Greetings from Hillsdale! Yesterday, I returned from my last of four trips to Washington, DC, this summer. This morning, I had two Western Heritage classes. It’s the beginning of my 28th year at Hillsdale. Tonight, I’m off to Detroit to see Rush for their 50th anniversary tour. Never a dull moment.

My prayers and best wishes to all of you, Brad]

In 1939, the same year the Germans and the Russians mutually consented to rape Poland, T.S. Eliot rather famously (or, I suppose for some, infamously) declared: “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.” Eliot, of course, could not have been more correct. In 1936, you had three choices: National Socialism, international socialism, or dignity.

In 2026, we find ourselves in similar circumstances, even if they aren’t quite as clear cut as they were in 1936.

Of all the disturbing developments in culture and ideas over the last several years—including violence against legitimate authority, violence against the average citizen, and violence against the very ideas that undergird the West—few have been more disturbing than the reemergence of communism and socialism.

Why is this happening now, as much of Western civilization lingers in its twilight state? Most likely, it has to do with three critical things. First, we scholars have failed to convince the public of just how wicked all forms of communism were and remain. Most historians have focused their research and teaching on how “liberated” every form of eccentricity has become and how—in terms of race and gender—victims remain victims. Almost all historians ignore the most salient fact of the 20th century: that governments murdered more than 200 million innocents, the largest massacre in the history of the world. Terror reigned in the killing fields, the Holocaust camps, and the gulags.

Second, an entire generation has grown up never knowing such things as the Soviet gulags or even the Berlin Wall. Indeed, it’s been more than a full generation since communism existentially threatened sustained violence on a global scale. With America currently at the height of her power (militarily and economically, not spiritually or ethically), we are the bad guys of the world, if for no other reason than we stand—for the most part—above and alone.

Third, the five nations that remain officially communist—Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, North Korea and mainland China—seem to be relentlessly backward, mad, or capitalist. No one thinks about the first three countries anymore. North Korea looks like a loony bin. China seems more bent on profit and power more than anything it might profess officially.

Equally disturbing is that most younger defenders of communism buy into the oldest propaganda line of the Left—that real communism has never been tried and fascism is the polar opposite of communism. That the Nazis were actually “National Socialists,” these apologists argue, was merely a cynical ploy on the part of Hitler to gain the support of the working and middle classes of Germany. The term “socialism” meant nothing to Hitler. He was really a supporter of controlled corporate capitalism, not of the beautiful and compelling idea of socialism. Many of these young communism supporters go so far as to argue that those who label the Nazis “National Socialists” are either ignorant or willfully smearing a good word. While these new supporters have yet to proclaim those who call Nazis socialists as racists, they are coming close. A quick look at the social media response to a British conservative’s recent claim that National Socialism was—surprise!—socialist should be proof enough that communism is hardly dead and gone.

The young communists are more than convinced of their intellectual as well as their moral superiority. With dread certainty, they bully anyone who believes differently than they do. In other words, the Left is back and in full force, up to the same deceptions and tricks as it was in the 1920s and after.

That the National Socialists embraced socialism is factually accurate. Though they did not nationalize to the extent the Leninists wanted, they did nationalize very vital industry in Germany, even if by outright intimidation rather than through the law. In his personal diaries, Joseph Goebbels wrote in late 1925: “It would be better for us to end our existence under Bolshevism than to endure slavery under capitalism.” Only a few months later, he continued, “I think it is terrible that we and the Communists are bashing in each other’s heads.” Whatever the state of the rivalry between the two camps, Goebbels claimed, the two forces should ally and conquer. He even reached out to a communist in a personal letter: “We are not really enemies,” he offered.

Hitler admired Stalin, and the two willingly carved up Poland in 1939. One SS division named itself after Florian Geyer, a Marxist hero promoted by Frederick Engels in The Peasant War in Germany. Hitler actively recruited communists into the National Socialist movement, believing they were far more malleable than Christians.

The Italian fascists had even closer ties to the Marxists, with Mussolini having begun his career as a Marxist publicist and writer. A few Italian fascists even held positions in the Comintern. The only serious divide between the Italian fascists (or those who would become fascists) and Italian communists in the 1910s was their support, or not, of Italy’s participation in World War I.

In the West, one of the first to recognize these vital connections was none other than Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian turned Englishman. Nationalism is nothing “but a twin brother of socialism,” he proclaimed in a 1945 speech in Dublin.

In his profound work Reflections on a Ravaged Century, Robert Conquest labeled all forms of totalitarian socialism a type of “mindslaughter.” Fascism and communism share much in common, he argued. First, the two ideologies came from identical origins in 19th-century thought. Second, both celebrated the peasant revolts of the 1500s as foreshadowing 20th-century uprisings. Third, both claimed to speak in the name of “the people” and “the masses.” Fourth, both embraced a variety of social sciences and pseudosciences from the 19th century, though the Marxists did it with more finesse. Fifth, both claimed to be progressing humanity toward some end goal. And, finally, both accepted moral nihilism.

In his fascinating work The Faces of Janus, A. James Gregor convincingly argues that the rival claim for power in 1922 in Italy inaugurated a propaganda war between these two factions that lasted—at least rhetorically—to this day. “The enmities bred by the dispute,” Gregory writes, “ultimately reached such intensity that Marxists of whatever variety and nationality refused to acknowledge the heretical Marxist origins of the first Fascism.” From this point forward, Marxists began to write of fascists as “reactionary,” as “right-wing,” and as part of the last stages of capitalism. The debates among Marxists over fascism raged between 1922 and 1935 until the Communist International finally declared fascism to be the result of the economic downturn of the previous decade, “the sharp accentuation of the general crisis of capitalism.” As such, the communists officially defined fascism as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of finance capitalism.”

Since 1935, of course, fascism has become such a catch-all term for anything evil that it’s now a hollow thing, full of fury but devoid of substance. In addition to Gregor and Conquest, scholars and writers such as Sheldon Richman and Robert Higgs have done their very best (and their best is extraordinary) to define fascism properly. In general, though, their appeals to intellect and understanding have failed, falling only as pearls among the passionate swine.

Just as T.S. Eliot saw in Hitler and Stalin two sides of the same coin, so too did his close friend and ally, Christopher Dawson. In one of Dawson’s finest pieces, written in the immediate aftermath of the World War II, “The Left-Right Fallacy” (published in The Catholic Mind), Dawson rightly noted that there is no left and no right; there is only man and anti-man. That is, the divide is not horizontal but vertical. “The tactics of totalitarianism,” he wrote, “are to weld every difference of opinion and tradition and every conflict of economic interests into an absolute ideological opposition which disintegrates society into hostile factions bent on destroying one another.” The so-called and false divisions between a left and right, then, are “a perfect god-send to the forces of destruction.” Such a sophomoric notion of left and right becomes a blunt weapon, used to beat any and all opposition, while in actuality separating the human person from the human person, clothing each not in glory but in wretched rags of chaos and deceit. The results, Dawson realized, could only be confusion, disintegration, degradation, violence, inhumanity, hatred, and suspicion, disgracing even “a tribe of cannibals.”

This brings us back to Eliot in the 1930s. Not only did he see Stalin and Hitler as intellectual allies, not enemies, he recognized how reliant communism and fascism were on traditional religion—at least in their very heretical perversions. From T.S. Eliot’s “The Rock”:

But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before:

though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where.

Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no god; and this has never happened before

That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason,

And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic.

The Church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned, what have we to do

But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards

In an age which advances progressively backwards?

Sadly, the age that advances progressively backwards has not halted. Indeed, over the last several years, it has advanced backwards rather quickly, suddenly, and, fearfully, without end.

Greetings on a muggy Michigan afternoon. I hope, trust, and pray that you’re all doing well.

Dedra and I drove to DC this past week for a three-day conference sponsored by the Heritage Foundation. We had an absolutely wonderful time. Not only did I learn quite a bit, but I left feeling very inspired. I’ve been reading Heritage materials since the fall of 1982, and I was so very honored to be a part of them so many decades later.

