In the Tradition of Liberty.
In the Tradition of Liberty.
On social media
FUSION’s archive of commentary.
-
By
If we want to understand the current political landscape of college campuses, I suggest we look at a trend in doctoral training that took off around fifteen years ago and that hasn’t received enough attention: the rise of autoethnography. Autoethnography is a research method where the scholar studies their experience of the world. The doctoral student is the researcher and object of the research. In social science fields, especially, autoethnography is growing in popularity (at the time of writing, an introduction to this method has over 8,000 citations in Google Scholar).…
-
By
In his first annual address in January 1790, George Washington highlighted one of the most consequential themes in American politics: the necessity of a knowledgeable, virtuous people. As Washington stated: Answering Washington’s call for civic education, Johnny Burtka IV, president and CEO of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), has published Gateway to Statesmanship as a guide to leadership in the modern age. In particular, Burtka seeks to revive the “Mirrors-for-Princes” literary tradition, which stretches back to antiquity. As Burtka describes it: “The genre’s essential writings—usually short books or letters—are described…
-
By
Liberalism has been getting a bad press. Even self-described liberal Francis Fukuyama endorses “the substantive conservative critique of liberalism – that liberal societies provide no common moral horizon around which community can be built,” proof of a profound “spiritual vacuum” at their core. New York Times columnist David Brooks, whose convictions are hard to pinpoint, similarly laments that “the liberal world order is in crisis.” Are these influential opinion-makers right? That all depends on how you define “liberal.” No easy task. For if there is one consensus about its meaning, it is that no such…
-
By
There is a long history of American-British relations, but it hasn’t always been plain sailing. Of course, there has been collaboration—most significantly during the Second World War. Yet there have also been serious tensions and even outright conflicts from War of Independence to the War of 1812, to the Suez crisis, and beyond. We talk of the ‘special relationship’. Especially in recent years, though, this has involved overt American influence on the now junior partner. We shouldn’t be surprised by these differences. America and Britain have very different cultures. In…
-
By
While many Americans are feeling the sting of Tax Day, April 15, that same day another holiday passed with little notice outside of Massachusetts and Maine. Patriots’ Day commemorates the Battle of Lexington and Concord and the start of the American Revolution happened to fall on the same day as the deadline to file income taxes. The “shot heard ‘round the world” is worth remembering because the ideas those men fought for are worth defending today. The Significance of the Battle of Lexington and Concord Much ink has been spilled about the…
-
By
To an extent unrivalled by any other country, America has been defined by its economy and economic success. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the young republic for ten months in 1831 and 1832, he immediately noticed the extraordinary degree to which Americans were preoccupied by their economic circumstances. A “spirit of enterprise,” he commented, dominated American society in a way quite unlike any other nation that Tocqueville knew. Economic conditions—and sudden changes in those settings—have also exercised profound influences upon American politics and government. To many, that is obvious.…
-
By
In 1982, the German writer Peter Schneider tried to capture the strangeness of divided Berlin. His book Der Mauerspringer compiles impressions of Cold War life, some written in a sober journalistic tone and others bearing a hint of magical realism. One line from near the beginning has stuck with me ever since I first read it, and not just because I had to memorise it for my A-Level German exam. “Westgesichter staren in Ostgesichter, wie Menschen Menschenaffen betrachten”: West German faces stared into East German ones, the way human beings…
-
By
Joseph Horowitz, The Propaganda of Freedom: JFK, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and the Cultural Cold War (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2024). At a 1963 ceremony at Amherst College honoring the recently passed Robert Frost, President Kennedy expanded his artistic purview beyond Camelot to offer a thesis on the nature of creative action. “If art is to nourish the roots of our culture,” he said, “society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it…
-
By
In the current debate between so-called Freedom Conservatives and National Conservatives, it has been widely assumed that the latter’s embrace of British and European-inspired conservatism must result in a philosophy that is more hostile to liberty. Charles Kesler has described National Conservatism as “a re-writing of American conservatism along new, less brazenly American lines, assimilating it, in effect, to the nationalism of other nations, beginning with Great Britain.” Matthew Continetti also remarked that “pre-2016 conservatism was distinctly American, National Conservatism is global: Its signatories hail from Israel, Croatia, Canada, Italy, the United…
-
By
Across modern American history, our elites have shown a soft-spot for authoritarian leaders abroad. Some have even mused about such models bearing fruit closer to home. Although this pattern includes dictatorships representing all sorts of ideologies, Jacob Heilbrunn, the editor of The National Interest has chosen the Right as his focus in America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators (W.W. Norton 2024). In it, we find a brisk survey of Right-leaning sympathizers for authoritarian rulers stretching from Imperial Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II to the current bête noire of European liberalism,…