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A Conservative Jurisprudence Worthy of a Conservative Economics

The New Right, in contradistinction to the liberalized Hayekian governing mentality that American Compass’s Oren Cass has called “Let the Market Rip,” is unafraid to wield the levers of political power in the service of good political order.

Labor for the Future

This is one of those half-baked blog posts that are the point of a blog but increasingly rare; after all, in the digital era everything seems to just get slicker and more centralized. There are only three sites to post to and you have to be on, and casual-Friday professional, you know?, for your brand. If you want to spitball you can just tweet. Anyway.

Yoram Hazony’s Liberal Nationalism

In a previous post, I used the term “synthetic nationalism” to describe what is increasingly the default premise of many conservative nationalists—or, in their words, of many national conservatives.

Republicans Are Ripping Out ‘The Very Heart and Soul’ of Their Party

Reason magazine’s Stephanie Slade cites American Compass’s work on Corporate Actual Responsibility as evidence that conservatives are pushing libertarianism out of the Republican Party.

Integralism, Rightly Understood

What’s good for us must be good for the world, we think, and vice versa—an assumption the rest of the world does not necessarily share.

More Than Materialists: Class and Religion

When does something become a cliché? I’m not sure. Truisms lose a certain power after much repetition, but it doesn’t make them less true. That fundamental political conflicts are always theological is an old observation by theorists that still bears repeating, always suggesting something new.

John Ruskin and the Purpose of Political Economy

As we seek a realignment in American political economy we would do well to rediscover the thought of a 19th-century critic who did not like us very much. John Ruskin (1819–1900) found Americans obsessed with a liberty he considered license and naively committed to an ideal of equality he believed impossible: “also, as a nation, they are wholly undesirous of Rest, and incapable of it.” In her utilitarian preoccupation with commercial ventures, America had inherited Montaigne’s English vice of inquietude and seemed unlikely to recover.

Liberalism is Bringing About the State of Nature it Sought to Escape

Liberal theory starts by imagining a state of nature: a world that never existed, could never have existed, and leads liberals to a wholly unreal view of human nature.

Hamiltonian Means, Jeffersonian Ends

My American Compass co-blogger, Michael Lind, likes to portray America’s development as a tug of war between the ideals of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson — nation builders and industrialists on the one hand, and laissez-faire localists on the other. 

“One Nation” America

This paragraph was penned by G.K. Chesterton in 1925 about William Cobbett, 1763-1835.

Toward a New Anti-Corruption Statecraft

Matt poses some important questions below about how conservatives must defend anti-corruption statecraft against (tellingly) American libertarians and Chinese communists. I think it is right to suggest that the founders and their generation generally shared a robust sensibility that opposing, combating, and defeating corruption was properly political activity at the regime level.

Whither Corruption and Conservatism?

Oren Cass invited me to contribute to this site not as a conservative but as a lefty and Democrat who is fascinated by the project of intellectual revival in which this network of thinkers is engaged.

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