In the Tradition of Liberty.
In the Tradition of Liberty.
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FUSION’s archive of commentary.
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Through a decade of political innovations, shifting alliances, and emerging coalitions within American conservatism, few stances have remained as consistent as the right’s antipathy to the censoriousness and ideological uniformity of higher education. At the heart of that stance is what seems to me to be a characteristic fusionist mantra: an amalgamation of Aristotelian instincts about functions, purposes, and natures with the utilitarian argument for free speech in John Stuart Mill’s classical liberalism. The mantra goes like this: A good university is a university that serves its purpose. The purpose…
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Describing Americans’ attitude toward “bureaucracy and state centralization,” the great conservative Robert Nisbet observed that they “curse it, deride it, abhor it, all the while they are beckoning it to them with one hand.” There is plenty of cursing and deriding going on today. Opposition to the administrative state is having a moment. Following up on Donald Trump’s rhetoric about the “deep state” and DC “swamp,” the “Department of Government Efficiency” has, with much sound and fury, laid off federal employees, slashed budgets, and worked to shutter certain agencies. While…
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America has never quite satisfied political theorists. On the one hand, it can seem as though the Founders were idealistic revolutionaries, committed to an abstract notion of the “rights of man” that can obliterate tradition and introduce disorder. On the other, it can seem as though they were cold-blooded realists who made cynical compromises with unjust institutions. It is difficult to explain this tension with many of the prevalent methods of political science – and therefore difficult for those in the field to understand it at all. Is it any…
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The poor bourgeois family. Can it ever get a break? The left stands ever-ready to dismember it, and while the right tries so hard to fortify it that it romanticizes it beyond recognition. Deirdre McCloskey wishes, I think, to do the family a favor in her essay calling for social science and public policy to re-orient itself away from utility-maximizing individuals and instead around “little liberal groups” like families to defend liberalism from the encroachment of the leviathan state that rises when we reduce and atomize people as economists like to…
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Families and groups of friends matter. They matter because language matters and upbringing matters and direct, personal cooperation matters. No person is an island, entire of itself. Even the lonely individual, believing that “I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul,” has a family or friends or fellow employees or at least some casual encounters in the neighborhood, or else he goes mad, an unconquerable soul on a mountain in Montana plotting to send letter-bombs to save Nature. If personal relationships matter then…
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American Heretics: Religious Adversaries of Liberal Order, by Jerome Copulsky. Yale University Press, 384 pp., $40.00. Liberalism, postliberalism, illiberalism, anti-liberalism. Christian nationalism, American nationalism, protectionism, national-conservatism, integralism, accelerationism, neoreaction, fascism. Far right, hard right, tech right, trad right, New Right. MAGA, MAHA, Musk. The current era of discontented ideological flux in America is replete with ‘isms’ and broad labels taken from academia, introduced by entrepreneurial thinkers themselves, or emerging from the bubbling churn of borderline schizophrenic online discourse. Sometimes these labels are assigned carefully by thoughtful interlocutors, but just as…
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The free market movement has a problem. A growing number of so-called “populists” on the “New Right” are developing an affinity for government-expanding policies like tax increases, minimum wage hikes, industrial subsidies, railroad safety regulations, caps on credit card interest rates, increased government powers for labor union bosses, and more. In response to the New Right, the “Freedom Conservatives,” or “FreeCons” for short, have emerged. They hope to rally support for their “Statement of Principles” which includes things like “liberty,” “free enterprise,” “equality under the law,” and of course, “freedom.”…
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It is reassuring to see Rachel Lu diagnose the same problems I do in the new sports-gambling market, and offer the same prescription: prohibition. She is one of the steadily growing group of Americans waking up to the problems that legalization brought with it. And her recognition that banning gambling is a more elegant and more functional solution than regulation puts her well ahead of those now attempting to apply band-aids to a limb in need of amputation. Where she falls short, however, is failing to generalize this insight to other…
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Americans love to gamble. In 2024, we spent over $60 billion in casinos, over $12 billion on licensed sports betting, and likely more than $100 billion on state lotteries, to say nothing of tribal casinos, home poker games, and all the other myriad ways, licit and illicit, we stake money on future outcomes. (These are net figures: what gamblers stake minus what they win back.) All this money Americans spend on gambling reveals a basic truth we should keep in mind: gambling brings many people enjoyment. That enjoyment is valuable. Gambling isn’t inherently…
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Last month, Freedom Conservatism convened its first conference in Washington, D.C. The Freedom Conservative movement published its statement of principles in 2023, and since has gained hundreds of signatories, including myself. The statement identifies both the poison afflicting the American body politic and the remedy for it. “Authoritarianism is on the rise both at home and abroad,” the manifesto reads. “More and more people on the left and right reject the distinctive creed that made America great: that individual liberty is essential to the moral and physical strength of the nation.”…