A fairly coherent Right still exists in America—and it needs help, not a re-founding.

Just because someone asserts that an approach is “conservative” doesn’t make it so, or make it it politically practical or responsive to our times.

Our system has become utterly cavalier in its use of the criminal sanction.

The best way to explain why we incarcerate so much is to explore what would happen if we didn’t.

We do imprison too many, and Latzer unduly minimizes the breathtaking severity of America’s criminal justice system.

Debates should continue about root causes, but attacking incarceration is not the right way forward.

As with politics, so with law: progressive wokeness ensures that ideas, issues, and legal interpretations once debatable are now placed beyond dispute.

Anyone who has thought about identity politics must conclude that the term obfuscates more than it illuminates.

lntersectionality makes no allowance for forgiveness, atonement, or reconciliation.

Piety is not itself nonsense and we cannot do without the recognition that some things are higher, off-limits, and worth sacrificing for.

If comparative advantage is created rather than discovered, refusing to play the game has consequences.

No market exists in a social vacuum, and hardly any market exists in a political vacuum.

We aren’t going to spend or policy-wonk our way out of decline and anomie in certain segments of our population.

American policymakers and citizens should acknowledge that the benefits promised by economic nationalism are illusory.

Because coercion could only work to a certain point, the default communist policy was deceit, even when everyone knew the regime’s positions were a lie.

If the current regimes in places like Hungary and Poland do indeed represent the “Spirit of 1989,” this is only true in a very partial way.

As we remember the anti-totalitarian spirit of 1989, let us also recall that the spirit of Lenin is alive and well in China.

Chances are the ideological Lie will continue to haunt a modern adventure that has lost its true sense of purpose.

What goes into one’s body can sometimes be an object for public concern; the question is when and how.

Prohibition may have been disastrous for America, but it reflected a deep respect for American constitutionalism we should envy today.

The very people the nativists sought to Americanize or, failing that, oppress and restrict, were oftentimes the very ones who benefited from Prohibition.

The question in 1919, and before and since, was whether such sweeping attempts at social control promoted responsible citizenship or undermined them.

Our experience of self-rule is how we attach ourselves to abstract principles like equality of right, not the other way around.

Some on the Left actually see that they’ll never gain power in nations now in existence if their message is the illegitimacy of nations.

Abstract principles cannot by themselves bind people together in any enduring way. That’s the problem with constitutional patriotism.

The nature and destiny of the commotion over nationalism is just beginning, and this is good news.

They were ordered to blame the Nazi invasions of Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg in 1940 on the “rapacious” Western democracies.

It chose the honorable option (joining the democratic nations) when it might have allied itself with one dictator to try to ward off the other.

During the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the two nations’ secret police shared intelligence. The NKVD turned German communist exiles over to the Gestapo.

In our discussion of the Molotov Ribbentrop pact we must conclude that the personalities of the two dictators mattered.

The irony: that legal conservatism seems to have triumphed now, at a moment when the political conditions that initially spurred it have ceased to obtain.

And in any case, Merriam does not identify a theory that would deliver better results than those delivered by originalism.

Some conservatives are unhappy with modern originalism; the best path for them is not to abandon it but to promote a more conservative version. 

There are too few legal traditionalists to achieve what Merriam wants; this argues for a restorative project that’s conceptual rather than demographic.

Libertarian originalism tends to undermine conservative legal positions.

Is there a connection between originalism and conservatism that runs deeper than crude results-orientation?

Conservatives, if they wish to preserve state and local governance, should resume their resistance to the incorporation doctrine.