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  1. Elites

Crisis of Legitimacy

People talk a lot about polarization. It is true that polling shows a growing partisan divide. But our rancorous political atmosphere is a symptom, not the cause. We are polarized because the credibility of our ruling class has eroded. A trustworthy establishment anchors society and brings stability . . . . Continue Reading »

Impersonal Responsibility

How are we to assign responsibility for the opioid epidemic? Patrick Radden Keefe—the New Yorker staff writer who in 2017 wrote a lengthy profile of the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma—offers an easy answer in his new book Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the . . . . Continue Reading »

They Did It for the Kids

Operation Varsity Blues,” the 2019 college admissions scandal, returned to the news earlier this year when a Netflix documentary provided a fresh opportunity to decry abuses of privilege and the selfishness of parents seeking to boast of their children’s achievements. Comforting accounts, to be . . . . Continue Reading »

The Failure of Evangelical Elites

There are times in history when Christianity feels its place in ­society coming under threat. As it finds itself pushed to the margins, two temptations emerge. The first is an angry sense of entitlement, an impulse to denounce the entire world and withdraw into cultural isolation. In the early . . . . Continue Reading »

Abortion and Class

America’s abortion regime and the absolutist ideology that animates it is part of a war by the powerful on the weak. This is true not only because it targets unborn children in the womb, the most helpless members of our society. It is also true because the regime is sustained by the rich while it . . . . Continue Reading »

Class Acts

Another summer, another moving season in Northern Virginia, a region filled with peripatetic military and federal families. Some folks, like us, move by choice—our three-bedroom townhome with no yard had become ­inadequate for our four small children. Others, like the family of six across the . . . . Continue Reading »

Upper-Class Christianity

Pour la canaille, il faut la mitraille: For the rabble use the grapeshot, the Duke reportedly said of an Irish mob. No, not John Wayne (“The Duke”), but the Duke of Wellington. In America today, we often hear of two mobs, antifa and the deplorables. One mob is praised and encouraged by . . . . Continue Reading »

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