Articles

Victor Davis Hanson asked a question this month that he intended as rhetorical. Speaking with Jack Fowler about the gathering at Tucker Carlson’s home in Maine and the ten-point platform that followed it, he said that these were supposedly learned people, and that they should ask themselves when a third party ever got elected, and when a third party ever did anything other than harm the party most akin to it.

The phrase they used for what they feared was not absolutism or tyranny in the abstract. It was popery and arbitrary power, spoken as one linked idea, and it appears in exactly that form in the statute they eventually wrote. To them the halves were a single thing: a Catholic king would rule without Parliament, and a king who ruled without Parliament would restore Catholicism. That is prejudice and constitutional argument at once, sincerely both, and translating it into secula

A man was killed for what he had written in private and never published. It is worth truly considering that fact still for a moment, because it tells us something about the stakes of the ideas this article concerns. These were not abstractions to be debated at leisure. In the England of the 1680s, the proposition that no king could derive an unanswerable title from Adam — and that legitimate power rested instead on law, the public good, and some form of consent — was dangerou

The war that ended in 1647 had begun five years earlier as a quarrel over exactly the questions the previous article left unresolved: whether the king’s power ran only as far as the law allowed, or whether the crown held reserves of authority above the reach of Parliament and the courts.

Articles 8 through 15 follow arguments. They follow a lawyer insisting that the common law bounds the King, a regiment debating the franchise in a Putney church, a philosopher justifying revolution, and a generation of Scots and Frenchmen asking what a free society requires. What those articles do not do, because they cannot do it without losing their subjects, is keep a running account of who held the throne while the arguments were made, and what that person was doing.

To understand why that sentence was revolutionary, and why the man who spoke it is widely regarded as one of the most important legal minds the English common-law tradition has produced, we have to understand what the common law was, what the Stuart kings claimed, and why the collision between them shaped the constitutional inheritance that the American colonists would one day take up as their own.

The revolt that began as a defense of provincial liberties against a foreign king had produced something its own leaders never set out to build: a durable, tolerant, prosperous republic that governed itself without a crown and became, for a century, one of the richest societies in Europe and among the most free and religiously plural of its political orders. It was the practical answer to the question the resistance theorists had left hanging — not only how to be rid of a tyr

In the decade after 1572, and especially in the seven years that followed, the Calvinist world produced a body of political theory that would change the trajectory of Western liberty. Theodore Beza, François Hotman, the anonymous author of the most systematic treatise of them all, and the Scot George Buchanan set out to answer, with rigor and at length, the question that Luther had raised at Worms and refused to resolve.

The lesson of Worms was not the lesson Luther meant to give. He meant to defend the Word of God against a corrupt Church. He taught, instead, that no earthly authority is beyond the judgment of a conscience answerable to something higher — and that lesson, once learned, could not be confined to the Church.

Two stories crossed my desk this week, and at first they look unrelated. One is a fight over a proof-of-citizenship and voter-identification bill that the House passed and the Senate could not advance past a filibuster. The other is a long-shot resolution to repeal a constitutional amendment more than a century old. Follow them far enough, though, and they meet at the same question — the one I keep returning to. Did this leave Americans more free, or more governed?

The medieval centuries in which the inheritance traced in the first three installments of this series was put to immediate political and legal use. Athens had given the West reason and the idea of the mixed constitution. Jerusalem had given it the covenant and the conviction that even kings stand under a law above themselves. Rome had given it natural law and the architecture of a republic. The House of Wisdom had preserved and transmitted the Greek philosophical inheritance

This is the article in which the cross-civilizational character of the liberty tradition becomes unmistakable. The reader who insists on seeing the Founding as the product of one people, one continent, one faith, will find the historical record contradicts such insistence. The reader willing to follow the evidence will find an inheritance richer than any chauvinism could fit inside.

If Social Security returns so little compared to the alternative, leaves nothing to one’s heirs, and rests on a financial foundation this precarious, why is it so popular?

The men who designed the American constitutional order treated antiquity as a laboratory of political experiment — failed experiments, mostly, and one or two qualified successes — from which the principles of constitutional design could be empirically extracted.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

A convention should be judged first by what it accomplished, and the body that met in Grand Rapids accomplished more than its sharpest critics will credit. The case for the convention, stated as charitably as the record permits, is substantial.

This final article aims to do four things. First, it synthesizes the long arc — not as a 1945 break with the founders’ republic, but as a two-century accumulation of choices, each of which could have been made differently, each of which can in principle be made differently again. Second, it acknowledges the Roman example, which has hovered over the entire series. The Roman Republic did not fall to invasion. It was abandoned in stages, each stage seeming individually tolerabl

This three-part feature exists to ask what should happen there, what is likely to happen there, and what either outcome would mean. The first piece cannot begin at the convention. It has to begin at a distance from the convention, with the most basic question: what is being claimed, and by whom, when someone uses the word libertarian?

This article examines Venezuela as the present-tense case study, surveys the ongoing operations that receive far less attention, and asks the only question that ultimately matters: what does the choice between republic and empire look like when the empire is not a memory but a current event?

This article examines that architecture of US Debt and Finance. What it is, how it was built, what it enables, and why it is no longer working the way its designers intended. The military empire traced throughout this series could not exist without the monetary system that finances it. Understanding that system is the precondition for understanding both the power the United States has exercised over three generations and the limits it is now beginning to encounter.