Dear Intelligent American,
This weekly salutation was stolen from the standard missive William F. Buckley Jr.—he of the recent commemorative postage stamp—mailed to many millions of Americans, addressing those he was lobbying to subscribe to his fortnightly journal, National Review. It’s used here as an excuse to note that Monday, November 24, is the centennial of the birth of the founder of the modern conservative movement. He is sorely missed.
For those who would like to know why one of his biographers, Al Felzenberg, rightly called “WFB” one of the greatest Americans ever, consider spending some time in the archives (housed at the Hoover Institution) of his consequential PBS program, Firing Line, which commenced in 1966. Be assured: It will be a joy to revel in the lively debate that this show offered for over three decades.
It should hold no relic-nostalgia, though. Buckley’s critical role—of engaging with political and ideological foes in an hour-long discussion/debate, a thing perhaps unthinkable in our current era, when 60 seconds of video seems a lifetime, never mind 60 minutes—remains relevant and instructive. It is imperative that when offering a platform to a public figure, even one with odious views (say, for example, admiring Stalin and Hitler?), the pabulum-spewing not go unchallenged.
Buckley’s was a tough testing ground, one some leading figures feared. For example, RFK dad Bobby Kennedy, leading presidential timber until his assassination (do we forget, by a Muslim extremist?) in 1968, famously refused to appear on Firing Line. Buckley had an explanation: “Why does baloney reject the grinder?”
Our baloney-beset times surely need more grinders (and no, not the app).
Let us now get on to the business at hand before the eschaton immanentizes, but not before mentioning this to nonprofit leaders: Applications for the Heritage Innovation Prizes have opened, so get yours in.
Enjoy These Before the Turkey Day Hubbub
1. At Plough Quarterly, John Ehrett contemplates the intersection of Nietzsche and young American men and hears echoes of Ayn Rand’s famous character, Howard Roark. From the essay:
From Alexis de Tocqueville on, observers have frequently commented on the spiritual vitality of the American public. Religion has flourished in American soil. And yet something in the American heart still thrills to Roark’s defiance, though there is nothing Christian about Roark’s soliloquy. Nor, even, is there any classical language of the common good: Roark deplores such an appeal, as “the claim and justification of every tyranny ever established over men.” No, Roark and his will are justifications that need no end beyond themselves. They are uncivilized, or rather, they remake civilization in their own image.
This is the spirit of Friedrich Nietzsche. It is also a very American spirit. Looming behind the image of the pioneer is the shadowy mountain man, who roams and hunts and dwells beyond the polis, beyond constraint. Roark himself admits it: “This country was not based on selfless service, sacrifice, renunciation, or any precept of altruism. It was based on a man’s right to the pursuit of happiness. His own happiness. Not anyone else’s.” Such lawlessness is itself the object of fascination: American lore constantly returns to the archetype of the lone gunslinger who must take power into his own hands when institutions fail. Some stories, such as the 1943 Western film The Ox-Bow Incident, admit the moral ambivalence. But far more, like The Wild Bunch and Django Unchained, glory in it.
It’s not hard to understand the appeal. At the heart of the Nietzschean vision is an ideal of human excellence, construed in a particularly vitalist way. Only the truly excellent man, strong in body and soul, is capable of becoming a law unto himself. And so Roark, summoned into court as an aesthetic martyr, is no Christ figure, but Nietzsche’s Übermensch (superhuman). He does not suffer the scourge and nails as Christ did. Rather, his beauty, strength, and intellect are on full display. As Nietzsche himself might have put it, Ecce homo, behold the man. No gods and no kings.
2. At The Catholic World Report, Marcus Peter argues the religious right cannot draw inspiration from the nihilistic left. From the article:
The allure of this so-called “woke right” lies in its imitation of critical theory’s grammar. It borrows from Foucault’s suspicion of power while pretending to defend Christian civilization. Its discourse is therapeutic rather than intellectual. The point is not truth but vibe as the transgressive mood of rebellion. Carlson’s refusal to press Fuentes on his admiration for Stalin or his venom toward Jews was deliberate. To challenge the guest would have disrupted the emotional payoff of mutual victimhood. The result is a show that sells grievance as identity.
