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Archive of posts published in the tag: Suicide of the West

Our Exaggerated Demise

While we should not ignore the problems we do have, we should also not ignore the means that have given us the exponential improvements we have enjoyed.  Jonah Goldberg in The Suicide of the West emphasizes that human progress is neither natural or inevitable.

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Entitlement and Gratitude

“The American Founding’s glory is that those English colonists took their cousins’ tradition, purified it into a political ideology, and extended it farther than the English ever dreamed. “

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Little Platoons of Civil Society

Socialism and its cousin, Progressivism, are not the forward-thinking ideologies they pretend, but regressions to the natural tendencies of man.

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Gardens of Liberty

The government of the Founders’ Constitution is more than merely a “night watchman state,” but not very much more. It creates the rules of the garden and the gardeners and little more. This does not mean the government cannot intervene in the society or the economy. It means that, when it does so, it should be to protect liberty, which Madison defined in Federalist No. 10 as “the first object of government.” Jonah Goldberg

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Path Dependence

“The fact that the Constitution is hard to change— a great frustration to passionate political movements of every stripe— automatically confers deep democratic legitimacy to any successful alterations and provides assurance that we will not sacrifice some fundamental liberty in the heat of a given moment. ” J Goldberg

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Progress is Not Inevitable

Reform is seductive.  The faults of the status quo and our current institutions are vivid, magnified in an academic media complex that considers ‘viral’ an achievement. Reform is inchoate and illusive with faults yet to be recognized, presently clear only in the minds of critics and reactionaries.  In the future these faults are the subject of history.

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Passion and Persuasion

“Our political system was designed to be deliberative. Deliberation is a waste of time if minds cannot be changed. But today, partisans left and right value purity and passion over persuasion. Opponents aren’t potential converts; they’re an abstract and unredeemable them, and their tears, we’re told, are delicious.”

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Artificial Tribes

“Populism, which always wants the national government to solve local problems, is in vogue on left and right precisely because local institutions and civil society generally no longer do their jobs. “

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