See you in Seattle?

That’s where I’ll be Thursday through Sunday at the American Political Science Association meeting.

You can see me at two big shows:

Thursday at 2, I’ll be on a Claremont panel with Hadley Arkes, our own Jim Ceaser, Pat Deneen, and Matt Spalding on the place of natural rights in understanding America today. So there are various things I could talk about: How the Road to Serfdom Never Gets to Serfdom . . . How natural rights vs. History doesn’t account for our situation today. How the Lockean change of our time (both economic and “social) is change we can half believe in . . . . etc. Not to mention my legislative compromise, accidental Thomism theory of the Declaration. I will, of course, be cast as the anti-American evildoer. But I might actually be the mean between the extremes of Deneen and Ceaser.

Friday at 8 (a.m.!) I will be on a really good panel on Tocqueville and Catholicism—including presentations by Paul Rahe and Gary Glenn. I’ve already suggested that the seeds of American Thomism can be found in Tocqueville, although he didn’t really locate an American aristocracy he could believe in.

I just got interviewed by THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE on Catholic views of President Bush the younger. Although I didn’t defend a lot of the results of his policies, it seemed heretical even to say that his intentions were almost always good and he was our most Catholic president ever. I also took shots on both MacIntyre and “new natural law” that I hope aren’t used, because I didn’t get to balance those unkind remarks with some positive stuff. I was asked: What public officials around today (including public intellectuals) do you believe in? I went with Yuval Levin—not a Catholic. But if you have any more names, I’d be pleased to have them.