A collection of 32 posts
The core principles of liberalism—freedom and equality—are insufficient for the good life. We need to supplement them with a more robust, metaphysically thicker understanding of human nature and the good.
"That was the moment I realised I had underestimated the ideological rot inside academia."
Only when we understand the fragility of liberal democracy will we be properly motivated to defend it.
Many liberals are strangely eager to concede that liberal societies are morally and spiritually bankrupt without religion to give life meaning.
We have lost the words that we could once call upon to justify diversity of thoughts, desires, viewpoints, and policy preferences, as opposed to a diversity of demographic groups.
Education was divided along confessional lines into Catholic and Protestant school systems; for these purposes, Jews were designated Protestant.
Hungarian politics is usually much less ideological than you think.
This kind of regime-analysis disappeared with the rise of classical liberalism, which supplied an altogether different language of politics.
It would be a mistake to conflate “adaptive” with “good.” But similarly, it is a mistake to conflate “good” with “sustainable.”
This imbalance between rights and responsibilities is not only restricted to individuals, it is also affecting our governmental, societal, and cultural institutions.
Our pre-liberal past was far worse than our imperfect present, and attempts to build a utopian post-liberal future have invariably ended in regression to barbarism.
The parties that have previously sold themselves as staunch defenders of freedom are now the parties most susceptible to authoritarianism.
Yoram Hazony, author of The Virtue of Nationalism, talks about the why liberal institutions like the New York Times have proved so vulnerable to capture by the hard Left. He wrote about this recently for Quillette.
For a generation after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, most Americans and Europeans regarded Marxism as an enemy that had been defeated once and for all. But they were wrong.
What, exactly, had I said that was so dangerous as to lead Democrats to engage in character assassination and undermine liberal democratic norms? Nothing I hadn’t already said last January when I testified before Congress about climate change and energy.