In the Tradition of Liberty.
In the Tradition of Liberty.
On social media
FUSION’s archive of commentary.
-
By
Last year, in the middle of a snowstorm on Christmas Eve, I became a mother of six at the age of 35. So, it was with great interest that I read Catherine Pakaluk’s essay on falling birthrates, in which she draws on interviews with college-educated mothers of five or more kids. I was moved by the piece, seeing in these mothers the contours of my own identity transformation, and resonating with their hard-earned wisdom. And yet, because of my own qualitative research with mostly non-college educated young adults in Ohio…
-
By
Catherine Pakaluk’s thesis is as radical as it is succinct: “religion is the cardinal family policy”. In the highly developed world, until fifty to one hundred years ago it was men who held sway over the birth rates of their societies. Today, of course, it is women, both socially (through feminism) and technologically (through abortion and modern birth control) empowered as the ultimate deciders of human fertility. And they cannot be bribed into child-bearing by mere “cash incentives and tax relief”. Pakaluk’s claim is that human beings will be produced,…
-
By
Squinting at screens scanning for an alternative to CNN and MSNBC at the gym recently, I caught a bit of a 2017 film iteration of Wonder Woman. It was fun—I hadn’t even thought about Wonder Woman since my mid-80s childhood when, like millions of other girls, I pined for her Marvel-themed Underoos and placed her action figure in a cherished top-floor spot in my Barbie house. Gazing in mild amusement at the fantastical scenes depicting mythological beauty and feminine power, I was reminded of late summer’s viral video of 33-year-old…
-
By
Sam Bankman-Fried founded crypto exchange FTX and vaulted to viral fame, even earning the three-letter moniker of SBF usually reserved for progressive “saints.” But success was fleeting. In his recent trial, a jury found him guilty of 7 counts of fraud as well as stealing 8 billion dollars from customers. You may have followed the SBF saga for a few reasons: an interest in cryptocurrency, a keen eye for business trends, or plain old schadenfreude. But the business leaders who shared his giving philosophy of effective altruism have watched the…
-
By
In 1960, a group of young conservatives issued the so-called Sharon Statement. It began “In this time of moral and political crises, it is the responsibility of the youth of America to affirm certain eternal truths.” Foremost among the “transcendent values” it wished to affirm was the “individual’s use of his God-given free will,” which it deemed foundational to the “right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force.” The Sharon Statement became a kind of charter for the postwar conservative movement that culminated with the Reagan presidency. More…
-
By
It came in a flash. And it came in a church. Bob Putnam, a political scientist studying the Italian government’s experiment in regional decentralization of power, was gathering data to study which administrative divisions thrived, and why. In essence, he sought to find what makes democracy work. Amassing data on regional government efficacy, wealth, and a host of other variables, he found some intriguing correlations. Wealth generally correlated to efficacy, for instance, but it was far from a perfect positive relationship. Again and again, he fell short of coming to…
-
By
The bad news, according to George Hawley, is that a growing chorus of conservatives are embracing a far-right ideological agenda that either flirts with, or openly embraces, white identity politics. The good news, Hawley tells us, is that the Republican electorate is not following their lead. Republican voters are not “demanding the party abandon its traditional commitments in favor of a more radical right-wing ideology,” Hawley writes. “If the Republican Party, and the conservative movement more broadly, is moving to the far-right, it is not a bottom-up phenomenon.” Rather, Hawley…
-
By
Understanding liberty as a product of a society’s evolutionary process means studying human behavior over time. In this reading, liberty emerges because humans, having lived together for ages, learn a great deal about collective life. A society recognizes rights because evidence formed over generations demonstrates what contributes to security, what people need to flourish, and what happens when some people possess disproportionate power. Said another way, liberty exists primarily because of experience, not because of abstract philosophical reasoning. Experience is also the only way we can answer the all-important question,…
-
By
Edwin Van de Haar, Human Nature and World Affairs: An Introduction to Classical Liberalism and International Relations Theory (London: IEA, 2023) Over the last several years, great power politics returned in earnest. After an apparent vacation from history, the need for politicians to develop good judgment about these matters is as important now as it was during the Cold War. To whom should they turn for wisdom to deal with threats? Academic historians increasingly disdain diplomatic and military history. Philosophy and theology can offer some moral guidance. But these fields…
-
By
A common definition holds that conservatism is about turning back the clock. That’s not always accurate, but it does describe the goal of some conservatives. In a recent piece for The New Criterion, Daniel McCarthy sympathetically reconstructs the political logic of what he calls “restorationism”: the economic and religious nationalist turn in conservatism. Restorationists, he says, want to return to “the industrial economy and a Christian culture.” While restorationists might cite different golden ages (some extending back centuries), the most plausible version of their goal could look something like America…