If you’re interested, over at The Imaginative Conservative, I have a piece critiquing socialism in all its forms, democratic or otherwise, and I describe the current democratic socialist movement as an existential threat to the American republic. I wish it were hyperbolic, but it’s not.

The piece I’m posting here comes from six years ago. I was analyzing the famous 1964 book, edited by Frank Meyer, called “What is Conservatism?” Given the presidential election that year, the book was very influential.

My best to each of you, Brad]

When the prestigious publishing house Holt, Rinehart, and Winston published “What Is Conservatism?” edited by Frank Meyer, on March 6, 1964, there was an air of triumph to the entire drift of those not firmly on the ideological Left.

The movement itself was just celebrating a little over a decade of success, following upon Russell Kirk’s magisterial The Conservative Mind (Regnery), Leo Strauss’s insightful Natural Right and History (University of Chicago Press), Ray Bradbury’s poetic dystopia, Fahrenheit 451 (Ballantine Books), and Robert Nisbet’s penetrating The Quest for Community (Oxford University Press) in 1953. William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review had been making cultural inroads since late 1955, Young Americans for Freedom had swept across American college campuses in just four years, and a young, dashing, and forthright senator from Arizona was the knight errant of millions of Americans.

Whatever fate Goldwater would suffer in the November elections, his was a moment that was not fated to be “has been.” Besides, What Is Conservatism? came out in March, and the November elections were still eight months away. Success, then, should have been within the grasp of American conservatives, if not in the White House, at least, in some American universities and in some cultural institutions. Right?

1964’s What Is Conservatism?—featuring pieces by Kirk, Buckley, Meyer, Friedrich Hayek, Father Stanley Perry, Wilmoore Kendall, John Chamberlain, Gary Wills, Wilhelm Roepke, Frank Chodorov, and a whole host of others—served as a “Who’s Who” of the movement, in all of its glories and in all of its failures. Its main glory was that it proved that conservatism mattered. Its main failure was that no one could agree upon what conservatism actually meant or how one would define it in a way that brought together so many diverse thinkers and their own particular ideas. As such, What Is Conservatism? is witty, encyclopedic, captivating, prickly, interesting, triumphal, broad, narrow, painful, joyful, and self-effacing, all at once.

Then as now, the conservative served as not only the world’s best critic, but also as a critic concerned with his own place within criticism itself. And, like all conservatives, past and present, these conservative writers were profoundly idiosyncratic and individualist, even as they lamented individualism.

The reviewer for The New York Times was not incorrect when he explained in his review of What Is Conservatism?, “One is all but obliged to conclude that although there are many highly intelligent American conservatives, there is as yet no formulated American conservatism.” In general, two things should hold conservatives together, the reviewer continued, what to conserve of the past and what to fear in the present. Sadly, the New York Times reviewer concluded, most “new conservatives,” as they were then called, only spewed forth their bitternesses about what they hated. This seemed to be all they could agree upon.

Jump now to the time of Corona, in the year of our Lord 2020. “Conservative is kind of a meaningless word now,” a young and skilled writer (one I like to read, Brad Polumbo) recently stated on social media. Meanwhile, over at the venerable Intercollegiate Studies Institute, an institution charged with promoting conservatism within higher education, another young and gifted writer, Gracy Olmstead, writes: “I am loath, in fact, to embrace the label ‘conservative’ myself—in part because of the ways most people define it, and in part because I am unsure whether any political label fully defines my beliefs.”

I suppose it must be age and, perhaps to some extent, ego, but I find such statements to be as mystifying as they are unsatisfying. While I agree that conservatism is not, nor ever should be, a political label, I am far less certain that it should be loathed or dismissed so readily. I also fear that in this age of Trumpian populism and soft authoritarianism, conservatism is all too readily confused with populism.

The most important question for any conservative remains: what should be conserved?

When Russell Kirk, the father of post-World War II conservatism, attempted to explain the meaning of the movement, he counseled against any ironclad definitions. Taking a term from the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church (of which he was not yet a member in 1953), Kirk argued that one should define conservatism in terms of “canons” or tenets, rather than in terms of absolutes. In some writings, he offered four canons, in some five canons, and in some ten canons as he struggled with the meaning of conservatism. Most often, though, Kirk listed six.

One: a conviction that one God—most likely, for Kirk, the Stoic Logos in 1953, but the Trinitarian God of orthodox Christianity by 1964—rules over all things, transcends all things, and holds all things together. If we rely merely on the human understanding of reason, he continued, we end with the Cross, with the administering of hemlock, and with the naming of false goddesses. In essence, the Logos defines the universal.

Two: a love of the particular as a specific manifestation of the universal. In this, Kirk wrote, we should embrace an “affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of traditional life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and equalitarianism and utilitarian aims of most radical systems.” Each person, then, is a unique and unrepeatable reflection of the Logos and must be treated as such.

Three: that society demands variation in rank, class, and structure. Fearing radical egalitarianism, the conservative must uphold the excellence within each person and within each community, recognizing that thing of excellence as a leavening agent for the rest of the community and its members.

Four: that of all natural rights, the most important is property. If one does not own himself and take responsibility for his moral actions, he can never be expected to lead or even to live with another. Each person, in Kirk’s view, is a moral agent, a manifestation of free will itself. Kirk also meant ownership of land and “stuff,” but he mostly meant being morally and ethically culpable.

Five: a belief that tradition is the accumulated experience of humankind and, thus, the only real and efficacious laboratory of sociology that has ever existed. In this, the conservative recognizes the power of reason, but also its limitations. When combined with the first and second canons, one might state—with Plato, Cicero, and C.S. Lewis—that there is eternal reason (Logos), private reason (rationality), and the reasonableness of experience.

Six: a “recognition that change and reform are not identical, and that innovation is a devouring conflagration more often than it is a torch of progress.” Here, Kirk is rather directly channeling Burke as he acknowledges that each generation may act in three different ways when inheriting the past. It may reject the inheritance, accept the inheritance, or reform the inheritance. Kirk, as did Burke, favored the latter course as it demanded that each generation see itself in continuity with all other generations, past and future.

Kirk wisely chose to define conservatism by not defining it. He was, however, fundamentally clear that conservatism did not belong exclusively to the sphere of politics. It was a movement in education, in literature, in the arts, in living, in religion, in economics, and in politics. But never in politics alone.

When the critics of conservatism emerge—whether in 1964 or 2020—they all too readily view conservatism as primarily a political movement, and, more often than not, as a populist movement. Yet, the difference between conservatism and populism is not only vast, but it is also insurmountable. At its root, populism seeks homogeneity throughout culture, while conservatism embraces variety and distinction.

By its very nature as well as by its own history, conservatism can never be a coherent ideology, centered around a like-minded group of (un)thinkers, dedicated to remaking the future of government or of political society. Backward looking, conservatism was born as a rebellion against conformity in society, in bureaucracy, in education, and in government, and, by its very essence, it promotes what is eternally (not temporarily) true, good, and beautiful. It seeks that which is everlasting even as it finds such everlasting things in mortal envelopes, slowly crushed by time.

Is there an American conservatism? Yes…and, no. Harry Jaffa once stated that all American conservatism must be defined by its relationship to the American founding. He was certainly correct about this. The Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman traditions as understood through the experience of Anglo-Saxon common law anchor our conservatism in the United States. We must never fail to ask, just what are we conserving? What matters most is how our traditions uphold (or not) the dignity and uniqueness of the human person. If our conservatism conserves that which is evil, false, and ugly, it is a failure, lower than mere misery. If such were the case, I’d be loath to embrace it as well.

Is there an American conservatism? No…and, yes. To understand it, though, one must be willing to sift through thousands of events and thousands (plus) of traditions and an innumerable number of decisions made by unique individuals, each endowed by their creator with free will.

Yet, in 1964 when What Is Conservatism? appeared, it was thoughtful, intense, and diverse. It remains so in 2020…at least for those with eyes to see and souls to imagine.

Dear Substack subscribers, please forgive the tone of this post, but I want to remember my daughter, Cecilia Rose Birzer, who would’ve turned 19 on August 8, 2026. I’d write on that day, but I can guarantee you, I won’t be in the mood. That day, no matter what, is always a huge downer, every year without fail. It will be a depressing day, a day in which I want to do next to nothing.

