Modern Age

Founding Partisans: Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and the Brawling Birth of American Politics By H. W. Brands (Doubleday, 2023) H. W. Brands here undertakes to tell the story of American federal politics down through the Revolution of 1800. He does so chiefly through the writings, public and private, of the Federalist era’s four leading political figures.

“What makes a woman?” This question isn’t precisely the one that has been agitating American society of late. When in her nomination hearings Senator Marsha Blackburn wanted to put now-Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on the spot, she asked her for a “definition” of a woman, a question that, in a legal context, might have different answers in different contexts.

Winning America’s Second Civil War: Progressivism’s Authoritarian Threat, Where It Came From, and How to Defeat It By Jeffrey E.

Over the past few years Americans have heard much about “our democracy.” The possessive adjective is polemical—it signifies an “us” against “them” division, on one side of which are progressives, who lay proprietary claim to democracy. Our democracy is liberal democracy, and anyone who is not a liberal democrat is illiberal or undemocratic, or both.

The Ideology of Democratism By Emily B. Finley (Oxford University Press, 2022) Tradition and the Deliberative Turn: A Critique of Contemporary Democratic Theory By Ryan R.

Conservatives with at least a basic grasp of the history of our movement know that the victory of 1980—when the former governor of California was first elected president, launching the Reagan Revolution—began in an unlikely place: the ashes of defeat. And not just any defeat, but a decidedly crushing one: the election of 1964, when Barry Goldwater lost in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson. Yet ISI-schooled conservatives can trace the triumph of the 1980s even further back.

Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order Edited by Michael Walsh (Bombardier Books, 2022) In my single days, I hung out most evenings in certain Upper West Side saloons, smoking cigarettes, drinking scotch, and reading. Such evenings were nearly heaven for me. That is until someone intruded upon my reverie and asked me to move down. “Can you move down so my wife and I can sit together?” “Sure, no problem.” Back to smoking, drinking, reading.

Climate is the dominating and definitive issue of our time, a compound of acutely emotional considerations concerning science, politics, society, culture, anthropology, and religion, the breadth and complexity of which has yet to be recognized comprehensively. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, a fresh movement on behalf of “wilderness” was growing and coalescing, chiefly in the Rocky Mountain West.

Since 1976 Modern Age has been published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. But when ISI began seventy years ago, its educational mission was narrower than it is today.

Another storm will be here soon.Winds drive older snow to a dune Against the fence. The weeds Wait for spring. Darkness leads The eye into a half-gone moon. Winter creeper and bull thistle, Though dead for-the-time-being, bristle And spike. Bindweed and birch Still smother stems and search For ground to cover on this hill. Vines looped themselves around barbed wire All summer. Now the strangling sweetbriar Sleeps in muddy banks of snow; Once winter’s gone, they’ll grow Again like an untended fire.