This style of communication preys on moral exhaustion. Many conservatives, battered by years of cultural defeat, find relief in outrage. They crave certainty in an age of confusion. Conspiracy theories offer that certainty. They restore the illusion of coherence to a chaotic world. Yet they also erode the capacity for reasoned judgment. Every refutation becomes proof of the conspiracy. Every appeal to evidence is dismissed as establishment propaganda. In this way, conspiratorial thinking mimics the totalizing nature of ideology. It closes the mind and inflames the passions.
3. At National Review, Stanley Kurtz reflects on late scholar Allan Bloom, and how he foresaw the coming of America’s culture wars. From the essay:
The cultural maladies Bloom anatomized in 1987 have significantly worsened since then. In marked contrast to his first decade in the classroom, Bloom noticed in the late 1960s that students were entering college with little experience of or taste for reading. This, Bloom observed, contributed to their spiritual impoverishment. Without having experienced serious literature, students had a limited capacity for discerning human motivation. Even the Bible and the Declaration were undiscovered territory for these students. Those reference points, said Bloom, had once provided students with perspective on the present, impetus for critique, models of admiration and contempt, and a Rosetta stone for the West’s artistic tradition. Now students were simply marinated in pop psychology.
The collapse of reading, and the consequent impoverishment of social and intellectual life, has only accelerated. Mark Bauerlein’s studies of the effects of social media on the Millennial soul can be read as extended commentaries on Bloom. Reading scores among high school seniors today have hit rock bottom, along with attention spans. College freshmen often cannot handle long articles. Many elite college students are now nearly incapable of finishing an entire book. Professors, accordingly, are reluctant even to assign them. Bloom also suggested that the emotional fragility of the children of divorce, then at universities in unprecedented numbers, was an additional barrier to liberal education. These students, he said, are often too distressed or self-protective to risk exploring life’s core moral and intellectual alternatives in class. What, then, should we say of today’s young generation, renowned for psychic vulnerability induced by family decline, isolation, and the depredations of social media?
4. At First Things, Adam Eilath finds that people are once again talking about God, but believes the conversation needs some clarifying. From the article:
Across the West, religion is returning, but no one knows what kind. It could become another therapeutic brand, spirituality retooled for stress management, or it could become again what it once was, a grammar for awe. Whether the revival deepens or dissipates will depend not on slogans but on schools, not on outreach but on teachers. A generation ago, we taught rules without warmth and drove children to rebellion. Now we teach warmth without weight and risk raising souls unable to bow. If we want faith to endure, we must recover the weight of the One before whom we stand, for children need more than affirmation. They need a world that can command their attention.
If I could leave my students one gift, it would be this: that when the world tells them everything is negotiable, they will still feel the tremor of something unchangeable; that when they speak of love, they will mean the kind that holds the cosmos in being. The world does not need more curators of mood. It needs mediators of mystery.
5. At The Grumpy Economist, John Cochrane combats the advocates of rent control. From the post:
A rent control only makes rental “affordable” for the lucky recipient. It does not make rental housing more “affordable” for society as a whole. It does not increase the number of people who have housing. Indeed it reduces that number. It just changes who gets it. It does not even make housing more “affordable” on average. For those who want it must now pay with time, and inconvenience, or pay by foregoing the great opportunities that moving to the city provided.
The biggest losers of rent control are the young, the mobile, the ambitious, immigrants, and people without a lot of cash. If you want to move from Fresno to take a job in San Francisco and move up, and you don’t have millions lying around to buy, you need rentals. Rent control means they are not available. Income inequality, opportunity, equity, all get worse.
There is no blob of “government” money, or “policy” that can make something affordable for one without making something else less affordable for another.
6. At The Imaginative Conservative, Barbara J. Elliott recalls how a papal visit commenced the collapse of Soviet Communism. From the piece:
On the final day of the Pope’s first pilgrimage to Poland, he addressed more than one million of his countrymen who had gathered across the open plain of the Krakow Commons. To this wildly enthusiastic crowd he preached on the Great Commission that Christ gave his disciples. “You are receiving a new anointing of the Holy Spirit” the Pope told them, “and are being sent out to make disciples in your country.” He cautioned his countrymen to temper their enthusiasm with prudence. “[T]he future of Poland will depend on how many people are mature enough to be nonconformist,” he said, emphasizing the word “mature.” In every talk throughout his pilgrimage, the Pope had emphasized dignity and restraint as necessary qualities for followers of Christ. This message was received and understood.
