With Progressives increasingly condoning censorship of conservative views as “hate speech,” conservatives are responding with an increasingly absolutist freedom of speech. Some recent essays written in reaction to the Antifa/neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville show the appeal that the absolutist view has to conservatives: If political...
J.M. Opal’s new book interprets the history of the southern frontier from the late colonial period through Andrew Jackson’s presidency as a tale of constant violence and brutal grasping for power. “Old Hickory,” the main character of the work, appears as a bloodthirsty, self-righteous opportunist...
One of the standard distinctions these days is between the old originalism and new originalism. While different people define the distinction a little bit differently, I define the old originalism as having two essential characteristics: using “original intent” to determine the original meaning of a...
The increase in globalization over the last couple of decades, and the Great Recession, has spurred interest and attention in Karl Polanyi’s book, The Great Transformation. Republished in 2001 (and in 1957), scholars such as Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz (who wrote a preface...
Our identity politics could use some Madisonian wisdom. In an earlier post, I argued that our current legal regime, which has created protected and non-protected classes of Americans, is one important source of our current political alignment and a reason why we have “identity politics.” Since at...
Journalists often claim to write the first draft of history, but that statement raises the question when a story turns from current events into history. The Vietnam War now stands closer to World War II than 2017. A formative experience for the baby boom generation,...
Gordon Lloyd and Steve Ealy make a compelling case for liquidation, what they call “Originalism for the Living Generation,” as the most Madisonian means of settling constitutional meaning. Grounded as it is in Madisonian text and example, from The Federalist to the bank veto, the...
It was the Czech writer Milan Kundera who said: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” His fellow writer Liu Xiaobo, who died this summer under police guard while serving an 11-year prison sentence, made a profoundly important and...
There is a long established convention of referring to the Supreme Court in a given era by the name of its Chief Justice. Thus, we have the Marshall Court, the Warren Court, and the Rehnquist Court. But this name is often a misnomer because the...
The party in control of the presidency typically loses seats in the House and Senate in midterm elections. Since Jimmy Carter, the presidential party has on average lost just over 20 seats in the House and just under four seats in the Senate. An average...