Mr. President, Friends and Fellow Citizens : He who could address this audience without a quailing sensation, has stronger nerves than I have. I do not remember ever to have appeared as a speaker before any assembly more shrinkingly, nor with greater distrust of my ability, than I do this day. A feeling has crept […]
LATEST ARTICLES
Our Promissory Note
Living downstream from the American founding, we are heirs today to what Martin Luther King, Jr., in his most famous speech, referred to as the “promissory note” implicit in our Declaration of Independence: that “all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the […]
The 4th of July in 2020
We have entered the decade of the Declaration of Independence Semiquincentennial with social turmoil similar in magnitude to the fateful 1770s. Simultaneous and intersecting crises in public health, the economy, and race relations have made 2020 feel more like a time to start fresh than a time to celebrate the past. Many Americans find themselves […]
Madison and the Merchant Class
Nationalist populism is a hostile reaction to globalization and its transformation of nation-states. As I argued in a previous Starting Points essay, what makes this movement “nationalist” is the angry sentiment among populists that elites today are rootless cosmopolitans who have betrayed their native countries. The “Davos Man” is despised because he supposedly regards all […]
Book Review: Originalism’s Promise
It is no small feat in 2020 to say something original about originalism. Lee Strang’s Originalism’s Promise: A Natural Law Account of the American Constitution (Cambridge University Press, 2019), however, is more than up to the task. The book is at once ambitious and minutely detailed (Chapter Two alone contains a jaw-dropping 546 footnotes), carefully […]
