[William McKinley]

Sic transit gloria mundi
Thus passeth the glory of the world.

---

I am in the process of reading The Conservative Mind, and think that as I find particular passages of interest or relevance I will take a moment to type them in and share them. I posted last week the following excerpt:

The Conservative Mind: Burke & The Politics of Prescription (An Excerpt)

[Wonder Warthog]

The only problem is that John Adams and the rest of the Federalists have been proven wrong, and the Anti-Federalists have been proven right. The "chains of the Constitution" were NOT STRONG ENOUGH to prevent the massive accumulation of power that the central/Federal government has accrued to itself.

One precedent at a time, the statists are over-writing the Constitution, and changing the US into a "parliamentary democracy" in all but name.

[William McKinley]

Ping to those who showed interest in the last excerpt.

[TBP]

Dr. Russell Kirk is one of my intellectual mentors. I had the privilege of knowing him and talking with him when I was in college, and he is one of the most brilliant people I ever met. Many conservatives don't know that he was also one of the best authors of fantasy literature and a winner of the Lovecraft Award.

And picking the section on John Adams is great. Without Adams, there would be no United States of America.

[BikerNYC]

I recently finished reading McCullough's John Adams and found it to be a fascinating book. Adams had many great moments in his life, beginning with his defense of British soldiers in connection with the Boston Massacre. I think, however, that Adams' justifiably lost his bid for re-election because of the Sedition Act fiasco, which led his party to extinction. It's a lesson to all presidents who try to take too much power for themselves.

[occam's chainsaw]

Bookmark for later reading...

[Z in Oregon]

Interesting article.

[Roscoe]

BTTT

[AuntB]

redrock, I thought you'd appreciate this discussion. Then there was Thomas Paine (and Thomaspaine.com), someone we can all detest. He would have destroyed Adams and the constitution along with it.

[Kevin Curry]

When the doctrinaire liberals repudiated the idea of Providence, they retained only a moral concept shorn of religious sanctions and left to wither into mere selfishness.

E.g., Ayn Rand's insipid atheistic objectivism pap, and modern atheistic libertarianism that believes that a people who reject God and the moderating influences of traditional virtue-instilling institutions including church and family can remain free, prosperous, and secure.

But Edmund Burke described well the deadly consequences of such morality-negating hedonism and populism when he critiqued the sorry state of France post-revolution.

Libertarians--particularly atheist libertarians--are drunk on the same rotgut populist, knee-jerk anti-government wine that the Jacobins brewed up in 1793. This drunkness led to the Reign of Terror which ultimately created the necessary conditions for Napoleon to wrest absolute despostic control of France.

What was it Santayana said about those who fail to learn from history?