Latest Posts

May 14, 2026

Why Postliberalism Failed

(This essay is one of two forewords to James M. Patterson and Thomas D. Howes’s forthcoming Why Postliberalism Failed, published by the Acton Institute. Preorder here.) In the fall of 2017, I was invited to attend the Ramsey Colloquium in Washington, a gathering convened by R.R. Continue Reading...
May 13, 2026

The Technocratic State and the Last Frontier of Freedom

The global discussion on artificial intelligence has ceased to be a technical debate and has become a first-rate political conflict. In 2024, the European Union enforced the EU AI Act, the world’s most comprehensive AI regulatory framework, placing strict compliance requirements on developers and companies before their products reach the market. Continue Reading...
May 07, 2026

Washington the Great

What made George Washington so great? This is the question asked by H.W. Brands in the last chapter of his new biography, American Patriarch: The Life of George Washington. If one made a list of qualities that make an effective leader, Washington would check a lot of boxes: He was brave, diligent, resourceful, and inspiring. Continue Reading...
May 05, 2026

Practical Action in an Age of Decadence

Roger Scruton often wrote of oikophobia, the phenomenon, so prevalent in the modern West, of distrusting one’s own home, society, and cultural inheritance. The culture of repudiation is one-directional, however, valorizing “the other” at the expense of ourselves—we can do no right while they can do no wrong. Continue Reading...
April 30, 2026

C.S. Lewis and the Dance of Masculine and Feminine

Debates about gender within and without the Church tend to operate on a hidden fear: If gender is real in some way, then that might lead to an artificially rigid understanding of gender roles—for example, women must stay in the kitchen and men must work outside the home, as if every age were the 1950s, complete with Sunbeam Mixmasters and assembly lines. Continue Reading...
April 29, 2026

The Millennia-Long History of American Liberty

One of the first hurdles in designing a course is assigning readings. Digital databases, book scanning, and ebooks have empowered teachers to assemble any combination of chapters, journals, and primary sources, but having so many choices can be as paralyzing as it is liberating. Continue Reading...
April 28, 2026

The Economic End of History

The final dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 heralded the victory of Western democratic societies over communism and the ideologies of collectivism. Proponents of the market economy now had definitive proof that central economic planning cannot outperform a decentralized market order, in terms of creating goods that people value and distributing them in a timely, efficient manner. Continue Reading...