In the Tradition of Liberty.
In the Tradition of Liberty.
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FUSION’s archive of commentary.
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In the 250th year of independence, it is altogether fitting that Americans should return to the Declaration of Independence and meditate on its teachings. For the more passively familiar we are with the words, the more sterile they risk becoming in our hearts and minds. In this light, it is a pleasure to comment on Dr. Spinks’ thoughtful essay, whose close reading of the Declaration will surely be reinvigorating to citizens and scholars alike. Returning to the text of the Declaration need not entail the idea that America is merely a propositional republic, as if Americans in the founding era were not a fusion of folkways, tied together by…
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Robert Duvall, who died this week at the age of 95, was one of the small number of famous actors from the New Hollywood of the 1960s who endured long enough to become, as we used to say, iconic. More than that, Duvall was not just one of the actors defining manliness in his heyday, but a very adventurous man himself, in ways more typical of his time than ours. There’s much to admire in his work and no better way to remember him than at his peak. Duvall had…
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I began reading the great (and not so great) novels during my twenties as a pleasant distraction from studying medicine. I read more during my thirties while studying political science—again, just for fun. Most of the novels that I read were published sometime between 1800 and 1950, before the greatness in novels dropped off considerably. Interestingly, many of the authors went beyond fiction and travelled to America to write serious studies of the country. Even in their fiction, insights about America pop up here and there. Among foreign visitors we tend…
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The civil war among conservatives that began with Tucker Carlson’s interview of Nick Fuentes isn’t over yet. At the Heritage Foundation in December, Ben Shapiro gave a fiery speech taking on the decision of foundation president Kevin Roberts to defend continued partnership with Carlson. Just before Christmas, at TPUSA’s Freedom Fest, Vice President J.D. Vance addressed the proverbial elephant in the room after Shapiro repeated his challenge to exclude Carlson from the conservative movement. In his opening remarks, Vance stated that “President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics…
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“We will run the country,” Pres. Trump said of Venezuela’s future after capturing its dictator Nicolas Maduro. The use of the “Royal We” softens the reality of what he means—that Trump himself and a small group of his loyalists plan to “run” the South American country in the name and with the resources of the United States. Anyone who has followed politics for the past decade knows this is one of Trump’s favorite ways to describe his domestic role as well. “I run the country and the world,” he told The Atlantic last…
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Early twentieth century writer G.K. Chesterton describes an absurdity in English social policy reminiscent of Oliver Lee Bateman’s interesting and provocative FUSION essay on reforming our criminal justice and mental health systems. Chesterton observes that a certain branch of English law once told people “to do something.” For example, it told a slave or a serf to sleep in the master’s shed, and nowhere else. Now, Chesterton complains, people are merely “forbidden to do anything.” The law tells a tramp he will be jailed if he sleeps in anyone else’s…
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The recent capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has resulted in renewed interest on what ‘regime change’ looks like when done from the outside. A great deal of commentary has fixated on whether the action was justified or how we should judge it in relation to the international system Yet lying in the background is a more neutral question: what does a transition away from the Maduro regime likely look like? It is useful to think through the future trajectories of potential regime change in Venezuela for a variety of…
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In early November, the Chinese fast fashion giant Shein opened its first European store in the heart of downtown Paris. The reaction was, to put in mildly, mixed: bargain-hunters flocked to the store but riot police had to physically remove protesters for setting off a stink bomb. The contrast between enthusiastic shoppers, stink bomb-wielding activists, and a mostly indifferent public is an apt symbol for Europe’s confused response to China’s rise, which vacillates between courtship, benign indifference, and deep suspicion. Anti-China sentiment recalls earlier anxieties about American commercial and industrial…
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As everyone is now aware, Rob Reiner has died at the age of 78. He was of the few funny cinematic chroniclers of the Baby Boom. Reiner was the son of Carl Reiner, who won about a dozen Emmys writing for Sid Caesar and Dick Van Dyke (who just turned 100) back in the 1950s-1960s. He then directed Steve Martin’s early movies: The Jerk (1979), Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982), and others. The younger Reiner graduated high school in Hollywood, went to UCLA Film School, and of course followed his father into the…
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The latest wave of tech layoffs has revived an old storyline. Scott Galloway notes that U.S. employers have announced roughly 946,000 job cuts this year—numbers we have not seen since 2020. At the same time, internal memos from firms like Google report that AI has boosted engineer productivity by about ten percent. For many observers, stories like these appear to show that AI is displacing workers. But that leap from juxtaposition to explanation is a familiar temptation. It assumes that every labor market tremor occurring near a new technology must…