As the Pope reluctantly said goodbye, he wiped away tears. Many of his countrymen did the same.
For nine days, the entire nation of Poland had suspended its normal life to be spiritually taught and transformed. One third of the nation, thirteen million people, saw the Pope in person and virtually everyone else saw him on television or heard him on the radio. His message lifted up the people of Poland and called forth the memory of their authentic history, culture, and identity. The Polish people heard and remembered who they really were. By bringing millions of these people together publicly, the Pope gave them courage and dispersed the rule of fear and terror. Bogdan Szajkowski, a Polish political scientist, described the phenomenon of the Pope’s visit as a “psychological earthquake, an opportunity for mass political catharsis.” Adam Michnik, a prominent dissident and non-Catholic, characterized the experience as “a great lesson in dignity.” He was struck by the way the Pope had spoken compellingly to believers and nonbelievers alike, appealing to their “ethos of sacrifice, in whose name our grandfathers never stopped fighting for national human dignity.” John Paul II had called for a thoroughgoing moral renewal without even mentioning the communists. Instead, he pointed the people toward a deeper moral level to recognize that they would be culpable if they were to allow their country to continue as it was.
7. At Public Discourse, William Carroll explains that St. Thomas Aquinas is being celebrated, somehow, in Red China. From the piece:
Qi’s essay is indicative of a new current of interest in Thomism, particularly in various academic circles in China. There is a historical dimension to this interest: the encounter between Jesuit missionaries and Chinese intellectuals, primarily in the seventeenth century. As part of their missionary project, the Jesuits brought with them sophisticated knowledge, especially, but not only, in mathematics and astronomy. They came to play important roles in the communication of astronomical observations and theories central to the development of the Chinese calendar. In particular, their scientific expertise gave them unprecedented access to Chinese intellectual circles and provided them with the opportunity to advance their missionary objectives of converting important Chinese scholars, and perhaps even the emperor, to Christianity.
The Jesuits did not bring their message to China into a vacuum, however. The China they entered possessed a literary-philosophical heritage that spanned millennia. Philosophical analysis was important since the Jesuits encountered sophisticated reflections in Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist thought. The Jesuit missionaries sought to expand on this foundation by explaining fundamental doctrines and practices of Christianity. They emphasized two doctrines in particular: creation and the immortality of the soul. As they sought to explain what they believed, especially about creation, they employed Chinese expressions, expressions that themselves had long interpretive histories.
8. At The Spectator World, Rupert Stone charges that marijuana legalization has been a disaster. From the article:
Marijuana also messes with your motor skills and your coordination, which is why it’s often considered to be a factor in car accidents. There was a 6 percent increase in highway crashes in four states which legalized marijuana. And 42 percent of drivers who died in accidents in Ohio between 2019 and 2024 had high levels of THC in their bloodstream.
The negative neurological effects of marijuana are even more concerning in the case of young people, whose brains are still forming and are thus more susceptible to THC.
Research has shown that marijuana harms the hippocampus, which controls memory function and, with it, learning, as well as the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for decision-making and emotional regulation. Good luck, New York City. Let’s hope the new mayor has better ways to de-stress at the end of a demanding day. Even among young cannabis users who are not addicted, and who assume that casual use has few downsides, a recent study shows marijuana is more likely to result in difficulty concentrating and lower grades, not to mention higher levels of truancy, aggression and arrest. And that’s before you get to depression and suicidal thoughts.
9. At Commentary Magazine, Nicholas Eberstadt finds that freedom for all Koreans must be an imperative for those in the South. From the piece:
For three long generations, Korea has been a house divided. Part of the peninsula enjoys great freedoms; the other part is wholly enslaved. For many in the South, the current status quo has proved to be a workable order. South Koreans can go about seeking their own modern comforts, engaging in their own pursuit of happiness, without worrying too much about the unending suffering endured by their cousins and compatriots just across the DMZ.
For those who accept the status quo, this relative indifference to human rights in the North may be unfortunate, or unseemly, but it is nonetheless an entirely manageable course of action.
