As the Boomers Head for the Barn

by Patrick J. Buchanan

When the April figures on unemployment were released May 4, they were more than disappointing. They were deeply disturbing.

While the unemployment rate had fallen from 8.2 percent to 8.1 percent, 342,000 workers had stopped looking for work. They had just dropped out of the labor market.

Only 63.6 percent of the U.S. working age population is now in the labor force, the lowest level since December 1981.

During the Reagan, Bush I and Clinton years, participation in the labor force rose steadily to a record 67 percent. The plunge since has been almost uninterrupted.

A New Dark Age

by Bradley J. Birzer, TIC co-editor

There are days and, then, there are days.

In 1948, T.S. Eliot assumed that western civilization moved inexorably toward a new dark age. “We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline,” he lamented. “The standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago; and the evidences of this decline are visible in every department of human activity.”

One can only shake his head in wonder and bewilderment at what Eliot might write in 2012.

In the elite world of affairs, the powerful steal more and more through the machinery of politics, depriving us not only of liberty but, of course, of justice. There is, in no real sense, neither liberty nor order, internally or externally.

The Real Founding: Long Gone

by Bradley J. Birzer, TIC co-editor

George Mason

Last week, I had the privilege of lecturing on the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Passed unanimously by Congress in New York on July 13, 1787, this law never ceases to inspire me. As our own venerable John Willson has argued many times, it is, quite possibly, the most impressive republican law ever passed. Protecting religious freedom and common law rights, it also called for good relations with the American Indian, for a prohibition of slavery north and west of the Ohio River, and for the prevention of empire as the republic expanded West. My favorite provision is the untempered defense of property rights in the second article:

And, in the just preservation of rights and property, it is understood and declared, that no law ought ever to be made, or have force in the said territory, that shall, in any manner whatever, interfere with or affect private contracts or engagements, bona fide, and without fraud, previously formed.

Contrast this for a moment with what the French Revolutionaries passed only two years later in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, article III:

The source of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body, no individual can exercise authority that does not explicitly proceed from it.

At first reading, the second article of the Northwest Ordinance appears to be a statement about mere possession. I own this; it’s mine; leave it alone; I obtained it through good faith; back off.

Popular Government and Intemperate Minds: Democracy As Ideology

by Russell Kirk

At the beginning of the twentieth century, few states in the world could be called democratic. Yet much personal and local freedom existed under the reign of law.

Near the close of the twentieth century, nearly every political regime throughout the world professes to be democratic. Yet in many lands, personal and local freedom has been extirpated.

On the face of things, it appears that the triumph of democracy, far from preserving or enlarging freedom, has brought to power a host of squalid oligarchs.

Pat Buchanan on Suicide of a Superpower

Below is an excellent interview with Pat Buchanan on his book Suicide of a Superpower.

Balancing the Universal and the Particular in American History

by Bradley J. Birzer, TIC Co-editor

Bradley J. Birzer

Certainly, as John Willson and others have argued throughout their professional careers, one of the greatest problems of western civilization has been its attempt to balance universal truths (not necessarily limited to the transcendent and divine truths, but timeless and universal nonetheless) with particular, cultural expressions of those truths.

Throughout the history of our civilization, we tend toward one or the other.  If we err toward too much universalism, we lose our proper sense of diversity or what Russell Kirk called “the principle of proliferating variety.”

If we focus too much on the particular, we become bigots, nationalists, and racists.

Our own Declaration of Independence hits the balance in a dynamic and brilliant way.  The first 1/5, the most famous part, describes a universal cosmology, addressing questions of the nature of God, the nature of man, and the nature of man to God.

The Equality Racket

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Our mainstream media have discovered a new issue: inequality in America. The gap between the wealthiest 1 percent and the rest of the nation is wide and growing wider.

This, we are told, is intolerable. This is a deformation of American democracy that must be corrected through remedial government action.

What action? The rich must pay their fair share. Though the top 1 percent pay 40 percent of federal income taxes and the bottom 50 percent have, in some years, paid nothing, the rich must be made to pay more.

That’s an appealing argument to many, but one that would have horrified our founding fathers. For from the beginning, America was never about equality, except of God-given and constitutional rights.

Polling the Commandments

by John Willson

John Willson

I just read the results of a poll taken by Rasmussen stating that 47% of Americans now think that abortion is morally wrong “most of the time.”  This is the first time, Rasmussen says, that the question, framed exactly that way, has been answered at under 50%.  In other words, it could be argued that abortion is slowly gaining in popularity.

A couple of decades ago I came across this poem, written by the great teacher Elton Trueblood.

Above all else love God alone;
Bow down to neither wood nor stone.
God’s name refuse to take in vain;
The Sabbath rest with care maintain.
Respect your parents all your days;
Hold sacred human life always.
Be loyal to your chosen mate;
Steal nothing, neither small nor great.
Report, with truth, your neighbor’s deed;
And rid your mind of selfish greed.

The Roots of Voter Anger Go Back to 1954

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Sixty-nine percent of voters nationwide are angry with the policies of the federal government.

