All your sophisters cannot produce anything better adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we have pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and magazines of our rights and privileges. ~ Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution [...]

The National Review features a fantastic piece by Alexander Benard and Anthony Dick on America’s True Genius. The thesis: change does not make a nation great, and it certainly is not what has made America great. Rather, it is the constitutionally-mandated stability of our system of laws – the difficulty of implementing radical change – [...]

So, America has elected its next President, its next Vice President, 35 Senators, 435 members of the House of Representatives, and thousands of state and local officers. We did it, again, without violence or bloodshed, with a minimum of intimidation, with a minimum of fraud, and, in general, with great dignity. There can be no [...]

“To avoid therefore the evils of inconstancy and versatility, ten thousand times worse than those of obstinacy and the blindest prejudice, we have consecrated the state, that no man should approach to look into its defects or corruptions but with due caution; that he should never dream of beginning its reformation by its subversion; that [...]

I have one request of Americans this week: Please, don’t immanentize the Eschaton.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking – far too much, actually – about this election. I am not going to blog here about the relative merits of each candidate – anyone undecided between these two extremely different candidates at this point hasn’t been paying attention. In fact, this will probably be my last election-related [...]

Redstate has a post by Pejman Yousefzadeh, Barack Obama: That Burkean Chicagoan, that I found very interesting and right on the money. I think Obama’s association with the University of Chicago has somehow been widely interpreted as a signal that he is actually somewhat conservative, or at least moderate, in a somewhat Burkean sense. This [...]

There has been a huge amount of blogging on Burkean conservatism, especially as it relates to John McCain, over the last couple of weeks. I have relatively little to add to the mix, except to say that it’s important to distinguish between Burkean conservatism and other forms of politics called conservative. Burkeans favor change, but [...]

I am, I admit, a paleocapitalist and (mostly a) paleoconservative. That said, I do not think oil company executives – or any other corporate executives – should have to defend their company’s profits, unless illegally gained. For that reason, this meddling strikes me as ridiculous. Lest we forget, oil is among the most volatile and [...]

See Arthur C. Brooks on Charitable Giving & Barack Obama on National Review Online (yes, my title pun was intended).