A Dozen-Plus Stimulants, Gathered for Your Edification and Inspiration
Dear Intelligent American,
Howard Husock, an occasional—but always mandatory-reading—contributor to our journalism home at Philanthropy Daily, has written an important new book, The Projects: A New History of Public Housing. It is quite powerful. Even maddening. Its nutshell: Millions of Americans, for three-plus generations, have lived (many amidst rats, cockroaches, drug dealers, busted elevators, cold radiators) with the terrible consequences of public housing, an idea that at its 1930s progressive-brainchild outset may have been well-intentioned, but that in practice became a force for wholesale devastation of many American communities—was Carthage their model?—and the resulting impoverishment (imprisonment?) of millions.
Why did the alleged need (fantasy! thrill?) for government-run housing come with a heaping, toxic, bureaucratic side order of “slum clearance?” And just what was a “slum” anyway to these “urban planners,” whose bulldozers and wrecking balls laid waste to civil society, replacing maybe-poor but still-vibrant neighborhoods (often black majority) with soulless apartment-tower complexes that soon proved hellacious?
The Center for Civil Society hosts regular “Givers, Doers, & Thinkers” webinars (Yours Truly moderates) on interesting topics, and such will be the case on Tuesday, October 14th, when Mr. Husock, along with Reason’s Jim Epstein, will gather (3:00 to 4:00 p.m., Eastern, via Zoom) to discuss the book and its terribly consequential themes. Learn more, and register, right here.
And: Don’t forget to register for the Center’s forthcoming (November 5-6) America 250 conference in Philadelphia. Do that here.
Herewith, 14 Ways to Increase Your Brain Power
1. At The Spectator World, Bill Kauffman tells of his moving, and unpacks the wistfulness. From the piece:
Lucine and I purchased our soon-to-be-former home in 1992 from a charming eccentric who had named it “La Maison des Fleurs Printemps,” and the first thing I did upon moving in was to rip out that sign—though of course the flowers still bloom every May.
I had a wonderful second-floor office crammed with books and files, its walls papered with posters and our daughter’s artwork. The Kauffman homestead, which is at most two-thirds the size of our current home, offers no such aerie, so I am consigned to the basement, which provides ample room for my avalanche of books and LPs and autographed baseballs and posters bearing images and signatures of persons and things from George McGovern to Barber Conable, Gore Vidal to William Cullen Bryant, Ray Nitschke of the Green Bay Packers to Clyde Tombaugh, the man who discovered Pluto, and The Hired Hand to Zabriskie Point. (I’m a sucker for early 1970s cinema.)
If I must settle in this netherworld, I told Lucine, the dingy-gray basement had to be chromatically transformed into something out of The Brady Bunch. So we’re painting it a color dubbed “sunshine yellow.” Bring sunglasses if you visit.
2. At Civitas Outlook, fan favorite Daniel J. Mahoney takes another look at Yoram Harzony’s The Virtue of Nationalism. From the reflection:
As the Hungarian Catholic philosopher Aurel Kolnai called it as far back as 1949, “progressive democracy” aims to sever the long-standing mutually beneficial relationship between democracy and the nation. In the process, it divorces the honorable word “democracy” from any identification with the exercise of self-government and the defense of the broader continuity of civilization. But it is the very appreciation of civilization itself, and the gratitude that flows from such an appreciation, that gives moral content and direction to the exercise of human liberty. The rhetorical and substantive subversion of democracy entailed in the contemporary assault on our civilized inheritance cannot be overstated. Hazony is particularly sensitive to this mutilation of the meaning of words, this willful distortion of democracy to render it a perversion of itself.
His book, written with verve and clarity, succeeds on several levels. It compellingly argues that in theory and practice the real alternative to a world of self-governing nations is an imperialism that runs roughshod over the concerns and interests of ordinary people left unmoored from everything that hitherto had given individual and collective life meaning and purpose. He argues persuasively, as we have already suggested, that a misnamed liberalism has taken on imperial and despotic traits, and in promoting woke despotism at home and woke imperium abroad has run roughshod over self-governing peoples and an older, richer wisdom that we leave behind at our peril.
