Free Republic

We conservatives are pretty pissed off at John Roberts, Chief Justice. We remember the cartoon of a week or so ago when the United States Supreme Court was represented as three donkeys, four chickens, and, on the end of the row, two Americans: Justice Alito and Justice Thomas. But now our Democratic friends want to have a trial of Citizen Trump in the Senate. So I looked up the text of the Constitution online. It saysThe Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the...

Sir Roger Scruton has died and Britain has lost her greatest conservative thinker, writer, fox hunting man, philosopher and all-round-hero of the right. Like so many of the bravest and best, he was a prophet almost without honour in his own country.

Very, very sad to get the news that Sir Roger Scruton has died of cancer. Details yet to come, but I want to ask your prayers for him and for those who loved him. This past summer, my friend Laura and I visited him at his farmhouse in Wiltshire. I interviewed him for my forthcoming book about what the experience of resisting Soviet-bloc communism has to teach us about resisting the soft totalitarianism emerging today. Sir Roger was strongly supportive of this book, telling me it was urgently important. I feel so humbled by his friendship and encouragement. Sir Roger...

Sir Roger Scruton has died. Diagnosed with cancer last summer, he passed away peacefully on Sunday surrounded by his family.

Conservative philosopher and author Sir Roger Scruton has died aged 75. The author of more than 50 books on aesthetics, morality and politics, he was also a government advisor. Supporters hailed him as "the greatest conservative of our age". A statement on his website said he had been fighting cancer for six months and "died peacefully" on Sunday. "His family are hugely proud of him and of all his achievements," it said. Sir Roger was at the centre of controversy last year when he was dismissed from, then reinstated to, an unpaid role as a government housing advisor after criticism...

The real problem, in America, Britain, Canada, Oz, NZ, is not the left, who know what they want and are serious about getting it, but the pansy right. It's easy to mock AOC and Justin and Jacinta Ardern, but all they're doing is sailing full steam ahead for their desired utopia. The right, who profess to disdain the final destination, nevertheless follow along, albeit at a more desultory rate of knots. We see this routinely in their urge to "distance" themselves: In Washington, as I mentioned the other day, House Republicans ostentatiously distanced themselves from their colleague Steve King, because...

These days conservative writers come in all stripes. And one of the most profound -- if somewhat esoteric -- is English author Roger Scruton. Unfortunately, for those with a somewhat practical perspective, most of Roger Scruton's writings are about as far away as you can get from the lively fusillades of practical wit and outraged innuendo regularly unleashed on the liberal-conservative battlefield by the likes of Ann Coulter, David Horowitz and William Grim. However, a recent essay by Scruton in the New Criterion, titled Why I became a conservative, is still well worth reading. Unfortunately, for the uninitiated, Roger Scruton...

Why I Became a ConservativeBy Roger ScrutonThe New Criterion | February 5, 2003 I was brought up at a time when half the English people voted Conservative at national elections and almost all English intellectuals regarded the term “conservative” as a term of abuse. To be a conservative, I was told, was to be on the side of age against youth, the past against the future, authority against innovation, the “structures” against spontaneity and life. It was enough to understand this, to recognize that one had no choice, as a free-thinking intellectual, save to reject conservatism. The choice remaining was...

I recently gave an interview to the New Statesman, on the assumption that, as the magazine’s former wine critic I would be treated with respect, and that the journalist, George Eaton, was sincere in wanting to talk to me about my intellectual life. Not for the first time I am forced to acknowledge what a mistake it is to address young leftists as though they were responsible human beings. Here is my brief response to an unscrupulous collection of out of context remarks, some of them merely words designed to accuse me of thought-crimes, and to persuade the government that...

The government has sacked its housing adviser Roger Scruton after he appeared to repeat antisemitic statements and denied Islamophobia was a problem. A spokesman for the Ministry of Housing said: “Prof Sir Roger Scruton has been dismissed as chairman of the Building Better, Building Beautiful commission with immediate effect, following his unacceptable comments.” In an interview with the New Statesman, the rightwing philosopher was unrepentant about his views on George Soros, the Hungarian-American philanthropist, who is frequently cited in antisemitic conspiracy theories and attacked by Hungary’s rightwing prime minister, Viktor Orbán. “Anybody who doesn’t think that there’s a Soros empire...

