Philosophy

Myopia’s Archetype (Review of Delgado and Stefancic’s “Critical Race Theory”)

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EDIT: Shame on Amazon.com for deleting this review from its listing for this book. I realize I pull no punches, but I would argue my review is thoughtful and substantiated by solid arguments, unlike some of the 1-star drivel under books by right-wing authors.

Why is it that the Woke aimed to reduce six works of Dr. Seuss, known primarily as the author and illustrator of an enormous number of wonderfully whimsical and educational children’s books, to toxic contraband due to alleged racism within these stories, written three quarters of a century ago?

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No, Trump Won’t Bring About Authoritarianism — But Biden Might

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An existential angst has taken hold of America. It’s come in the form of a realization that our constitutional republic may be slipping through our fingers. This anxiety seems to be the one point of bipartisan agreement in our otherwise hopelessly divided body politic. But when it comes to assigning blame for the erosion of our institutions, conservatives and progressives revert right back to pointing fingers at one another.

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In Defense of Liberalism (Review Of “Cynical Theories”)

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It is a boring platitude that history has produced its share of intellectual folly. Jean Jacques Rousseau, for example, believed that humans are born a “blank slate” and only corrupted as they grow up in modern society, an assertion he could have known to be insane merely by paying a few hours of attention to the handful of children he fathered and sent off to the orphanage right after their birth. Karl Marx falls neatly into the same category: Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he spent most of his life staring at books and had little actual regard for the “proletariat” he purported to elevate. This showed in his writings, which betrayed a one-dimensional view of the capitalist economies in the West.

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A Tale of Two Narratives: Review of “White Fragility”

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Yours truly finished reading two books last week, each of which rather instructive in its own way. The first is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s three-volume The Gulag Archipelago. In this world-famous, monumental work published in 1973, the author offers a horrifying look into life in the Soviet prison camps. Contrary to popular opinion at the time, Solzhenitsyn traced the gulags‘ origins all the way back to Lenin and argued that they were inherent to the Soviet political system. This came as a shock to gullible Western intellectuals who excused the existence of the camps as a mere deviation under Stalin.

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The Failure of Liberalism and Elegies for Hillbillies

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You know your reading is taking off when the books you’ve knocked off your list start connecting in your head like puzzle pieces on the dining room table. This happens to yours truly all the time nowadays, and it particularly occurred with two works I read in 2018, Patrick J. Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed and Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of A Family and Culture In Crisis by J.D. Vance.

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A Remarkable Exercise In Inanity. Review of Arthur C. Brooks’ “Love Your Enemies”

/ Mark Vandenberg / 1 Comment

It has been my conviction for a while now that social media and the daily phony outrages they help spur are rewiring our brains as we speak and make us more stupid. (Ever been on Twitter? Yeah.) Moreover, reading the drivel passing for political insight on our feeds makes us desperate to avoid the latest spat involving President Trump when we talk to these Facebook philosophers at an uncle’s birthday party. Better to change the topic to, say, the Patriots’ ‘Deflate Gate’. It’s bound to get some voices raised, but at the end of the day that feels better than having to battle accusations of secretly cherishing Nazi sympathies.

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Top-Heavy Liberalism (Book Review)

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During a good chunk of the mid-twentieth century the great conservative giants of that era argued over the question of what conservatism is. For Russell Kirk it transcended particular cultures and was, in the words of Bradley Birzer, “a natural longing to preserve the best of human thought as divined by, through, and across the slow process of the experience of humanity, tied to an omnipotent source of creation.” To Robert Nisbet, in contrast, conservatism was a modern phenomenon formed in reaction to the French Revolution and essentially launched single-handedly by Edmund Burke.

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Brett Kavanaugh, Identity Politics, and the Descent Into Ochlocracy

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If a sigh of relief can be heard whooshing through these United States after the Kavanaugh debacle has come to an end, it’s surely to be followed shortly by a scratching of heads over the question of how it got this far. There is no doubt that the battle over Justice Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court has left wounds that extend far beyond its losers, such as Dianne Feinstein, that loathsome Michael Avenatti, and the Democrats in general. Amidst the rubble, a larger meaning of what took place can be found by the discerning eye.

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The Peculiar Cassandra: Review of Michel Houellebecq’s “Submission”

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The string of terrorist attacks in European cities in recent years has produced, in addition to a significant number of casualties, no shortage of prophets counseling us on where the present crisis of Islamic immigration into the Old Continent will end. Those predicting that it is but a passing moment which will dissolve into a peaceful and harmonious future face off against doomsayers, yours truly included, who fear that many European countries are at risk of becoming Balkanized and collapsing into political turmoil or even civil war.

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What Went Wrong?

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When Bernard Lewis wrote his excellent book with this title, he had the Muslim world in mind, but not too long from now somebody will almost certainly be producing the long-expected sequel with the West as its subject. The recent kerfuffle over Jeff Sessions praising the “Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement” prompted this sad thought in me, in particular after reading this commentary by Mark Steyn. “We live in wretchedly moronic times,” Steyn writes, “in which even senators, lieutenant governors and other panjandrums who bestride the land know nothing of anything that happened before last Tuesday.”

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