Let me start at the beginning and explain why today is the anniversary of it all. Cecilia Rose would’ve been our fifth child, and we had chosen godparents in our great friends, Phil and Melinda Nielsen. Dedra, my wife, came to full term on this day, August 6, in 2007. Our doctor, a wise and rather beautiful person, asked us to induce and deliver her immediately. Somehow, in our utter arrogance, we wanted a “natural birth,” and so we waited. We waited on August 7 and nothing happened. Early morning, August 8, though, Dedra was awaked early in the morning by a sudden jerk. We knew something was wrong, and we rushed to the hospital. We hoped beyond hope, but it was too late. That jerk was Cecilia Rose getting caught in her own umbilical cord and strangling to death. If only.

Without question, that day was the most horrible as well as the most blessed day of my life. At that point, we did induce the birth, and late in the day, my wife gave birth to our deceased daughter. We were able to hold her for several minutes, but her body was without a soul and she cooled down immediately. It was horrifying.

Some amazing things happened that day, though. Some of our closest friends—Mark Kalthoff, Steve and Laura Smith, Eden Simmons, Father Brian Stanley, and Mark and Christy Maier—spent the day with us. The nurses must of thought we were insane, as we laughed and cried and prayed. Every emotion was utterly raw and we were quite loud. It was the day I finally understood what true friendship and true community mean.

Then, even more amazingly, my wife—with the strength of her Viking ethnicity—gave birth with the ferocity and determination of a Demi-goddess. Her strength—and my weakness—were palpable. I’ve never been so proud of her.

After the birth, though, I went home to take care of the other kids. After just a few short hours of sleep, I found them all jumping on my bed, excitedly demanding to know whether they had a new brother or sister. In one of the most painful moments of my life, I had to tell them that their baby sister had died. Nathaniel was horror struck, and Gretchen lost it. I’m not sure that Maria and Harry were quite old enough to understand what was happening, but they were sad as well. Even nineteen years later, I can so clearly see each of their pale faces, tears flowing.

The days that followed were each horrors. Every minute felt like an hour, every hour like a day, and every day a month. Doing everything from planning a funeral Mass to buying a casket to buying a burial plot and paying property taxes on that burial plot just about did us in. At one telling moment, while the extremely nice church ladies were trying to help us with the funeral arrangements, we snapped—”No, of course, there can’t be Altar Girls; we aren’t heretics!!!” They didn’t deserve that, but we were at the end of what we could take.

On August 14, we had the funeral, presided over by two close friends, Father Brian and Father Bill Miscamble, an old friend from Notre Dame. Steve Smith pretty much took over the whole Mass and arranged the readings, the rosary, and everything that matters. Of course, we were utterly stunned by how many people came to the funeral. President Arnn shut down the college and encouraged everyone to attend. They did, and the church was packed. Friends and family flew in from all parts of the country. Each and every visitor was a gift. Indeed, I was truly humbled by the gifts of their presence.

The funeral was excruciating, and the burial terrible—I couldn’t believe we were leaving our daughter in the ground. Amazingly enough, though, we live across the street from a gorgeous nineteenth-century cemetery, Oak Grove. Having walked through the cemetery daily, I know it intimately. That our daughter is buried only yards from our house has meant everything to us over the past two decades. We visit often.

Crazily, that year after Cecilia Rose died was a sabbatical year for me. My first. I did everything I could to distract myself from her death, and I dove into the book I was writing at the time, American Cicero: The Life of Charles Carroll. I love the book, and I’m very proud of it—but it will always be tainted by Cecilia Rose’s death. I also spent as much time with Dedra and the kids as possible—watching and reading Batman, reading the Lord of the Rings, going on long walks, and playing Legos.

But, I will admit, I was absolutely furious at God. I couldn’t understand how He could so readily ask us to be parents and then take away the chance of doing so. I screamed at Him. I screamed a lot. I called him the Greatest Abortionist of the Universe. I would walk over the Cecilia Rose’s grave, lay down, and just yell and yell. I have no idea if it was healthy or not, but it was a little nutty, to be sure.

I have always loved music—especially complicated rock music—and one album, in particular, Marillion’s Afraid of Sunlight, kept me calm and sane. On my iPod, I listened to it over and over. Those guys in the band have no idea who I am, but I can honestly say they saved a life that year.

Though I never stopped attending Mass or taking the sacraments, I was pretty mad at God for about a decade. On what would’ve been Cecilia Rose’s tenth birthday, my very wise and beautiful oldest daughter, Gretchen, told me that I had been angry long enough and that it was time for reconciliation. She was right, of course. I suppose I should feel bad for doubting God’s intentions and for having spent a decade of my life angry with Him. I choose to believe, though, that as a Father Himself, He understands. Someday, I’ll find out.

One thing I’ve always been able to do is write, and I promised myself that I would never go a year without writing my reminscenes of my daughter, Cecilia Rose. It’s the least I can do to honor her. I want her always to be a part of the family. We celebrate her birthday, we put a stocking out for her at Christmas, we visit her grave frequently, and I always proudly say I’m the father of seven (even though only six are living).

This year, her birthday hits especially hard. She would’ve turned 19, and, as we’ve kept all of our kids out of school an extra year, she would’ve been an entering freshman at Hillsdale College. She would’ve, I’m sure, lived in Olds dorm. In the brief moments we knew her, she had black curly hair and deep blue eyes. That’s how I see her still, but at age 19. She’s bright, like her siblings, loves to read, loves to hike, and still isn’t too old to be play with Legos. I’m not sure what she would’ve majored in, but I’m guessing English. Cecilia Rose is brainy and beautiful, a Birzer. I can see her giving us a hug at opening ceremonies, taking the Platonic oath to the good, the true, and the beautiful, and then saying goodbye. Another hug. All is well.

If only.

[Please note, the icon at the top of this page was written by Phil Nielsen, as a gift to our Cecilia Rose. Phil, as noted in the piece, is her godfather.]

I will admit, it’s been a very rough week. Nancy Ryan, one of my favorite colleagues at Hillsdale, passed away, and we had the funeral Mass for her this morning. She was one of the first persons I met when I interviewed at Hillsdale way back in February 1999, and she—being immensely kind and wise—put me immediately at ease. She had the most amazing and comforting smile. I’ve thought the world of her ever since. She led a great life, but she was only 79. That seems ways too young to me. Anyway, please keep her and her family in your prayers.

I also have a couple of friends who have gone through some terrible losses over the last year. Please keep them in your prayers, too.

Last week, though, I had one brilliant thing happen. Acton had a book release event for me, and I lectured on republican virtue and the American founding. I had a total blast. I’ve been involved with Acton since the summer of 1991 when I attended their summer conference in North Bend, Washington. That they would recognize my new book meant the world to me.

After the lecture, I sat down with one of my closest friends and a former student, Dan Hugger. We talked for about an hour. If you’re interested in that discussion, here it is.

Below is a piece I wrote about Russell Kirk on his 100th birthday. That was back in 2018. I think pretty much the same things I did back then. Here’s hoping you approve.

I hope and pray you’re each doing well. Yours, Brad]

Even among the odd, Russell Amos Kirk was unusual. Perhaps only in America could such an eccentric and anti-individualist individual have arisen. And arise he did.

One hundred years ago, Kirk entered the world. Born to poverty-stricken but bookish Anglo-Saxon Celts on the wrong side of the tracks in Plymouth, Michigan, probably very few looked at his young parents and believed them capable of producing a genius. Kirk’s mother was a quiet saint, but his father was a ne’er-do-well who never quite got his life together and certainly never earned any respect from his only son. Like so many who settled in Michigan during the 19th century, the Kirks and their relatives had come with the first waves of immigration to the northern American colonies, slowly migrating across New England, upstate New York, and towards the Great Lakes. They had lost their Puritanism at some point, these old Yankees, and were to become the supporters of Abraham Lincoln and the proud backbone of the Union army during the American Civil War. Northern and agrarian, they replaced their lost Knoxian faith with not only cherished books but also with séances, faith healings, levitations, and bizarre spiritual liturgies.

