While militant ideologies can appear as a source of stark clarity in an often-muddled world, their excesses only serve to erode the tradition of liberty. Amid historical instability, people often sought the simple security of absolutes. Thomas Hobbes insisted that…

The centerpiece of the recently defeated Senate Bill 1 was the nationalization of voting laws. It would have taken away from the states the right to govern their own elections, something they have enjoyed since the inception of American independence….

Long before I became acquainted with Saul Alinsky and his tactics, I had read Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion. Draeger, one of the important characters in that book, is a skilled union organizer who comes to a coastal Oregon…

First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country  Thomas E. Ricks (Harper, 416 pages, $23) The next time I start a college, I’d like to hire Thomas E. Ricks as the…

Professor Marvin Fox once said to a graduate philosophy class, “God doesn’t command us to breathe.” His point was that there is no need to command people to do something they will do anyway. Instead, a commandment directs us to…

Hours after perhaps a thousand Trump supporters misbehaved in the Capitol (while, outside, tens of thousands of Trump supporters were well-behaved), purple rhetoric was the order of the night in the Senate chamber. A lot of verbal striking was going…

Democracies have taken great pains to separate religion and the workings of law and politics. And surely, the intimacy of the religious connection of the human being and God should not be subject to the compulsion of the state. But…

Joe Biden has promised to complete the “fundamental transformation” of America that Barack Obama started. Toward that end, he vows to radicalize the judiciary. He intends to stack it with as many liberal activists as possible, whose rulings would eliminate…

Though we could talk for hours about the meaning of life and liberty, at least everyone knows the basic meanings of the words. “Pursuit of happiness,” however, is not so obvious. John Adams provided some helpful insight into all three…