3. More CivOut: Steven Hayward explores the thinking of Max Weber on political action in extreme times. From the essay:
“The decisive means for politics is violence," Max Weber declares at the climax of his dense, difficult but profound January 1919 lecture “Politics as a Vocation," adding that "the world is governed by demons, and that he who lets himself in for politics, that is, for power and force as means, contracts with diabolical powers . . ."
I am always drawn back to Weber's challenging lecture whenever events like the political murder of Charlie Kirk and renewed talk of civil war erupt ominously as they have now. It is not supposed to be this way in a liberal democracy, where we are meant to do battle at the ballot box, year after year. “Where ballots replace bullets" might be the simplest and shortest definition of liberal democracy. Only once has this practice failed to get America to the ballot box again, though Harry Jaffa warned that our Civil War “is the most characteristic phenomenon in American politics, not because it represents a statistical frequency, but because it represents the innermost character of that politics." That "innermost character" of fundamental division is back on full display, but the problem now may go much deeper than mere partisan or ideological dispute.
4. At The American Conservative, Spencer Neale finds greatness in Erika Kirk’s public eulogy for her slain husband. From the piece:
Then Erika spoke of Charlie’s legacy as a peacemaker. Despite loud protestations from certain elements of the polity who characterize Charlie’s work as spiteful and divisive, Kirk’s assassination did not inspire in his own fans and supporters a desire to commit similar acts of evil. Quite the opposite, in fact. “After Charlie’s assassination, we didn’t see violence,” Erika noted. “We didn’t see rioting. We didn’t see revolution. Instead, we saw what my husband always prayed we would see in this country: We saw revival.”
That revival was on display Sunday as more than 100,000 people gathered at Kirk’s memorial service, making it one of the largest public turnouts for a private citizen in the history of the United States. Thousands raised their hands to the sky and sang, in one voice, “Hallelujah.” It was the sort of response that Charlie would have loved. Americans. Joined at the hip. Peacefully. In song. In spirit. In unison. Together. In the days since, TPUSA has received more than 120,000 inquiries to start new chapters nationwide. In death, as in his life, Charlie inspired our nation’s sons and daughters toward something greater than themselves alone.
But perhaps Charlie’s greatest accomplishment, and the one that shone brightest during Erika’s fabulous speech on Sunday, was his ability to inspire people of all ages and backgrounds toward the soft light of the Lord. At his very foundation, Charlie was a deep believer, a man of God, and his organization always centered ideas of faith and family at the core of its mission. As much as he inspired the next generation of conservatives, Charlie’s most telling success was that he inspired the next generation of Christians.
5. At Tablet Magazine, Marc Weitzmann sees an impending political collapse in France. From the beginning of the analysis:
When I was a kid in France, going to a demonstration was as routine as going to the movies. My parents and their friends and colleagues, all left-wing, would hit the streets four times a year at the very least, preferably on weekends, before and after the summer vacations, while buying a new car or a new fridge or paying the lease for their country house. Like them, most middle-class folks from the early ’70s to the end of the last century—especially those whose jobs were secure because they were unionized or were civil servants—used to protest peacefully to demand a fifth week of vacation; a lower retirement age, from 65 to 60; a 35-hour workweek (they achieved the first two in 1982 and the third in 2000). To gather in the streets with hundreds of thousands of people was as cultural a custom as croissants on Sunday mornings, Social Security-covered medical expenses, or the pension they knew they’d receive from the state once they retired. It was a way to socialize, almost anthropological in nature, a rage-less representation of anger rather than anything raw.
Today’s France is quite different. It is tired, angry, financially and socially broke, and unrecognizable to itself. Marine Le Pen, former leader of the National Rally Party, has a 35% approval rate in the polls, President Emmanuel Macron has 17%, and the left barely 19%. Right-wing populism has dominated the political landscape since at least April 2002, when Marine’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, challenged then President Jacques Chirac in the second round of the presidential election. In the years that followed, the country saw a brutal rise of murderous antisemitism, followed by a terror wave of a magnitude unseen since WWII. In short, France may well be the first European country to have experienced the events of the 21st century that have destroyed the credibility of the Western liberal narrative everywhere.