Like so many traditionalists of the 20th century, Russell Amos Kirk (“Jr.”) revered his grandfather while dismissing his father. His traditionalist sympathies and piety were lacking in the previous generation, who deemed it unworthy even of consideration. All real hope rested in his grandfather’s cohort. Russell especially admired his maternal grandfather, Frank Pierce, a well-read and rough Stoic character.

Unsure of what greater things to believe, young Kirk found certainty in his mother and in her father. Through their influence, he read everything he could find, from the collected works of James Fenimore Cooper to Thomas Jefferson to Karl Marx, all while still in his tweens. He never stopped reading, and possessed amazing recall courtesy of what was almost certainly a photographic memory. Of all the great things in the world, however, nothing bested a walk with his quietly certain grandfather. On those walks, Russell felt his mind sharpen, his soul enlarge, and his world come into focus.

Not realizing how abnormal it was for a 12-year-old to read and devour all the knowledge and wisdom around him, Kirk never felt the sting of poverty, so immersed was he in the life of the mind.

When moved, he began to write, and once he started to write, he never stopped. One of his most loyal students, Wes McDonald (RIP), noted that Kirk probably wrote more in his lifetime than what even the most educated American reads in a lifetime. Having been privileged to read all of Kirk’s published books, articles, and reviews, as well as his private correspondence and papers, I can affirm McDonald’s suspicion. Everywhere Kirk traveled, he took with him his three-piece tweed suit, a swordstick, and a typewriter. The eminent scholar Paul Gottfried claimed that watching Kirk at the typewriter was akin to watching Beethoven compose. According to those who knew Kirk well, he could type while carrying on a conversation simultaneously. His photographic memory allowed him to reference things he had read over the years without looking them up. Sometimes in a furious day, he might answer tens or even hundreds of letters, and often in a furious night, he could produce a full-book chapter.

Almost as soon as Kirk entered Michigan State College as an undergraduate in 1936, Professor John Abbott Clark took him under his care and introduced him not just to the profoundly important but already neglected works of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, but to Socratic and Ciceronian humanism as a fundamental part of the Western tradition. During his college years, Kirk combined his love of romantic literature, the humanist ideals of Babbitt and More, and the stoic wisdom of his grandfather into what would be recognized by 1953 as modern conservatism. While earning an M.A. in history at Duke in 1940 and 1941, Kirk also discovered an intense love of Edmund Burke, whom he’d encountered through Babbitt and More in college but only indirectly. It was while writing his M.A. thesis on the rabid Southern republican John Randolph of Roanoke that Kirk first felt the influence of the greatest of the 18th-century Anglo-Irish statesmen. Though many scholars—from Daniel Boorstin to Leo Strauss to Peter Stanlis—were also re-discovering Burke (along with Alexis de Tocqueville) in the 1940s, it was Kirk’s 1953 work, The Conservative Mind, that would once again make Burke a household name in America and, to a lesser extent, in Great Britain.

By the time America entered World War II, a very young Kirk—rather enthusiastically Nockian and anarchistic—already despised Franklin Roosevelt for his mistreatment of ethnic and religious minorities at home and abroad and his militarization of the American economy. As much as Kirk hated Hitler, he did not see FDR as a viable alternative. Succumbing to the draft in the late summer of 1942, Russell Amos Kirk, B.A., M.A., endured in the military the only way he knew how: by spending all of his free time reading. Before shipping off to training at Camp Custer in Michigan (he would spend much of the war as a company clerk in the desert wastes of Utah), Kirk purchased every work of Plato and the Stoics that he could find. From his childhood to his death, he kept a copy of Aurelius’s Meditations close to him. As in the rest of his life, it would serve as his greatest comfort during the war. As he wrote in a personal letter, “everything in Christianity is Stoic”:

Really, the highest compliment I can pay to the Greeks is that they could understand and admire the Stoics and admit their own inferiority. Were the Stoics to ask the moderns the rhetorical questions they asked the Greeks, the moderns also would accept the questions as rhetorical—but would answer them in exactly the opposite manner.

In imitation of Aurelius, his own war diaries attempted to describe the world around him through the lens of the Greek and Roman-adopted Logos, the eternal order of the universe. “’Nothing is good but virtue’—Zeno” Kirk scrawled across the cover of his first diary.

That same Stoicism, however, also made Kirk profoundly aware of the majesty of nature, even in the desert wastes of the Great Basin. Though he had always been an excellent writer, something fundamentally changed in his view of the world in September of 1942. Kirk, though only 24 when he wrote these words, is worth quoting at length:

This is written in the dead of night (and why shouldn’t it be the dead of night? All else is dead here, and has been ever since the beginning of time). …I handle special orders, travel orders, daily bulletins, and the like—a great many stencils to type—and am a star contributor to the Sand Blast, our paper, a copy of which I’ll send you once we get the next issue out; I intend to do some brief literary criticism for it, once the post library opens. Officers are affable, hours required are briefer than those I had as a civilian, and the work is very light and sometimes infrequent. …I’ve grown to endure the country in true Stoic fashion, and take a certain pleasure in feeling that I’m a tough inhabitant of one of the most blasted spots on the continent. There’s enough leisure here, and that’s a lot; the winters are said to be dreadful, but I have found fears exceed realities here, as everywhere. Already we have very cold mornings and evenings, and as I write a great sand-laden wind very chilly, is howling around the shacks of Dugway. Coming here tends to make me lean toward the Stoic belief in a special providence—or, perhaps, more toward the belief of Schopenhauer that we are punished for our sins, in proportion to our sins, here on earth; for I’d been talking of Stoicism for two or three months before I burst into Dugway and there never was a better and sterner test of a philosophy, within my little realm of personal experience—to be hurled from the pleasures of the mind and the flesh, prosperity and friends and ease, to so utterly desolate a plain, closed in by mountains like a yard within a spiked fence, with everywhere the suggestion of death and futility and eternal emptiness. But, others, without any philosophy, live well enough here; and, as Marcus Aurelius observes, if some who think the pleasures of the world good still do not fear death, why should we?

Though disgusted by the ill treatment of Japanese Americans and the dropping of the atomic bombs, Kirk remained loyal to, if not uncritical of, the United States. The Army finally released Kirk in 1946, and after two years of teaching Western civilization at Michigan State, he accepted a position in the doctorate program at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland in 1948. It was after a messy breakup with a girlfriend in the fall of that year that a dispirited Kirk devoted himself to “an invigoration of conservative principles.” The five years of research and writing following that breakup would become The Conservative Mind, which was published in the spring of 1953.

Amidst today’s whirligig of populist conservatism, crass conservatism, and consumerist conservatism, we conservatives and libertarians have almost completely forgotten our roots. Those roots can be found in Kirk’s thought, an eccentric but effective and potent mixture of Stoicism, Burkeanism, anarchism, romanticism, and humanism. It is also important—critically so—to remember that Kirk’s vision of conservatism was never primarily a political one. Politics should play a role in the lives of Americans, but a role limited to its own sphere that stays out of rival areas of life. Family, business, education, and religion should each remain sovereign, devoid of politics and politicization. Kirk wanted a conservatism of imagination, of liberal education, and of human dignity. Vitally, he wanted a conservatism that found all persons—regardless of their accidents of birth—as individual manifestations of the eternal and universal Logos.

A hundred years after the birth of Russell Amos Kirk, those are ideas well worth remembering.

It’s been a great week. Lots of family and kid time and time with friends. And, on Thursday, I was asked to speak at the Acton Institute on the universal qualities of the Declaration, followed by an hour-long podcast with my great friend, Dan Hugger. I’ll certainly post those when they’re available. Here’s a short clip from my lecture—on why western civilization, at its best, is beautiful.

Over at The Imaginative Conservative, the editors have kindly posted the first part of a three part series on Eric Voegelin. If you’re interested, here’s a link to part one, Voegelin and the question of character.

As Law and Liberty, I got about as radical as I ever get, looking deeply at political anarchy. It was picked up by Real Clear Politics.

