"Are Women Human?"

Ben Domenech, in "She Loved God, Booze, And Cigarettes — And She Thought...," notes that today is the birthday of Dorothy L. Sayers, the author of very good, "Golden Age," mysteries featuring Lord Peter Wimsey. But she was much more:

If you are a Christian, you may know Sayers as someone who, while not a member of the infamous men-only Inklings, was a close friend of some of its members, including C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams. ....

If you’re a true nerd, you may even know Sayers as a founding member of the renowned Detection Club, whose first members included Agatha Christie and whose first president was G.K. Chesterton. She famously authored the oath to be sworn over a skull by its invite-only members: “Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or Act of God?” She would go on to curate great collections of detective fiction published by some of the top writers in the field. ....

The daughter of a vicar, she behaved like nothing of the sort, despite her Christian faith. She loved to smoke and drink and ride her motorcycle, and as an advertising writer in the 1930s, she created the famed Guinness toucan, the ads for which you’ll still find hanging around your Irish local pub.

What certainly deserves to be known and appreciated more about her is that Sayers’ unique life and experience gave her an understanding of human nature that proved prescient for our day and age, and particularly for the fractious relationship between modern men and women. .... (more)

Domenech proceeds to quote from Sayers' "Are Women Human?" It can be found online here. A few excerpts:

...[W]e have, I think, allowed ourselves to drift into asserting that “a woman is as good as a man,” without always pausing to think what exactly we mean by that. What, I feel, we ought to mean is something so obvious that it is apt to escape attention altogether, viz: not that every woman is, in virtue of her sex, as strong, clever, artistic, level-headed, industrious and so forth as any man that can be mentioned; but, that a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual. What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person. A certain amount of classification is, of course, necessary for practical purposes: there is no harm in saying that women, as a class, have smaller bones than men, wear lighter clothing, have more hair on their heads and less on their faces, go more pertinaciously to church or the cinema, or have more patience with small and noisy babies. In the same way, we may say that stout people of both sexes are commonly better-tempered than thin ones, or that university dons of both sexes are more pedantic in their speech than agricultural labourers, or that Communists of both sexes are more ferocious than Fascists — or the other way round. What is unreasonable and irritating is to assume that all one’s tastes and preferences have to be conditioned by the class to which one belongs. That has been the very common error into which men have frequently fallen about women — and it is the error into which feminist women are, perhaps, a little inclined to fall into about themselves. ....

We are much too much inclined in these days to divide people into permanent categories, forgetting that a category only exists for its special purpose and must be forgotten as soon as that purpose is served. There is a fundamental difference between men and women, but it is not the only fundamental difference in the world. There is a sense in which my charwoman and I have more in common than either of us has with, say, Mr. Bernard Shaw; on the other hand, in a discussion about art and literature, Mr. Shaw and I should probably find we had more fundamental interests in common than either of us had with my charwoman. I grant that, even so, he and I should disagree ferociously about the eating of meat — but that is not a difference between the sexes — on that point, the late Mr. G.K. Chesterton would have sided with me against the representative of his own sex. Then there are points on which I, and many of my own generation of both sexes, should find ourselves heartily in agreement; but on which the rising generation of young men and women would find us too incomprehensibly stupid for words. A difference of age is as fundamental as a difference of sex; and so is a difference of nationality. All categories, if they are insisted upon beyond the immediate purpose which they serve, breed class antagonism and disruption in the state, and that is why they are dangerous. ....

Indeed, it is my experience that both men and women are fundamentally human, and that there is very little mystery about either sex, except the exasperating mysteriousness of human beings in general. And though for certain purposes it may still be necessary, as it undoubtedly was in the immediate past, for women to band themselves together, as women, to secure recognition of their requirements as a sex, I am sure that the time has now come to insist more strongly on each woman’s — and indeed each man’s — requirements as an individual person. It used to be said that women had no esprit de corps; we have proved that we have — do not let us run into the opposite error of insisting that there is an aggressively feminist “point of view” about everything. To oppose one class perpetually to another — young against old, manual labour against brain-worker, rich against poor, woman against man — is to split the foundations of the State; and if the cleavage runs too deep, there remains no remedy but force and dictatorship. If you wish to preserve a free democracy, you must base it — not on classes and categories, for this will land you in the totalitarian State, where no one may act or think except as the member of a category. You must base it upon the individual Tom, Dick and Harry, on the individual Jack and Jill — in fact, upon you and me. (more, the entire essay)

Ben Domenech, "She Loved God, Booze, And Cigarettes — And She Thought," DailyWire, June13, 2026.

"Back when I didn’t believe in God..."

I found this book review very much worth reading. David Brooks:

Back when I didn’t believe in God, I did a lot of church shopping. I was trying to figure out which denomination of atheism I could have faith in. There were so many to choose from! Marxists, Freudians, existentialists, the hard-core science types like Richard Dawkins, and the rationalist philosophers like Bertrand Russell. In my Fatherless mansion, there were many rooms.

As I looked across all these different flavours of atheism, I think I intuited something that Christopher Beha makes explicit in his book Why I Am Not an Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer. Beha argues that it is a fallacy to define atheism as simply an absence of belief.

Atheists sometimes like to portray themselves that way. They like to tell what philosopher Charles Taylor calls subtraction stories: Over the last thousands of years, religious people built up all this mumbo-jumbo about the supposed supernatural world. The job for any reasonable person is to strip all that away and get down to reality itself—the stuff we can see, feel, and measure. In this telling, atheists don’t subscribe to a creed or a faith; they are just taking a neutral, objective look at empirical reality and following the evidence.

Beha counters that this is nonsense. In fact, atheists have a worldview just like anybody else. A worldview is a system of belief that describes the underlying nature of reality, a theory of how we ought to act, and a theory of knowledge, where we should go for wisdom. ....

Humans are structured in such a way that it is hard for us to feel content unless our mess of desires is drawn by something outside ourselves, some supreme love that harmonizes them. Humans were built in such a way that it is hard for us to find peace through self-analysis, as the rationalists might suppose, or self-creation, as the Romantics argue, but only through the self-emptying love that flows from a sanctified soul.

The second advantage of the religious worldview is that it provides a structure for that yearning; it provides a way. Many secular worldviews are neutral about ends. It’s up to each person to define the goal of their life. (This is not true of Marxism, which is a religion without God.) Many secular worldviews have failed to come up with compelling systems of morality precisely because, without a concept of what life is for, it is hard to come up with justifications that separate right from wrong. .... (more)

David Brooks, "More Than Evolution Requires: Christopher Beha’s journey out of atheism," Comment

“To be an American is not to be someone, but to believe in something.”

