William Novak is Charles F. and Edith J. Clyne Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. This interview is based on his new book, New Democracy: The Creation of the Modern American State (Harvard University Press, 2022)....
individualism
The Author’s Corner with Robert Gross
Robert A. Gross is Emeritus Draper Professor of Early American History at the University of Connecticut. This interview is based on his new book, The Transcendentalists and Their World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). JF: What led you to write The Transcendentalists...
Historian Jonathan Couser responds to George Will’s column on individualism and identity politics
Yesterday I wrote a post on George Will’s recent column on identity politics and modernity. Over at Facebook, historian Jonathan Couser responded to Wills. Here is his take, published with his permission. –JF George Will is one of the few...
George Will on the premodern origins of identity politics…
…and national conservatism. This is a really interesting column. A taste: Prophecy is optional folly but an irresistible end-of-year temptation. So, at the risk of allowing a wish to be the father of a thought, a plausible prediction is that...
Jill Lepore on the state of “society”
Here is a taste of the Harvard historian’s recent piece at The Guardian: In March 2020, Boris Johnson, pale and exhausted, self-isolating in his flat on Downing Street, released a video of himself – that he had taken himself –...
Joan Chittister on the Beatitudes
Here is the Benedictine Sister at the National Catholic Reporter: In Scripture, we find the Beatitudes, the signs of what it means to be a good human being, an ethical government, a moral country. The renewal of the United States...
Commonplace Book #198
However much the United States has been a moral or religious nation guided by (individual) impulses of spirit and conscience, it has also seen repeated mergers, or confusions, of religious and material intentions. One would be hard-pressed to argue that...
Tocqueville said that “selfishness originates in blind instinct: individualism proceeds from erroneous judgment.” Both are at work in our mask wars.
What is happening to America? The Donald Trump presidency is primarily responsible this mess. He lifted the veil of civility and empowered the kind of people you see and hear about in the video I posted below. If the republic...
Do Americans still believe in the common good?
It’s a fair question. Here is Kentucky-based writer Silas House at The Atlantic: Refusing to sacrifice for the common good is an American problem, not just a Kentucky one; opposition to masking and vaccination is happening in such disparate places...
Is this what Ronald Reagan meant by a “shining city on a hill”?
Today as I read New York Times writer Jamelle Bouie’s recent column on vaccines, I was struck by these words. Is it any surprise that millions of Americans treat this fundamentally social problem — how do we vaccinate enough people...
What is going on at McLean Bible Church? (And the ongoing debate over “wokeness” in evangelicalism)
I remember back in 2010 when evangelicals were reading David Platt’s book Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream and giving out copies to their friends. Platt is now the pastor of McLean Bible Church, a flagship evangelical...
The Biden administration is framing health as a matter of personal choice. Why this is a bad idea.
I drove through four states yesterday. I didn’t get out of the car much, but when I did make stops I didn’t see many masks. When I got to my hotel I read Ed Yong’s piece at The Atlantic. Here...
What about proof of vaccination?
Here is Dr. Leana Wen at The Washington Post: For months, I have been criticizing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for being too cautious with its guidance for what fully vaccinated people can do. I saw little incentive...
Pope Francis’s scathing critique of American life
Yesterday at The New York Times, Pope Francis published an excerpt of his new book Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future. He offers a devastating critique of the selfishness that we Americans try to pass off as...
Why don’t white evangelicals vote for Democrats?
Historian Daniel Williams, in a thought-provoking piece at The Anxious Bench, asks: Why have white evangelicals been so antipathetic to Democrats, even before their disagreements with Democrats over abortion or LGBT issues emerged? And can anything ever convince them to...
What COVID-19 exposed about the United States
All of these points come from Ed Yong’s recent piece at The Atlantic: “How the Pandemic Defeated America.” We under-fund public health. Our health-care system is weak. Too much of what we do spend on healthcare is wasted. We have not...
Citizenship is More Than Just the Facts We Learned in Civics Class
History News Network is running my piece on history and citizenship. Here is a taste: Good students and teachers of history understand full well that history is more than just “the facts.” Yet even they may fail to grasp the...
A Time for Citizenship
It’s not really that difficult to be a citizen in times like these. Health officials are telling us to stay six feet apart, wash our hands, avoid crowds, self-quarantine, and check on our older neighbors. If we want to get...
Trump and “Expressive Individualism”
Some good analysis here by Ronald E. Osborn: In a 2011 article in First Things, the Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart pondered why so many literary depictions of the devil present him as attractive, witty, stylish and debonair. If there...
W.H. Auden on Catholicism and Protestantism
Here is another Protestant Reformation post. This one is stolen from Alan Jacobs’s blog Snakes and Ladders. What follows is a quote Jacobs posted today from Auden‘s review of Erik Erickson’s Young Man Luther: The Christian doctrine which Protestantism emphasizes is that...