Below is a piece I wrote about five or so years ago, about one of my favorite persons in contemporary art and culture, Frank Miller. Miller is best known as a comic book illustrator and writer, being one of the most important creators when it comes to Batman and Daredevil. But, he also wrote the brilliant 300. I consider him a crucial voice in the defense of western civilization. Since it’s the fortieth anniversary of the seminal Dark Knight Returns, arguably the first graphic novel, it seemed appropriate to republish my praise of the man.

Let me know your thoughts. Blessings, Brad]

Frank Miller raged.

He stood naked at the edge of the skyscraper. The streets lay far below him. A frozen explosion of steel and glass burst in flight to the sky over the motionless traffic. The traffic seemed immovable, the steel and glass flowing. The steel and glass had the stillness of one brief moment in battle when thrust meets thrust and the currents are held in a pause more dynamic than motion. The steel and glass glowed, wet with sunrays.

(with apologies to Miss Rand and the writers of the Christian Gospels)

There is no doubting that the attack on the World Trade Centers on September 11, 2001 fundamentally shaped one of the greatest and most innovative artists of the last half century, Frank Miller.

Though his name might not be instantly recognizable to many readers of The American Conservative, his shadow hangs over much of popular culture, enigma though he might be. Films, novels, and television shows—directly and indirectly—reveal daily his vast imprint on American culture. While many book sellers and critics do not consider graphic novels serious literature, his 1986 work, The Dark Knight Returns, has sold over three million copies, making it a continuous best seller since its initial publication. Even Miller himself despises the term “graphic novel,” believing it sound too much like something risqué. Still, there’s no denying its success and importance. Miller believes that writers, artists, and readers should embrace the “graphic novel” for what it is: a comic book, plain and simple.

Frank Miller is to comics and film what Neil Peart is to rock and what Camille Paglia is to academia. He is nothing less than himself. Always and everywhere, he is purely Frank Miller. It seems, he could be nothing other than Frank Miller. If he changes, he can only become even more Frank Miller. On September 11, 2001, however, Frank Miller became more fully Frank Miller.

Though of us not on the political and cultural Left should celebrate him as a radical and unreconstructed individualist, the kind that only North America seem capable of producing in the post-modern world, a man never afraid to voice his views, whether commensurate with the bullying and mindless nightmares of the mob or not.

The Emerging Talent

Born in 1957 to Irish-American Roman Catholics, Miller grew up in Vermont, one of seven children. From about age five, he fell head over heels in love with comics, and his parents encouraged and nurtured this passion. At times, he found his early adult careers on the edge of derailment. Finishing high school because of the advice of his parents, Miller tried his hand at janitorial work, at transporting goods in trucking, and at driving buses. Every boss he had prior to entering the field of comics fired him.

In the late 1970s, as he lost job after job, he began to study with the then-best artist in the comic world, Neal Adams. After working at Gold Key comics and on lesser-known titles at DC, Miller moved to Marvel and soon took over the then nearly-defunct character, Daredevil. Much to the surprise of all at Marvel and in the comic world, Miller wrote what is now considered the definitive Daredevil, an anguished and blind Matt Murdock who regularly seeks the sacrament of Confession, confiding in his parish priest, as he wonders just how far he can fight in the name of vigilante justice. With Miller as writer, Daredevil went from being relatively obscure to being one of Marvel’s finest, most nuanced, and popular comics. After working on his independent cyberpunk comic and hero for DC, Ronin, Miller then moved to Batman. Miller not revived the then-failing character but, along with Alan Moore and his The Watchman, but also revitalizing the entire comic industry, then on the edge of bankruptcy.

An avowed gnostic, a Leftist, and a seemingly particular person, Alan Moore soon left the industry in boredom and disgust, but Miller stuck with it. A monumentally determined perfectionist, Miller kept his politics much closer to his chest than had Moore, though his quietly expressed views almost always embraced a kind of Goldwater libertarianism. Trying to improve his writing, Miller also read and studied like mad. Not surprisingly, he has read everything from Dashiell Hammett to Robert Heinlein to Christopher Lasch, and he has studied Japanese and European comic styles. Restless and curious to the nth degree, he became an amateur anthropologist as he traveled throughout Asia and the Near east, observing everything from cultural norms to speech patterns to the shades of light hitting the landscape.

His reading and traveling, combined with his love of cinema, seeing everything from Hitchcock to Dirty Harry, Miller honed his own art—in drawing and writing—to write modern myth, centering around the hero and anti-hero, around good and evil, and around beauty and chaos.

If understood properly, Miller persuasively argued, heroes bring us back to first principles of “right and wrong.” “I love heroes, I believe in heroism. I also adore fantasy, and so I’m drawn back to these superheroes,” Miller explained in October 2016. “Their mythology is open to infinite expansion, and the basic myth is irresistible. They got so much right in that first Superman movie, down to the tagline “you’ll believe a man can fly.” That’s our job.”

His explicit goal has always been “to do heroic adventures without compromise.” Too much of modern culture, he complains in the vein of Russell Kirk and C. Wright Mills, has become nothing but conformist drivel, with movies, television shows, and comic books serving the public at large as heavy “sedatives.” Instead, we need the Batmans and Dirty Harry’s to bring the “wrath of God” down upon the murderers, rapists, and tyrants of the world. The world desperately needs morality, order, and myth.

With his trademark fedora, open jacket, t-shirt, and scruffy white beard, Miller might look almost as unpleasant as Alan Moore really is. But, watch an interview with Miller and you’ll find he’s about the nicest guy in the world.

Unforgivable

On the tenth anniversary of 9-11, Miller did something unforgivable to the politically correct mafia as well as to the state of Iran (which condemned him, he proudly reminds us). He published a graphic novel, Holy Terror, in which the bad guys are Islamic fundamentalists. The first release of the then-fledgling company, Legendary Comics, a subsidiary of Legendary Pictures, Holy Terror horrified most of the media, formal and social. In the press release that launched the book, though, Miller’s editor, Bob Schreck wrote: “It has been my extreme pleasure and honor to have worked so closely with Frank for over 20 years now.” The new graphic novel, Holy Terror “finds Frank at the top of his game. A fast paced, biting commentary on our uncertain and volatile times, told with some of the most gut-wrenching, iconic images he’s ever produced.”

Schreck, though, stood affront a tidal wave of epic proportions. Wired called it “one of the most appalling, offensive, and vindictive comics of all time,” a product of “9/11 decadence, a “horror” of America’s “carefully nurtured grievance.” ThinkProgress claimed that Miller was “viciously Islamophobic” and took pleasure in the “sexualization of torture.” Others called it a “mean and ugly book,” “sickening,” a book about “rage-aholics with a limited vocabulary,” “fodder for the Anti-Islam set,” a “revenge fantasy” of a person who has removed himself “from reality,” and a “sloppy, arrogant work by an arrogant bastard.” Even Miller’s hero and mentor, Neal Adams, claimed—without details of how and where—that Miller had allowed his work to consume him, claiming Miller had become “white trash.”

In the year following the book’s publication, Miller unapologetically defended Holy Terror, explaining, rather rationally, “I lived through time when 3,000 of my neighbors were incinerated for no apparent reason. I lived through the chalky, smoky weeks that followed and through the warplanes flying overhead and realized that, much like my character, The Fixer, I found a mission.” Drawing inspiration from the anti-Nazi and anti-Japanese Empire war comics of the 1940s, Miller saw his own work as the equivalent in the war against terror. No doubt, he openly admitted, “I come in with my own very pro-Western-they-attacked-my-city-point of view.” In no way, he continued, did he mean “to be fair or balanced.” Interesting to be sure, Miller had earlier in his career complained that too much in comics was propaganda, not art. “My one attempt at” propaganda, he conceded in the early 1980s, “was a dismal failure.” Asked why, he responded, “It was too preachy.” A quarter of a century later, though, he was ready to try his hand at it.

When asked earlier this year by the London Guardian if he would still defend his views as vented through 2011’s Holy Terror, Miller admitted that the work was, at times, “bloodthirsty beyond belief.” Still, he noted, he would never go “back and start erasing books.” The Guardian took this as an apology, and many in the comic industry and media have since forgiven him.

