Category: Essay

My Guilty Pleasure

The initial sense of accomplishment gave way to the realisation that it was like completing Guitar Hero on the hardest difficulty—only to consider your time would have been better spent actually learning to play the real instrument.

Useful Religion: The Future of Christianity in Europe

Any discussion of Christianity as part of a conservative resistance to revolutionary changes needs to make a sober assessment of the religious situation in Europe—without wincing at uncomfortable truths.

The Fight for the New Right

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.

Abraham Lincoln, Roe, and the Politics of Prudence

To engage in judicial activism is to embrace a spirit of anarchy, in which the means of determining law are dependent upon who happens to be in power at a given moment. As Lincoln said, “we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it.”

The Italian Conservatism Conference: Charting a Path Forward

From Europe’s north to her south, it is difficult to avoid the sense that the prevailing order is coming apart, that the cultural revolution to which her people have been subjected is being met with some real resistance.

Dragged Towards Unipolarity

Like the world which Kojève observed in 1945 and again in 1957, ours is a world of great powers vying for global dominance.

Decline of the English Bobby, Part II:
The New Commissar

Police now show at least as much interest, if not more, in what people think and say as they do in obvious kinds of criminal behaviour. The new paramilitary social worker will sooner quiz a TERF than catch a thief.

The Woke Revolution Isn’t By-Passing Poland

While there may be fewer rainbow flags around and more room for self-expression on sensitive topics than is present in Western societies of today, ‘woke culture’ is spreading in Poland.

An Analysis of Orbán’s “Illiberal Democracy”

I would go so far as to argue that unadulterated liberalism corrodes democracy, and true democracy is opposed to liberalism. Illiberal democracy is capable of integrating what is valuable in liberalism without allowing the liberal framework to take over.

Nationalism from Maccabees to Modernity, Part I: Covenants over Conquerors

Nationalism from Maccabees to Modernity, Part I: Covenants over Conquerors

The champions of an imperial and of a national world order were and are sons to a mixed heritage. This essay explores the deeper compatibility of Europe’s Greco-Roman and Biblical inheritances, as well as of national political entities and broader universal commitments. 

A New Framework for Freedom

A New Framework for Freedom

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.

May 22, 2022
Criminalising ‘Conversion Therapy’ in a Liberal Democracy

Criminalising ‘Conversion Therapy’ in a Liberal Democracy

How is it, we may ask ourselves, sexuality is widely deemed something fluid, unless its fluidity runs towards heterosexuality, and then all of a sudden sexuality becomes a binary phenomenon that cannot undergo any change?

May 20, 2022
Le Chambon

Le Chambon

It is the ordinary nature of their goodness that makes the story of Le Chambon such a miracle. It was weathered men and women with brittle hands, shiny with callouses from backbreaking work, hard as oak and often gnarled with age, who did these things.

Sacré-Cœur Basilica: Counter-Revolution Incarnate

Sacré-Cœur Basilica: Counter-Revolution Incarnate

As I knelt to pray my rosary before the Blessed Sacrament, I was struck by the astonishing confidence required to build Sacré-Cœur. In 1789, France, the Church’s eldest daughter, declared herself no longer a disciple of Jesus Christ but an apostate.

May 15, 2022
Futurism, Feminism, and Faith: Musing on Valentine de Saint-Point

Futurism, Feminism, and Faith: Musing on Valentine de Saint-Point

If Europe is to enter a new, restorative cycle, it will not do merely to push against contemporary ‘woke’ elites and the consequences of mass immigration. Her defenders must attend to what drove some of her most perceptive sons and daughters away.

The Peter Pan Generation

The Peter Pan Generation

The ideal of responsibility is based on the simple assumption that with maturity should come a certain readiness to accept the sufferings and burdens of life with dignity. This, if you like, is part of the backbone of Western Civilization.

May 14, 2022
Plasticity against Personhood, or the Philosophy of Microplastics

Plasticity against Personhood, or the Philosophy of Microplastics

Humanity’s ongoing plastic saga suggests that mass production and mass disposability—the same process that replaces fabrication and craftsmanship with production—also reduces our ability to make ourselves, that is, to reproduce.

The Weak Giant

The Weak Giant

For the first time in many decades, German politicians must learn to think, rather than feel— and to assert Germany’s vital national interests.

May 12, 2022
The Wrath of Lesser Sons: What Motivates the Crusade Against Our Culture

The Wrath of Lesser Sons: What Motivates the Crusade Against Our Culture

Our dreary present, in its moralizing arrogance, believes it can judge countless generations of our ancestors, while refusing to even try and grasp the spiritual richness of our past.

May 9, 2022
Modern Russia and the Russian Aristocracy

Modern Russia and the Russian Aristocracy

Contrary to what many Western journalists and politicians persistently assume, there exists little continuity between Imperial Russia and the Soviet regime, just as there was no ideological or political identity between pre-war France and the Vichy regime.

May 9, 2022
Freedom

Freedom

Whether it is the threat of being canceled or anxious concerns that we’ll lose out in the meritocratic race for success, we’re more and more enslaved and less and less free. We’ve lost sight of the true sources of freedom, which come not from permission but from commitment.

May 8, 2022