While much has been made of the “Ten Commandments” in recent history, men for centuries have accepted these commandments as deeply rooted in the order of the universe and of creation—as an overt expression of the Natural Law. And, to be certain, they are logical as well as honest. They promote good order in the society, in the family, and in the community.
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2019/08/burning-bushes-smoking-mountains-law-bradley-birzer.html

Is Trump Hitler? Is he Mussolini? Is he Nero? Is he Rutherford B. Hayes? (That is probably closer to the mark). We could do a lot worse. But only those with eyes and ears can see.

We must judge the man by 1) his actions 2) his deeds. History will be the final judge. The problem with calling Mr. Trump Hitler is like the boy crying wolf. If a real Hitler shows up no one will believe it. Mr. Trump is a patriotic American. He is a moderate conservative but a strong believer in property rights and American capitalism. I would like to believe he is a social conservative (I don’t think he is) but I am satisfied he tolerates and respects socially conservative views.

How honest is his administration as compared to Mr. Obama? I only know what I read in the papers but from what I know Mr. Trump is much less corrupt than Maduro or the president of Mexico (those nations are kleptocracies -Venezuela is a failed state and Mexico is only one push and a shove from total anarchy and catastrophe.)

My immigration views do not correspond exactly with Mr. Trump’s but I will say this. Mr. Trump is right that our illegal immigration anarchy must be attended to and that it is a threat to our national security and possibly the survival and success of the union over the next 20-50 years. My policies might be different in many cases. I am perhaps naive or overly optimistic about immigration and the assimilation of immigrants.

But I believe in the idea of America. I also believe we must be Good Neighbors to our closest American neighbors. I believe we must be firm on the border and with illegal immigrants but just and our policy should be generous to ordinary hardworking, honest non-violent immigrants. Some guest worker programs (with no immediate path to green cards or citizenship) should be broadly enacted. Every immigrant worker I know (I have known thousands) would PAY for a two-year permit to work in the USA for a certain occupation. So instead of enriching coyotes sell work permits for cash and require cash deposits and guarantees as well as biometric ID cards. A real problem today is 1) so many phony IDs and phony social security numbers 2) identity theft threatens the financial security of millions of Americans. Is immigration good? It can be and over the long run, it can be positive for America. But it SHOULD be an organized and orderly process. Immigration anarchy is bad for children, bad for immigrants, and bad for America. I have my differences with Mr.

Trump. I have never, personally, liked him. I think he is a philistine. I thought, erroneously, he would lose to HRC. He didn’t. I don’t think Mr. Trump is a man of high culture and character. But I think he is a streetfighter and a remarkable politician. In other words, Mr. Trump has courage. He has guts. I respect that.

I think Mr. Trump is wise about certain issues (he knows Socialism and the Bold State are not the answers for America or anywhere if you want happiness, freedom and prosperity). The economy has done very well under Mr. Trump and he must get credit for that.

And Trump is no Hitler or Mussolini. He will win in 2020 or lose in 2020 and he will respect the outcome of the election. So it is up to the American people to decide.

And Mr. Trump? History will be the final judge. So far he is at least as good a president as Rutherford B. Hayes. Let us now see if he is politically as successful as Ronald Reagan or Eisenhower or FDR.

Even if the Allies should utterly defeat the Axis, Dawson feared that the poisons of power and centralization will remain. “The sufferings that the occupied countries have endured have weakened the whole tradition of civilized order and have accustomed men’s minds to violence and lawlessness,” he wrote a year later, in 1945. Because the democracies themselves were forms of totalitarianism, their party politics would especially descend into thuggery after the end of the war, thus permanently dividing Republicans from Democrats and Tories from Labour. We will no longer see our opponents as opposition, but rather as the enemy in a stake for total control of each respective society. Political opponents will call not for victory over their opposition, but rather for the complete “liquidation” of the opposition. “Every election,” he predicted, would become “a potential civil war.” Even as of 1945, broader commentaries identified fascists as “right wing” and democrats as “left wing,” thus creating artificial distinctions in the race for total control. “The result of this division is to obliterate the distinction between constitutional and totalitarian parties, and to force every shade of political opinion into alliance with some extremist totalitarian party which inevitably tends to become… predominant.”
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2019/08/christopher-dawson-modern-public-opinion-bradley-birzer.html