To understand why, it’s important to remember that most voters believe tax cuts and government spending cuts are good for the economy. Collectively, voters have voted for politicians who promised spending cuts and tax cuts in just about every election over the past four decades.

Barack Obama promised tax cuts for 95 percent of all Americans. George W. Bush’s across-the-board tax cuts were the centerpiece of his domestic policy. Bill Clinton promised tax cuts for the middle class. The first President Bush asked the nation to read his lips while promising no new taxes. And Ronald Reagan rode the tax revolt to the White House. Jimmy Carter ran as a fiscal conservative, and Richard Nixon was more fiscally conservative than Hubert Humphrey.

In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government

This lecture by Charles Murray draws on the themes of his excellent book In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government. It is a strong argument for the central place of community in conservative thought.

The Libertarian Double-Face and the Case for Conservatism: A Reply to Wenzel

by Nathan Schlueter

Conservatives value individual liberty as much as libertarians, but they deny that freedom from coercion is the only form of liberty.

It cannot be repeated often enough: The issue dividing conservatives and libertarians is not whether there should be a public philosophy by which we are governed, but which philosophy should govern us, conservatism or libertarianism.

The “conservatism” that Professor Wenzel describes frightens even me. Fortunately it bears little resemblance to the American conservatism I am defending. Wenzel’s libertarianism, on the other hand, is Descartes with a Burkean face. Beneath the modest surface lies a rationalist principle that threatens the very foundations of free government.

The Tragedy of Democracy without Authority: A Reflection on Maritain and Thucydides

by Jose Maria J. Yulo

Scrupulous fear of the gods is the very thing which keeps the Roman Commonwealth together. To such an extraordinary height is this carried among them, both in private and public business, that nothing could exceed it. –Histories, Polybius

Infirmity doth still neglect all office
Whereto our health is bound; we are not ourselves
When nature, being oppressed, commands the mind
To suffer with the body. – King Lear, Shakespeare

In the Poetics, Aristotle described the distinctly Hellenic medium of tragedy thusly. It was "the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself...with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions" (p. 1460). From Aeschylus to Sophocles and finally Euripides, there can be observed certain unspoken dynamics within tragedy. The tragic figures of Agamemnon, Oedipus, and Pentheus all share a binding doom which can be traced to the ramifications of their chosen actions in the course of their respective tales. There are subtle differences between what brings about suffering and pathos to each of these men. Aeschylus' Agamemnon agrees to divinely mandated sacrifice of his own Iphigenia. Pentheus refuses to bow to the new god from the east. Oedipus is the unhappy mean between these two in his having complicity, albeit unknowing, leading to his father's death. To study tragedy, it seems, is to attempt to understand humanity's role in bringing it about.

Why I am Not a Libertarian

by Nathan Schlueter

The contemporary Tea Party Movement, like its revolutionary ancestor, looks to principles for guidance. Yet an old but active fault line runs just beneath the surface of the movement that has the potential to cause a fatal rupture. Tea Partiers simultaneously promote both a conservatism based upon the principles of the American founding and a libertarianism based on individualism, but the two are ultimately incompatible.

Libertarians are good at explaining why the market works and why government fails, and they have made important policy initiatives in areas such as school choice. On the other hand, they actively oppose laws prohibiting obscenity, protecting unborn children, promoting marriage, limiting immigration, and securing American citizens against terrorists. These positions flow from core principles that have more in common with modern liberalism than with the American founding, and which threaten to erode our constitutional order even further.

Classical Greek Philosophy and American Democratic Thought

Dr. E. Christian Kopff on "Classical Greek Philosophy and American Democratic Thought."

Before You Vote, Read Orwell's Animal Farm and Politics and the English Language

by Robert M. Woods

For Christians living in a culture such as ours, a key issue is the "grammar" and "rhetoric" of our daily lives.  Imagine what would happen if we embraced the vocabulary of our faith and it became the way we talked to one another and about one another.  I recently read Animal Farm and Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language, as well as Orwell's Inside the Whale.  Speaking of the English language (in Politics), Orwell remarking on our language says,

"it becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible." (103)

In Orwell's essay Inside The Whale (1940), he brilliantly dissects totalitarianism. We, in America, should not be so ignorant of history or the workings of dictatorships to be so naive as to not recognize the real possibility that totalitarianism can even exist in the presence of a democratic republic.

Jefferson Was Right

by Joseph Sobran

In the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 — one of the most important and prophetic documents in American history — Thomas Jefferson made a simple and irrefutable argument. The Constitution is designed to define and limit the powers of the federal government. But if the federal government (including the federal judiciary) is the sole, exclusive, and final authority to say what the Constitution means, it can be expected to rule in its own favor, constantly expanding its own powers and usurping the powers reserved to the states.

In short, if the federal government can define the extent of its own powers, we may as well not have a written Constitution, because its whole purpose has been defeated.