What was so patently obvious to anyone who knew Frank Miller’s work, however, was that Holy Terror was no more and no less anti-fundamentalist than his other works. His masterpiece, The Dark Knight Returns(1986), attacked Protestant fundamentalism, and his noir series, Sin City (1991-), showed the heinous results of Roman Catholic fundamentalism. His recreation of the Battle of Thermopylae, 300, portrayed the Persians as slavish fundamentalists worshipping a god-king. Though Iran condemned Miller for 300, most critics gave him a pass (and often high praise) for his anti-Evangelical and anti-Catholic fundamentalism. For a billion reasons, though, they found his anti-Islamic fundamentalism unacceptable. Hypocrites all.

God bless you, Frank Miller

As soon as Miller became secure and success in the field of comics by the mid 1980s, he not only nurtured anyone who asked for his help, but he also launched a major and public campaign for comic companies pay better their writes and artists upfront as well as in royalties earned. Not only did Miller help resurrect the dying industry in the 1980s, but, since, his example and efforts have led to a flourishing of talents in and around comics and movies.

Combatting the Jerry Falwell and Tipper Gore busybodies of the 1980s, Miller also attacked censorship at every political level, convincingly arguing that with few exceptions, censors never know what they are doing, while their motives are less than pure. They seek power over society as well as governmental and corporate control over family. Time and again, Miller stressed, it is the sole prerogative of the mother and father to censor material for the family, not the job of the state to do so.

Sometimes, Miller takes his mischievousness to untoward levels of poor taste, such as when he plasters the “Approved by the Comics Code Authority” stamp on a sexy, female robot tart in his stories of Lance Blastoff. Generally, though, the humor is more “junior high level” than it is clever satire. Still, there’s a definite humor to it, even when he shocks, simply to shock.

While it’s tempting to love Miller for the enemies he has made—here in the United States and in Iran—it’s far better to praise him for his virtues and his innumerable creations. Through Daredevil, he taught us wisdom; through Batman, he taught us morality; through 300, he taught us fortitude; through Sin City, he taught us struggle; and through Martha Washington, he taught us patriotism. When talking about his own work and its expressions of heroism, he wisely noted that “doing the right thing routinely causes one great difficulties and one has to sacrifice a lot.” This is not just true for his heroes, but for Miller himself.

God bless you, Frank.

If you’re interested, I take a long and hard look at the notion of anarchy (yes, seriously) in today’s Law and Liberty. In particular, I’m reviewing the great Aeon Skoble’s work, Deleting the State.

Also, I just wrote a three-part article on the achievements (and follies) of Eric Voegelin, forthcoming from The Imaginative Conservative. And, also for TIC, I wrote a piece examining the politics of AOC, the Squad, and the DSA. Needless to write, I’m not a fan. Again, that’s forthcoming.

Blessings, everyone. Yours, Brad]

The dismantling of the idea of the West began when medieval philosophers began re-introducing the Sophist notions reduced to ashes by Socrates. This reintroduction came about as a reaction to extreme scholasticism in the Middle Ages. It was a fascinating thought experiment known as nominalism, but it unwittingly wrought massive damage upon the very ways in which Western citizens viewed themselves, disconnecting them not only from other cultures and peoples but also from one another—even within the same communities. Rather than reaching, often in anguish and pain, toward the transcendent and universal, their own priests were telling them to look more toward the muck of this world, perhaps even to wallow in its filth as a simple fact of existence.

Despite the great successes of the Scottish (well, the Celts—Adam Smith, David Hume, and Edmund Burke) and Americans (especially Thomas Jefferson and John Dickinson) in the eighteenth century (and, with less success among the English) and their claims of universalism, the nineteenth century bred the narrowest thought of all—from men such as Georg W.F. Hegel, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, and Sigmund Freud. As each of these men possessed individual genius, they offered the deepest thought possible on a variety of things: biology, adaptation to the environment, economics, breeding, sexuality, and psychology. Yet, they focused so strongly on individual ideas (the particulars of life) that they displaced their ideas (many of which were true) from the context of many true things. So, while we are certainly economic beings, we are not merely economic beings. We are also emotional, stupid, brilliant, wicked, good, procreative, and a million other things, many of which we barely understand about our individual selves. As the great economist and man of letters, Friedrich Hayek noted, to attempt to understand another and not have reservations and humility about such a study is to engage in a “fatal conceit.”

Or as C.S. Lewis’s tragic character, William Hengist claimed in That Hideous Strength, “I happen to believe that you can’t study men: you can only get to know them, which is quite different.”

During the 1960s, the New Left—more culturally than economically Marxist—began a concerted effort to destroy the foundations of Western Civilization, claiming that the West was little more than a facade for a while, European males to maintain a powerful hegemony over society. The view, as the New Leftists argued it, was that such claims as natural law, natural rights, and opportunity for all were merely smokescreens, allowing for the elites to maintain control over the oppressed and the voiceless. Rather than standing for the Platonic and Socratic notions of the good, the true, and the beautiful, the West really maintained a power relationship of one group solidifying and perpetuating its control through sexism, racism, and imperialism. Given the progressive dismantling of liberal education six decades prior to the rise of the New Left, the New Left was able to gain control of departments and promote an agenda of destruction, though often with the best of intentions.

Certainly, there were those who defended a traditional understanding of Western civilization throughout the previous century. In the United States, Irving Babbitt of Harvard, Paul Elmer More of Princeton, Willa Cather, Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet, William F. Buckley, Flannery O’Connor, and Sister Madeleva Wolff worked mightily to preserve the western tradition. Abroad, T.E. Hulme, T.S. Eliot, Christopher Dawson, Sigrid Undset, Theodor Haecker, Jacques Maritain, Wilhelm Roepke, and others did the same.

They were each, unfortunately, fighting a rear-guard action, defending the ramparts as the flood swept in and subsumed their efforts, no matter how noble.

Even the few schools that continue to claim to offer a true liberal education—Wyoming Catholic College, St. John’s College, Thomas Aquinas, Faulkner, Hillsdale, Notre Dame, and the University of St. Thomas (St. Paul, Minnesota)—are but bizarre counter-cultural institutions.

The West, for most Americans who even think about it, is simply the study of “dead white males” or a shorthand for “lazy white males.” As I write this, students across the United States have shut down universities and occupied buildings to protest the oppression—supposedly—still lingering from the 1960s. Thomas Jefferson, though liberally educated and the author of the Declaration of Independence, has come under fire, in particular, as a hypocrite, the protesting students seeing his enslaving but not his liberating.

And, yet the West has offered so much good in the world. It was not for nothing that Chinese students protested in Tiananmen Square in 1989 holding signs of Thomas Jefferson. The Chinese communists might have seen this as proof of CIA influence, but the rest of us understood that the symbol of Jefferson stood for something much greater than simply Jefferson himself: He stood for the entire Western tradition of natural law and natural rights, applicable to all persons and all times.

The West, as noted above, not only created philosophy (while all significant civilizations have accepted ethics, but, generally, only ethics), but it also introduced the ideas of natural law and natural rights.

The West has also understood that freedom and liberty are not ends, in and of themselves, but means by which we make free decisions toward the good, the true and the beautiful.

The West has also, critically, understood that while natural law and natural rights might be inherent in the very being of man himself, the securing of those rights comes with the cost of great sacrifices.

The West has also understood the necessity of myth, symbol, legend, allegory, and poetry as a means by which to pass the most important lessons from one generation to the next.

And, as the men around Socrates so wisely understood, we use the space offered by free choice to pursue not just the good, the true, and the beautiful, but we pursue these things through the four pagan virtues: prudence—the ability to discern good from evil; fortitude—the ability to persevere against all odds; justice—the giving of each man his due; and temperance—the use of earthly goods as a form of plastic, a means to an end. Later, of course, St. Paul would add the Christian virtues of faith—the ability to see beyond ourselves; hope—the confidence that we matter; and charity—the giving of one’s self for another.

