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Search Results for: slavery – Page 2

children caught fish in the lake. boys playing near the water

From the Editor’s Desk: Public Discourse’s Monthly Roundup, June 2023

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Rather than sandlot games and diving contests, June is, for us, a month of contested visions about the body, about sex, gender, race, birth, and death. Perhaps the poet was wrong in declaring April the cruelest month—perhaps that title should go to June. 
President George Washington home at Mount Vernon in Virginia, USA

Reclaiming Museums’ Civic Duty

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Museums assume, both for the country and the individual, a special trust of preservation and civic encouragement. That encouragement need not involve glossing over the failings of our past. We distort our history both when we whitewash it and when we overemphasize our shortcomings.

Juneteenth: A Conversation on Freedom

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Juneteenth, coming as it does just weeks before July Fourth, provides a perfect opportunity for us—both individually and collectively—to engage in a season of contemplating and celebrating the complexities and nuances, highs and lows, of this American experiment that has at its core the achievement of freedom.
Closeup of the document of Juneteenth National Independence Day Act. Juneteenth is a holiday celebrating the emancipation of those who had been enslaved in the United States.

The Making of Juneteenth

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The principal irony of Juneteenth is that slavery was still a legal institution in the United States on June 19, 1865—if not in Texas because of the Emancipation Proclamation, then certainly in Kentucky and Delaware, where slavery would not be blotted out until the ratification of the thirteenth amendment. This would not, however, be the only irony in the history of American emancipation, and certainly not the last.
Custom library

Leo Strauss on Greatness and Democracy: An Interview with Timothy W. Burns

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Leo Strauss was an extraordinarily generous writer, by which I mean that he went to great pains to present the best case he could for the arguments of a serious thinker with whom he disagreed, before offering any tentative critique of that thinker. One never finds in his writings mere polemic or straw men. He invites the reader to take seriously and try fully to understand and spell out the serious and deepest thoughts of those whose thought he is confronting, even if he disagrees.
Lincoln memorial

Lincoln and the Question of Self-Government

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Lincoln saw the fundamental problem in democracy as one single, monstrous question: “Can the principle that liberates all and produces self-government remain disciplined and restrained enough in practice to retain self-government?”
Regent Street with Union Jack Flags in London, United Kingdom UK

Reckoning with Colonialism

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As a moral framework for assessing regimes in an imperfect world, Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning has much to recommend it.
Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson, America’s Writer

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Fred Kaplan’s new biography of Thomas Jefferson, His Masterly Pen, gives us the Jefferson we deserve: Jefferson the writer, the listener, and the aesthete.

A Culture of Life Starts with Turning the Other Cheek

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Advocates must remain clear about the moral stakes of abortion. But the non-violent ethic of life will reinforce the witness of conscience that drives objections to killing innocent human beings. By refusing to retaliate with violence or indignant rhetoric, pro-lifers will enhance their moral witness.
group of surgeons in operating room at hospital

The Surgeries Are Immoral

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Conservatives should oppose “gender-affirming” surgeries with a positive account of human freedom ordered towards the goods that make freedom a blessing rather than a curse.
Background image of voting booths decorated with American flags at empty polling station

Democracy Can Be Trusted Because Citizens Can Be Trusted

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What you think about democracy probably comes down to what you think about the nature of your fellow citizens. What are they like? Are they children of God, made in the image of their Creator and thus in possession of common sense and common reason? Do they have enough sense to distinguish between truth and falsehood on the issues that drive our current political conflicts? Or are they ignorant bumpkins?
Uniform buildings on a college campus

An American Tragedy: On the Suicide of Liberal Education

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Life’s biggest questions are almost never resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, and if we don’t study the differences between the Epicureans and the Stoics, between Locke and Rousseau, and between legal originalists and non-originalists, we are missing out on our own music: sometimes a battle of the bands, sometimes cacophony, always fascinating.
Digital painting of crowds cheering or demonstrating with waving USA flags in Washington DC, digital artwork with matte painting

National Conservatives for the Status Quo?

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By deviating from the American political tradition, national conservatives double down on rather than challenge many of our political ills.
John Witherspoon statue in Princeton

Damnatio Memoriae: Princeton’s Witherspoon Statue Controversy

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Aside from a certain gruff nobility, the statue of John Witherspoon in Princeton is not overly stylized; he’s human, which is to say, flawed. A hero in bronze he may be, but with feet of clay, Witherspoon is worth remembering as he is portrayed there.
offices, towers, city

ESG, Woke Capitalism, and the Virtue of Humility

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ESG, the investment ideology that considers environmental, social, and governance issues, is an important part of the story of the rise of woke capitalism. Resisting ESG will require business leaders not just to communicate the good that they do, but also to cultivate the virtue of humility, which clarifies the importance of restraint and the meaning of community.
Blurry shadow in front of the window - Concept of mystery and inner disorder

The Long-Term Harms of Anonymous Sperm Donation

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In attempting to create families, doctors across the country have created people who, on a fundamental level, do not know who they are. No one gets to choose the family into which they are born. But medical professionals have willingly abetted the conception of human beings in circumstances marked by deceit; or, at the very least, marked by deliberate withholding.
Painting of the pilgrims

What the Puritans Can Teach Us about American Exceptionalism

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Perhaps as we modern Americans experience a cynical hangover after the giddy confidence of the “unipolar moment,” revisiting the Puritans’ nuanced notion of what it means to be an exceptional people can bring needed perspective, and restrain us from falling for triumphalism or despair.
Painting of the signing of the Constitution in Independence Hall

What’s Wrong with Social Contract Theory

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Although social contract theory is a prominent feature of the American founding, it is both unsound and harmful to a proper understanding of politics. This fact presents a challenge to any form of conservatism that is based on protecting and promoting the principles of the American founding.
Woman on phone laying in bed

Confessions of a Comatose Son of Liberalism

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Even the healthiest patriotism does not address whether America’s political regime ought to re-main basically neutral about whether its citizens flourish. If what our politics can give us is fair procedures for resolving disputes, and protections for speech and property, and a broad enough distribution of power that tyranny has difficulty taking hold, that is remarkable and we should be grateful. That still isn’t living well.

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.
Painting of Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson’s Religion of Reason

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Readers of Thomas Kidd’s book, Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh, are left with a portrait of a brilliant, morally flawed, and often contradictory, overindulgent, and undisciplined man—a combination not uncommon in great men. The biography is careful and balanced in its presentation of the evidence, revealing a man of monumental achievements and profound failings.
Painting of Edmund Burke

The Dilemmas of the American Burkean

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The arguments of Yoram Hazony’s Conservatism: A Rediscovery reveal both the value and the difficulty of applying a Burkean approach to human social life in a modern, non-Burkean society like our own. Part two of a two-part review.
Yoram Hazony book cover

A Biblical Conservatism

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Yoram Hazony’s Conservatism: A Rediscovery offers a valuable new take on non-Lockean political theory, grounded in the Biblical tradition and relevant to our current affairs. Part one of a two-part review.
kansas state capitol

The Meaning of Kansas: Lessons from a Pro-Life Defeat

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The recent defeat of a pro-life constitutional amendment in Kansas was not a consequence of strategic overreach, nor was it a rebuke of Dobbs. In fact, it followed from the difficulty of communicating complex legal and political principles, as well as navigating the fear and distortion generated by abortion advocates and their media allies. To help secure a pro-life future, we must learn the correct lessons of the Kansas loss, including the need to harness the emotional power of truthful narrative to shape political choices.
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