America’s emergence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries represented a dramatic break from the past. The United States came on the scene with only vestiges of the old European feudal order—mostly in the plantation economy of the Deep South. There was no hereditary nobility, no national church, and, thanks to George Washington’s modesty, no royal…
Read MoreAs critiques of liberalism have become more pronounced, alarm bells about possible alternatives to liberalism have grown louder. These alarms, ironically enough, have often been sounded most emphatically by American writers who otherwise describe themselves as conservatives. In response to the recent challenges to liberalism, conservatives have generally dropped the pretense that they are anything…
Read MoreMedia headlines to the contrary, there is at present no authentic debate between globalists and nationalists in the West. Paradoxical as it may seem, this is because there are no authentic globalists. Worse than any open conflict between the two is the confusion that results from the absence of one. This confusion with respect to…
Read MoreOne of the central themes of Tocqueville’s thought is that a political movement, or (at a later stage) a political regime, may be undone by its very success. University of Notre Dame professor Patrick J. Deneen shows himself to be a worthy successor of Tocqueville…
Read MoreIt is not difficult to imagine historians, several centuries from now, wondering how it could be that Americans, without really knowing how to do it, decided to go to the moon in eight short years. “What were they thinking?” these historians might exclaim! Their amazement could take two forms, however, depending on how Americans today,…
Read More“However sudden and momentous be events that have just taken place so swiftly, the author can claim that they have not taken him by surprise.” So wrote Tocqueville in the Author’s Preface to the Twelfth Edition of Democracy in America, on the occasion, in 1848, of the final political repudiation of the effort to restore…
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