is a poignant reminder that we should never allow discouragement to swamp our sense of gratitude. As Americans, liberalism is our patrimony. Even recognizing the drawbacks, we should maintain a proper respect for that heritage.

Can States “Confess” Religious Belief? Should They?

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The confessing state exceeds the limits of its authority, either by acting to no good effect, or by acting contrary to good effect. Thus, the confessing state seems inappropriate as a matter not simply of prudence, but of principle.

The Trump Administration Must Keep Abortion Out of Humanitarian Law and Policy

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The Trump administration must continue to push the United Nations to respect U.S. sovereign prerogatives not to support abortion in humanitarian efforts. It must not give abortion groups a pass to continue to implement their covert strategy to establish an international right to abortion.

Free Speech and the American Experiment

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The noble impulse to purge the public square of offensive and insulting language quickly degenerates into censorship of unpopular viewpoints. By contrast, the American experiment is founded on the view that a people capable of governing themselves are worthy of the trust that the First Amendment places in them.

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.

Natural Rights, God, and Marriage in the American Founding

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By calling our attention to the Founders’ political theory of the family, Thomas West’s new book leads us to ask whether a secular theory of natural rights and natural law can sustain the moral ecology necessary for self-government. If a secular natural-rights republic cannot sustain the family, it would seem to be neither a good nor attractive political theory.

Vetoing Life, Vetoing Women’s Care

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One would think that a politician like Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who aspires to national office on a message of unity and inclusion, would push his party toward common ground—like the common ground that the Women’s Care Center occupies. Why, then, would he veto this pregnancy center’s zoning request?

On Christian Liberty and Lockean Liberty: A Grateful Response to Micah Watson, Samuel Gregg, and Anthony Esolen

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If we want a different politics, ultimately we must offer a different moral imagination for ourselves, our children, and theirs.

Patrick Deneen, The Little Sisters of the Poor, and Libertas Idiotica

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We are not Hobbesian atoms of self-will, not until liberalism makes us so. Human beings have ever been human by virtue of their relations with others, and by virtue of the bonds of duty and memory that these relations imply.

Patrick Deneen and the Problem with Liberalism

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Patrick Deneen poses good questions but begs others. The second installment in the Public Discourse symposium on Why Liberalism Failed.

Prisoners in the American Cave

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Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed is a provocative attempt to explain what’s wrong with our culture, how this came to be, and what might be done about it. Although his historical account of liberalism is unpersuasive, he offers a prescient analysis of the current moment and insightful prescriptions for constructive action.

Muslims and Christians Should Work Together to Support Family and Human Flourishing

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It’s time for Christians to partner with conservative Muslims and others who share traditional views on key social issues. And American Muslims should leave behind their lockstep alliance with the social justice left.

The Catholic Church, the State, and Liberalism

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According to previous papal teaching, a Catholic confessional state is the ideal, even if in most modern situations it’s not a practical possibility, and prudence would steer us away from it. That teaching continues to be normative for Catholics.

Adapt or Die: Why Social Conservatives Need a Moneyball Revolution

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If social conservatives don’t radically alter what we are doing—if we don’t buck the current conventional wisdom and do something different—we will lose.

California’s New Sexual Orientation Bill Is Bad, but It Wouldn’t Ban Books

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Social conservatives are right to oppose proposed legislation that would ban therapy to help those experiencing unwanted same-sex attraction or gender identity confusion. But they’re wrong to say that the bill would ban books.

The First Amendment Didn’t Separate Church and State—Christianity Did

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It was Christianity, not modernity, that separated church and state. It was modernity, not Christianity, that sought to bind them back together. And, at day’s end, the American order has more in keeping with the Christian apostasy than with either antiquity’s sacral political orders or modernity’s rejection of the claim that there exists any domain outside the jurisdiction of the modern state.

The Dual Legitimation Crisis: Elitism, Populism, and Political Power

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Because liberal Western democracies are ostensibly rooted in the theory of popular sovereignty, elite disdain for the people creates another legitimation crisis—one that many fail to recognize. It is not simply that the people have lost confidence in the elites and their governance, or that the elites struggle to speak for (and even to) the people. Disdain for the people also unmoors elite authority.

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