Conservatism is a Love of Home as Somewhere
From him most of all I took my own idea of what conservatism is, the attempt to preserve or recover a home in this world — a place of consolation, a sanctified somewhere that connects us to the dead, the unborn, and our neighbors through love, memory, and sacrifice. A place that belongs to us and implants in us a longing for the true home that can never be destroyed by storms, war, neglect, or the encroachment of speculative exurban developers who want to replace our homes with parking lots and Panera Bread. We put in our labors to preserve freedom, decency, and culture, so that our children receive this somewhere as a place prepared for me by my father.
From Michael Brendan Dougherty’s memorial to Richard Scrunton.
Trying to Make Sense of National or Classical Conservatism
Michael Brendan Dougherty of National Review makes a strong case that liberalism, in its classical, Lockian sense, is antithetical to a Christian and conservative vision of society. A government and society dedicated to protecting an individual’s right to do whatever, as long as that practice does not infringe on anyone else’s rights to do what they want, inevitably tends towards elevating a set of “neutral” values as good and treating any divergence from those values as social deviancy. Liberalism does not create a world where a multi-value society flourishes, but inevitably demands that all members of that society become liberal. I have written about this in the past as it relates to abortion and Satanism.
Dougherty argues for a vision of classical conservatism in the tradition of Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk as an alternative to liberalism. While Dougherty does not mention National Conservatism, he is responding on the movement’s behalf to George F. Will’s conservative defense of classical liberalism…
The Buttigieg-Evangelical Pincer Move
I grew up in an evangelical world that constantly said that character™ mattered, especially for public officials. The character qualities in mind were always Christian and almost always about sexual activity. The world I inhabited also wrote off most Democratic politicians as lacking character™, either due to their stance on abortion, openness on sexual and cultural revolutions, or being theologically liberal or sterile. You needed to vote GOP, either because the Democrats were godless, or because the Republicans were faithful to God.
Then came 2012. Something odd happened in that election…
Infanticide and Guilt By Association
One week ago (January 23rd, 2019) the government of the state of New York enacted a bill legalizing abortion all the way up to delivery and legalized leaving infants to die who survive a botched abortion. The One World Trade Center was lit up in pink to celebrate this legislation, with the morbid irony that it has a monument to all the unborn children killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Yesterday a Democratic delegate to the Virginia State Assembly defended bill she submitted to the assembly that would allow abortion up until the moment of delivery, even if the baby is full-term and the mother is dilated…
The Gospel According to John Galt
This post is based on two essays that I originally wrote six years ago, edited to fit your screen.
This summer I read everything that Ayn Rand wrote, fictional and nonfictional. I had read all of her nonfiction before, so that was mostly review, but I had never touched her fiction. Her four prominent fictional works are We The Living, Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged, which are the ones I’ll be addressing here.
Rand was born in St. Petersburg, Russia in the early 20th century and lived through the Soviet revolution as a young adult. By the late 1920s she had escaped to the United States and started writing a decade later. Her work was clearly directed against Karl Marx, Soviet Stalinists, and their guiding philosophical principles.
Historical context is important because Rand was not writing in a vacuum, but addressing a particular philosophical movement. Like many thinkers, what Rand opposed shaped the things she supported. Her works make sense when read with people like Marx, Harold Laski (the basis for the character Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead), or Plato in mind. Rand intended her philosophy, Objectivism, to be a grand unifying theory, but it only addresses her immediate world…