Allen Guelzo, historian of the American Civil War, comments on what was lost when Gordon Wood was killed. Wood was one of the most influential historians of the American Revolution. He died in a grocery store parking lot accident at 92. Guelzo on Wood:

...Wood made me understand how thoroughly stuck in the antique ways of pre-modern European society Americans were on the eve of 1776, a world in which slavery was treated with a shrug of the shoulders as just one more practice of servitude, and where commerce functioned within webs of patronage, not customers. The Revolution, Wood explained, constituted a sharp and decisive break with that world. Servitude disappears in America and slavery becomes an aberration that demands either bizarre excuses or unprecedented denunciation. Gentleman is no longer a rank for those who do not work with their hands, but merely a description of polite behavior; honor shrinks as a symbol of importance, and business becomes dominated by the mobility and impersonality of banks and paper money. With a jolt, it becomes clear how, in the span of a single generation, Americans become the people who Tocqueville admired and who elected Lincoln as president.

Wood’s trademarks were his strict attention to written sources, and his relative indifference to social, cultural, and ethnic history. .... When Creation was published in 1969, Wood was considered avant-garde because his revolutionaries seemed to pay no attention to the restrained and lofty political models of Greece and Rome. But he would remain just as resistant to the import of more recent ideological fashions into history writing, and especially the attempt to convert historical process into broad binary categories of oppressed/oppressor or settler/indigenous. In 2019, he broke with a large community of historians when he expressed his skepticism toward the 1619 Project’s proposal that slavery was the dominant fact of American life and that the Revolution was a device for protecting it. In Wood’s eyes, this was absurd. The 1619 Project might be pardoned as an example of over-wrought journalism, but it should not be mistaken for sober-sided history-writing, and it was important for the life a nation for historians to say so. “We all want justice,” he wrote, “but not at the expense of truth.” ....

As fully as he repudiated the 1619 Project, he also repudiated the more recent nonsense which insists that there is an American “heritage” conferred by ancestry from the Mayflower or Valley Forge. “There is no American ethnicity to back up the state,” he wrote in one of his last essays. To the contrary, it was the Revolutionary state and its fiery and universalistic Declaration of Independence which made the American nation. “To be an American is not to be someone,” he wrote, “but to believe in something.”

Gordon Wood understood that historians are the memory system of a democracy. Because the American democracy has been organized around a set of propositions which have political meaning, it is vital to understand where that political meaning came from, and that is the task of the historian. .... (more)

Allen C. Guelzo, "In Memoriam, Gordon S. Wood," National Review, June 10. 2026.

The trouble with the Humanities

Many colleges, both private and many campuses of state schools, are in trouble. Demographics indicate that there are, and will be, fewer and fewer students of college age. Less expensive alternatives and the prospect of higher pay also lead to alternatives like junior colleges and trade schools. But some of the wounds have been self-inflicted. From the "Special Commission Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences":

The report is prompted by the widespread sense that, despite their value and their promise, the humanistic disciplines are in trouble. It is, of course, widely recognized that undergraduate enrollments in these disciplines have plummeted and that there have been numerous complaints about the content of syllabi. However, with rare exceptions, our committee has not focused on these issues. Our concern has rather been the quality of academic scholarship in this domain.

Scholarship on matters of human concern has been a source of controversy from the start — witness the trial of Socrates for corrupting the youth of Athens. In recent years, however, the complaint has assumed a more specific form, namely, that the traditional goal of coming to understand the human world through careful scholarship has been subordinated to, or even displaced by, a “political” goal: the aim of realizing a conception of social justice nowadays associated with the progressive left. More specifically, the complaint is that scholarly standards for the assessment of academic work have been distorted within these disciplines both to privilege work on topics that are taken to be relevant to social justice, and much more importantly, to replace more traditional standards for assessing academic scholarship with political standards designed to ensure that only politically acceptable work is published, taught and valorized. ....

...[O]ur review of the disciplines paints a mixed picture. Every field we have studied shows some signs of the pathologies sketched above: a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of longstanding ideals of rigor and objectivity. In some fields (e.g., philosophy) the problems are largely confined to a single subfield focused on a charged topic. In others (e.g., history), while there are streams of scholarship in which standards have been politicized in problematic ways, they run alongside more dominant streams in which a wide range of views is tolerated, and appropriately scholarly standards are brought to bear. In the most extreme cases (e.g., anthropology), we see a widespread deterioration in scholarly standards grounded in a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished. ....

...[W]hile we have focused entirely on the humanities and the humanistic social sciences, there is reason to believe that the problems we have identified exist to some extent in other areas, including the natural sciences. Our report does not speak to these larger issues but may form a useful template for the study of them. Second, within the humanities and social sciences, we have focused exclusively on core academic disciplines represented at research universities by Ph.D.-granting departments in schools of Arts and Sciences rather than the academic work generated by interdisciplinary units of various sorts and by scholars elsewhere in the university, e.g., in schools of education, social work, communications and so forth. There is reason to believe that the problems we have identified in the core disciplines are significantly more serious in some of these allied areas, but we have not studied these issues in detail. ....

An indispensable condition for serious scholarship in any area is institutional openness to a range of ideas. That openness requires firmly resisting any effort to judge scholarly work based on its conformity to a priori ideological constraints. .... (more, very much worth reading if you care about higher education).

"Special Commission Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences," April 5, 2026.

Humbly grateful

June 6, 1944

From Patrick Kurp, Those Both Dead and Alive Who Did It for You:

Now that it is over it seems to me a pure miracle that we ever took the beach at all. For some of our units it was easy, but in this special sector where I am now our troops faced such odds that our getting ashore was like my whipping Joe Louis down to a pulp. . .

Note Ernie Pyle’s use of the first-person plural — “we” took the beach, “our units,” “our troops.” Pyle could assume his readers — tens of thousands of them back home — shared a unanimity of purpose with the troops on June 6, 1944 — D-Day. At a symbolic though not trivial level, Pyle and his readers were invading France, retaking Europe, defeating Hitler. Such a consensus — call it reflexive patriotism — seems impossible today. On June 6, an estimated 4,414 Allied soldiers were killed, of whom 2,501 were Americans. The rest were from the United Kingdom and Canada. Pyle continues his thought:

In this column I want to tell you what the opening of the second front in this one sector entailed, so that you can know and appreciate and forever be humbly grateful to those both dead and alive who did it for you.