6. At the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, Graham Hillard admits American higher-ed is broken, and makes the case for fixing it. From the article:
Two things are worth insisting upon in the future. First, if an institution of higher learning accepts federal dollars, it must submit to public oversight. This means opening admissions “black boxes” so that taxpayers can see who gets to enroll and why. It means ending illegal preferences for all time, not only among student applicants but on the faculty-hiring end, as well. Most pressingly at the moment, it means ridding campuses of those whose illiberalism extends not just to mean tweets but to the unblushing celebration of murder—just as we might, after due process, declare a faculty member in a Klan hood unfit to teach. These are difficult measures and will call for strategic action before judges, among boards of trustees, in state legislatures, and in the court of public opinion. Yet they should be enacted precisely because colleges are worth saving. If that were not the case, the institutional juice would not be worth the reformers’ squeeze.
Second, colleges must be incentivized to get their academic houses in order. Every year, American taxpayers lay out tens of billions of dollars in higher-ed funding. Widespread cheating is thus a political as well as a moral issue. Perhaps ChatGPT and its ilk will be with us forever, requiring new thinking about teaching and learning. Perhaps they are (as I hope and believe) a mere poisonous fad. In either case, the fact that college grades now signal almost nothing is an untenable state of affairs. To save universities from irrelevance, reformers must find a way to reward those schools that rediscover authentic education.
7. At The American Spectator, Richard K. Vedder explains the trio of crises facing higher education. From the piece:
As American universities falter, who is minding the store? Who runs, owns, controls, or dominates universities? That indeed arguably is the root of the problem: there is no clearly defined leader at most universities. The president? The governing board? Prominent donors and alumni? For public universities, the state government and its leaders (governor, legislators, state higher education department or coordinating board, etc.)?
The murkiness and uncertainty surrounding control of governance often lead to unproductive turf wars, clashes of priorities, etc. There are many different leadership models. There is the Articles of Confederation model: a few universities are like federations of semi-independent academic villages with relatively weak overall leadership. There is the King Louis XIV model: “L’ecole est moi!”, mostly smaller schools led and effectively controlled by a strong-willed president. The governing board at many, probably most, schools is viewed as an honorific group, much like the British monarchy or House of Lords, with lofty theoretical powers but largely meaningless appendages to school administration except when selecting a new president.
Unlike private for-profit businesses, there is no clear bottom line, no universally accepted way of measuring success or failure. Market forces exist in higher education, but public and private subsidies and grants often cushion leadership from the brutal consequences of managerial failure, and they stumble along on a path of mediocracy and even, increasingly, failure and death.
8. At The Lamp Magazine, Peter George Flynn tells of his return to confession, the sacrament’s diminishment, and the storied death of Ireland’s Michael Collins. From the article:
One can learn from one’s own mistakes and then try again next time, but there is no next time after a bad death. One can only learn how to die from the deaths of others: those who died well and those who died badly. Did Collins die prepared? I read that account of his death and, like a good historian, I learned from someone else’s mistake rather than making my own, and I learned the Act of Contrition and made my confession, all of fourteen years ago. Not long ago, I found another set of those two volumes among a heap of books in our Manchester friary: the familiar green cloth cover, each with a golden portrait of Collins and a facsimile of his signature. At one time, these books must have been enshrined in any Irish house where pride of place had not already been accorded to the family Bible or to The Irish Republic by Dorothy Macardle.
