Introduction to Conservatism: Four Book Recommendations
June 11, 2018
I sometimes wonder (and I’m sometimes asked) what I think would be the single best thing to read, what book I would recommend, to introduce someone to the ideas of conservatism for the first time, or to persuade those not yet persuaded. (To date, I’m not sure I have an answer. Mark Steyn’s America Alone and Arthur C. Brooks’s Who Really Cares—and of course C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity—were significant and influential for me, but I’m not sure any of them is a direct answer to that question.)
In a recent interview, Ben Shapiro asked Jonah Goldberg more or less the same question; Goldberg gamely offered some impromptu thoughts on the subject. Here’s the list:
Politics, Poetry, Tragedy, Comedy
February 3, 2016
New Web site offers an unusual combination of haikus, news, and conservative views:
Themes covered and alluded to so far range from the Bible to Donald Trump. But you have to click on the links, the text (haipertext?) of the poem, to understand what it’s talking about.
Why Red States Are Better Places to Live, in One Sentence
November 3, 2015
NRO’s Kevin Williamson remarks,
Driving along Interstate 10 in Houston last week, I saw a wonderful inversion of the familiar urban scene of a sad homeless fellow standing in an underpass with a “Will Work for Food” sign: Houston’s version is guy standing in an underpass holding a placard reading: “General Labor Wanted,” handing out fliers to passers-by looking for work.
You can read the rest of the piece here:
“With Its Bathroom Ordinance, Houston Takes Leave of Its Municipal Senses”
It’s actually a great piece, but it’s not really a piece about that.
Bobby Jindal on Donald Trump
September 13, 2015
Glass Half Full
July 30, 2015
From today’s e-mail newsletter from NRO’s Jim Geraghty:
From the way conservatives talk, one would never know that Republicans have 54 U.S. Senate seats, 246 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives (a majority that the party could easily hold for the next decade), 31 governors, and 68 out of 98 partisan state legislatures. Republicans control the governorship and both houses in 23 states; Democrats control only seven.
Abortions have dropped 12 percent nationwide since 2010 and are down in almost every state. The divorce rate declined significantly in the past generation and is staying down, while the marriage rate is up a bit. Slate concedes, “Most Americans have given up on achieving meaningful gun control in their lifetimes or in their grandchildren’s lifetimes.”
Jonah Goldberg has an interesting piece at National Review Online today: “The Myth of the Good Conservative” (“For liberals, he always existed yesterday”). The thesis is as the subtitle implies: that certain liberals are always praising particular conservatives of the past and/or hypothetical conservatives in general, to whom particular conservatives and conservative policy proposals of today supposedly compare unfavorably.
What’s Wrong with the Welfare State
November 20, 2011
Eternity Matters discusses (with illustrations) why the welfare state is bad, not just in any particular execution of the idea, but intrinsically. It’s short; read it—if not to believe and understand the world better, then at least to understand conservatives’ point of view a little bit better.
Mark & Mark!
August 20, 2011
(Via Steyn Online, whence the title of this entry.)
Mark Steyn had a great line in an interview with Mark Levin about Steyn’s new book:
What I think is the difference when you talk about the divide in America is I think most conservatives exist in a kind of oppositional world. They know every time they go and see a Hollywood movie, every time they switch on a sitcom and hear a certain kind of cheap joke, every time they happen to be stuck at the airport and they’re watching some drone on CNN—they understand the other guy’s point of view, they’re exposed to it relentlessly. Read the rest of this entry »
America Loses AAA Credit Rating
August 11, 2011
Well, it finally happened: Standard & Poor’s, one of the big three credit-rating agencies in the United States, has downgraded the United States’ credit rating. Specifically, S&P downgraded the federal government from AAA to AA+. “The outlook on the long-term rating” is also “negative”, meaning that S&P may lower our rating again “within the next two years” if we don’t shape up and get the national debt under control. Read the rest of this entry »
Debt-ceiling Fight Over?
July 26, 2011
Last Friday, Speaker of the House John Boehner finally walked out on the unproductive talks with President Obama; he cut Obama out of the loop and went to negotiate directly with Democrats in the Senate, which arguably makes a lot more sense.
By yesterday, Boehner had already come up with a new plan, which he believes can pass both the Republican House and the Democratic Senate. Read the rest of this entry »
Are liberals smarter than conservatives? It’s an interesting question, if you like, and you can find interesting studies and speculations on whether and why, but intelligence isn’t the same as wisdom. A person gifted with higher than average cognitive ability can still be a fool.
Some liberals certainly think that liberals are both much smarter and much wiser than conservatives. Arguably that belief is an intrinsic part of the ideology of the American Progressive movement. A commenter on this blog has said, “. . . the American people are by and large an idiotic bunch. . . . And these are the people that are voting!” Read the rest of this entry »
On Conservatism and Global Warming
May 11, 2011
I had a conversation a few days ago with a (liberal) friend of mine about conservatism and liberalism, liberty and tyranny, regulations, “entitlements”, and other things. It was a good conversation, but she asked one question that got lost in the back-and-forth and I never answered:
What is the conservative answer to global warming?
It’s a good question. I have some thoughts. My answer can be divided into two parts. Read the rest of this entry »
From “Protest voices opposition to ALEC group”:
A group of conservative state legislators from across the U.S. met in Cincinnati last week and drew the ire of local college students and union members during a protest Friday.
. . .
The demonstration began with a play portraying the ALEC as a monster attacking the rights of women, minorities and workers.
I don’t go out looking for these; I just happened to pick up a copy of the student newspaper today, and there it was, staring me in the face!
Postscript on Civility
March 21, 2011
Two months ago, someone shot a lot of people at an event in Tucson, Arizona, including Congressman Gabrielle Giffords. Six of those people died; many others were injured. Liberals argued that conservatives (e.g., radio-talk-show hosts) participate in the great national debate a little bit too boisterously, and that eruptions of such violence are a natural result of that debate (i.e., a natural result of what I think Mark Steyn has called the rough and tumble of a free society). Liberals talked about the need for “civility” in the national discourse, ambiguously attempting to deligitimize debate.
Enjoyment and Contemplation 