Showing posts with label Law & Liberty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Law & Liberty. Show all posts

Friday, October 23, 2026

Statism and libertinism are two of the greatest threats faced by the American republic

 Hear, hear.

Fusionism or the Founding?

... the so-called “Dissident Right” can offer America nothing like renewal.

... the axioms of ideological liberalism cannot answer the present crisis.

... Tradition, not fusion, is the surest guide. 

Tuesday, September 28, 2021

Contra Matthew Rose: It's kind of hard to ask a nation of immigrants to be loyal, who are here because they are by definition disloyal

... what is needed is loyalty to one’s nation and people tied to, and measured by, “truths that transcend them".

If, with the Pope, the nation is properly viewed as a natural human community, there is little either natural or communal about this one.  

America, sorry to say it, was doomed from the start. We are a nation of treasonous bastards.

And they sent out unto him their disciples with the Herodians, saying, Master, we know that thou art true, and teachest the way of God in truth, neither carest thou for any man: for thou regardest not the person of men.

More.

Friday, July 17, 2020

You'll recognize the conservatism of Russell Kirk in James M. Patterson's description of the American founding, but you'll never learn about it from dimwits like Rush Limbaugh or dilettantes like Mark Levin



'In the American context, “liberalism” was not the term used to define the political foundations of the Declaration of Independence or the American Constitution. These documents were understood to be the extension of an older British tradition, even if the British themselves had failed to keep it. American colonists had, by 1776, over one hundred and fifty years of experience of self-government in covenanted and compacted governments, and the language of individual consent to government and rights reserved by individuals against the government were there at the very moment the colonies were chartered.

'Hence, as Donald S. Lutz finds that it is not right to call the Founding “Lockean” because the colonial origins of the Founding preceded Locke by decades. Rather, the Founders found in Locke something that articulated what their forebears already knew and understood when hewing logs to build a cabin in 1611. Moreover, during the Founding, Locke received attention only in the lead up to American Independence but faded into the background as matters of constitutional design arose upon the revolution’s success. During that period, jurist William Blackstone and republican theorist Montesquieu dominated the discourse, with David Hume, Samuel von Pufendorf, and Edward Coke each receiving more attention than Locke from 1780 onward. All were dwarfed by references to the Bible, especially, as Lutz discovered, to the book of Deuteronomy. One would only be surprised by this if one believed that the Founders were liberals. Some were, of a kind, but they were primarily republicans. Their appeal to “liberal” principles was, as James W. Ceaser, has argued, primarily to insist that the “rights of Englishmen” to which Americans, being no longer Englishmen, could no longer appeal. Rather, what made the rights of Englishmen truly rights was how they were grounded in nature, accessible by reason, and endowed by God. In addition, Paul DeHart has shown how this effort involved a combination of classical, Christian, and modern sources with the diverse and extensive experience in statecraft.

'For these reasons, it is simply ahistorical to apply a prefabricated concept of liberalism onto the American Founding or attribute it to a rather complicated mix of ideas and influences expressed among the leaders at the time.'