Not long after my discovery, there was a discussion at the friary’s breakfast table about a different book. One of our friars was reading Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Short Primer for Unsettled Laymen. Why such an ebullient friar who was so settled, and so priestly, should read a book of that title is anyone’s guess. I think, like me, he wanted to learn from history, from the history of a particular time in the Church’s recent past. This friar was mystified by Balthasar’s comment that at the time the Swiss theologian was writing, sacramental confession had nearly disappeared from everyday life in the Church. The friar, an adult convert, had never known a time in the Church when clergy never shrived and people never sought shriving. He imagined that auricular confession was one of the hills on which a Catholic would be obliged to fight and die. He could not imagine the Catholic landscape Balthasar had surveyed, devoid of hills, the flat wasteland of churches without confessionals, of face-to-face confessions by appointment only, of twice-yearly Rite III of (General) Absolution ceremonies—the wasteland in which I had been raised.
9. At The Public Discourse, John G. Grove explores the tensions of conservatism, between the intellectual and the politically active. From the essay:
In America, at least since the Reagan presidency, the incessant struggle to control the levers of the central leviathan state, and particularly the executive branch, has dominated the imagination of “movement” conservatives, with the result being the latter of the two dangers Eliot warned of: the tail has wagged the dog. “Conservative” has come to mean whatever the Republican Party standard-bearers say it is, defined and redefined based on the political objectives of the moment and the men.
This has taken many iterations, from the neoconservative crusaders for liberal democracy, to libertarian-inflected conservatives, to today’s populist “National Conservatives.” All have ideologized some aspect of the prudential, conservative approach to politics. And all, accordingly, have sold a bill of goods to America’s “popular conservatives” by promising that there is a clear political or policy solution to the evident dangers they perceive to their traditional way of life.
And not least of all, this brand of conservatism has systematically captured the minds and attention of young people who have an instinctive conservative impulse, directing them away from cultural endeavors and toward the inanities of talk radio, then cable news, and now social media influencers and podcasters. It has turned them toward what Kirk called “the politics of passionate unreason.”
10. At Front Porch Republic, Brandon McNeice comes to the defense of children’s work. From the piece:
The claim is simple: when it is local, supervised, age-appropriate, and limited, children’s work helps form responsible adults. Somewhere along the way we let the worst abuses of industrial child labor define the whole idea of kids working. We mistook the sweatshop for the shop. The first deserves prohibition; the second deserves protection.
Before the argument goes farther, the bright lines. School comes first. Jobs must be safe, supervised, undertaken with parental guidance and a child’s assent, and bounded by modest hours. Hazardous or industrial tasks are out of bounds. Kids must be paid fairly for real contributions. These guardrails already exist in law and custom, and we should honor them.
For most of human history, children’s work lived inside the household economy: milking before school, stacking split wood, sweeping a shop floor, carrying casseroles through a church kitchen, running a paper route before dawn. The aim wasn’t résumé padding but membership. Work stitched children into the daily fabric of place—into the habits, adults, and neighbors that give shape to a young person’s sense of identity and duty. We once recognized this as apprenticeship to life. It did not compete with learning; it was a form of learning—about time, trust, tools, and other people.
11. At Law & Liberty, James Hankins argues for a revival in the study of Western Civilization. From the piece:
Thus, the revolt against Western Civ of the last forty years blithely swept away a tradition that was in fact centuries older than most people at the time recognized. As usual with sudden preference cascades, nobody in the academic herd stopped to ask what might be the result of joining the stampede away from the study of the Western tradition. Now, however, forty years later, the downside of our willful plunge into ignorance of the Western past has become all too visible.
Most obviously, students today have next to nothing between their ears to block the negative stories being told them about the Western past. Yes, the Western past is marred by racist and sexist beliefs, by the practice of chattel slavery, and by exploitative forms of colonialism. But no, it’s not true that these civilizational failures are unique to the West. In fact, the West is more enlightened (by modern standards) when compared to other world civilizations. It was in the West, after all, that modern efforts to remove these ugly blemishes began, spreading from Britain, America, and Europe to the rest of the world.
12. At American Reformer, Ben C. Dunson sees the Almighty in architectural terms. From the essay:
The extensive architectural language in the Bible is often understood as mere metaphor. Though this imagery is not meant to be taken literally (there is no solid dome over the earth, nor did Moses intend us to think there was, etc.), I would suggest that it is more than merely an evocative or picturesque enhancement of what would otherwise be a prosaic depiction of the physical creation. What the architectural language of the Bible reveals, I would contend, is the precise order and minute design of God’s creation. That is to say: the evidence of divine order and design is found in every aspect of creation, in the natural world just as much as in the products of human craftsmanship.
