The unacknowledged though painfully obvious assumption of The Mount Vernon Statement is that the values we all share necessarily translate into the conservative movement’s policy agenda, as if no additional intellectual work were needed.  more

NM SYMPOSIUM: The actual picture Tanenhaus draws is of a movement stuck helplessly in a rut. Right-wing intellectuals should eschew the movement and reintegrate into the mainstream, not because the movement threatens the Republic, but because freedom of thought can only be found outside of it.  more

There is no way to move from the current system to a system where everyone is insured without cutting back on their benefits and thereby angering them considerably. Instead, Republicans should endorse universal healthcare access within the system we already have.   more

As you may have heard, the novelist Christopher Buckley and the popular historian Richard Brookhiser have each written a book about Buckley’s father, the late William F. Buckley Jr.  Neither is just about WFB. Buckley’s Losing Mum and Pup tells what it was like – from battling grief to ghostwriting eulogies – to bury both   more

This is part four of a series. Read part one here, part two here, part three here, and part four here.

In my previous post, I argued that believers in marriage equality, as a matter of principle, should oppose the movement for government-endorsed same   more

This is part four of a series. Read part one here, part two here, and part three here.
In my previous post, I argued that the government does not have a general policy of favoring marriage over relationships. (On the contrary, in some ways the government’s policies disfavor marriage.) Rather, the government has a variety of policy goals   more

This is part three of a series. Read part one here and part two here.
In previous posts, I argued that marriage traditionalists have no reason to oppose the right of same sex couples (or other unmarried persons) to enter into private covenants governing the division of property and income. In this post, I argue that they   more

This is part two of a series. Read part one here and part three here.
In my first post in this series, I “unbundled” the concept of marriage. That is, I divided the features of marriage into three categories, the private (ie., the marriage contract set by the parties), the government (ie., the legal consequences of marriage),   more

 
This is the first in a series.  Read part two here, and part three here.
This post and the four that will follow argue for a conclusion that will strike many readers as preposterous: The goals of those who favor marriage equality, I believe, are not inconsistent with the goals of those who defend traditional marriage. Not   more

Voters don’t think in terms of policy or facts but rather imaginary personalities (Walter Lippmann called them “stereotypes”) — that stand in their minds for a given class of people. Time was, the Republican stereotype was an elderly gent, cigar clenched in his teeth, grousing that the government won’t let him turn a profit anymore.   more