.... Pyle covered the war from December 1940 until April 1945. He filed dispatches from Great Britain, North Africa, Sicily, Italy, France and the Pacific. On April 18, 1945, he was killed by Japanese machine-gun fire on the island of Ie Shima near Okinawa. .... (more)

The quotations are from Ernie’s War: The Best of Ernie Pyle’s World War II Dispatches

Patrick Kurp, "Those Both Dead and Alive Who Did It for You," Anecdotal Evidence, June 6, 2023.

Useful idiots

About useful idiots and fellow travelers: today there are many on both the Left and the Right.

What is the difference between a useful idiot and a fellow traveler? For the record, “useful idiots” (a term coined not by Vladimir Lenin but first used mockingly in Britain against Russian nihilists of the 1860s) are unaware that they are being used for propaganda purposes by sinister regimes. Fellow travelers, on the other hand, are well aware but don’t care.

In Soviet times, world-class celebrities such as Pablo Picasso, George Bernard Shaw, John Steinbeck, André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre and John Dos Passos all made carefully orchestrated trips to admire the achievements of the mighty USSR.

Most of these Commie-curious pilgrims were deeply impressed. “Tomorrow I leave this land of hope,” wrote Shaw in 1931 after a luxury river cruise and a visit to Stalin in the Kremlin, “and return to our Western countries – the countries of despair.” Others later became disillusioned. But for 70 years Kremlin propagandists were able to enlist a sizeable chunk of the West’s intellectuals to their cause. ....

This week, a motley crew of Westerners, all self-professed Putin fanboys and girls, appeared at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) to express their solidarity with Holy Russia. Among them were manosphere influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate, who face charges in Romania and Britain for alleged rape, actual bodily harm, human trafficking and controlling prostitution for gain. ....

American Right-wing influencer Candace Owens was at the forum too, as was the Kremlin’s favourite action hero Steven Seagal, beloved among pensioners as the star of history’s cheesiest karate movies. Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector and convicted paedophile, attended in his capacity as a prominent pro-Kremlin voice. ....

The Kremlin’s attempts to demonstrate that it still has friends and supporters in the West look pathetic, ham-handed and deeply cringe. It’s a sad indication of Russia’s inferiority complex that they still crave validation by Westerners – even if they’re Q-Anon Tik-Tokers, steroidal weirdos and convicted perverts. And it’s a powerful indication of how far Russia’s soft power has fallen that they can’t recruit even half-decent idiots any more. (more)

Owen Matthews, "Andrew Tate’s bizarre trip to Russia shows how ridiculous Putin has become," The Telegraph, June 5, 2026.

"I know that my Redeemer lives..."

In 1988, I gave my pastor, Rev. Kevin Butler, a sealed envelope containing my "Funeral and Burial Instructions." Recently, his wife, Janet, came across that envelope in his desk. I was curious about my thoughts on such matters almost forty years ago, so I asked if it could be mailed to me. It came today (thanks, Janet). Not much has changed, although my hymn selections might vary a bit. Following the burial instructions, I wrote:

3. I am a Christian. I believe that I will live eternally in the presence of God. I wish a service that reflects that fact. If possible, I would like the following elements to be a part of that service:

• "The Order for the Burial of the Dead" from The Book of Common Prayer, 1559. I do not want a modern language version.
• Hymns: "Amazing Grace," especially the verse: "When we've been there ten thousand years..." Isaac Watts' "O God, Our Help in Ages Past" to St Anne's tune.
• If possible, a soloist and choir to sing "O Taste and See" by Ralph Vaughan Williams from the Sacred and Secular Songs.
• Only the barest and briefest eulogy, or none at all.
• No choruses and as little sentimentality as possible.

4. The service must be conducted by someone who is orthodox in Christian doctrine and who believes the words he will say or read.

Today, I might add or substitute the hymn "How Firm a Foundation." The Vaughan Williams is probably a bit much to ask (see below). I would change the Prayer Book selection for the scriptures, prayers, and readings to the 1662 version of "The Order for the Burial of the Dead." By and large, though, it was fine — just a description of the ordinary elements of a Christian funeral with some personalization. I won't mind if the need for such instruction is postponed for a while.

"You can't return"

Patrick Kurp:

“I am a nostalgist. More susceptible to the pull of the past than many of those around me, I am also aware of my condition, even somewhat ashamed of it.”

Rarely does someone speak so precisely for me. Boris Dralyuk is writing in “On Nostalgia: Ever Cleaner, Ever More Pillowy.” Few states leave me as conflicted as nostalgia. Every day my thoughts turn to the past. It’s as involuntary as a heart attack. Is this associated with aging? Of course. Nostalgia is misunderstood as a wish to return to the past or at least flee from the present. That’s not my desire. In fact, nostalgia is made more piercingly bittersweet by the knowledge that you can’t return, that even the sweetest, most vivid memory is a dream.

Patrick Kurp, "An Emotion I Must Have Been Inventing," Anecdotal Evidence, June 2, 2026.

Trees

I've owned this book for some time, but only started reading it yesterday. It is The Hidden Life of Trees, by Peter Wohlleben. Definitely not my usual fare. But I am finding it fascinating (the influence of Tolkien?). I'm neither a hunter nor a camper. I'm a pretty urban person, so I don't experience forests much. Nevertheless...

From the Forward, not by the author, but a good introduction:

WE READ IN fairy tales of trees with human faces, trees that can talk, and sometimes walk. This enchanted forest is the kind of place, I feel sure, that Peter Wohlleben inhabits. His deep understanding of the lives of trees, reached through decades of careful observation and study, reveals a world so astonishing that if you read his book, I believe that forests will become magical places for you, too.

One reason that many of us fail to understand trees is that they live on a different time scale than us. One of the oldest trees on Earth, a spruce in Sweden, is more than 9,500 years old. That's 115 times longer than the average human lifetime. Creatures with such a luxury of time on their hands can afford to take things at a leisurely pace. The electrical impulses that pass through the roots of trees, for example, move at the slow rate of one-third of an inch per second. But why, you might ask, do trees pass electrical impulses through their tissues at all?

