“If our halls of power are rife with mini Aaron Burrs, what does that say about us?”
Erich J. Prince’s Latest Column
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Author: Thomas Koenig
Let’s Make the Founders Less Unique
Nicholas Kristof Discusses “Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope”
“One of the reasons our anti-poverty efforts in America don’t do better is we start too late. We need to help kids early on.”
James Madison, Greg Weiner, and What to Do about the Filibuster
“Patience ‘is the central constitutional virtue—and it is, by all signs, a lost one.'”
When Reading about Abraham Lincoln, in 2021
“As historian James Oakes writes in his new book, The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution, the Republican Party was once home to a tight union of moral principle and constitutionalism.”
David French Talks “Divided We Fall”
“Well, the first paragraph basically says it all. It begins with ‘The continued unity of the United States of America cannot be guaranteed.'”
The Foe We Need Is the Foe We Have
“At a time when we are losing a grip on the fundamentals of the American Experiment, a powerful foe has arisen that stands in direct opposition to those fundamentals.”
What Is the Intellectual’s Duty to Society?
“In his new book, Hope & Scorn: Eggheads, Experts, and Elites in American Politics, historian Michael J. Brown adeptly probes questions such as these as he delves into ‘the uncertain role of intellectuals in a democracy.'”
Francis Fukuyama: Making Identity Politics Work
“One of the core conclusions of Fukuyama’s Identity is that identity politics—the ‘demand for [political] recognition of one’s identity,’ whether that be a racial, ethnic, religious, or national identity—is here to stay.”
In Response to a Worthy Critic
“I will close here by thanking Senatore for his thoughtful critique of my review. I hope that this response convinces him that my ‘sweeping statements and feel-good-isms’ are not wholly without merit!”
“After Trump”
“In what ways can we further immunize our governing institutions from the political malaise of today and tomorrow?”
What Ails Us?
“The loss of faith in America, its promises, and its constitutional and democratic ideals augurs not only American decline, but American collapse.”
Kevin Williamson: How to Improve the Lot of Those Left Behind
“And he wrote this very famous novel called Infinite Jest, which he described as a very sad book about the pursuit of happiness. And so, I think in some ways, I’ve written a very sad book about the pursuit of happiness as well.”
Thomas Ricks: Politics, as Seen from Aristotle to Trump
“And so I remembered from college: When you’re facing a problem that seems deeply puzzling, go back to fundamentals, go to first principles. So I took Aristotle’s Politics off my shelf, my old college copy, and reread it in the context of the election of Donald Trump.”
The Historic Unifying Potential of the U.S. Constitution
“Professor McConnell’s extensive study of the substance and scope of presidential power under the Constitution has convinced me that the unifying capacity of the Constitution could perhaps be revived.”
H. R. McMaster: How He Sees China, and the World
“And so I think we have to resist the tendency to try to define a new administration’s foreign policy mainly as an opposition to the administration that came before it.”
