One of the fundamental laws of government powers is that they always invite mission-creep expansion. Laws that begin their lives as benevolent instruments for the common good can easily morph into tools of power for the sake of power itself. As the EU Commission finalizes its proposal for a Single Market Emergency Instrument, the citizens of the EU are well advised to keep themselves informed of that proposal.
What Augustine witnessed in his friend—that interior opposition between fidelity to the peace of Christ and addiction to violence—Joseph de Maistre presented at the societal level. Why was it that, prior to the arrival of Christianity, every culture practiced sacrifice, including human sacrifice? The reason, for Maistre, was that every society was seeking in nature what could only come by supernatural intervention.
The British economy has been largely unaffected by its exit from the European Union. That is not to say there will not be other repercussions; there is an ongoing debate about the future of the financial industry in London, with the implication that the British capital may lose its status as a global hub for the financial industry.
There are grave consequences from having a poor property rights ecosystem. Cuba is an example.
The Right in France finds its birth in the original trauma of the French Revolution. It is on the side of those who lost, of a history that will never be written again. The French Revolution was also a period of intense persecution of the Catholic religion, and a painful synthesis took place in people’s minds: a fallen monarchy united to the martyred faith. The right-wing remained affixed to this double cause to defend.
With the case ‘Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization,’ pro-life activists are holding their breath and daring to hope that a post-Roe America may be within reach.
Once countries with costly governments have created a Berlin Wall around their high-tax jurisdictions, they will be free to collude on other taxes beyond the corporate income tax. Personal income taxes, wealth taxes, death taxes… there is no end to the imagination of a government that does not have to worry about tax competition.
Central banks are recognizing that their own sustained monetary expansion has now awoken the sleeping giant of inflation. The goal now is to avoid trapping us in the same protracted inflation period we experienced 40 years ago.
Already before Boric takes office in March next year, there are troubling signs that he may lead his country far and fast down the same road that Venezuela took under Hugo Chavez.
Growing capital formation and a rising standard of living are irrefutable evidence of how the Hungarian government is successfully putting its conservative values to work. With a distinctly conservative welfare state, Mr. Orbán has led his country out of a demographic slump. Marriage and birth rates are up noticeably, which is precisely what the Hungarian government was aiming for.
Laurent Wauquiez, president of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, has just announced that he would put an end to the public subsidy previously granted to the branch of Institut d’Etudes Politiques located in Grenoble due to its “ideological and communitarian drift.”
How could an ‘innocent’ citizens’ initiative for democracy bring about powers of government that would pose any threat to our freedom? To answer this question, we first need to remember that freedom is not only lost to boots and bayonets. We can, actually, vote away our own freedom. By giving up our rights to government, small slices at a time, we can lose control over our lives just as definitively as if it happened through open oppression.
It seems that both the architects of the Brave New World and the serfs who live in it actually fear the state of nature found in the Rousseauian paradise. In fact, we have a profound aversion to nature. Rather than acting like animals, we feel a kind of queasiness not only when we witness the more animal-side of human life, but even when we witness animals acting like animals.
There is an ethical case to be made against vaccine mandates. It is far from straightforward, and it requires careful reasoning and methodical analysis. This conversation would be centered around the question about the role of government in our lives.
Until a few months ago, the French media believed that the presidential campaign would be a repeat of the 2017 campaign, with a second round that would pit Emmanuel Macron against Marine Le Pen and end with the re-election of Emmanuel Macron. Today, nothing is written in stone, and the fundamentally unpredictable nature of political life gives us hope.
Nowadays, HR departments are focused on pursuing a ‘woke’ culture, dictating what staff can say or do or even think (or increasingly not), and introducing evidence-free, trendy but transient initiatives such as mandatory unconscious bias training, and ‘Equity, Diversity and Inclusion’ courses.
In terms of ecology, conservatism is far from a nostalgic fixation. It can feed a profoundly human ecology, testify to a deep love of life, and help develop lasting attachments to a life shaped by the constant search for perfection and harmony.
The ‘classical liberal’ emphasis on negative freedoms tends to appeal to older conservatives, perhaps because they assume that what they grew up with was the spontaneous, neutral state of things, ever ready to mushroom forth again, just as soon as things return to normal. Yet sometimes, finding one’s home means building it, and that might take a village.
As a sovereign country, Ukraine is in its full right to make whatever constitutional reforms it sees fit. Their right to independence is as strong as is Russia’s right to national security. If one is weighed against the other, national sovereignty always wins.
The European Commission’s promotional material makes ‘Next Generation EU’ comes across as oddly remote from the task of actually facilitating Europe’s next generation. Nor is it meant for a specialized audience, as it lacks any reference to how one might actually procure the product being advertised—namely, funding.
We rarely learn from history; but we persistently repeat it.
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.
A reformed Ukraine could be the most dangerous development imaginable for those in Moscow who would like to keep things the way they are.
The terrible incident of the Notre Dame fire should have been the occasion to renovate a church so damaged by the ravages of time, to make it even more beautiful. Instead, the sorcerer’s apprentices in charge of its destiny have preferred to indulge in their dreams of experimentation, as if a centuries-old cathedral were a creative laboratory subsidized by the Ministry of Culture.
Having managed the country with the sole aim of keeping her ‘clientelist’ system in power for as long as possible, Angela Merkel is disappearing from the political scene—just as the first cracks in the German ‘ship of state’ are beginning to show.
If the EC and ECJ are to have general power of competence, then the EU becomes not about the pooling of sovereignty but about the removal of sovereignty of the member states.
Bullying a part of the population into undergoing a certain medical procedure is a poor precedent, given the dystopian applications of the instrument that one can imagine.
Like any great performer, Boris knows his audience. So when, last month, it came to his first in-person speech at a Tory Party conference as leader—it is not surprising that we heard little about the challenges facing the UK. Instead, we were left smiling at jokes about lockdowns accounting for the fall in reported crime or, better still, about the return of beavers to the British countryside—“Build back beavers”—and enough alliteration to keep a poet happy for months. Here was Boris promising nothing except that it would all be alright.
Progressives believe that the right-wing populists must be destroyed. Not because populists are smashing norms; it is because they are, in many cases, defending the norms that progressives are busy dismantling.
A good chair can be ‘conservative’ because it speaks of ‘home’—the place that Roger Scruton said “defines us, that we hold in trust for our descendants, and that we don’t want to spoil.”
