Commonplace Book

The family is a weak institution compared to the popular culture industry. Parents may have limited success, but the institutional power of the entertainment industry and of the internet more broadly ensure that any success is, at best, temporary… The […]

In a strangely prophetic passage that suddenly began to be quoted widely in 2016, [Richard] Rorty even predicted that a hyper-moralized leftist politics indifferent to material conditions would eventually drive “members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers” into the […]

As a public philosophy, conservatism largely abandoned its public appeal to religious faith. Christian conservatives still made up the plurality of the conservative electorate, but the public appeal to religious ideals and the effort to ground conservatism in Christian theology […]

While not understood sociologically by most on the right, the intent of these new speech codes and the cultural commitments they represented brought into relief both the cultural and economic alienation of working-class, small-town, and more often than not, religious […]

The most obvious and also the most pervasive mechanisms for protecting the power, privilege, and status of the new meritocrats, though, would be through the development of distinct linguistic innovations–ways of speaking (politically correct speech cods–words like Latinx, whiteness, lgbtqia2s, […]

We come to see that there is within every man, the image of God, and no matter how much it is scarred, it is still there. And so, when we come to recognize that the evil act of our enemy […]

What could break the endless cycle of injustice? The prophetic myth of Judaism and Christianity, both of which required “the spiritual discipline against resentment.” Such a discipline discriminated “between the evils of a social system…and the individuals who are involved […]

Fear and loathing, then are effective sources of solidarity and can provide a framework through which political discourse and action can take place. Yet negative solidarity is always limited in its effectiveness. Absent any other shared beliefs and commitments, not […]

Even at their worst, the churches kept alive a vision of man and fraternity, a knowledge of injustice suffered and retribution due. And for long periods, given the hopeless political environment in which the Negro found himself, “other-worldliness” was the […]

The miners retain many of their admirable qualities today, but it is evident that their world, the world of early industrialism, is dying–and the union, seeking to survive by allying itself to management and mechanization, itself becomes an enemy. It […]

The Social Gospel softened the impact of industrialism and brightened the lives of many men, and the policies it recommended still have merit. It did, however, strengthen that tendency of American thought that identified fraternity simply with solidarity. By adding […]

American theorists sought for some element of fraternity some suggestion of bonds uniting man and man. Yet the Enlightenment doctrines made the object of that search difficult to attain. Reason, conceived as the “servant of the passions,” could not unite […]

The Revolution of 1689 put matters on a different basis. James II had been New England’s unambiguous foe, an enemy to provincial autonomy and a Roman Catholic. Pardonably, the clergy could not resist the temptation to regard the Glorious Revolution […]

Americans, especially young Americans, cannot find their country in the land about them. Often, in fact, they cannot find the land, hidden as it is by the cancer-growth of concrete and the slow poisoning of air and water. Wealth accumulates, […]

American socialists, like all Christian socialists, had to cope with the fact that socialist rhetoric about abolishing capitalism evoked fears of class war and proletarian smashing. Christian socialism, wherever it took root, sought to mitigate this threat. Marxists, radical democrats, […]

By the end of World War II the divergence between democratic socialism and social democracy was something quite definitive, not merely a rhetorical convention, albeit with room for exceptions at both ends. Democratic socialists held out for some form of […]

Though the slogan “The personal is political” initially called attention to how personal life was affected by political arrangement, it also captured the sense that transforming American life could begin at the personal level. Much of a generation was inspired […]

It is vital for historians to reckon with the flaws of their profession as an institution, not only for their own sake but for the sake of the nation that supports their institution, and to reflect on the ways that […]

The Twitter mob in too many ways defines the current Internet. The objective of the mob is to stamp out apostasy. We are righteous. We are correct. We conform to the current patterns of behavior–and you’d better too. Ultimately, what […]