1774

• Parliament passes the five “intolerable acts”
• Late May: Maryland meeting in Annapolis passes resolves in support of Boston
• September 5-October 26: First Continental Congress (CC) meets
• September 17: Suffolk Resolves tempers but passes by CC
• October 14: CC passes “Declaration of Rights and Resolves”
• October 24: CC forms Continental Association (nonimportation, nonconsumption, nonexportation)
• October 25: CC petitions King for protection against Parliament
• October 26: Congress adjourns permanently–if King answers petition
• December: John Adams writes as “Novanglus”

1775

• February 9: Parliament declares Massachusetts in a “state of rebellion”
• March 22: Parliament rejects Burke’s plan of reconciliation
• April 19: Battles of Lexington and Concord
• May 10: American militias take Ft. Ticonderoga and Crown Point
• May 10: Second Continental Congress (SCC) meets; declares united colonies on defensive
• May 26: SCC again claims defensive
• May 29: SCC invites Canadian provinces to join America
• May 31: Mecklenburg County, NC, declares itself independent from UK
• June 15: SCC forms Continental Army; names Washington as commander
• June 17: Brits “win” the Battle of Bunker Hill
• July 6: SCC passes “Olive Branch Petition” for King; passes Dickinson’s Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms”
• August 2: SCC adjourns
• August 23: King rejects “Olive Branch Petition”; proclaims Americans as traitors to empire; colonists must either “submit or triumph.”  
• September 12: SCC meets; Georgia finally sends delegates; all 13 represented
• November 16: Burke again calls for reconciliation
• November 29: SCC forms secret committee to treat with other nations
• December 6: SCC declares complete independence from Parliament; claims loyalty to King
• December 22: Parliament declares all N.A. Colonies beyond protection of empire; prohibits all trade with colonies

The irony, Dawson noted, is that the allies, ostensibly at least, waged their war against fascism. What is this thing the enemy propagated through extreme violence? It is, Dawson stated, “an attempt to transform the modern society into a purely dynamic organism, and to fuse community, party and state as a unitary mass driven by the aggressive will to power.” Dawson cautioned against the identification of fascism with authority. Instead, he claimed, one must identify fascism with power. Authority, as opposed to power, was the proper acquiescence every society (and its members) gave to those who ordered and secured a healthy society. Thus, as examples, a judge had authority because he decided things with wisdom; a teacher had authority because she taught her students the good, the true, and the beautiful; a policeman had authority because he upheld the law. Authority, as properly understood, was vital to a free society as were natural rights, Dawson argued. Authority, when used well, protected social freedoms, justice, and law. When violated, though, authority easily became power, a “poison” that seeps through societies, destroying all that it cannot corrupt. Power is, in essence, raw and naked force.
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2019/08/becoming-enemy-world-war-ii-christopher-dawson-bradley-birzer.html

I’ve been interested in the 50,000 foot view of what has been going on in the last several years politically and culturally with respect to things like the election of Trump, Brexit, the populist surge sweeping across Europe, an so on.  Also, I am a podcast junkie, and listen to quite a number of them on a regular basis – arguably too many.  Although I need to add yet another podcast to my list just slightly less than I need a really bad case of malaria, I have nevertheless stumbled across one that is particularly suitable for the interests discussed above – The Realignment, which you can find at the link.  The first and only episode (so far) is an absolutely fascinating interview with JD Vance, who was the author of the equally fascinating Hillbilly Elegy from 2016.  If you are into podcasts and into understanding what’s going on in the world right now, then this is one you won’t want to miss.

Our beloved Cecilia Rose would’ve been twelve today. It’s not hard to imagine a curly, brown haired, blue-eyed girl being the delightful middle child of the family, just on the verge of teenagedom. 

I imagine she would still love all the things of childhood—her dolls, her princesses, her games, her costumes—just on the eve of thinking about grownup things. She would be, at age 12, the embodiment of that tug we once all felt, between past and present, between what we love and what we think we should love.

