It is maddening to listen to people who attempt “conservative thought” with but a shallow mentality for the concept. True conservative thought comes from the seeds of agrarians and various…
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God’s guidance and blessing began in Virginia. But Civil War is where we are today. For those who have had the usual blather from a contemporary public-school education, a little…
The Federalist online magazine has a problem. It’s a condition that characterizes and infects almost the entirety of the present national conservative media. This hit home for me on May…
Our “conservative” punditry go forth daily in what seems increasingly to be an already lost battle against the agenda of the left and its progressivist minions in and outside the…
Southern conservatism is considered an enigma when juxtaposed against the bipartisan political configuration having been imposed upon us since the beginning of the American experiment. The candor of its echoed…
A review of Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition (All Points Books, 2018) by Sir Roger Scruton. There is no such thing as conservatism, according to Sir Roger Scruton’s…
As someone who came to the Southern Conservative tradition late this moment feels very strange. I have inculcated affection for the South my whole life without living there very often,…
A review of Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence (ISI Books, 1999) edited by Herbert Agar and Allen Tate In graduate school, I was assigned by the resident…
I started my political journey on what I thought to be the Left. Books like Klein’s The Shock Doctrine resonated with me, as did films like American Beauty and Revolutionary…
A review of The Southern Tradition: The Achievements and Limitations of Southern Conservatism (Harvard, 1994) by Eugene Genovese The notion of a Southern political tradition can be understood as conservative,…
A review of How To Be a Conservative (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2015), by Sir Roger Scruton. It is highly unusual for any political leader to articulate any sort of learned political…
One of the great issues of American political history is whether an authentic American conservatism exists. This is a crucial question for Southerners, as the South is historically viewed as…
No discussion of Southern conservatism, its history and its relationship to what is termed broadly the “American conservative movement” would be complete without an examination of events that have transpired…
Fred Douglas Young, Richard M. Weaver, 1910-1963: A Life of the Mind. University of Missouri Press, 1995. 217; Joseph Scotchie, editor, The Vision of Richard Weaver. Transaction Publishers, 1995. Early…
A number of years ago I became interested in the writings of the great Southern author and philosopher Robert Lewis Dabney (d. 1898). Dabney, if he is much known at…
One-hundred and fifty-two years ago, April 9, 1865 was a Palm Sunday just as today, and in the central part of war-torn Virginia, a major turning point occurred in American history….
. .the South—alone among the civilized communities of the nineteenth century—had hardihood sufficient for an appeal to arms against the iron new order which, a vague instinct whispered to Southerners,…
This essay was presented at the 2016 Abbeville Institute Summer School. When I was young I used to read a lot of books about archaeology—the study of ancient lost worlds…
An American president can wreck his country and blow up the world, but he cannot recreate either of them. —Chilton Williamson A recent book on the George W. Bush presidency…
What is true conservatism? That question, more than anything else, is the argument raging in the Republican Party today – one side fully represented in the party’s establishment wing, while…
Kurt Schlichter wrote an interesting article on Town Hall recently entitled Liberal Attempts to Silence Dissenters Will Not End Well. I thoroughly enjoyed (and agreed with) it. There was a…
The perennial champion of racial division and hatred has, unfortunately, returned to Louisiana politics. Duke’s return will be a boon to his race-hustling counterparts on the left. The likes of…
Old Hickory has been chopped off the front of the twenty-dollar bill. Andrew Jackson will still appear on the back of the bill, but Harriet Tubman (freed slave, conductor on…
This piece was originally published at The American Conservative. When John William Corrington died in 1988, Southern conservatives lost one of their most talented writers, a refined Cajun cowboy with…
The God-fearing, Bible-reading, hymn-singing Confederate army grew out of a Southern soil well cultivated during the long struggle of countless, if largely unsung, preachers to civilize a harsh and violent…
Born in 1782 near Abbeville, South Carolina, Calhoun’s educational opportunities were limited, albeit advanced by the occasional tutelage offered by his brother-in-law, Reverend Moses Waddel. After his parents’ death and…
This selection was originally printed in Brion McClanahan and Clyde Wilson, Forgotten Conservatives in American History (Pelican, 2012). Of the Great Triumvirate who dominated American public discourse from the War…
This essay was first printed in the Southern Partisan Magazine, Volume III, Number 1 (1983). INTRODUCTION One hundred and forty years ago, Senator Henry Clay proposed a constitutional amendment to…
It has been fifty-seven years since the Weaverville, North Carolina native Richard Weaver (1910-1963) published an article in Modern Age titled Up From Liberalism (Fall-Winter 1957-8, Vol. 3, No. 1,…
I have called M.E. Bradford the Agrarian Aquinas. He did not write a Summa, but his work as a whole enriched and carried into new territory the message of I’ll…
M.E. Bradford said of Southern Conservatism that: “This conservatism is both historic and principled in not insisting on rights anterior to or separable from the context in which they originally…
It has become fashionable among contemporary historians to claim that the Southern identity was fabricated in the late antebellum period mostly as a result of the attack on slavery. Historians…
This article originally appeared in American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia (ISI Books). It is reprinted by permission of the publisher. Southern conservatism, as opposed to the generic American variety, is a…
This past May 8 would have been the late Melvin E. Bradford’s 80th birthday. That the anniversary passed without much, if any, commentary is not surprising, given the intellectual tenor…
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