Conservative Minds

One Nation, Two Cultures presents Himmelfarb's autopsy of American cultural decline. She describes how Victorian values prevailed in America up until the middle of the 20th century. But, as society became more affluent, morality and culture were liberalized and democratized. A loose system of morality emerged and became available to everyone.

Writing early in the 20th century, Weber sees how rational capitalism had developed in the West but not so much in other civilizations around the world. His project is to find out why. He finds a connection between modern economic life and ascetic Protestantism, which held that economic achievement was evidence of God's favor.

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What constitutes a conservative foreign policy? From Senator Bob Taft's isolationism to President George W. Bush's idealistic adventurism, Republicans have differed substantially in their approaches over the years. Dueck walks us through the history of modern conservative and Republican foreign policy. Despite real differences, he finds a common thread running through the decades that he labels 'hard line.'

Dreher has some hard truths for Christian conservatives: the culture war is over, and values-voters have lost. The light of Christianity is flickering out all over the West. He says, if Christians want to survive, they must return to the roots of faith in thought and practice. He calls on Christian conservatives to withdraw from politics and build thriving communities apart from the world where Christian truth can be lived.

Haidt's project is to understand why conservatives and liberals disagree about morality. Using groundbreaking social science research, he identifies a series of moral foundations that can explain why people seem to experience different moral intuitions. He argues that conservatives have at least five moral foundations, while liberals only have two. As a result, Haidt says, "Republicans understand moral psychology and Democrats don't."

For Machiavelli, the end of politics is the maximization of power. A prince achieves greatness through calculation and maneuver. The wise prince knows how to use and constrain human nature to manipulate his subjects.

Crisis of the House Divided is Jaffa's exploration of Abraham Lincoln's political thought. Lincoln believed that the rights enunciated in the Declaration of Independence were understood by its authors to apply to all men - African Americans included. According to Lincoln, the Declaration not only implies what are the goals to be sought with the consent of the governed in a free society; it also states a theory of political obligation.

Huntington argues that culture and cultural idenities will shape the post-Cold War world. The most important distinctions among peoples are not ideological, political, or economic. They are cultural. The dominant division is between the West and "the rest." The dangerous clashes of the future are likely to arise from the interaction of Western arrogance, Islamic intolerance, and Sinic (i.e., Chinese) assertiveness.

Cass argues that work matters. Trade, efficiency gains, and immigration have led to growth in GDP, but he says we gave up something. The labor market can no longer allow families and communities to support themselves. And, without stable families and communities, economic opportunity vanishes. The alternative is to place the renewal of work and family at the center of public policy.

According to Deneen, liberalism has failed because it was true to itself. The Left and Right cooperate in the expansion of both statism and individualism. The liberal state both creates the individual and secures the free market through the increasingly massive and all-encompassing Leviathan. Both the free market and individual liberty have a solvent effect on traditional relationships and the social fabric.