The answer is that trees need to communicate, and electrical impulses are just one of their many means of communication. Trees also use the senses of smell and taste for communication. If a giraffe starts eating an African acacia, the tree releases a chemical into the air that signals that a threat is at hand. As the chemical drifts through the air and reaches other trees, they "smell" it and are warned of the danger. Even before the giraffe reaches them, they begin producing toxic chemicals. Insect pests are dealt with slightly differently. The saliva of leaf-eating insects can be "tasted" by the leaf being eaten. In response, the tree sends out a chemical signal that attracts predators that feed on that particular leaf-eating insect. Life in the slow lane is clearly not always dull.

But the most astonishing thing about trees is how social they are. The trees in a forest care for each other, sometimes even going so far as to nourish the stump of a felled tree for centuries after it was cut down by feeding it sugars and other nutrients, and so keeping it alive. Only some stumps are thus nourished. Perhaps they are the parents of the trees that make up the forest of today. A tree's most important means of staying connected to other trees is a "wood wide web" of soil fungi that connects vegetation in an intimate network that allows the sharing of an enormous amount of information and goods. Scientific research aimed at understanding the astonishing abilities of this partnership between fungi and plant has only just begun.

The reason trees share food and communicate is that they need each other. It takes a forest to create a microclimate suitable for tree growth and sustenance. So it's not surprising that isolated trees have far shorter lives than those living connected together in forests. in forests. Perhaps the saddest plants of all are those we have enslaved in our agricultural systems. They seem to have lost the ability to communicate, and, as Wohlleben says, are thus rendered deaf and dumb. ....

Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, Greystone Books, 2016.

Melodramatic schlock?

Kyle Smith didn't much care for Pressure, a film about the preparation for D-Day which I had been hoping to like. Not so much, now.

A sharp intake of breath greeted the news that Brendan Fraser had agreed to play the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in the D-Day drama Pressure. Brendan Fraser? As Dwight David Eisenhower? ....

Mr. Fraser, the Canadian-American star of George of the Jungle and The Mummy, and an Oscar winner for The Whale, shares top billing with the man playing his chief meteorologist, the recently commissioned RAF Group Captain James Stagg (Andrew Scott). ....

The commander of ground troops, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, tries to bigfoot [Stagg], insisting the attack must go ahead at all costs. The normally sturdy Damian Lewis (who, at the other end of events, was among the first Americans to parachute into Normandy years ago, on Band of Brothers) plays Monty as an almost comically out-of-touch figure who is prepared to sacrifice thousands of lives on the altar of his vanity. ....

If Mr. Lewis’s portrayal is wince-inducing on one end, Mr. Scott’s is almost equally unfortunate. I’ve never seen the latter give a weak performance before....

For anyone with a passing acquaintance with military ways, the movie is eye-gougingly painful, with senior officers lounging around half out of uniform, ties askew or missing, their headgear AWOL when they go outdoors. Capt. Stagg treats Lt. Col. Krick like a private and rarely addresses Eisenhower himself as “Sir.” When Montgomery pops in, Stagg doesn’t even stand up, let alone treat him with one-tenth of the deference due a man who was by then one of the most revered figures in the history of the British military.

It’s as if every actor on hand were told to behave like a vain, semi-insolent millennial. ....

The mushy score, absurdly pompous speeches, and Victorian staginess harmonize with Mr. Fraser’s conception of his role as the emoter in chief. Eisenhower, the very model of quiet composure amid unfathomable stress, this time comes across as a petulant, often rageful ninny who has to be told, again and again, that the weather near the English Channel is volatile. Ike had lived in England for two years by this point.

Today our historical memory of the 1940s stands in severe jeopardy, given that hardly anyone living remembers the war years. For decades thereafter, though, people who knew them well made the war pictures. If Pressure is any indicator, we might be in a new era when what Ike dubbed the Crusade in Europe will be reimagined as melodramatic schlock. (more)

Kyle Smith, "Pressure Review: Brendan Fraser Isn’t Like Ike," Wall Street Journal, May 28, 2026.

Good detective fiction

From CrimeReads, Jeffrey Archer selects the "the ten novels [he] return[s] to from before 1980," excluding Agatha Christie (who got her own list elsewhere). It's a good list. Some excerpts:

• 
  Sherlock Holmes had been dead for eight years when The Hound of the Baskervilles was published. Doyle had killed him at Reichenbach Falls in 1893 because he was tired of him; the public refused to accept it; and Hound—a chronologically earlier case, set before Holmes’s death—was Doyle’s compromise. It is also, by general agreement, his best novel. .... It is gothic. It is patient. Watson is alone on the moor for almost half the book—Holmes does not appear for chapters at a time—and the slow gathering of menace, the fog, the great dog, the family curse, are all sustained for two hundred pages without a single passage that drags. ....
• The Maltese Falcon became a worldwide bestseller, and rightly so. Sam Spade is not Sherlock Holmes. He’s bloody good. He’s not Sherlock Holmes. But it’s a damn good story. And I recommend it. .... Hammett wrote the way he had lived. He had been a Pinkerton operative. He knew, in a way no British crime writer of his generation could have known, what the inside of an actual investigation felt like. The dialogue is harder than English fiction permits itself to be. The morality is bleaker. The book is shorter than you expect. ....
• The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler, written in 1939, is a classic—and of course became a classic film. Its genius is that Marlowe is Sam Spade with better lines. It’s famously complicated. Very difficult to follow at some points, but a wonderful story. .... [N]o reader reads Chandler for the plot. It’s the language. He captures Los Angeles. He captures America. He captures the people. You know you’re on the street with him. That itself is a gift. ....
• The Nine Tailors is set in a Fenland parish where the bell-ringers gather one New Year’s Eve to ring a peal of nine thousand changes—and somewhere in the course of that long, freezing night, a man dies. Lord Peter Wimsey, Sayers’s amateur detective, arrives by accident. .... In the case of The Nine Tailors, what you have is the great Lord Peter Wimsey—who is not a detective. He is a member of the House of Lords. He is an aristocratic peer. He is an amateur. He just loves joining in.

The others include another Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night, Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, Maigret Sets a Trap by Georges Simenon, P.D. James' first Adam Dalgliesh novel, Cover Her Face, the first Inspector Morse novel by Colin Dexter, Last Bus to Woodstock, and an Ellis Peters Cadfael novel. (the full descriptions)

"The Top 10 Classic Detective Novels, According to Jeffrey Archer," CrimeReads, May 29, 2026.