Calhoun, Jefferson, and Popular Rule

by Lee Cheek

John Caldwell Calhoun inherited the social and political tradition of his South Atlantic world, confirmed by participation in a community and intermediary institutions that encouraged a republicanism with the moral and philosophical overtones necessary to encourage a just polity and the ethical life. Contrary to the fashionable and persistent maligning of Calhoun as a departure from the republican tradition--especially the republicanism of a Jeffersonian cast--his lifelong dedication to restoring the regime to its "republican simplicity and virtue" found much wise counsel in the political thought of Thomas Jefferson.[1] The promise and perils of comparing Jefferson and Calhoun are legion, although this essay concentrates on the aspect of Jefferson's thought most influential to Calhoun, the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 and 1799.[2] As Jefferson had faced the crisis posed by President John Adams and the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, Calhoun's devotion to republican principles also forced his separation from the extremes of the Jacksonian consolidation of all aspects of the regime and the Whig accommodation of "interest group" politics regardless of the costs. Having resolved the nullification crisis through maintaining a commitment to the republican idea of diversified liberty, as well as a spirit of moderation amidst great turmoil, Calhoun could toast the Jefferson of the Kentucky Resolutions as the "true interpreter and faithful advocate" of a still-vibrant American republicanism. According to Calhoun, Thomas Jefferson served as the "Republican Patriarch," the political thinker who had incorporated the republican understanding of liberty into a theory of federal relationships most conducive to the life of the community and political order.[3]

The Prophetic C.S. Lewis

by Joseph Sobran

Deep political wisdom can be found in a writer who took very little interest in politics: C.S. Lewis, a scholar who achieved his greatest fame as a popular Christian writer.

Joe Sobran

Lewis was sometimes laughably ignorant of current events. His friends were once amused to discover that he was under the impression that Tito, the Communist dictator of Yugoslavia, was the king of Greece. But the very distance he kept from politics enabled him to see large outlines invisible to those preoccupied with the daily news.

During World War II, Lewis realized that both the Allies and the Axis were abandoning the traditional morality of the Christian West and indeed of all sane civilizations. The great principle of this morality is that certain acts are intrinsically right or wrong. In a gigantic war among gigantic states, Lewis saw that modern science was being used amorally on all sides to dehumanize and annihilate enemies. When peace came, the victorious states would feel released from moral restraints.

Know Your Gnostics: Eric Voegelin diagnosed the Neoconservatives’ disease

by Gene Callahan

Eric Voegelin

Eric Voegelin often is regarded as a major figure in 20th-century conservative thought—one of his concepts inspired what has been a popular catchphrase on the right for decades, “don’t immanentize the eschaton”—but he rejected ideological labels. In his youth, in Vienna, he attended the famous Mises Circle seminars, where he developed lasting friendships with figures who would be important in the revival of classical liberalism, such as F.A. Hayek, but he later rejected their libertarianism as yet another misguided offshoot of the Enlightenment project. Voegelin has sometimes been paired with the British political theorist Michael Oakeshott, who greatly admired his work, but he grounded his political theorizing in a spiritual vision in a way that was quite foreign to Oakeshott’s thought. Voegelin once wrote, “I have been called every conceivable name by partisans of this or that ideology… a Communist, a Fascist, a National Socialist, an old liberal, a new liberal, a Jew, a Catholic, a Protestant, a Platonist, a neo-Augustinian, a Thomist, and of course a Hegelian.”

But whatever paradoxes he embodied, Voegelin was, first and foremost, a passionate seeker for truth. He paid no attention to what party his findings might please or displease, and he was willing to abandon vast amounts of writing, material that might have enhanced his reputation as scholar, when the development of his thought led him to believe that he needed to pursue a different direction. As such, his ideas deserve the attention of anyone who sincerely seeks for the origins of political order. And they have a timely relevance given recent American ventures aimed at fixing the problems of the world through military interventions in far-flung regions.

After-birth Abortion

by Stratford Caldecott

The recent furore over the publication by a reputable medical ethics journal of an article arguing that infanticide should be permitted because there is no moral difference between an embryo and a newborn, and the other fuss about the discovery that women in the UK are regularly given abortions on the NHS simply because they don't like the gender of the child ("gendercide"), have caused a certain amount of consternation in the minds of the British public.

If we are on a slippery slope to barbarism, it started earlier than the 1967 Abortion Act. It can be traced back at least to the 14th-century Oxford philosopher William of Ockham, and to other nominalist and voluntarist philosophers of the Middle Ages. Abortion is a social justice issue, and a moral issue, but more than that, it is an ontological and epistemological one. What is a "person", and what is a "right"? Modern dilemmas over abortion stem from the widespread assumption – derived from these philosophers – that the word "person" is merely a label that we choose to apply to some group of individuals we choose to relate to as equals. It does not, that is, have a deeper significance, as referring to some "essence" that all human beings have in common (something, let us say, in the Mind of God; or something objectively present in all members of that group). Which means, of course, that we can absolve ourselves from murder by refusing to attach the label to anyone we have reason to kill.