Burke and the Nation
Edmund Burke, painted by Joshua Reynolds via Wikimedia CommonsRekindling Constitutional Ambition
Whatever the outcome of this year’s election, conservatives and other friends of American constitutionalism have our work cut out for us. The Republican candidate for president has not shown much familiarity with or interest in the workings of our constitutional system. And the Democratic candidate (as usual) has evinced a desire to continue, with judicial backing, a transformation of that system—one that further enhances executive and regulatory power while weakening the powers of Congress.
A Decentralizing Remedy for the Diseases of a Fractured Republic: A Conversation with Yuval Levin
This edition of Liberty Law Talk welcomes back Yuval Levin to discuss his latest book, The Fractured Republic. Levin notes that our decentralizing republic, as observed in the decades long trends in social, economic, religious, and cultural diffusion, provides both opportunities and difficulties. America's ongoing deconsolidation from a nearly unprecedented period of national cohesion after World War II has led to numerous benefits for individual freedom and economic prosperity. However, if we are more free than ever, we may also be more alone than ever and bereft of the contexts for a responsible freedom and citizenship. And this has sparked a…
Tailoring the Help to Those Who Need It
Michael Tanner’s Liberty Forum essay provides a characteristically insightful and level-headed overview of the 1996 welfare reform and its consequences. He admirably clears away the rhetorical fog that still envelopes our debates regarding welfare, and does not let either side get away with much. “Welfare reform was neither the disaster that its critics feared nor the success its supporters claim,” he concludes. “It was a step in the right direction—a small one, and one from which we can learn.” And he offers some key lessons we might build upon. His proposals make very good sense. But I think they evince too…
More Responses
There is much with which to agree in Michael Tanner’s Liberty Forum essay summarizing the post-1996 history of welfare reform, its successes and failures, and where to go from here. However, I view the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act as having succeeded to a greater extent than Tanner believes. Indeed, as I have argued…
The 1996 welfare reform law seemed, at the time, like a very big deal. Critics denounced it as a savage assault on those Americans whose lives were already precarious. Supporters hailed it as the first reversal since 1932 of a relentless trend: individual government welfare programs grew more numerous, while each one spent more money…
Scott Winship, Yuval Levin, and William Voegeli offer insightful critiques of my Liberty Forum essay on the 20th anniversary of welfare reform. Actually, I use the term “critique” advisedly, because there may not actually be that much daylight between our positions. Still, there are quibbles, if not major differences. Scott Winship clearly feels the 1996 reform…
The Great Exception
In response to: The Great Society, a Half-Century On
The 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” speech offers us an opportunity to reflect not just on the speech itself but also on the half century of consequences that have followed in the wake of the grand project it announced. As William Voegeli notes in his Liberty Forum essay, he commencement address Johnson delivered to the University of Michigan’s graduating class on May 22, 1964 was something of a mess. Gauzy and unfocused, marked by both astonishing ambition and an almost total lack of specificity, it was a very peculiar way for an American president to talk (albeit a way we…
More Responses
William Voegeli’s Liberty Forum essay reminds us of the absurdity of so much American political discourse of the past 60 years. The call for greater state-mandated redistribution and entitlements in order to “oppose the drift into the homogenized society” and “fight spiritual unemployment,” to combat “loneliness and boredom” and “build a richer life of mind…
With the 50th anniversary of President Johnson’s “Great Society” speech fast approaching, we are seeing a flood of historical remembrance and analysis, and there will be more in the weeks and months ahead. The television historians and talking heads will be swooning over how much was accomplished by an 89th Congress that was, in the…
The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left
This edition of Liberty Law Talk is with Yuval Levin, author of The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left. A 2013 Bradley Prize recipient, Levin connects us with the actual contest between Burke and Paine as they debated the central claims of the French Revolution and much of modern political thought with its focus on rights, individualism, the social contract vs. Burke's more expansive notions of social liberty, the contract among the dead, the living, and those yet to be born, and his belief in prescription or the notion that change should be…
