Defending the Founders

Remembering the indispensable man

Featured image Today we celebrate the anniversary of the birth of George Washington. Of all the great men of the revolutionary era to whom we owe our freedom, Washington’s greatness was the rarest and the most needed. At this remove in time, it is also the hardest to comprehend. Take, for example, Washington’s contribution to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Washington’s mere presence lent the undertaking and its handiwork the legitimacy that »

Podcast: PLU Lesson 2: Federalist #10

Featured image Yesterday we held our second class session of Power Line University, this time taking up the famous Federalist #10, drawing out key points of James Madison’s views on how an “extended republic”—long thought impossible—was a solution for the perpetual defects and eventual failures of republican governments. His views on equality and property come in for special attention. If you want to see the text slides, you can take it in »

Announcement: Power Line University Webinar Tomorrow

Featured image Following up on our dry run at Power Line University last week (not too late to go back and take it in if you missed it), tomorrow (Wednesday) at 4 pm Pacific/7 pm Eastern, we’ll be doing our first class session on The Federalist in webinar format, which means you’ll be able to watch live and send in questions and comments. We’ll be covering Federalist numbers 1 – 10, with »

Podcast: Introducing “Power Line University”

Featured image I get a steady stream of emails from readers and listeners who want to know if any of my or Lucretia’s college courses are webcast or otherwise available online, and unfortunately the answer is No, partly for legal reasons but also for some technical reasons (streaming live classes is not as easy as it might seem, and the recording quality is often poor). But we have for the longest time »

Bushrod League (Updated)

Featured image The confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson are off to a predictable start, with Sen. Ted Cruz mentioning the forgotten late 18th-century Justice Bushrod Washington, who was confirmed to the Supreme Court in 24 hours, provoking a spasm from the left, which may have been Cruz’s intent. Gillian Brockwell, a staff writer for the Washington Post‘s “history blog,” found this all too much to take: Ted Cruz told Ketanji »

The Left vs. the Constitution

Featured image One reason the left hates the American Constitution, and wishes to replace it, is that its embedded principles along with much of its explicit text is foursquare against the two main purposes of the left: class struggle and race struggle. Never mind the drive to abolish the electoral college, or the Senate, or admit new states to increase the odds of Democratic election victories. Just take in how the left »

Podcast: The 3WHH on ‘The Soul of Politics,’ with Glenn Ellmers

Featured image Next Tuesday, Encounter Books will publish Glenn Ellmers’ magisterial intellectual biography The Soul of Politics: Harry Jaffa and the Fight for America, and Glenn joins us this week to walk through some of the highlights in the book in what is turning out to be a month-long “Jaffapalooza.” Naturally, we draw Glenn into our running argument about the problems of communicating the proper understanding of the principle of equality in an »

Feddie Night Fights, FedSoc Style

Featured image Forget Friday Night Lights. How about Feddie Night Fights—Federalist Society style? Two weeks from now, on Wednesday June 30 at 8 pm eastern time, I’ll be refereeing a Federalist Society student division online webinar on the issue of whether the Declaration of Independence should inform judicial interpretation of the Constitution. This is a live issue on the right, and I’ve written an outline of the two sides of this issue, »

Will *France* Save America?

Featured image Yes, that is a ridiculous headline. And yet, as we noted here last week, what does it tell us about the present condition of America that the president of France, Emanuel Macron, has a better grasp of perversity and danger of our “woke” culture than the President of the United States? The New York Times has followed up on its first startling account with a report this week on steps »

Podcast: The Three Whisky Happy Hour, with Uhlmann to the Rescue

Featured image If Trump wins the electoral college again on Tuesday while losing the popular vote (perhaps by a bigger margin than he did in 2016), the left will lose its mind. Well that’s a given, but they’ll really lose their mind about the electoral college. After hoisting a couple of toasts to the passing of Sean Connery and a second sour whisky shot for Britain going back on COVID lockdown, “Lucretia” »

Podcast: The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Liberal Education and Responsibility (With a Side of Biden)

Featured image Lots of things to pour whisky shots for this week. Before returning to our short course on Leo Strauss’s perspectives on liberal education, “Lucretia” and Steve reflect on Joe Biden’s long career as a chameleon (if you didn’t know better, you’d almost think Biden had read Richard Weaver’s famous Ideas Have Consequences, since he thinks Antifa is an “idea,” and one that certainly has consequences), and why the 25th Amendment, »

Podcast: The Three Whisky Happy Hour—”The Frigate 93 Election?”

Featured image I know we promised listeners that last week’s episode would be the beginning of a three-part series on liberal education rightly understood, but the passing of Justice Ginsburg has thrown us off our plan. But rather than go in for the usual punditry about confirmation battles and the effect this will have on the election, Lucretia and I decided to step back and take on a truly radical perspective on »

PL Podcast: The Three Whisky Happy Hour, with Guest Bartender John Yoo

Featured image Settle in for an extra-long bonus episode, as Lucretia and I depart from our nascent Islay-Highland-Irish whisky flight format because we have a guest bartender and malt master on with us for this weekend’s episode—John Yoo! John not only knows the deep history of fine Japanese whiskies, but also the Constitution and presidential power. He has a terrific new book coming out on Tuesday, Defender in Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight »

Liberals Versus the Constitution

Featured image It was jarring to the ears to hear Democrats piously invoking the words and “original intent” of the Founders during the impeachment farce, because as everyone knows liberals would re-write the Constitution wholesale if they had the power to do so. The list of things they despise in our Constitution is quite long, i.e. get rid of the electoral college, abolish the Senate, etc. I’ve seen lists with as many »

The Power Line Show, Ep. 166: America’s Revolutionary Mind, With C. Bradley Thompson [with comment by Paul]

Featured image Prof. C. Bradley Thompson of Clemson University has written a superb new book, the first of two volumes, about the American Founding, America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It. In my opinion this book deserves to take its place alongside Bernard Bailyn’s Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and Gordon Wood’s Creation of the American Republic as one of the indispensable »

Roger Scruton Contra Mundum: Who’s the Greatest?

Featured image [Note: This lengthy post is mainly intended for our academic readers and connoisseurs of conservative intellectual history, and if this is not your cup of tea—like Paul’s soccer posts—you’ll want to move on right away to another item and spare us your TL;DR complaints. . .] I had a notion that when I said in my observance of the passing of Sir Roger Scruton that he was “the greatest conservative »

The Power Line Show, Ep. 164: Special Impeachment Edition!

Featured image This special edition of the Power Line Show offers a panel discussion on impeachment that I hosted and moderated yesterday before a packed house at Berkeley Law School. Its purpose was not to rehash or thrash out the specific issues of the Trump impeachment as much as to illuminate what the founders had in mind when they wrote impeachment into the Constitution, and what we have learned from the two »