When traditional conservatives, or Burkean conservatives, or paleoconservatives talk about their conservatism, they like to emphasize its opposition to ideological thinking. Many have begun their search with some sort of typical political conservatism, and working back historically and philosophically, have discovered these ideas about society – the effect of time in weeding out bad laws […]

Anna Speckhard My bologna has a first name. As does my car. As does just about everything else in the world, but I don’t know what most of those names are. Naming things is a very human pursuit, all the way back to Adam. Unfortunately, taxonomy as a discipline is diminishing, according to Carol Kaesuk […]

The Heritage Foundation just published an essay by one Brian Brown (available here in HTML, here as a PDF) which tells the story of the link between centralized government and civic apathy (clue: it involves a lot of wars).  Please leave your thoughts here on the comments board; the topic is worth further conversation. Excerpt: […]

Last week Daniel Hannan, the member of the European Parliament best-known for his scathing dressing-down of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, delivered a lecture at The Heritage Foundation. It’s a good 40 minutes or so, but well worth watching–Hannan articulates American political principles better than most Americans, and warns against chasing a technocratic solution to healthcare […]

Conservatives, in reaction to Rousseauean liberalism, have become good at understanding how the government ends up becoming a deified abstraction. Solve Poverty? Fix social relations? If a theorist can think of an abstract solution, it can quickly become a justification for government action … even though the action is necessarily particular, multifaceted, and one among […]