A brilliant exposition of what's wrong with our society by one of my favorite modern philosophers.

"knighthood for Professor Roger Scruton, often described as Britain’s foremost philosopher"

For some time, the leading Western nations have acted upon the assumption that democracy is the solution to political conflict, and that the ultimate goal of foreign policy must be to encourage the emergence of democracy in countries which have not yet enjoyed its benefits. And they continue to adhere to this assumption, even when considering events in the Middle East today. We can easily sympathise with it. For democracies do not, in general, go to war with each other, and do not, in general, experience civil war within their borders. Where the people can choose their government, there is...

The project of European integration, advanced by politicians and elites of defeated nations in the wake of the Second World War, was founded on the belief that nationhood and national self-determination were the prime causes of the wars that had ruined Europe. There were disputes as to who started it: Napoleon? Bismarck? The French Revolutionaries? The Revolutionaries of 1848? The Reactionaries and Monarchists? Metternich? Talleyrand? Garibaldi? Fichte? Wagner? Louis XIV? But, however far back you went, in the eyes of the post-war political survivors, you came across the demon of nationalism, locked in conflict with the pure spirit of Enlightenment....

I was brought up at a time when half the English people voted Conservative at national elections and almost all English intellectuals regarded the term "conservative" as a term of abuse. To be a conservative, I was told, was to be on the side of age against youth, the past against the future, authority against innovation, the "structures" against spontaneity and life. It was enough to understand this, to recognize that one had no choice, as a free-thinking intellectual, save to reject conservatism. The choice remaining was between reform and revolution. Do we improve society bit by bit, or do...

....That noble form of humanism has its roots in the Enlightenment, in Kant's defense of the moral law, and in the progressivism of well-meaning Victorian sages. And the memory of it leads me to take an interest in something that calls itself "humanism," and is now beginning to announce itself in Britain. This humanism is self-consciously "new," like New Labour; it has its own journal, the New Humanist, and its own sages, the most prominent of whom is Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and vice-president of the British Humanist Association. It runs advertising campaigns and letter-writing campaigns and...

Wherever the Western vision of political order has gained a foothold, we find freedom of expression: not merely the freedom to disagree with others publicly about matters of faith and morality but also the freedom to satirize solemnity and to ridicule nonsense, including solemnity and nonsense of the sacred kind. This freedom of conscience requires secular government. But what makes secular government legitimate? That question is the starting point of Western political philosophy, the consensus among modern thinkers being that sovereignty and law are made legitimate by the consent of those who must obey them. They show this consent in...

Should he have spoken? By Roger ScrutonIn 1968 the products of the postwar baby boom decided to seize the European future and to jettison the European past. In that same year Enoch Powell delivered to the Birmingham Conservatives the speech known forever after as “Rivers of Blood”: a speech that cost him his political career, and which, on one plausible interpretation, made the issue of immigration undiscussable in British politics for close to forty years. It is a speech that raises in its acutest form the question of truth: What place is there for truth in public life, and...

Conservative Philosophers Rising By Douglas Murray Socialaffairsunit.org.uk | August 25, 2005 Gentle Regrets: Thoughts From a Life by Roger Scruton Pp 256. London: Continuum, 2005 Hardback, £16.99 The End of Time by David Horowitz Pp 168. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005 Hardback, £20.99 Who would be a conservative philosopher? The professional prospects - as evidenced by both these superb volumes – hardly seem rosy. David Horowitz and Roger Scruton have both suffered throughout their careers for refusing to kowtow to the wrong-headed presumptions of their times, winning no small number of enemies in the process. But enemies are bearable so...

APOLOGISTS for terrorism (and they are not in short supply) argue that it is a weapon used by people who despair of achieving their goals in any other way. It is a cry from the depths by those deprived of a voice in the political process. The terrorist is not an aggressor but a victim, and we must disarm him not by violence but by addressing the grievance that motivates his deeds. This argument has been used to excuse Palestinian suicide bombers, IRA kneecappers, Red Brigade kidnappers, and even the mass murderers of September 11. Its main effect is to...