What if peoples’ failures were never their fault but the product of genetic or environmental conditions into which they were born? Would such news be a cause for celebration regarding the newfound potential to improve these unfortunate circumstances and prevent human suffering, or would it be viewed as dangerous, a threat to the individual responsibility essential for any decent society?...

　　The US Supreme Court recently decided to hear an appeal from the notoriously-liberal Ninth Circuit, in a 2023 case entitled City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, which effectively ruled in the tongue-in-cheek words of the Wall Street Journal that there is a “constitutional right to vagrancy.” Many observers believe that the Court will use the Grants Pass case as an...

　　Between the ongoing war in Gaza and Houthi attacks on Western shipping in the Red Sea, the media has had plenty of gruesome foreign policy fodder for the content mill. However, this coverage has come at the expense of the ongoing grinding conflict in Ukraine, which has quickly gone from a euphoric cause célèbre to a now embarrassing catastrophe that...

　　We live in a world of mutually assured cancellation. Piled-on abuse and career destruction are now standard when dealing with political or intellectual opponents. 　　I wrote about this on my personal Substack last month. There, I drew on the escalating—and global—war of words and deeds over Israel-Palestine. Finally, conservatives and dissenting liberals had found a way to wound the woke...

　　I thank Graham McAleer for his thoughtful review of The Narrow Passage: Plato, Foucault, and the Possibility of Political Philosophy. 　　McAleer makes a number of intelligent observations and fair-minded criticisms. My most substantial disagreement concerns his claim that Eric Voegelin provides a ready solution to our dilemmas. McAleer writes: 　　Voegelin argues that an enduring polity has a resilient symbol that...

　　Canada is normally so mild-mannered that our biggest recent national scandal involved the House of Commons rising to greet a Ukrainian war veteran whom the Speaker introduced as a hero “who fought against the Russians” and politely applauding before realizing in horror that fighting “against the Russians” meant alongside the Waffen-SS. But for a few fevered weeks in the winter...

　　Good fiction, especially science fiction, can be prophetic, not because the writer has some mystical way of reading the future, but because, as Southern Catholic novelist Flannery O’Connor once wrote, “prophecy is a matter of seeing near things with their extensions of meaning and thus of seeing far things close up.” Audiences turned out in record numbers this past summer...

　　Friedrich Hayek remarked in the original preface to the 1944 publication of The Road to Serfdom that, “This is a political book.” Hayek was an academic economist who had argued with John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s regarding his Treatise on Money, and published The Pure Theory of Capital 1941, among other earlier works. But now he had become embroiled...