Remember and Honor

 

Politically homeless

Irving Kristol once defined a neoconservative as "a liberal who's been mugged by reality." Former mainstream liberal Democratic mayor of Madison, Dave Cieslewicz, seems to have suffered a mugging. In his recent column, "A Conservative By September?" he writes that he is going to study conservative thought, but "By this I most definitely do not mean anything having to do with Donald Trump, who is no conservative in any event. Trump is a blood and soil, white Christian nationalist populist. I want nothing to do with any of that or with the obnoxious “conservative” blatherers, like Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson." He continues:

I realize that I’m in political no man’s land, no matter what I choose to call myself. I enthusiastically reject what Donald Trump represents. But I’m also repulsed by a liberalism that rejects Enlightenment values to pursue a rigid identity politics in which everyone is either a helpless victim or an undeserving winner based solely on their race or gender. What attracts me most about traditional conservatism is that it sees people as individuals who are primarily responsible for their own lot in life.

Identity politics is now so engrained in the Democratic Party that I don’t see how it can reform itself. Meanwhile, I don’t know how the Republicans can recover from Trump, now that they’re addicted to his populist voters. If the pre-Trump party could ever reconstitute itself, I might give it a try, but I don’t see that happening.

What I question is whether I want to go on thinking of myself as a moderate, non-partisan Democrat or rather as a traditionally conservative (and classically liberal) independent.

I know. Nobody cares. But I do. ....

Reagan said that he didn't leave the Democratic party; it left him. These days, there are a whole lot of us, from both major parties, who feel the same way, politically homeless.

Dave Cieslewicz, "A Conservative By September?," Yellow Stripes & Dead Armadillos: A safe place for moderates in a polarized world, May 19, 2026.

War on the "pigs"

History may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. In a review of Love and Terror: The Helter-Skelter History of the Manson Murders, attention is called to  approval of the Manson "family" murders by political radicals. The Mangione fans are hardly original:

.... Manson sought to discredit the entire proceedings, and was tutored in flamboyant disruptive tactics by Jerry Rubin, one of the “Yippie” (Youth International Party) activist prankster-protesters who’d caused mayhem by donning judges’ robes in court two years earlier, when he’d been charged with inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago.

Rubin claimed to have fallen “in love with Manson” after seeing his “cherubic face and sparkling eyes on national TV”. He wasn’t the only Leftist who saw Manson and his co-defendants as fellow travelers in the revolution to come. Members of the terrorist Weather Underground group equally toasted the Family’s supposed war on “the pigs”, meaning the ruling establishment, on the basis that the victims were white and wealthy. .... (more)

Travis Elborough, "Why Charles Manson was even more crazed than you thought," The Telegraph, May 19, 2026.

"Other forces at work..."

Wise counsel from a work of fiction:

...Tolkien’s assessment of history isn’t just the musings of some dour and curmudgeonly professor. His views never amounted to despair or cynicism; as is his read on history, they are tethered and illumined by hope.

This is alluded to throughout The Lord of the Rings. In the film adaptation, while Frodo and Gandalf are in the Mines of Moria, Frodo laments,

“It's a pity Bilbo didn't kill Gollum when he had the chance.” Notice how Gandalf’s answer isn’t merely a reprimand or a lecture on providence.

Gandalf: “Pity? It's pity that stayed Bilbo's hand. Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends. My heart tells me that Gollum has some part to play in it, for good or evil, before this is over. The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many.”

Frodo: “I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.”

Gandalf: “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world, Frodo, besides that of evil. Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, in which case you were also meant to have it. And that is an encouraging thought.”

There are other forces at work, indeed. ....

In the epic of Tolkien’s literary masterpiece, he does in fantasy and fairy tale what few theologians and professors can do in lectures. In his characters, we see despair assuaged, courage enlivened, contempt tempered. Ultimately, Tolkien reminds us that God has chosen what is foolish in the world to shame the wise (1 Cor. 1:27). Precisely because this is what God does, we can trust that the best strategy for the church and for us individually in the Christian life is not to relent to our reactionary impulses but to “Let folly be our cloak!”

We might think hanging on to the ordinary means of grace is an act of despair, but it's not. We can’t fathom that in these plain practices, by faith, we are participating in the most powerful things in the world. Not in a methodological, technical, or pragmatic sense; the rituals of the church do not coax God as if he’s a feral animal. God’s mystical and mysterious work is beyond all of that. Rather, they are the very inbreaking of the New Creation in our lives.

You see, in a world where God has revealed himself, become incarnate, died for our sins, and risen for our justification, who promises to come again to judge the living and the dead, there is no room for cultural moods to dictate our life and ministry. .... (more)

Caleb Wait, "A Veil Before the Eyes of the Enemy: On Tolkien, Foolishness, and the Ordinary Means of Grace," Modern Reformation, May 19, 2026.

As Memorial Day approaches

Kevin DeYoung on "Why Christians Should Give Thanks for Memorial Day" begins ".... It is always tricky to know how the church should or shouldn’t celebrate patriotic holidays. Certainly, some churches blend church and state in such a way that the kingdom of God morphs into a doctrinally-thin, spiritually nebulous civil religion. But even with this danger, there are a number of good reasons why Christians should give thanks for Memorial Day." DeYoung continues with five points. Two of them:

1. Being a soldier is not a sub-Christian activity. In Luke 3, John the Baptist warns the people to bear fruit in keeping with repentance. The crowds respond favorably to his message and ask him, “What then shall we do?” John tells the rich man to share his tunics, the tax collectors to collect only what belongs to them, and the soldiers to stop their extortion. If ever there was a time to tell the soldiers that true repentance meant resigning from the army, surely this was the time. And yet, John does not tell them that they must give up soldier-work to bear fruit, only that they need to be honest soldiers. The Centurion is even held up by Jesus as the best example of faith he’s seen in Israel (Luke 7:9). Military service, when executed with integrity and in the Spirit of God, is a suitable vocation for the people of God. ....

4. Love of country can be a good thing. As Christians we have dual citizenship. Our first and ultimate allegiance must always be to Christ whose heavenly dwelling is our eternal home. But we are also citizens of an earthly country. We will stand before God not as individuals wiped clean of all earthly nationality, but as people with distinct languages, cultural affinities, and homelands. It is not wrong to love our distinct language, culture, or nationality. Whenever I’m at a ball game I still get choked up during the singing of the National Anthem. I think this is good. Love for God does not mean we love nothing else on earth, but rather that we learn to love the things on earth in the right way and with the right proportions and priorities. Love of country is a good thing, and it is right to honor those who defend the principles that make our country good. .... (more)

Kevin DeYoung, "Why Christians Should Give Thanks for Memorial Day," Clearly Reformed, May 26, 2025.

