Making our history one step at a time
Zakaria is in many ways a heretic. The basic premise of his book is: there is such a thing as too much democracy. A system that is more "democratic" just means it is more open to influence by billionaires, extremists, and demagogues. You replace one set of elites with another.
I re-checked out Jerry Z. Muller's comprehensive little library of conservative theory "Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought from David Hume to the Present" this past week, because I kept wanting to quote it, but I hadn't written down any quotes when I first read it! Checking it out from the UW library,... Continue Reading →
In politics, each side usually blames all the problems on the other: it's either the rainbow-loving communist godless liberals or the oppressive wealthy capitalist overlords and their witless redneck cronies. But here in Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen argues that the problems are systemic, built into liberalism itself and its underlying assumptions. By liberalism, he... Continue Reading →
I have been meaning to pick up the works of Friedrich Hayek for a while now. I initially stumbled upon him in the "School of Life" series on Political Thinkers. His name kept coming up, first in "Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought" and again in another book still on my to-read list... Continue Reading →