Not too much to report on my end. My beautiful wife, Dedra, an expert on all things Little House on the Prairie, reviews the new Netflix series at The Daily Wire and finds it rather glorious. Yesterday, as many of you know, was Bastille Day, the beginning of the French Revolution. I had the chance late yesterday afternoon to talk with my great friend, Dr. Marcus Peter, about the differences between the French and American Revolutions. Please check out both of these things.

I also had a blast doing a podcast with another great friend, Nadya Williams, on the deeper meanings of science fiction especially as manifest in Walter Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz. I’ll link to that as soon as she’s posted it.

Blessings, everyone. Yours, Brad]

For those of us who still love Western civilization and consider ourselves loyal patriots to our ancestors, we are in a world of pain. At best, the world of today regards us as antiquated eccentrics. At worst, we are secretly promoting some kind of European supremacy and cultural hegemony. We are, supposedly, deaf to the cries of the oppressed, presenting history as a series of successes of one peoples (almost always white, against those who are not). Or, maybe in full innocence, we are simple reactionaries of the worst kind, the kind who really don’t know just how reactionary we are. Or, a bit more generously, we are misguided romantics, endlessly tilting at windmills.

Admittedly, I would love to be Don Quixote. At best, though, I’m merely his noble but decrepit steed, Rocinante.

When I was a student in college, back in the late 1980s, the Western canon was under attack. Of course, it had been under attack for nearly a century at that point, but it came blatantly under attack in the late 1980s by the newly-tenured radicals (those who came of age in the 1960s) who called for “inclusivity” in the canon of the West. They did not argue against studying Plato, but they wanted to know about Plato’s wife or if Plato had been influenced by central African philosophy. Frankly, every not quite “in-group”—at least as they saw themselves—wanted representation in the canon. Perhaps the most memorable and influential book at the time was, appropriately enough, named Black Athena (1987). In the late 1980s, each side saw the other as intractable and somewhat insidious. How naïve we all were then, presuming the debate would simply continue about inclusivity. And, how I long for those days when at least we debated what should be in the canon. As we approach the third decade of the twenty-first century, no canon can be stated with any certainty to exist. Not in the minds of academics and, most certainly, not in the minds of the average citizen of Western civilization. At least in 1989 and 1990, we still presumed a canon existed. Today, few even know that the word “canon” exists.

Today, though, most academics not only fail to recognize a canon, they act as though a canon should not exist in a rational world, evolved culturally past the superstitions of an older age. A canon belongs with pre-anesthesia dentistry and chattel slavery, in the past. Long in the past.

As conservatives, we have a duty to our ancestors, ourselves, our children, and their children to remember and conserve what must be remembered and what must be conserved. While the West has made more than its share of mistakes—after all, the West is no different than any other civilization, in that it is made up of men and women, some who choose to do good and some who choose to do ill—it has also done some things better than any other civilization, or, at the very least, introduced things to the world that the world than claimed for all of humanity.

Sometime within a generation of either side of 500 BC, a recognition about the uniqueness of each individual person—yet tied to a whole—arose among Ionians, Hindus, Buddhists, and Confucians. Each of the four great civilizations began to ask if an ethic might be universal. All peoples keep a certain set of rules—such as no murder, no adultery, no theft—for their own communities, but around 500 BC these four beginnings of civilization began to wonder whether or not ethics applied to those not in the in-group. Perhaps, such ethics might apply to action toward, to, and with one’s neighbors, near and far.

In Miletus, now sadly under water in the Aegean, several profound thinkers took such ethics seriously and asked the first questions that would soon be called “philosophy,” that is, a love of wisdom. If there was a universal ethic, these Greeks asked, what tied all peoples—regardless of time, soil, ethnicity, etc.—together? Was there a universal principle that held all together? Perhaps some primal element, such as earth, wind, water, or fire?

While this topic deserves an essay or two of its own, for now, it is worth noting that through the Stoics and early Christians, the West adopted its primal element as fire (logos). What matters most for this essay is that the entire discipline of philosophy began in the West, and it began as a way to find the universal that holds all humans together so that there is neither Greek nor Jew, male nor female, black nor white—but all made one through the Logos. When I see modern conservative claims that digging into the idea of universals is succumbing to the madness of political correctness, I only shake my head in disbelief, as they know not what they are trying to conserve. Since its beginning, the West has sought—more successfully than not—to find a way to balance the individual manifestations of universalism with the universalism itself. It is a difficult thing to do. Too readily, one can focus on the universals at the expense of the individual. This, of course, results in tyranny, pure and simple. One, however, can equally focus too much on the individual. Our modern world sees this is in the absurdity, “Well, that’s your ideology, and this is my ideology.” In the end, of course, no matter how much chaos might arise from such an unsustainable view, it will end in nothing less than might is right. This, I fear, is the greatest danger that comes from our loss of tradition and our loss of the understanding of the true West. By losing any anchor or pride in our purpose as citizens of the West, we also risk everything that makes the West special and gives us particular freedoms.

Thus, rather than a reactionary view, one can readily state the themes of the West in the best way possible—by asserting them as positive contributions, original or not, to the world and humanity at large. But, this comes soon. Very soon…

Dear Substack Reader,

As always, I trust and pray you’re doing well. I’m not sure about you, but I can say about myself that I often let the weight of the world get the best of me. My Hillsdale College students are so excellent and so engaged that I can’t but help feel optimistic about the future during the fall and spring semesters of the academic year.

When I’m out of the classroom, though, I let the world depress me.

Recently, I’ve been deeply worried about the future of our American republic. Having spent a considerable amount of my adult life studying the subject, I can safely say that the Founding generation wanted to restrict the political realm more than leaven it. The entirety of the founding—from our duty to overthrow governments in the Declaration to our praise of associationalism in the Northwest Ordinance, Article II—was meant to give us a free society, a society free from the interference of the political realm.

Since the Progressive period, though, we have seen the rise of the administrative state—in particular through the power of the presidency. Progressive President Theodore Roosevelt was quite blatant about this wishes—all power, especially the sovereignty of the people, should reside in the executive branch. This, of course, was diametrically opposed to Madison who said that, by necessity, all power in a republic should reside in a legislature. Let’s just say that I take Madison’s, not Roosevelt’s side, on this. Yet, our Congress is almost utterly impotent.

It would be folly not to recognize that Demos, Mars, and Leviathan have become the new gods in the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries.

Most recently, I was utterly dismayed by the Graham Platner debacle. To me—and I don’t think I’m wrong about this—the whole thing, nominating an openly declared Nazi, for the Seante—strikes me as the most cynical move, a realization that politics is nothing more than the vulgar grab for power. No ethics, no morality, no goodness—just pure and raw power, the fist in the glove, the boot upon our throat.

I already hated politics and the political realm before this summer, but I hate it even more now.

This leads me to Saint Augustine. Augustine, you’ll remember, tells us that while we are citizens of the City of God, itself in the heavenly realm, we are still called to do good in the City of Man, to call out those who would be fellow pilgrims. As such, I don’t feel I can abandon this world, however much the Benedicines might inspire me, too. We are called to leaven, even this passing world.

Still, rather than politics, I remember that my real faith is in Christ as Lord and King of the Universe. And, I’m so drawn to the words of St. John (1 John 4):

7Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.8Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 10In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

13By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. 14And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. 15Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. 16So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. 17By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. 18There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. 19We love because he first loved us. 20If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot^a love God whom he has not seen. 21And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.

So, I’m not ready to reject the world, but I would say this: do not make a god of politics or a religion of the political sphere. Rather, love your neighbor as your self. Trust not government, but friends, family, children, spouses, churches, small businesses, neighborhoods, and schools.

Yours, faithfully, Brad

Dear Substack Reader, Happy 250th anniversary/birthday of the United States! I’m thrilled that I got to live through 1976 as well as 2026. What an honor God has bestowed upon me.

Because of my Declaration book, I’ve had a total—if humbling—blast on so many radio interviews and podcasts that I literally and actually have lost count of them.

I hope this doesn’t sound cocky or arrogant—as much as I love being the Tolkien and the Batman and the Progressive Rock guy, I’m totally thrilled to be regarded as an expert on the American founding. I never served in the military, and this feels like maybe, just maybe, I’ve given something back to this glorious republic. Again, I hope this doesn’t sound like bragging. If anything, I think it’s the opposite, and I find it quite humbling. Regardless, what a true honor.