This view—the consensus opinion in South Korea today—constitutes a fateful miscalculation.
Never mind its morality: From a purely practical, purely selfish standpoint, this indifference to human rights in the North places at risk human rights in the South.
Korea’s freedom is an indivisible quantity. If regarded instead by the public as a blessing bestowed only on some Koreans but withheld from others, it will remain a fragile blossom. Before too long, those who are unwilling to make the principled case for the defense of these human freedoms for their brethren on the other side of the peninsula will find their own freedoms endangered, too.
10. At The Watch Fire, Lee Barkley explains how faction, like it or not, is part of the American fabric. From the piece:
The divisiveness we are currently experiencing is only a magnified form of what the Founders called “faction.” Faction is more than just disagreement, faction is the idea that people will inevitably use their voices pursuing differing goals in a representative government. They will do so with varying degrees of passion and conflict will always result. It will get messy. But the ability of a people to express faction is evidence of a free society, and the process of exchanging ideas in faction shapes society. The messiness is the point.
In “Federalist No. 10,” James Madison makes the case that faction is inescapable but not inherently ruinous. He asserts that faction will always arise in representative governments because governments are comprised of humans, and humans are self-interested. Because our self-interests do not all align, humans invariably come to conflict on the political means to achieve our goals.
Madison asserted that such faction is not only expected, but vital to and symptomatic of a functioning representative government. He timelessly reasoned that the only ways to remove faction are to remove liberty (unthinkable) or to remove differences of opinion (Orwellian). To Madison, the existence of faction means that the government at least functions well enough to advance the differing aims of its populace.
Was Madison naïve, operating in an environment of simplistic unity?
11. At UnHerd, James Rebanks explains how Britain’s bureaucratic ways have wreaked havoc on farms, leading to an important question: From where will the food come? From the piece:
The scale of the problem facing farmers was revealed in a separate report published earlier this month by McCain Foods, which found that one third of British farmers made no profit in the past year. More than half have considered leaving farming in the past year because of its dire finances; 40% think they will be forced to leave the industry in the next decade. And 92% of farmers think the greatest threat to the long-term growth of British farming is the government.
You might think these awful statistics would trouble our political leaders or make them wonder whether they’d got farming policy right, but we’ve seen no sign of any soul-searching yet. We’re told in soundbites that the government cares about farming—but their policies suggest otherwise, making real life on farms often close to impossible. According to the McCain report, only 4% of British farmers believe that current government support and protection is adequate.
Someone’s narrative about British farming is wrong. And I’d suggest you make a judgement: either farmers are all crazy, or else something has gone catastrophically wrong with the relationship between British politics and farmers.
12. At City Journal, Steven Malanga spotlights the impact lockdowns have had—an upside for rural and small metro areas, at the expense of big cities. From the piece:
More recent data show that this trend continued through 2024 and included prime-age workers and their families. Some of the nation’s smallest metro areas—those with under 250,000 residents, including many classified as rural—have reversed years of population loss among workers aged 25 to 49, gaining at least 100,000 net new residents in each of the past three years, according to census data.
Metro areas with 250,000 to 1 million residents have also grown, thanks in part to the success of midsize cities in some low-cost states, like Raleigh, North Carolina, and Ogden, Utah. These places combine the benefits of lower-density living—less congestion and more affordable housing—with many amenities of larger cities. Collectively, they’ve attracted more than 200,000 working-age migrants annually over the past three years.
This pattern has led some demographers to conclude that a major change in American migration is under way, particularly among workers. One factor driving the development is that even as the country grows more culturally divided, products, media, and services once found only in major markets are now widely accessible. As a recent University of Virginia report observed, “This convergence helped create the conditions that made millions of Americans more willing, in recent years, to move to small cities, towns, and rural counties across the country.”
Lucky 13. At Modern Age, Clifford Bates finds there is still tremendous wisdom to be had from Robert Nisbet’s The Quest for Community. From the article:
At the heart of Nisbet’s sociology lies his central diagnosis: Modernity, for all its liberating promises, has produced a profound dislocation of meaning. The traditional structures that once anchored human life—the family, the church, the neighborhood—have been eroded by economic mobility, secularization, and the cult of individual autonomy. In their absence, individuals find themselves spiritually adrift, seeking a sense of belonging in the state or in ideological movements that community once provided.
