All Cathedrals, I have realized, have a smell, a sound, and a feel that binds them to one another; it’s a congruity of design that unites believers wherever they go.
A constant undercurrent of the conference was the oscillation between equally eloquent articulations of despair at the present and an intrinsically Christian hope for the future.
The victory this week of Italy’s Giorgia Meloni fits into this story as well. Her words—and perhaps, in the future, by the grace of God, her party’s actions—are nothing less than a full-throated disavowal of the West’s Chronos Complex.
Can the lived conservatism of the Postliberals find common ground—and common political cause—with the universalist notions of natural right, justice and equality espoused by the Claremont School? On this question, I believe, hinges the fate of a new conservative fusionism updated to meet the challenges of our time.
Undeterred by his trials and compelled by curiosity, the Apostle Paul wears no mask; he mutes and stifles no truth that might advance the Gospel—no matter the cost.
If a new framework for freedom is to emerge in the West, it must be recognizable. The stories of anchored freedom must be told, and they must be disseminated with the same adamance in mass culture, whenever and wherever possible, as the Boomer myth of freedom.
“Fear of risk, an exaggerated love of safety or health, are pathologies that threaten the very virtues necessary for civilizational and cultural survival”—Ted McAllister
Must liberalism be leveled completely by the New Right, so that a new conservative edifice may emerge from its ruins? Or must the meaning of liberalism be reclaimed for the Right and from the historiographical distortions of the progressive Left? Haivry and Hazony, Deneen, and Legutko appear to answer in the affirmative. However, a compelling alternate view is offered by Spanish philosophy professor and politician Francisco José Contreras.
An important lesson emerges from the mediated individualism of Mazo and Velázquez’s family portraits. Nascent elites inevitably seek recognition by assimilation into, not the total destruction of existing social categories. Just as the monarch and feudalism were replaced by a bourgeois meritocracy, likewise too today’s revolutionary levelers will seek as much to reimagine hierarchy as to abolish it.
To be a Christian is to see behind the veil—to see the face of God. Advent–the arrival of Jesus Christ on earth–was, is–the apotheosis of human history—when the Lord tore through the veil of time that separates now and always.
The critiques of postliberals are all useful correctives in this regard. Nonetheless, conservative scholars—and perhaps even more so conservative politicians—must beware the potential perils of embracing postliberalism as a term and concept.
“Anyone who says nationalism isn’t too bad is now labeled far-right,” says Nicolaus Fest MEP (AfD), speaking about the upcoming elections and the political realities of Germany.
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