In the Tradition of Liberty.
In the Tradition of Liberty.
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FUSION’s archive of full-length features.
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One of the major questions of modern historiography concerns the beginnings of “capitalism.” Well-known explanations include Karl Marx’s account of the victory of the bourgeoisie over the feudal class and Max Weber’s tracing of the spirit of capitalism to the Protestant ethic. A key challenge faced by scholars is that capitalism is a rich concept that can refer to an economic system as well as a political ideology or even a worldview. The term can be used both as a neutral term of analysis and as a normative one for either…
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(This essay is the first in a series of reflections on the meaning of the Declaration of Independence in honor of its 250th anniversary. The series will run until July 4, 2026.) Many may find this “exposition’s” form strange; it might seem to them too strict to be edifying and too edifying to be strictly scientific. As far as the latter is concerned, I have no opinion. —Anti-Climacus, The Sickness unto Death When the flames came up her eyes burned out there like gatelamps to another world. A world burning on…
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The American criminal justice system provides room and board to more prisoners — 1.8 million across state and federal prisons and county jails — than any other liberal democracy in the world, even as our streets overflow with repeat offenders habituated to violent crime and mentally ill individuals left to their own sad devices. We proclaim rehabilitation while practicing warehousing. We delay executions for decades, transforming swift justice into prolonged torture. Nearly a century ago, the caustic Baltimore journalist H.L. Mencken observed that the “so-called progress of civilization” had fettered…
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The future of American conservatism, or “movement” conservatism, as it is known, has become linked to the outcomes of the Trump administration. It seems impossible to speak of its future without reference to President Trump’s influence. Yet it is also becoming clearer every day that the future of conservatism will be determined by ideas and events that Trump will not control. The choice faced by American conservatives will not only be which way forward in a post-Trump political sense, but how much of the path chosen will be paved by…
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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…
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For many years now, the dominant—if not exclusive—view among scholars has been that nations and nationalism are essentially modern phenomena. Despite disagreement on the specific times and places in which nationalism first began to arise, or the intellectual and material sources that gave rise to such movements, a relatively broad consensus remains that it did so in the modern era, whereas before that we had…something else. Somewhat unexpectedly, this view has recently come under somewhat amorphous challenge as part of a larger political and social turn against liberal pieties. The thinking goes…
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For generations, we’ve gazed into the eyes of chimpanzees and seen ourselves reflected back—a comforting mirror that suggested our nature was written in their behavior. But what if we’ve been looking at the wrong animal all along? In The Primate Myth, the author Jonathan Leaf dismantles one of modern science’s most cherished assumptions: that studying our closest genetic relatives reveals the essence of human nature. The stakes extend far beyond academic taxonomy. How we understand ourselves shapes everything from war and peace to family structure and democratic governance. If we’re…
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When Abraham Lincoln issued his Thanksgiving proclamation in 1863, he offered the previously regional holiday as a feast of national gratitude in counterpoint to the ongoing horrors of the Civil War. Celebrating the vast resources and opportunities of the United States, Lincoln declared that those boons “should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American people.” Today’s indulgence in resentment risks drowning out what should be a season of gratitude. In testament to the divides of contemporary American politics, the Thanksgiving table has…
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Yesterday marked William F. Buckley, Jr.’s centennial. We should celebrate the anniversary because many owe him a debt of gratitude—Buckley was far the most politically influential conservative from the mid-century onward. Such anniversaries offer us a much-needed opportunity to recur to origins. We should look back to Buckley for two reasons. First, he founded National Review, one of the few important publications of the conservative movement. We should be thinking about foundations at this moment, so that we learn to see opportunities where the consensus holds there is only a cultural…
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It is a common tic for foreign policy commentators to make confident assertions about what dictators are like at the negotiating table. There are apparently “Ten Simple Rules” in such negotiations, including “dictators are dictators for a reason” and “a dictatorship’s core goal is merely to perpetuate itself.” Some advise that negotiators “show [dictators] how the deal could advance their interests” rather than engage in moral preening. Others suggest “when a dictator believes they are winning, that is precisely when they begin to lose.” It is similarly common for grand…