Are you religious?

In an interesting essay reviewing a book about the role of "religion" in government, a few paragraphs explaining the original understanding of the word:

The English term “religion,” or the Latin religio, originally derives from the Latin verb religare, or “to bind again” (as in “ligation”). The noun religio, in the classical sense, was not conceived as a specific set of beliefs or propositional truth-claims among others. Rather, it was a sort of virtue or characteristic: one who is “religious” has the property of holding fast, or fidelity. That is why the term “religious life,” in the Middle Ages, was not a descriptor of one’s personal theological conviction. Rather, it referred to those who had bound themselves to a particular monastic or lay rule of life. In other words, almost everyone was Christian, but the phrase “the religious” referred to those who’d adopted a particular set of intense devotional practices.

On this older paradigm, individuals exemplifying the virtue of religio were those capable of seeing God as “what He is, namely the summit of all goodness, the truth of things, the light by which the mind operates” and so choosing to “sedulously revere Him in act, in goodness, in truthfulness of speech, in clarity of mind, in love,” as Wilfred Cantwell Smith notes. On this view, crucially, religion was not something other than natural; rather, it was a particular disposition toward the apex or limit condition of reality itself. “Since philosophia is the love and pursuit of truth and wisdom, and since truth and wisdom are, precisely, God, it follows that true philosophia and true religio are identical.” ....

“Religion” is not some zone of private belief or set of axiomatic commitments; rather, theology is the love and knowledge of God that orients the Christian way of life. It cannot be privatized, interiorized, or ever depoliticized. ....

John Ehrett, "The Problem with 'Religion'," Mere Orthodoxy, May 19, 2026.

Grievance culture

From the author of Therapy Nation, who is himself a psychotherapist:

Too much of modern therapy culture keeps people stuck, reinforcing grievance, externalizing blame, and turning everyone else into the reason their lives are so miserable.

The problem begins with my own field. For years, my profession has trained clinicians to elevate validation over challenge, affirmation over interpretation, and emotional fluency over the harder work of behavioral change. ....

The patient becomes good at explanation, more sophisticated in the language of harm, and more certain about who is to blame, but no closer to actual change. Grievance becomes part of identity.

That same emotional habit doesn’t stay confined to the therapy office. People carry it into marriages, friendships, workplaces, and, eventually, politics. Ordinary frustration becomes proof of mistreatment. Ambivalence becomes danger. Disagreement becomes evidence of harm. Once enough people are trained to interpret discomfort this way, coexisting with others starts to feel impossible. ....

The same therapeutic scripts that encourage patients to pathologize difficult bosses and disappointing partners now teach citizens to reinterpret ordinary democratic differences as evidence of danger. The result is a society less capable of living with differences, less able to tolerate friction, and more likely to retreat into emotionally curated silos and echo chambers. .... (more)

Jonathan Alpert, "Is Therapy Tearing Us Apart?" The Free Press, May 15, 2026.

A pretty good guide for decent behavior

Gene Autry's "Cowboy Code" for his young fans:

1. 
   The Cowboy must never shoot first, hit a smaller man, or take unfair advantage.
2. He must never go back on his word, or a trust confided in him.
3. He must always tell the truth.
4. He must be gentle with children, the elderly, and animals.
5. He must not advocate or possess racially or religiously intolerant ideas.
6. He must help people in distress.
7. He must be a good worker.
8. He must keep himself clean in thought, speech, action, and personal habits.
9. He must respect women, parents, and his nation's laws.
10. The Cowboy is a patriot.

"Not the smooth and orderly outcome, but the struggle"

From "Growling in a corner: Samuel Johnson’s lost years":

Moral advice is everywhere in Johnson’s work, not just the essays that expressly deal with ethical questions. In an age obsessed with taxonomy, the codification of knowledge, the scientific revolution, with understanding and categorising everything, Johnson was a voice of warning. Knowledge can be ordered. People cannot. He spent his whole life in the struggle for peace of mind. As a moralist, that was what he wrote about. Not the smooth and orderly outcome, but the struggle.

Much of Johnson’s insight captures the worser side of human nature, about which he is obdurately, provocatively truthful. He wants to expose all parts of the human mind to reason, to understanding. He knows about all the little vanities of man. ....

Johnson was able to specify any number of human frailties. Many of his sharpest lines come not from his essays, but were delivered to someone’s face. Johnson was not a lurker, a moralist who only let his thoughts out on the page; everywhere he went, Johnson preached. But he was generous, pragmatic, concerned not just to puncture hypocrisy, but to genuinely encourage better living. “I am a great friend to public amusements; for they keep people from vice.” Johnson combined strict ideals with a deep understanding of how hard it was to live up to them. He knew that most of all from personal experience. ....

Johnson contracted to start work on the Dictionary in 1746; he finished in 1755. He was forty-six. The Dictionary is an extraordinary accomplishment of scholarship, composition, and imagination to come from just one mind. But it was not all Johnson did in those years. In 1748 he published his most successful poem The Vanity of Human Wishes. Starting in 1750, he wrote the Rambler, a twice-weekly essay, with topics covering religion, morality, literature, social manners, psychology, marriage, and many other topics. The Rambler was published for over two years, more than two hundred essays in total. From 1758–1760, Johnson wrote the Idler, another set of essays, simpler and more direct than the Rambler. In 1759, he wrote Rasselas, a philosophical novella which has been described as having more wisdom than any other book by multiple writers and critics. All the while, he was often slowly working at his edition of Shakespeare. And there were minor works, too. .... (more)

Henry Oliver, Growling in a corner: Samuel Johnson’s lost years," The Common Reader, May 4, 2026.

What did Lincoln say at Gettysburg?

Ruggles of Red Gap (1935) is available on Amazon Prime for a modest rental fee and on YouTube, also for a fee. If you've never seen it, you probably should. It stars Charles Laughton and is a comedy, but has one scene that always gets to me. I watched that scene again recently:

Propaganda of the deed

A few posts ago, the subject was the American essay. That author indicated several essayists he still considered worth reading. One was Gary Saul Morson, at that point unfamiliar to me. Today I came across his "The Terrorist Mind," from which:

The Russian terrorist movement, which began in the 1870s, had reached prodigious dimensions by the beginning of the 20^th century. Between October 1905 and the end of 1907, some 4,500 government officials, and about the same number of private individuals, were killed or injured in terrorist attacks. ....

