Jonathan Jones

The depressing budget brinksmanship of recent weeks is another reminder of the inherent disorder of American political terminology. Those of a Tea Party persuasion - protective of Medicare, generally sympathetic to classical liberalism, capable of uniting with the populist left to critique the . . . . Continue Reading »

Tonight, the second season of American Horror Story begins. I thought last season was an excellent, though perhaps unintended , cultural acknowledgement that along with sexual “liberation” come unintended consequences – particularly regret of voluntary sterility. The realities . . . . Continue Reading »

The end of Halloween and the genuinely frightening FX show American Horror Story - in which a family heavily interacts with ghosts spanning the generations, where horror began with an abortionist doing his own Frankenstein-type experiments - has provoked the following somewhat disparate thoughts . . . . . Continue Reading »

Stephen Tonsor of the University of Michigan history department is not often mentioned among the intellectual heavyweights of American conservatism. But reading his work gives one the impression he should be better known. For the Postmodern Conservative, skeptical of standards for socio-political . . . . Continue Reading »

If American conservatism is inauthentic but intersecting with ideas of postmodernism through a (non-right liberal) distaste for ideology and incredulity toward meta-narratives, then it is useful to consider some of its rhetorical features. The definition of rhetoric will vary because of the diverse . . . . Continue Reading »

The literature of American conservatism is vast and varied, but one missing and vital question is of its authenticity. If, as the evidence strongly suggests, the two most empirically verifiable aspects of our nature are original sin and the world’s oldest belief system of “you shall be as . . . . Continue Reading »

I recommend the recent reissue of Robert Nisbet’s The Quest for Community, which includes an excellent introduction by Ross Douthat. The book is a critique of both leftism and the right-liberalism (more “freedom,” less “equality”), so prevalent in today’s conservative . . . . Continue Reading »

Yuval Levin, a researcher of the fractured relationship between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, recently wrote an interesting post about Burke’s significant appeal for conservatives as a founding father (and it should be noted that leftists won’t stop admiring him either). This raises the . . . . Continue Reading »

In the past few years, Glenn Beck and Jonah Goldberg have led the charge to popularize the notion that the governing totalitarianisms of fascism – centralizing, modernist, nationalistic, and willing to cooperate with the radical, internationalist Left, most notoriously in August 1939 – . . . . Continue Reading »

In response to the Rhetoric Society of America’s inquiry – what are Pope Benedict’s reasons for positioning the Catholic Church as an essential link between enterprise and justice, and as a significant voice in the public discussion of globalization – I suggest a “spiritual . . . . Continue Reading »