Conservatives
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The Coming Conservative Media Collapse December 12, 2024
The liberal media is in freefall. Ratings are cratering at MSNBC and CNN. The Washington Post is losing hundreds of millions of dollars and laying off staff. The Los Angeles Times has gotten so desperate that it’s hiring conservative columnists. Cons...
The Year of the American Underdog December 11, 2024
I keep waiting for the Detroit Lions to lose a football game. They should have lost Thursday. Green Bay had the Lions dead to rights and let them off the hook. As the Lions have done time and time again over these last few years, they somehow, dogged...
The Penguin Has Mommy Issues December 10, 2024
As any fan of Batman knows, the main draw of the franchise are the villains. While Batman himself has an interesting story—a billionaire who trains to become a vigilante detective after witnessing the murder of his parents—his opponents are what defi...
Richard Weaver’s South December 06, 2024
Recently, over drinks, Wilfred McClay voiced disappointment about the absence of a distinctly Southern perspective in today’s conservative movement. “Where is the next Richard Weaver?” he asked me, the only Southerner at the table....
Gen Z Is Super Weird December 05, 2024
Since February 2023, artist, university lecturer, and internet culture writer Joshua Citarella has been conducting interviews with a wide array of subjects who have formed their politics out of internet subcultures. It would be a crude oversimplifica...
The Conditions for Ultimate Greatness December 05, 2024
A friend asked me recently, “Is there any publication that reviews books that aren’t new?” I told her proudly that we do that here at The Imaginative Conservative. Our conservative imagination is such that we don’t believe that “new” equals better or...
Conservatives Can Curate Art for Themselves December 04, 2024
Does Philip Kennicott know what year it is? The Washington Post arts critic just published an essay that seems to have arrived in a time portal from 1986.“In Grim Times, Art Finds a Way” is a pious, flowery, and tiresome essay about how “the arts com...
Two Cheers for Viewpoint Diversity December 03, 2024
American institutions of higher learning, perhaps especially the most selective of them, are failing to help students become tolerant, reflective, and respectful of different viewpoints. Intolerance and dogmatism are common, resulting in censorship, ...
When Suburbia Was Weird December 02, 2024
Geography, not design, is the main determinant of housing prices in the Washington, DC, suburbs. A garish McMansion in the leafy inner ring will fetch far more than a charming bungalow out by Harper’s Ferry. If suburban Northern Virginia has an archi...
Essential Reading on the Constitution September 17, 2024
As Constitution Day falls on September 17, we are in the midst of an historically divisive election season. The gaps between Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservative have never seemed wider – and many Americans even feel alienated from th...
Constructing Conservatism September 17, 2024
Conservatives rightly recognize that the common good, and thus a coherent politics, requires a shared definition of virtue derived from a shared moral vision and set of values, which in turn must reflect the traditions and character of the nation and...
Painting the Revolution September 16, 2024
Conservative journalist Richard Brookhiser, author of, inter alia, well-wrought biographies of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and Gouverneur Morris and a perceptive account of “America’s First Dynasty,” the Adamses of Massachusetts, has now t...
They Want Government to Be God September 16, 2024
If you had told me back in the 1970s, when I was watching actor Scott Baio on the hit sitcom Happy Days, that 50 years later I would be talking to him about China’s Cultural Revolution, I would have thought you were crazy. Yet here we are. Baio, an o...
America’s Unlikely Tennis Star September 10, 2024
It was nearly midnight in New York City when Grigor Dimitrov’s hamstring came unglued. The commentator spoke gravely: “He’s going to dance at his own funeral. Heartbreaking, heartsick. It’s all that.”...
The Babbitt School of Conservatism September 10, 2024
In the 2020s, “conservatism” sounds passé, and its failure is taken for granted. A new right finds inspiration less in Russell Kirk or Edmund Burke than in Carl Schmitt, and the history of the conservative movement up to 2016 seems largely irrelevant...
Pope Francis on Literature September 09, 2024
Pope Francis’s pontificate has been, to put it mildly, controversial. His judgments—theological, administrative, and otherwise—have generally cheered those who seem to want the Catholic Church to resemble the liberal Protestant groups that are evapor...
Beyond the Cult of Self-Reliant Bootstrapping September 09, 2024
My ventures in attempting to lift myself up by my bootstraps led me to videos filled with hyperbolic exhortations aimed at motivating young men just like me. “Absolutely everything that happens in your life—whether it’s good or bad—is completely your...
Celebrating the Centennial of the Most Underappreciated American of Our Time September 06, 2024
The following essay is adapted from the recently released book Lessons in Liberty: Thirty Rules for Living from Ten Extraordinary Americans (HarperCollins) September 7th marks the one-hundredth birthday of one of the most extraordinary and inspiring...
Pseudo-Scholars and the Rise of the Barbarian Right September 06, 2024
For many of the conservatives who embraced it—myself included—the Trumpian moment promised a more populist, pro-worker GOP. Yet the latest iteration of Donald Trump has dashed these hopes, playing down the themes that propelled his 2016 campaign, and...
iThink Therefore iAm September 06, 2024
Steve Jobs named his company “Apple” after a pleasant trip to an apple orchard. The bite mark in the logo was added to give the silhouette a sense of scale, lest someone think it a cherry. Yet that name and that symbol, evoking consumption of the for...
New Right, New Fights September 06, 2024
With primary season having already been underway in the United States, June of last year may seem an odd time for Encounter Books to have released Arthur Milikh’s sensational compendium of essays, Up from Conservatism (2023).Presidential aspirants an...
The Metaphysical Promise of the Consumer Society September 04, 2024
In a book documenting his travels through the United States, a Frenchman commented that “there is nothing funny about Halloween,” a holiday characterized by an “evil force” and “infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world. . . . There ...
Confessions of a Private Transportation Snob September 04, 2024
For me, the surest sign of the imminent arrival of autumn is not the changing light, the cooler temperatures, or the ads touting pumpkin-spice flavors. No, the pending change of seasons is surely marked by the arrival, in the mornings and in the afte...
