StephenKMackSD's Blog

Despite the celebratory mood of Mr. Douthat’s premature obituary on Europe, in his essay of June 1, 2013 and it’s weak argument: the ‘welfare state’ as the motor of it’s decline. Decline, the idea fixe of Conservatism across time and place, we might just bring the political conversation down to the terrestrial plain. Not withstanding the quote from Francis Fukuyama on the Hegelian delusion of the ‘End of History’, as interpreted by a student of the Strauss/Ravelstein school of philosophical pretension: thinking of this skein of argument as so many polemical hot air balloons. Continue reading →

I find the public career of Mr. Andrew Sullivan puzzling, disappointing even infuriating. I started reading him when he was writing for The New York Observer and subsequently as he and Christopher Hitchens kept the debate of 9/11 within the bounds that they thought as reasonable, intellectually and politically acceptable, two stern enforcers of their continually evolving master ideas. Continue reading →

The American Empire is and will be at perpetual war. That is the fate of empires, but the fate of the Republic is a matter of our gravest concern. How do the tangible facts of empire and it’s necessary strategies and practices affect, confront and nullify republican values,practices and institutions? President Obama seems to think that he can,will and is fully capable of mastering that conundrum. There was nothing anguished about the President or his speech, just the relaxed,confident demeanor of the most gifted American rhetorician of the age. The serenity of the just? One might even liken this problem to that of the Gordian Knot and cast the president as the radiant Alexander,too much,perhaps?The President’s enemies can and do argue this as a product of his aloofness and arrogance. Continue reading →

I could quote that old hymn, Jesus loves me:
Jesus loves me—this I know,
For the Bible tells me so;
Little ones to him belong,—
They are weak, but he is strong.
(Anna Bartlett Warner)
Mr. Douthat in his latest essay All the Lonely People, an essay based on a defense of the old fashioned virtue of social conformity, as a defense against the growing number of suicides in American. Also, he connects  it to declining religious affiliations, modern America as godless wasteland. How can a country that disrespects prenatal life etc. is here implicit. He mentions those connections that a vigorously cultivated religious life can offer and celebrates small town virtues, although the reality is that most Americans  live in cities or their suburbs. But his political romanticism is not subject to anything like a check against reality. Continue reading →

Is it possible to write an essay on Kierkegaard without the mention of the ethical/philosophical monstrosity of the ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’? Mr. Jeffrey Frank benignly characterizes it as ‘ a dazzling thought experiment’ with ‘somewhat frightening, especially when you consider its extreme, all-too-familiar modern-day applications’ . Might we call it by it’s real name? The rationale or philosophical permission of the religious zealot and or mass murderer? Or does that strain the bounds of respectable bourgeois intellectual/political discourse? Continue reading →

What can one say about the self-serving and purposefully obtuse Mr. Douthat? The fact that Obamacare is the product of The Heritage Foundation? The premier think tank of the, once, most reactionary strata of the Party. The New Democrats took that plan and made it their own. The Republican Party calls it ‘Socialized Medicine’ and other such epithets, yet it is not single payer, but wedded to the welfare of insurance providers and drug manufactures. The Republicans have no real alternative because Obamacare is their own. Continue reading →