Tagged: John Dewey

Into the Shallows, aka World Update

The U.S. Congress has passed, and President Biden has signed into law, The Inflation Reduction Act. This law will bring sweeping changes to the United States economy and society, and, indirectly, to the world. None of those changes will be in any way related to inflation per se, let alone to reducing it. So why, the innocent child might reasonably ask, is it...

Reflections: Courage, Lyricism, Self-Knowledge

It’s all relative.— I have never felt particularly brave in my life. Nor do I believe I have ever acted with any special degree of courage even in an isolated moment. On the contrary, I have often been disappointed at what I have regarded as a deficiency in this area. These days, however, judging myself relative to what I see around me, I...

Achieving a “Social Consensus” for Tyranny

One of the great Kafkaesque elements of this moment in humanity’s collapse is the repeated sense, experienced only by the conscious minority, we happy few, that we are watching our fellow men behaving as people behave in nightmares — walking directly into obvious traps or off cliffs, seemingly without an iota of doubt or concern. We watch those around us, and around the...

Why Social Media Exists

A few days ago, Harry Potter author and knee-jerk progressive J.K. Rowling tweeted support for one Maya Forstater, who got fired from her job as a tax specialist for saying that “pro-science” progressives ought to accept the fact that men cannot change into women, even if this fact hurts some men’s feelings. For her simple expression of a belief so basic that until...

An Honest Marxist

Someone in Tennessee has hung an effigy of U.S. Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn from a tree, accompanied by the amusing slogan, “STOP THE HATE.” In response to this, I see that Soopermexican at Right Scoop is describing this as “the winner of the political demonstration most lacking in self-awareness.” I disagree. “Lack of self-awareness” is giving them too much benefit of the doubt....

On Restoring American Individualism

The following, originally published at American Thinker in 2012, was my attempt to offer a synoptic account of the intellectual grounding of modern constitutional republicanism — i.e., political freedom — and of how that grounding is undermined by progressivism. This essay is assigned annually in a required discussion course taught at University of Missouri, where I suppose it has made hundreds of young...