Walmart store in Miami, Florida in 2019 (Chekyravaa/Shutterstock.com).Leaving the Faith
Our own convictions are inevitably strengthened when someone who has long opposed our views experiences a change of heart and joins our side.
Whittaker Chambers before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Aug. 25, 1948. He repeated his testimony that State Department Director, Alger Hiss, was a secret communist. Hiss is in mid-ground left, looking into camera. (BSLOC_2014_13_57)James Burnham and Our ‘Soul-Sick’ Elite: A Conversation with Julius Krein
Adaptation or Abandonment?
The End of the Great Compromise
In response to: The Case for More Money in Politics
Constitutions are more than struggles over meaning or changing social values as interpreted by judges. Constitutions are part of larger political struggles and reflect that conflicts and compromises in those larger fights. The conflicts of the New Deal ended with a compromise—one that promised an open political process in lieu of constitutional protections for the rights of property. Eventually, policymakers turned to campaign-finance regulation to control opposition to what might be called the New Deal order. This interplay of a commitment to free speech and electoral vulnerability has shaped our nation for 80 years. Now we seem likely to take…
More Responses
One cannot fault Professor Derek Muller, whose work I admire and respect, for taking a hard libertarian line against campaign-finance regulation in his Liberty Forum essay. After all, that misguided approach is built into the prompt of the question posed by Law and Liberty’s editors: “Should a democracy through concerns about corruption in politics and equality…
I am in strong agreement with the Derek Muller’s opposition to Progressive ideas to reform laws relating to campaign speech. He is particularly eloquent on why the Framers believed that limiting government was the best route to eliminating political corruption—the opposite of the Progressive agenda, which seeks to expand the state. We can build on his…
It was a privilege to participate in this month’s Liberty Law Forum. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to contribute the lead essay, “The Case for More Money in Politics,” and I am humbled at the thoughtful commentary provided by Professors Rick Hasen and John McGinnis, and by John Samples, all of whose opinions…
Achieving Our Republican Greatness
Writing in the Journal of American Greatness, Plautus, who is more intent on making Trump to be the candidate he wants, as opposed to the vulgar brute that he is, calls for a conservative nationalism with tremendous purpose (link no longer available) whose chief goal will be the elimination of the “managerial class.”
Friday Roundup, November 8th
Comes now a discussion of an originalism that can sing! This month's Liberty Forum considers Mike Rappaport and John McGinnis's new book, Originalism and the Good Constitution. Rappaport and McGinnis offer their thoughts in a lead essay with responses from Richard Epstein and Ralph Rossum. The current Liberty Law Talk is with Mark Helprin on his latest novel In Sunlight and In Shadow. We also talk politics, war, and what's right and wrong in Mad Men. Walking The Wire and learning criminal procedure and constitutional law in the process. Tony Freyer and Andy Morriss: The structure and strategy of the Caymans as an…
Diluting Self Restraint: A View from Lombard Street
Banks are like governments, you can’t altogether do without them, however often you wish that you could. So when I read that one of the banks of which I am a small and unimportant customer had been engaged in the fraudulent manipulation of interest rates, fined accordingly, and denuded of its top management by involuntary resignation, I can’t say that I was altogether surprised.
From the Nation State to the New Church
In response to: Prospects for the Democratic Nation-State: What State Are We In?
Mankind is not easily rid of theology once it gets the bug. The nation-state tried to erase the distinction between earthly power and absolute right, but the attempt failed, with the result that the modern nation-state, its professed secularism notwithstanding, is once more coming under the tutelage of a clerisy. Almost since its beginning the nation-state has implied self-government in matters spiritual as well as temporal. It aspired to be an integral unit within whose borders a people were fully sovereign, answerable only to God—and perhaps not even to God, for what power could gainsay the people’s interpretation of His commands?…
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Ralph Hancock begins his interesting essay[i] be reminding us that, despite its internal contradictions and failures, the modern state has become the only conceivable political form in our post-modern world. This should be puzzling since the record is far from being a convincing successful story. At its best, the modern state has allowed us to…
Who is to say Nay to the People? Publius, Majority Rule, and Willmoore Kendall
The Enduring Importance of Willmoore Kendall
Once upon a time in America, conservatives celebrated Congress as the last best hope to preserve the authentic traditions of republican government. As recently as the 1960s, it was “conservative” to look to the first branch of government as the indispensable bulwark against the Imperial Presidency, Supreme Court activism, plebiscitary democracy, and federal social engineering programs. As long as the American people also looked to Congress to play this defensive role, the political system would remain intact.
No postwar conservative was more optimistically wedded to this perspective than Willmoore Kendall (1909-1967). Kendall, a defender of majority-rule (with some qualifications), particularly stood out among conservatives of his time as a fervent believer in the good sense of his fellow Americans to elect the “best men” to office. Americans were at least capable of being the “virtuous people,” who would insist that Congress preserve the traditions of the Founding. The principal evidence to which Kendall referred here was The Federalist, a text that he treated as political scripture for Americans. Kendall insisted that the Federalist provides the best possible interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. In his 1965 essay, “How to read ‘The Federalist,’” (which can be conveniently found along with his other major political essays in Willmoore Kendall Contra Mundum, edited by Nellie D. Kendall, University Press, 1994), Kendall explained why this great work of political philosophy laid out what conservatives ought to be busy conserving: a particularly aristocratic version of majority-rule. “Publius,” the famed pseudonymous author of The Federalist, teaches
