Basic Symbols News Today

Editor-in-chief, Paul Gottfried, offers an examination of three major streams of conservative thought, based on aristocratic tradition, universal principles, and the pragmatic pursuit of power.

Editor-in-chief, Paul Gottfried, offers an examination of three major streams of conservative thought, based on aristocratic tradition, universal principles, and the pragmatic pursuit of power.

Today’s progressives abuse the word “liberal.” Democracy needs the virtue of liberality, not the ideology of liberalism.

The cultural embrace of abortion and child mutilation reveals the erosion of the virtuous symbols that once underlined our society.

The roots of the American remain.

The gentlemanly battle between Willmoore Kendall and Harry Jaffa over the meaning of America’s founding documents.

Many conservatives behave as if their job is merely to slow the advance of progressivism, or—at best—block it from gaining more ground. But according to Willmoore Kendall, this isn’t enough. They must work to extirpate progressive advances on the American constitutional order and replace them with sound political and moral principles.

Kudzu and Equality It may be a fool’s errand to claim the same ideals as those espoused by the Left but call for one’s own interpretation of them, as the theoretical and rhetorical kudzu continues to spread. Amid what looks like a return to the Harry V. Jaffa-Mel Bradford debates of the 1970s with a new cast, it may be useful to clarify my own position about what are proper conservative principles. I am expressing my views as an independent scholar but one who has obvious paleo leanings. Th...

Lincoln, Chronicles Magazine, and the Disappearance of Southern Conservatism Abraham Lincoln has become, for most mainline conservatives, an icon, and, along with Martin Luther King, Jr., no opportunity is lost—it seems—on Fox News or in the establishment “conservative press,” to stress just how much conservatively-minded Americans owe to these two canonized martyrs. Any demurer, any dissent or disagreement, brings forth condemnations of the complainant as a “racist” or “reactiona...

Polemics & Exchanges No Mere Christian The cover of your November issue suggests the truth that we, conservatives and especially conservative Christians, are engaged in spiritual warfare. And yet, smack in the middle of that issue, you print an article, “Remembering C. S. Lewis.” The reader is led to believe that this man has been a powerful instrument of truth and has fought the good fight of faith to the very end. In Lewis’s  Surprised by Joy (1955), we  discover that he defended...