In the Tradition of Liberty.
In the Tradition of Liberty.
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FUSION’s archive of commentary.
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For all the laments over the failures of Americans to take on the demands of civic republicanism and to know their founding documents the way our forebears did, Americans still routinely reach to constitutional text and precedent to understand the most pressing political issues of our time. In the social media era, observers can see the unique American constitutional culture that Alexis de Tocqueville witnessed nearly 200 years ago. For conservatives, these debates also show that for all the success of the Originalism movement, there is still robust internal debate…
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David Lynch has died at the age of 78. With his death, we have lost the most eccentric of the directors who made their name in the 1980s and 1990s, at the apex of American confidence. The present moment of confusion makes that situation almost unimaginable. But perhaps even more surprising is the post-modern and yet conservative attitude with which Lynch confronted his era. Lynch predicted and dramatized the collapse of the shared American pop culture that triumphed in the mid-20th century America in which he was born and which…
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Higher education faces a crisis at the hands of new “Artificial Intelligence” tools. Everyone is on edge, and sides are being chosen. Some side with the optimists, gleefully proclaiming the advantages of our new tools and the work they will do for us. Others, like me, are less sanguine about the state of education in the ChatGPT era. Everyone is grappling with questions of academic dishonesty, the possibility of being made irrelevant or obsolete, and more. So, when the I made following claim, it caused a minor stir: The reactions…
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In an important essay at Fusion last week, John G. Grove addresses religious politics or perhaps more accurately, the potential politicization of religion in the United States. Evangelical author Nancy Pearcey, Grove notes, “tweeted out an appeal for pastors to be more political. Those who do not preach politics, she argued, offer ‘a privatized Christianity.’” At a major conservative intellectual conference, Gove heard “a panelist make the flip side of the same argument: that if the state is not actively enforcing certain values, those values are being ‘relegated to the private sphere.’”…
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In late November, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy co-authored a much-discussed op-ed on how DOGE (the “Department of Government Efficiency”) would overhaul the federal government. These two tech titans—unelected, brash, and aiming to affect hundreds of millions of lives and trillions of dollars—took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to bemoan the influence of… unelected, brash officials who affect hundreds of millions of lives and trillions of dollars. Though Musk and Ramaswamy thought they were poking the political left for its fondness for powerful, insulated technocrats, they were also demonstrating…
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Some time ago, Tyler Syck exhorted Americans in our own time to practice the nonideological pragmatism and haggling of the great Senator Henry Clay, The Man Who Would Not Be President. Syck captures an important whiff of the man and the statesman. But the essay is an incomplete reading of Clay’s person, intellect, and legacy. It sees the Great Compromiser as essentially a nonideological pragmatist, and while this Clay is more charismatic and eloquent, there is nothing that distinguishes him in politics from, say, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, or a certain…
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What is public life? In the leadup to the election, the evangelical author Nancy Pearcey tweeted out an appeal for pastors to be more political. Those who do not preach politics, she argued, offer “a privatized Christianity.” At a major conservative conference, I recently heard a panelist make the flip side of the same argument: that if the state is not actively enforcing certain values, those values are being “relegated to the private sphere.” This view on what is “public” and what is “private,” increasingly common to hear on the…
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There’s more eccentricity among our celebrated artists than we can easily deal with, but this holiday season I’m giving it a go. After a piece on Tim Burton for Halloween, bringing out his combination of comedy and horror, and another on Woody Allen for Thanksgiving, about his mix of sophistication and longing for family life, let’s consider Shane Black for Christmas, Back in 1987, Shane Black became a Hollywood celebrity after writing Lethal Weapon. The film was a hit even before it started a major franchise and quickly found…
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History is pervaded by a hostility to financial markets, the common notion being that they create little tangible value, just artificial profits for the leech-like financers, speculators, and usurers. This skepticism is quite old. Hammurabi’s code capped interest rates and regulated the terms of debt contracts to three years. In the Politics, Aristotle dismissed interest as mere “money born of money.” “Usury,” he wrote, “is most reasonably hated, because one’s possessions derive from money itself and not from that for which it was supplied.” In the 13th century A.D., Pope Innocent…
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Two decades ago, the internet was seen as a tool for advancing democracy and ending authoritarian regimes. The 2011 Arab Spring appeared to validate this optimism, as platforms like Twitter and Facebook played key roles in organizing protests and disseminating information. However, a decade later, most Arab nations experienced a failure of democratic movements, resulting in authoritarianism, civil wars, and instability. In 2023, Freedom House reported that global freedom had declined for the 18th consecutive year, with political rights and civil liberties worsening in 52 countries while only 21 improved.…