The Supreme Court has been facing a crisis of public confidence. This was true even prior to the controversy around Justice Clarence Thomas’s undisclosed financial ties to a billionaire conservative political donor, and prior to the spate of right-leaning rulings that marked the end of the court’s most recent term. Gallup reported last fall that […]
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Ben Franklin, The Albany Plan, and the Heart of American Consensus
Benjamin Franklin has avoided the fate of the other Founding Fathers in that he has not become a target for historians. People like George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, even Robert Morris – the entire starting line-up of the American Revolution – have all become enmeshed in ideological and political conflicts, in their […]
Book Review: The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics
The following is a review of The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics: Political Theology, Natural Law, and the American Founding, by Kody W. Cooper and Justin Buckley Dyer (Cambridge University Press, 2022). An enduring challenge in politics is how to achieve a strong and unified community amidst cultural and religious diversity. From ancient […]
Classical Republicanism, Lockean Liberalism, and the Creation of the American Republic
As several scholars, like Bernard Bailyn, Caroline Robbins, and Gordon Wood, have reminded us, a number of ideological influences have played a significant role in the creation of the American republic. Among them were two opposing concepts that were at the center of the Founders’ debate over the meaning of republicanism in America. One was […]
Burke and Adams: Tradition vs. Constitutionalism
In his 1953 classic The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk stresses what he sees as the remarkable similarity in political thinking between Edmund Burke, the “Father of Western Conservatism,” and John Adams, often referred to as the first great American conservative. Kirk asserts that “it is difficult to draw any clear line of demarcation” between the […]
