Free Republic

Conservatives have lost their mind. Not their minds, but their mind. What the late Russell Kirk called “the conservative mind” seems to have disappeared from our political landscape. When I got acquainted with the conservative movement in 1965, it was still a serious thing. It had principles, and it knew what it wanted: limited government. It had a dual agenda: to resist and defeat world Communism, and to repeal unconstitutional government programs at home. There were problems with these difficult goals, but the movement made some kind of sense. It was very much a minority movement, even within the Republican...

Bush, Religion, and War April 22, 2003 The hawks got their war, but it came at a heavy cost to America’s image and reputation in the world. As they tell it, France, Germany, and Russia were the petulant spoilers who tried to ruin the party. But this ignores the war’s huge unpopularity nearly everywhere, not so much with governments (which can be bullied and bribed) as with ordinary people. It also ignores the real spoiler: Pope John Paul II, who, in his measured words, made his own opposition to the war very clear. Robert L. Bartley of the Wall Street...

How Tyranny Came To America By Joseph Sobran One of the great goals of education is to initiate the young into the conversation of their ancestors; to enable them to understand the language of that conversation, in all its subtlety, and maybe even, in their maturity, to add to it some wisdom of their own. The modern American educational system no longer teaches us the political language of our ancestors. In fact our schooling helps widen the gulf of time between our ancestors and ourselves, because much of what we are taught in the name of civics, political science, or...

The Catholic Position by Joseph Sobran A few weeks ago I tried, in my feeble way, to express why I fell in love with the Catholic Church. I received many gracious and grateful responses from others who felt the same way, some of them converts like me. Inevitably, there were also a few jeers, directed not so much against me as against the Church. Some dredged up old scandals of wicked popes, or supposedly shocking utterances of Catholic saints, or mere clichés of traditional anti-Catholic polemics. Most of these were meant to embarrass, not to persuade; the usual ahistorical nuggets....