In my latest Loonie Politics column I say Pierre Poilievre’s overwhelming victory in the Conservative leadership contest, and Jean Charest’s hollow showing, demonstrates yet again that snobbery is no antidote to populism.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say we should be very wary of proposals from people who express angry ignorance about our Constitutional monarchy, including “republicans” who have no idea what a republic actually is.
“As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.”
James Madison, quoted by Christopher Buckley in National Review November 22, 1999
“He [Arnold Toynbee] observes that one of the consistent symptoms of disintegration is that the elites – Toynbee’s ‘dominant minority’ – begin to imitate those at the bottom of society.”
Charles Murray in Wall Street Journal February 6 2001
Re a lot of the kids in Haight-Ashbury already by summer 1967 “They’re like zombies, people with deadened nervous systems, people who see themselves as skeletons festooned with flesh.... The result is a young person who has barbed-wire guts, to use a phrase suggested by [Erik] Erikson.”
Nicholas von Hoffman, We are the people our parents warned us against
“Scandalous rumors concerning the state of the times had reached my ears.”
Jupiter in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in Charlotte F. Otten, ed. A Lycanthropy Reader: Werewolves In Western Culture.
In my latest Epoch Times column I explain why we talk a lot less about free speech than we used to, and a lot less convincingly.
“I invite the reader’s attention to the much more serious consideration [than myths in very early history] of the kind of lives our ancestors lived, of who were the men, and what the means both in politics and war by which Rome’s power was first acquired and subsequently expanded; I would then have him trace the process of our moral decline, to watch, first, the sinking of the foundations of morality as the old teaching was allowed to lapse, then the rapidly increasing disintegration, then the final collapse of the whole edifice, and the dark dawning of our modern day when we can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them.”
Titus Livius (“Livy”) The Early History of Rome