This was instinctively understood in the past. In the Middle Ages, for example, as C.S. Lewis puts it, you find that man “was an organiser, a codifier, a builder of systems. He wanted a place for everything and everything in the right place.”1 And rightly so: God is the one who has created a world in which everything has a place and everything is in its right place. When medieval man looked at nature, he thus saw an ordered world. One of the central ways in which the medieval understanding of an ordered creation was expressed was through its cosmology.
Lucky 13. At City Journal, Paul du Quenoy spotlights the attack on free speech by Britain’s thought police. From the report:
The country’s current government, though, would have the world believe nothing is wrong. “We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom, and it will last for a very, very long time,” Starmer said during an Oval Office visit in February. At a joint press conference with President Trump during the American leader’s state visit to the U.K. earlier this month, Starmer promised to guard free speech “jealously and fiercely,” calling it one of his country’s “founding values.” Nevertheless, many in Britain feel the country’s censorship laws have gone too far. The Online Safety Act, for example, passed in 2023 and fully in effect as of July, accords government regulators broad authority over forms of expression they deem offensive, indecent, obscene, or menacing. Older legislation still on the books prohibits communication intended to cause distress, anxiety, or annoyance—even more elusive categories.
British authorities are not slouching in enforcement. According to police records analyzed by the London Times, over 12,000 Britons per year are arrested for speech-related offenses—an average of 30 per day and nearly a fourfold increase over the 2016 figure. Recent cases have reportedly included arrests for derogatory comments about migrants, displays of the national flag that others found offensive, and even silent prayer near abortion clinics. Since 2014, police can record comments merely perceived as offensive as so-called “non-crime hate incidents,” which remain on the offending party’s record even if no charges are filed.
Bonus. At National Affairs, the aforementioned Howard Husock and Bruce D. Meyer consider how public housing tenancy constricts upward mobility. From the analysis:
Our findings indicate a clear conclusion: Instead of encouraging employment and self-sufficiency, current open-ended housing programs often lead to long-term tenancies. This accords with Brian Jacob and Jens Ludwig's research comparing the outcomes of winners and losers in a large, oversubscribed lottery for public housing in Chicago: They found that lottery winners had lower employment and earnings, as well as greater use of other government benefits, than those who didn't move into subsidized housing. Their work shows that being a subsidized-housing tenant causally reduces work effort and increases welfare-benefit use.
The most straightforward way of addressing the problem would be to impose a ceiling on the length of time households can spend in public or subsidized housing. A time limit would signal to tenants that they should build their savings in anticipation of exiting a housing program, thereby spurring them to seek employment or alternative housing arrangements. Encouraging turnover would also make better use of the existing stock of public and subsidized housing, allowing additional eligible households to take advantage of the programs available.
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. At Philanthropy Daily, Chas Baines gives guidance on key points for successful fundraising events. Read it here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: What do you call a cow with no legs?
A: Ground beef.
A Dios
These feet have never trod a golf course—except of course for the mini-golf joint in Old Saybrook back in 1973. So being an aficionado of the links is not on the c.v. But does one need to be a duffer to show interest—make that mild disgust—at the way spectators miserably / crudely behaved this past weekend at the Ryder Cup? No. And so the coarsening of the culture continues its unmerry way.
Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur have come and gone, and Yours Truly apologizes to his Jewish brothers and sisters, as these holy days, when forthcoming, should have been noted in this space, and were not. Accept please hopes (prayers!) and expressions of good will to a people increasingly beleaguered abroad and even here, in a country where Washington promised the “Stock of Abraham” who had come to these shores that “every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.” It is time for America to consciously embrace that promise.
May the Architect of the Universe Grant Each of us Wisdom,
Jack Fowler, who counts his blessings at jfowler@amphil.com.