She would love to snuggle with me (a real love, past, present, and future), and she would adore her older siblings, while always counseling her younger ones. Her favorite color, I think, would be a hue of violet, and she would cherish the princess stories of George MacDonald. Her imagination would be her joy.

No matter how I might feel on August 7 or August 9, I never feel quite right on August 8. Even if I didn’t have a calendar in front of me, I know that my soul and my body would know that it’s August 8. 

August 8 is a world between worlds, a twilight existence.

Though I never knew Cecilia Rose well in person, the painful hole, the tearing pit, the deep abyss in my heart reminds me that I knew her completely—at least as a child of Christ. It’s a hole that never goes away, and, I suppose, never will. 

At least not until she (please, God!) greets me at the gates of heaven, grabs my hand, and asks me for a dance.

Happy birthday, my Cecilia Rose (b. and d. August 8, 2007).

I am not a professional economist. Nor have I played one on TV. My own academic background is in literature, philosophy, and then theology, where I earned my doctorate writing about soon-to-be-saint John Henry Newman and the threat of Hell. My knowledge of economics has come out of interest and necessity. My interest is because my own liberal education, no matter how flawed it may have been or dilatory I was in study, convinced me that all knowledge is one, and that to truly have a view of the world, one must have a sense of the importance and place of all subjects. Though economists have often overstated the importance of their discipline, I have nevertheless been impressed with the ways in which economists, though often dismissed with Macaulay’s gibe about being a “dismal science,” have often come, as William McGurn has observed, to the same practical conclusions about freedom and human dignity that theologians and moral philosophers have.

The necessity in my interest in economics is because I am married and have seven children. Though the sums needed to raise them are often overstated, my experience is that they do cost money. “Economy” comes from two Greek words, oikos (home) and nomos (rule). While many of us tend to think of economics as involving titans of industry, IPOs, international deals, and world-scale decisions and players, economics in its original sense is all home economics.
— Read on theimaginativeconservative.org/2019/08/writing-economics-david-deavel.html

My required reading list, H301, Autumn 2019.

Most available at: http://oll.libertyfund.org

Documents to read before midterm: 

John Adams, Dissertation on Feudal and Canon Law

Cato’s Letters: 15, 17, 18, 25, 27, 31, 35, 42, 59, 62, 66, 84, 94, 106, 114, 115

Thomas Gordon, “A Discourse of Standing Armies”

Demophilus, “The Genuine Principles of the Ancient Saxon, or English Constitution”

Addison, Cato: A Tragedy

Hamilton, “Remarks on the Quebec Bill”

Dickinson, Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer: 1, 3, 8-10, 12

Edmund Burke, “Speech on American Taxation”

Edmund Burke, “Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies”

Samuel Sherwood, “The Church’s Flight into the Wilderness”

CX Letters (will be emailed to you)

Articles of Confederation 

Declaration of Independence (Jefferson’s version; will be emailed to you)

Documents to read before the final:

George Washington, “Circular to the States”(1783)

Northwest Ordinance, Articles 1-6

Farrand, ed., Records of the Federal Convention: May 29-June 8, June 18, June 26, June 28-29, July 26, August 7-9, August 13-14, August 21-22, August 30-31, September 17

Federalist Papers: 1, 10, 39, 45-51, 63, 70, 78, 84-85

Anti-Federalist Papers: 

James Wilson, “Speech to the Pennsylvania Convention”(December 1787)

John Dickinson as “Fabius,”letters 10-3

Noah Webster, “A Citizen of America”

Tench Coxe, “An American Citizen”

James Wilson, “Of the Law of Nature”

James Wilson, “Of the Natural Rights of Individuals”

Burke, “Reflections on the Revolution in France,”pp. 87-176

Burke, “Further Reflections on the Revolution in France,”(1791), pp. 75-124, 160-201

George Washington, First Inaugural Address

George Washington, “To the Hebrew Congregation in Newport”

George Washington, “To the Roman Catholics”

George Washington, Farewell Address