In The Quest for Community, Nisbet traced this process to the Enlightenment conception of man as an abstract individual, free from inherited bonds and traditions. While this conception was essential to the development of liberal democracy, it also contained the seeds of atomization. As social life became increasingly organized around contracts rather than commitments and rights rather than duties, the older moral vocabulary of obligation and loyalty weakened. The result was a society rich in freedom but poor in meaning.
This loss, Nisbet argued, was not merely psychological but also institutional in nature. The modern state, by assuming functions once performed by local bodies, gradually displaced them. Welfare programs that once would have been handled by churches or community organizations became the purview of distant bureaucracies. The shift, he wrote, was from “authority” to “power”: from personal, reciprocal, and moral forms of guidance to impersonal, coercive, and administrative control. The paradox of modern freedom, then, was that it left individuals so isolated that they willingly submitted to centralized authority in search of order.
Bonus. At The European Conservative, Anthony Daniels refuses to put lipstick on the pig of ugliness. From the article:
But there is something more to modern ugliness than mere neglect of appearance. Neglect will lead naturally enough to shabbiness, raggedness, dirt, and so forth; but great attention is often paid to ugliness, as if it were something that was positively desired. Ugliness is not therefore simply something negative, a manifestation or natural consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, where it is merely not resisted. It is something positive, in the sense of something being targeted.
Thus people often go to considerable trouble to make themselves ugly, or as ugly as possible. Nor is this simply a trait of rebellious youth that is trying to assert its independence and that will take the easiest route available to shock its elders. Such youthful rebellion is for most people a phase, as stamp-collecting or interest in dinosaurs used to be. But now, perhaps for the first time, the ugliness of youthful rebellion has become inscribed deeply into society, virtually as the norm.
The inversion of the value ascribed to beauty and ugliness has an intellectual, or at least an ideological, root. When we look at something beautiful that has come down to us from the past, we are now encouraged to view it not through the lens of aesthetic appreciation, but through that of supposedly historical understanding—which in our present intellectual climate is that of the backward projection of current grievances and detection of past injustices. According to this historiography, the beautiful was produced in conditions that we find repugnant: of hunger, poverty, yawning inequality, serfdom, slavery, and so forth. Unselfconsciously to appreciate beauty produced in such circumstances, when life itself for many or most people was far from beautiful, is to heap retrospective or posthumous injustice and humiliation on those who already suffered enough. The new museology in Anglo-Saxon countries increasingly partakes of this historiography.
Bonus Bonus. At Law & Liberty, Samuel Gregg turns to Tocqueville for instruction on dealing with the “woke right.” From the article:
Yet Tocqueville’s clear-eyed view of the hard left’s destructive impulses did not blind him to the problems of the right. For example, though sympathetic to arguments that a constitutional monarchy might help steady French politics, Tocqueville maintained some political distance from those royalists (including family members) anxious to wind the clock back to a pre-1789 world.
There was, however, a then-newly emergent group on the right towards which Tocqueville adopted a position of polite but unambiguous opposition. If we were to ascribe these individuals a contemporary label, “altright” or even “groyper” would perhaps be the most apt. For like these contemporary far-rightists, such thinkers embraced a highly racialized view of the world. Tocqueville’s response to their arguments is a model worthy of emulation in our time.
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. On Thursday, December 11th, Yours Truly will host a Center for Civil Society webinar on “The Beauty and Importance of the Declaration,” in which Hillsdale College scholar Matthew Spalding will be one-on-one interviewed about his important new book, The Making of the American Mind: The Story of Our Declaration of Independence—another feature of the Center’s ongoing “America at 250” project. The webinar is free, via Zoom, and will take place from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. (Eastern). Matt is soooo smart—you will want to attend and learn. Register here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: What did the astronomers do after watching the moon for 24 hours?
A: They called it a day.
A Dios
Who knows what would have been the fate of America but for the amazing life of Squanto. He deserves much more recognition than is ever given. That said, may the soul of William F. Buckley Jr. rest in peace.
May We Take from God’s Bounty with Gratitude,
Jack Fowler, who gazes into the abyss at jfowler@amphil.com.