Who were these terrorists? Except in rare circumstances, they came not from the oppressed working class or peasantry, but from the ranks of the highly educated or prominent. Resorting to terror, in this time and place, had become almost mundane and unexceptional. ....

Commentators spoke of “revolutionism,” that is, revolution, apart from what might follow it, as a goal in itself. Along with art for art’s sake, there was terror for terror’s sake.

Parallels suggesting we may be at an early stage of the Russian experience come readily to mind. As in Russia, alleged recent murderers and attempted murderers have been anything but uneducated. Luigi Mangione, accused of shooting UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the back, was the valedictorian of a Baltimore private school, founded his own game development company, and received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in science in engineering from the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania. Cole Allen, the alleged shooter at the Washington Correspondents’ Association Dinner, graduated from Caltech. He explained that he was not himself oppressed, but acting on behalf of those who were: “Do you think that when I see someone raped or murdered or abused, I should walk on?” he asked. The most famous Russian terrorists made similar avowals.

Highly prestigious institutions seem especially receptive to violent ideologies. Within hours of Hamas’s October 7 attacks, 34 Harvard student organizations rushed to express their approval. Such thinking results not from mental imbalance, ignorance, or irrationality. On the contrary, it issues from ideologies claiming to advance “social justice” and viewing murder not just as morally permitted, but as morally necessary. Somebody had to do it! As Allen explained, “I don’t see anyone else picking up the slack.” ....

The world’s greatest political novel, Dostoevsky’s Demons, examined the beginnings of the terrorist movement in the 1870s. The novel portrays the revolutionaries harshly, but not so harshly as the smug, cowardly liberals who apologize for them, both because liberal support allows the radicals to succeed and because terrorism reveals what is already implicit in some liberal doctrines. ....

“In my novel Demons,” Dostoevsky wrote in an essay, “I attempted to depict those...motives by which even the purest of hearts and most innocent of people can be drawn into committing such a monstrous offense” as political murder. When violence becomes fashionable, anything, literally anything, can be justified, and more than likely, will eventually be done. “And therein lies the real horror,” Dostoevsky concluded, “that...one can commit the foulest and most villainous act without being in the least a villain!” .... (more)

Gary Saul Morson, "The Terrorist Mind," The Free Press, May 4, 2026.

"The Maker of all these wonders is my friend!"

From Patrick Kurp's "I Myself Perhaps May Proceed Also" on William Cowper:

Here is Cowper on May 3, 1780, writing to his friend the Rev. John Newton and making piety playful:

I delight in baubles, and know them to be so; for rested in, and viewed without a reference to their author, what is the Earth, what are the planets, what is the sun itself, but a bauble? Better for a man never to have seen them, or to see them with the eyes of a brute, stupid and unconscious of what he beholds, than not to be able to say, ‘The Maker of all these wonders is my friend!’ Their eyes have never been opened, to see that they are trifles; mine have been, and will be till they are closed for ever.”

Cowper’s metaphors often mingle playfulness and precision. A bauble is a plaything, a toy or trinket. Cowper finds in them an endorsement of his faith.

Patrick Kurp, "I Myself Perhaps May Proceed Also," Anecdotal Evidence, May 3, 2026.

The contemporary essay

Patrick Kurp has come across an essay he saved, “What’s Wrong With the American Essay.” First, a portion he quotes from it, and then some of his reaction:

“The problem, of course, is not merely our essayists; it’s our culture. We have grown terribly—if somewhat hypocritically—weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable. Of course, everything is plural, everything is arguable, and there are limits to what we can know about other persons, other cultures, other genders. But there is also a limit to such humility; there is a point at which it becomes narcissism of a most myopic sort, a simple excuse to talk only about one’s own case, only about one’s own small area of specialization.”

Things have only gotten worse in subsequent decades. Contemporary essays are characterized principally by the writer’s desire to impress readers with his sensitivity and virtue, usually of a political nature, as though the essay were a form of loyalty oath. Of course, a few first-rate essayists are still at work, still getting published: Cynthia Ozick (age 98), Joseph Epstein (89), Gary Saul Morson (78), Theodore Dalrymple (76), Peter Hitchens (74). All are lineal descendants of the father of essays, Montaigne.... (more)

I read anything I come across by Epstein, Dalrymple, or Peter Hitchens.

Patrick Kurp, "Our Essayists Have Defected," Anecdotal Evidence, May 2, 2026.

May Day

Once upon a time, May Day had nothing to do with politics:

We've been a-rambling all this night,
And sometime of this day;
And now returning back again
We bring a branch of May.

A branch of May we bring you here,
And at your door it stands;
It is a sprout well budded out,
The work of the Lord's hands.

The hedges and trees they are so green,
As green as any leek;
Our Heavenly Father, He watered them
With His heavenly dew so sweet.

The heavenly gates are open wide,
Our paths are beaten plain;
And if a man be not too far gone,
He may return again.

So dear, so dear as Christ loved us,
And for our sins was slain,
Christ bids us turn from wickedness
Back to the Lord again.

The moon shines bright, the stars give a light,
A little before it is day,
So God bless you all, both great and small,
And send you a joyful May.

The Mayers' Song

When May Day was about things like May Poles and May Baskets and the celebration of the coming of Spring.

Happy May Day!

The verse and the illustration are from The Children's Book of Rhymes, by Cicely Mary Barker

St Mary Mead

The New Criterion has published an excerpt from Theodore Dalrymple's soon-to-be-published book about Agatha Christie. I always enjoy reading Dalrymple, and I enjoy reading about Christie. If you have ever been a reader of Christie's mysteries, I think you would enjoy this. A few excerpts from the excerpt:

The literary critic Fredric Jameson captures the difference between English and American crime fiction in his book about Agatha Christie’s detractor Raymond Chandler:

the murder in the placid English village or in the fogbound London club is read as the scandalous sign of an interruption in a peaceful continuity; whereas the gangland violence of the American big city is felt as a secret destiny, a kind of nemesis lurking beneath the surfaces of hastily acquired fortunes, anarchic city growth, and impermanent personal lives.

With the destruction of gentility as an ideal in England, it is not surprising that crime writing in England should come to resemble its American equivalent, exceptions being made for the backward-looking or nostalgic stories set in a world that no longer exists. Murder has been democratized, or at least made demotic.

