Alan Wolfe, announcing the end of the culture wars with the election of Obama, accuses the South of voting against Obama because Southerners are racists: “The single most disturbing aspect of last night’s election is the transformation of the Republican Party into the party of the . . . . Continue Reading »
The key thing about Obama’s skin is not its color, but its thickness. I have rarely seen such a thin-skinned, touchy politician. When Clinton said that Obama has the “political instincts of a Chicago thug,” that’s what he was talking about - he takes offense quickly and has . . . . Continue Reading »
Obama may be just as dangerous as some of my friends say he is. He certainly will do all he can to re-secure abortion rights, advance gay rights, enact counter-productive legislation on health care. His goals are all the more worrisome given the executive powers he inherits from the Bush . . . . Continue Reading »
Modern politics, we often think, is secular politics. Alexis de Tocqueville knew better. He observed that the French Revolution “took on the appearance of a religious revolution.” It was, he admitted, “a new kind of religion, an incomplete religion . . . without God, without . . . . Continue Reading »
A possibility Helen doesn’t explore explicitly is that Obama’s broad but thin and vague popularity is in some significant measure the consequence of stale ideas on the right — or at least of the inability of the right to translate their ideas into practice. We should wonder more . . . . Continue Reading »
Dr. Lawler asks, in a question re: my previous post, "Are today’s sophisticated Western individuals the first people to ever have lost all contact with any sense of transcendence of their biological existence?" To be intellectually sophisticated there must be . . . . Continue Reading »
James’s post, "A View from Somewhere of this Month in Pomocon," as I understand him, seems to me to describe a contemporary view of politics that has striking similarities to the age of the classical Greeks who were confronted with the death of their myth and the ongoing . . . . Continue Reading »
Quick takes on the sparks flying off Helen’s latest: 1. Definitely Alex Massie is right as far as it goes when he heaps criticism on this notion that there is a "Red" America and a "Blue" America. True, this is fostered by all the sweet and pretty maps, but it’s . . . . Continue Reading »
Jim Rogers of Texas A&M responds to my posts about liberalism, where I quoted a couple of passages from a recent essay by John Milbank. Rogers writes: “I do think that there is probably a liberal anthropology that can be criticized in a way similar to Milbank. But sometimes I wonder if . . . . Continue Reading »
Milbank, summarizing and critiquing the work of Pierre Manent, suggests that “there was, from Machiavelli through Hobbes to Montesquieu and Hegel, a bias toward the primacy of evil.” Honoring good was “the everyday unexceptional reality,” but not “the normative . . . . Continue Reading »
Subscribe
Latest Issue
Support First Things
