The Return of the Golden Kite: Japan’s Return to the Strategic Stage
In ancient Japanese mythology the Golden Kite, one of the highest decorative orders of the Japanese military, was a messenger bird which enabled the Emperor Jimmu to…
Political History Through the Eyes of Eric Voegelin
In his Autobiographical Reflections, Eric Voegelin recounted the moment when he had abandoned writing a history of political ideas to write a history of political order rooted…
Frederick Douglass and our “Glorious Liberty Document”
In August of 2019, The New York Times Magazine published a special series of articles collectively entitled The 1619 Project. The lead-off essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones immediately…
The Almost-Chosen President
Abraham Lincoln is America’s greatest and most important president. Although a contrarian might like to assert George Washington, himself a great president, the honest reality is that…
What’s Left of Heidegger
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is, without question, the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. While existentialism and phenomenology as philosophical movements existed prior to Heidegger, his 1927 Being…
What is Populism?
“Christopher Lasch once famously declared that the professions ‘came into being by reducing the layman to incompetence.’ [Emanuel] Haldeman-Julius’s idea was to do the opposite—to undermine elites…
How To Make a Political Extremist
Today, the word extremist in connection with politics is used frequently to a point where it has lost all of its prior meaning, and it is now…
Oh, For a Competent Elite
Samuel T. Francis claimed, adding to James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, that there are not only managers of government and managers of industry, as Burnham claimed, but…
Philosophy and Liberty in a Commercial Age
“Of all these [Gallic tribes], the Belgae are the strongest, because the provinces are farthest removed from culture and civilization, and not least because merchants often come…
Who Owns the Timeline? Covenant in Buber, Voegelin, and Ourselves
*Note: This was originally a paper presented at the 2023 APSA When we talk of living in history, what are we saying? Eric Voegelin credits the…
The Insidious Alliance of Leftists and Islamists
Hamas’s terrorist assault on Israel, and the warfare that has followed both on the ground and in the media, constitute a watershed moment in history. Some of…
Deliverance and Nationhood: A Comparative Political Study of T. E. Lawrence and Moses
The embryonic nation is a tumultuous one. It consists of a disjointed agglomeration of often diverse people who struggle to live and thrive as one. With no…
Dreams of Jerusalem
Like most Americans, my first encounter with Jerusalem was reading about it in the Bible. It was the capital city of David’s Israel, the city where the…
A Special Covenant
This is a deliberately big book, 585 pages of text, with nearly a hundred more pages of notes and index. Its ambition is also huge: to present…
Israel and Its Enemies
The Hamas blitz into Israel during the holiday of Simchat Torah and day after the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War has brought shock and outrage…