For myself, I have had enough to do with real murder in modern England to prefer the gentrified type in Agatha Christie. Most murder is merely sordid, unmysterious, stupid, and not infrequently drunken, or alternatively engendered by passions of a crude culture, of which I do not wish to be reminded when I read for pleasure. ....

The whole point of the murders in Agatha Christie is that they are committed in a milieu where they are least expected, a milieu in which people generally behave with refinement, carry no cosh, and do not stab each other to death in stupid drunken arguments.

She is aware that under any surface, however polished it may be, human nature remains the same. ....

She is always ready to draw an analogy between the events in her quiet, delightful, seemingly idyllic village of St Mary Mead, full of hollyhocks and climbing roses, and the criminality that she is investigating. When Mrs. Van Rydock first tells her that she (Mrs. Van Rydock) had a bad feeling about the atmosphere at Stonygates, Miss Marple at once recalls something that happened at St Mary Mead.

“I remember,” said Miss Marple thoughtfully, “one Sunday morning at church—it was the second Sunday in Advent—sitting behind Grace Lamble and feeling more and more worried about her. Quite sure, you know, that something was wrong—badly wrong—and yet being quite unable to say why. A most disturbing feeling and very very definite.”

The next day, Grace Lamble’s father, an old admiral with whom she lived, attacked her with a coal hammer and nearly killed her, claiming that she wasn’t his daughter at all, but the Antichrist posing as such.

Mrs. Van Rydock asks Miss Marple whether she had a premonition that something of the kind was about to happen, the implication being that there is, perhaps, a kind of mental faculty unrecognized by science. Miss Marple provides a rational explanation: “I wouldn’t call it a premonition. It was founded on fact—these things usually are, though one doesn’t always recognise it at the time.”

Grace Lamble, it turned out, had been wearing her hat the wrong way round that Sunday, and she was normally a most precise and careful woman. ....

Mrs. Van Rydock expresses surprise that such things go on in St Mary Mead, which she had imagined as a kind of paradise. Miss Marple replies: “Human nature, dear, is very much the same everywhere. It is more difficult to observe it clearly in a city, that is all.” .... (more)

Theodore Dalrymple, "Agatha Christie & the metaphysics of murder," The New Criterion, May, 2026.

For nonestablishment

In the introduction to this essay, the editor notes that "Christian nationalists... [contend that] the antidote to declining religiosity and deteriorating morals is a state-established church (either tacitly established or more formally)." On the contrary:

...Walker made the case that when a state declares itself the arbiter and defender of religion, the results are both predictable and regrettable. “The historical record is unbeaten,” he concluded, “in nationalized Christianity corrupting true religion.” A far better scenario, Walker suggests, is religious nonestablishment.

A Baptist theologian critiquing state religion is not exactly newsworthy: Baptist support for religious nonestablishment is, after all, a rich tradition. It’s no coincidence that when Thomas Jefferson wrote to assure a group of religious minorities that government should erect “a wall of separation between church and state,” he was writing to a group of Baptists. ....

This struck me for a couple of reasons. First, it runs counter to everything I believe as a Christian about the ideal relationship between church and state. To be clear, I am not a strict separationist. I believe the First Amendment protects religious individuals and groups, allowing them to engage the public square without government interference. And the best method for guaranteeing a thriving relationship between church and state is a robust and generous nonestablishment of religion, inasmuch as it keeps the government far away from religious traditions and institutions.

But the second reason—and why I’m writing this essay—is that it runs counter to everything I know as a social scientist about why and when religion flourishes in a given society. ....

...[N]onestablishment provides more benefits for American religion than any establishment regime ever could. Conservatives should grasp this more easily than anyone, with our healthy (and justified) skepticism of government power and influence over the lives of its people. We should cheer legal decisions that keep the state out of the business of religious traditions, denominations, and worshippers. Cultural pressures, real and disruptive as they are, are nothing new to the church and its history of resilience in proclaiming the gospel. .... (more)

Daniel Bennett, "A State Church Isn’t a Panacea for Cultural Problems," The Dispatch, April 26, 2026.

My kind of conservatism

Like many of my conservative friends who once felt comfortable in the GOP, I've felt homeless and alienated for the last decade. I endure the Trump era and hope for a restoration of what is known as "fusionism" in American conservatism. I'm not particularly optimistic (that may be a conservative trait). From "The Enduring Lessons of Fusionism":

The last decade was unkind to pro-freedom conservatives. Those of us who still find merit in the Reagan-era synthesis of free markets, limited government, moral traditionalism, and global leadership increasingly look like anachronisms. In the age of MAGA, a variety of insurgent factions—including new right populists, postliberals, national conservatives, and antisemitic groypers—compete for influence in a right united less by shared principles than by a common hostility to both the left and the conservative mainstream of the late 20^th century.

This is not the first time the American right has been little more than a loose collection of competing dogmas. In the years following World War II, the American right encompassed a jumble of ideological impulses. One faction included traditionalists such as Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver, who themselves disagreed on fundamental questions. Pro-market thinkers like Friedrich Hayek exerted enormous influence, despite insisting they were not conservatives at all. Ayn Rand’s anti-religion Objectivists, the remnants of the Southern Agrarians, and conspiracy-minded cranks like Robert Welch likewise all occupied space within the broader right-wing ecosystem.

The eventual consolidation of several of these factions into a recognizable conservative movement was neither automatic nor inevitable. It required intellectual leadership, institutional development, and a willingness to draw lines. Figures like William F. Buckley Jr. of National Review were indispensable in this endeavor. Conservatives sought to build a tent large enough to contain a winning coalition, but not so large that it welcomed figures and beliefs antithetical to the movement itself.

The postwar conservative intellectual movement never lacked disagreement, but it eventually established a framework capable of containing and promoting its best elements. The political approach that was eventually named fusionism played an important role in maintaining an uneasy but influential coalition. Fusionism’s leading proponents also provided a principled argument against one of the right’s most persistent temptations: populism. Their arguments have largely been forgotten. They are worth recovering.

Fusionism, most associated with National Review editor Frank Meyer, emerged as the most successful effort to give the postwar right-wing movement coherence. .... (more)

National Review and The Dispatch remain home to many fusionist conservative writers.

George Hawley, "The Enduring Lessons of Fusionism," The Dispatch, April 24, 2026.