Forget “The Great Books”: Read the Classics
Stop drinking the Kool Aid and brush up on your Shakespeare, Homer, and Tolkien.
The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary
Is Trump Negotiating with the Deep State?
A president in office can do only two main things; any more, and he divides his attention and gets nothing done, like Jimmy Carter, who corrected the grammar of the papers submitted to him. For example, Reagan revived the economy and stared down the Soviet Union in the Cold War Endgame. Trump’s two things are ending, or at least reducing, the foreign wars and expensive global empire; and getting control of our borders. The Deep State doesn’t want either.
The South’s Losing Strategy of Perpetual Retreat
For traditional Southerners today (and especially for those haggard souls who have somehow managed to remain unreconstructed through it all), the flag that so many of our ancestors fought and died under defending a foreign invasion is not something to be tossed aside.
Political Realism: A Greek Primer, Conclusion
Every society has its hypocrites, since most of us, to secure what we want, will sometimes pretend to be better than we are, but the Greeks were generally frank about everyday realities. Dr. Johnson was being very Greek when he told Boswell that “No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures.”
Humpty Dumpty on the “Liberal” Arts
The “liberal arts” have come to mean the arts that turn students into liberals.
The Politics of Human Nature: Thirty Years Later
Thomas Fleming begins a podcast series in which the main themes of his first book are explored in a more conversational tone. In this 29 minute podcast he and Rex take up the origin of the book and the great fallacy that underlies almost all modern isms and ologies.
Wednesday’s Child: Yet More Loners
Gustav Mahler once said that if the public thinks a conductor’s tempo too slow, what he ought to do is to slow it down. Such, anyway, is Wednesday’s Child’s feeble justification for persisting with the theme of the past two weeks, which is the plight of the socially anomalous child East and West. The occlusive membrane separating the home from the state, if one exists and is not ruptured by intrusion of the latter, is in most cases a good thing, indeed one of the condiciones sine quibus non of child rearing. But then, of course, there are cases when...
Swamp-Rats Revisited
When over a year ago now I wrote on: “A Nest of Swamp Rats,” I treated the leading actors in the pursuit of the Democrats’ Russian hoax as exemplars of institutional or bureaucratic mediocrity, of opportunism, arrogance, and stupidity. Apart from a mention of John Brennan’s youthful Communism, I credited none of them with anything as risky as thinking.
Paleoconservatism, Part Six: Three Cheers for Free Markets, Zero for Capitalism
The family is not the only natural social institution that is being undermined by the modern state. Men are by nature competitive, and they created war and games, politics and the marketplace, to satisfy their need to contend for status, wealth and power. One of leftism’s greatest successes has been to adopt the social language of Christianity and to transfer it from enclosed households (which are naturally communal and socialist) to the open fields where men do battle with each other. This is a point I made briefly in The Morality of Everyday Life and which has been expanded...
Stop (talking about) Brexit
I’m often told that people “didn’t know what they voted for,” or were “stupid,” or are, “as everyone knows, racist.” Fascinatingly, as far as I know, stupid people, racist people, and even people who are lied to get equal votes in a democracy.
