Gottfried Responds to the West Coast Straussians

Looking for Moral Foundations (in All the Wrong Places) by Paul Gottfried

Watkins on Jaffa

Foundering Inventions by William J. Watkins

A review of Original Intent and the Framers of the Constitution by Harry Jafffa, (Regnery, 1994). When Professor Harry Jaffa, in his new book Original Intent and the Framers of the Constitution: A Disputed Question,… »

Straussians Are No Conservatives

The Imaginative Conservative: Harry Jaffa, Walter Berns, & American Conservatism

A Response to Jaffa

Harry Jaffa and the Demise of the Old Republic

Walter Berns

Is he really someone for paleos to hold up as a teacher?

Country Before Faith by Gerald J. Russello
A constitutional scholar’s conscientious objection to the culture war

Anglo? He sounds like someone who grew up on the nationalist mythos.

His concern over the court’s involvement in cases touching on religious conviction had an unforeseen personal effect. In 1997, he resigned from the board of First Things over a symposium on the possibility of judicial tyranny. Some of the contributors to the symposium questioned whether because of cases like Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the United States could be considered still to have a legitimate government of, by, and for the people rather than what Russell Kirk elsewhere called “archonocracy,” or rule by judges. Berns, a World War II veteran, would have none of it. He wrote to the editors, “You do not speak for me… when you say that the government of the United State is morally illegitimate and come close to advocating not only civil disobedience but armed revolution.”

Berns knew from revolution: at Cornell in 1969 he was one of the few faculty who refused to bow to radical student demands, which cost him his post. But his reaction to the symposium is informative. The Supreme Court’s extension of its religious “logic” had created too many holes in the fabric of the polity. While other religious conservatives, myself included, rejoiced in the resistance to the “naked public square,” Berns lamented that it also meant the disintegration of a nation founded explicitly on the laws of Nature and Nature’s God, with religious freedom coming second to citizenship, an argument he elaborated on in his masterful 2001 book Making Patriots.

A Guide to the Work of Walter Berns
NYT: Walter Berns, Whose Ideas Fueled Neoconservative Movement, Dies at 95
Weekly Standard obituary and tribute
Walter Berns and Harry Jaffa
Spectator
Kirk Center
OLL
NEH

Paul Gottfried on Harry Jaffa

Prof. Harry V. Jaffa, Founder of Modern American Conservatism

Kendall or Calhoun?

The Constitution vs. Calhoun: Why Harry Jaffa Is Still Wrong About Willmoore Kendall by Daniel McCarthy

"Kendall was, in American constitutional terms, a “nationalist” rather than an advocate of states’ rights."

Part 2 of Peter Haworth's Piece on West Coast Straussianism

West Coast Straussians, Harry Jaffa, Bad Originalism, and Teleocratic Fantasies, Part 2

Two from Nomocracy in Politics

Clyde Wilson, Derailment of Civil War History
Peter Haworth, West Coast Straussians, Harry Jaffa, Bad Originalism, and Teleocratic Fantasies: Part 1

Is There a Place for Southern Conservatism in Uhmerica?

The Right’s Civil War by Daniel McCarthy
From Harry Jaffa to Jack Hunter, attitudes toward Lincoln have shown what conservatives think about centralized power today.

There are some comments about Jack Hunter at CHT.