Here’s a roundup of recent activity.

My podcast with the Federalist.

My podcast with the Cato Institute.

My podcast with Law and Liberty.

My interview with Carl Olson of Catholic World Report.

My article on the sources of the Declaration of Independence at Word on Fire.

My article on who was the American in 1775 at The Imaginative Conservative.

My article on the Declaration as an Anglo-Saxon document at Modern Age.

My contribution to the meaning of 250 at Modern Age.

My praise of Kansas in the Wall Street Journal.

David Deavel’s review of the Declaration book.

Hans Eicholz’s review of the Declaration book.

Phew, that’s one heck of a lot of Birzer! As always, Substack Readers, you’re in my thoughts on prayers. Let us celebrate—fully and wholesomely—the Spirit of ‘76!

Yours, faithfully and patriotically, Brad

For better or worse, we head back to Michigan tomorrow. Though we miss Maria Grace and her husband, Ben, the rest of the Birzer clan has had a glorious time.

Right before I left for vacation, I had the great privilege of being a part of a number of podcasts. If you’re interested, here I am on the Law and Liberty podcast with my great friend and ally, James Patterson, talking about all things dealing with the revolution. Here I am, talking with my great friend and ally, Marcus Peter of Ave Maria Radio, about Robert Nisbet and conservatism. Here I am, talking with my great friends and allies, Chris Wiley and the Pugcast! about Tolkien and the Inklings. Here I am, talking with my great friend and ally, Roger Ream, about the Declaration. And, here I am, reviewing the brilliant Michael Lucchese’s new edited book by Russell Kirk.

And, finally, below, please find part six of my six-part series on Cicero.

God bless, everyone. As you well know—or you should!—you are always in my prayers. Remember to keep the faith! Jesus and His Mother love you.

Yours, Brad]

A divorce, the death of a beloved daughter, the absence of his only son, and the death of the Roman republic with the loss of the Senate and the courts plagued Marcus T. Cicero’s last few years in this world of sorrows. For consolation, he turned to philosophy, and, in particular, to Stoic philosophy. In general, Cicero had identified with one of the competing schools of the Stoics, the more skeptical New Academicians, throughout his writing career. Under the instruction of Philo, the New Academicians had promoted what was “probably true” over what could be known with certainty as true. Cicero believed that the various schools existed only as a means of understanding Socrates and Plato, thus proving the various schools of thought more alike than different.

At the end of his life, though, perhaps reaching for something more concrete than what Philo had allowed, Cicero hoped to bring all Greek schools together in a sort of synthesis under the umbrella of Stoic ethics and morality. Inspired by Panaetius’ work, entitled On Duty, written exactly a century earlier, Cicero wrote his own On Duties (De Officiis) as a letter to his absent son, Marcus, then a twenty-one-year-old studying philosophy in Athens.

Whatever his exact reasons for adopting a more Stoical approach to life, Cicero unwittingly (but perhaps gracefully?) prepared Rome for Christianity in ways that other pagans and paganisms could never have allowed or done. That generation of Stoics, including Virgil and Seneca, expected, amazingly enough, the human incarnation of the God of gods. It is little wonder, then, that so many of the early Church fathers—such as Jerome, Augustine, and Ambrose—considered Cicero to be a pagan Christian, more related to Christ and his teachings than not. Most certainly, his martyrdom on December 7, 43 BC, did not hurt his cause among Christians, either.

Cicero begins his treatise, On Duties, by praising his son for having chosen philosophy as a discipline of study, and Athens as the area in which to study. He should, however, never forget that he is a Latin, not a Greek, and he should, accordingly, combine things Latin with things Greek.

Then, Cicero throws down the gauntlet, defining one of the most important aspects of Western civilization. A man, if judged properly, will never be judged by his rights. Instead, all right judgment is judgment of the success and execution of one’s duties.

Although philosophy offers many problems, both important and useful, that have been fully and carefully discussed by philosophers, those teachings which have been handed down on the subject of moral duties seem to have the widest practical application. For no phase of life, whether public or private, whether in business or in the home, whether one is working on what concerns oneself alone or dealing with another, can be without its moral duty; on the discharge of such duties depends all that is morally right, and on their neglect all that is morally wrong in life.*

In a modern and post-modern world saturated with our talk of rights, more rights, and still more rights, Cicero seems somewhat antiquated. Yet, he holds his ground. Virtue, by its very nature—that is, “virtue” as the very “power of man”—is the nature of man and at the heart of man and all good, right, and proper living and order. Following the teachings of Aristotle, especially, Cicero notes that man, of all creatures, not only has the desire to procreate and continue the species, but he also has a share of reason.

Reason, when properly employed (the practical Latins always care more about the usefulness of a thing than do the Socratic Greeks), leads one to seek all that is blessed in life. Reason, after all, brings real diversity to life. “Above all, the search after truth and its eager pursuit are peculiar to man,” he advises his son. “And so, when we have leisure from the demands of business cares, we are eager to see, to hear, to learn something new, and we esteem a desire to know the secrets or wonders of creation as indispensable to a happy life.” As such, there is no greater philosophy, or love of wisdom, than the discovery of what makes life worth living, and what our duties are to one another, to our communities, and to our God.

Moreover, the subject of this inquiry is the common property of all philosophers; for who would presume to call himself a philosopher, if he did not inculcate any lessons of duty? But there are some schools that distort all notions of duty by the theories they propose touching the supreme good and the supreme evil. For he who posits the supreme good as having no connection with virtue and measures it not by a moral standard but by his own interests — if he should be consistent and not rather at times over-ruled by his better nature, he could value neither friendship nor justice nor generosity; and brave he surely cannot possibly be that counts pain the supreme evil, nor temperate he that holds pleasure to be the supreme good.

In these vital matters, Cicero continues, only the Stoics fully understand. Others come close, but they fail to grasp the essence of goodness, of virtue, and of duty.

Never would God have given man the ability to pursue goodness, truth, or beauty without the desire that we do so. Even our sight alone, Cicero tells his son, allows us to see the strangenesses, the quirks, the oddities, and the congruences that hold the diverse together, that bring the gothic aspects into the whole. As such, then, men have the duty to pursue God’s will and to make whole what has been shattered. One cannot do this with rights, but only with duties.

Even if one fails in discovering the unity that holds all things together, it is honorable to try. This, after all, is man’s highest duty.

I hope, trust, and pray that you’re each doing well.

Big news here. Child no. 3 (daughter no. 2), Maria Grace Birzer, became Maria Grace Birzer Papez on Saturday. Though I was a bit nervous going into the weekend, it all went perfectly. Maria Grace, not surprisingly, was a beacon of joy, and her now husband, Ben, is a great guy, an officer in the Air Force. Additionally, of course, friends and family galore were here for the event. I loved it all, and I just feel so much happiness for my daughter.

Here are a couple of photos: Maria Grace and me; three of my four daughters; MG and me dancing; my two brothers and my mom; and Dedra and me.

The weather was perfect, and I’m pretty sure we all had a blast. Humorously (and someone Biblically), we ran out of alcohol, and several friends ran to a local liquor store and restocked us—with even better alcohol than we originally had. I, personally, don’t drink, but I’m certainly happy for other to do so! Echoes of Cana.

I have to note, not only did most of my Hillsdale colleagues come, but my truly excellent friends, Winston Elliott and Kevin and Lisa McCormick, came as well—coming all the way from Texas.

My older brother, Todd, and his family, get first place for travel—they flew in from Tokyo!

On a different note, I had a couple of pieces come out recently. Here’s my piece on the “Anatomy of a Republic (not a democracy!) at The Imaginative Conservative. And, just this morning, The Daily Wire published my reflections on celebrating the bicentennial in 1976. Most importantly, though, Maria Grace (yes, that Maria Grace) became a first-time published author last Thursday for her brilliant piece on Willa Cather’s Shadows of the Rock. Once again, I’m immensely proud of her. She even used her married name for the piece, though she was still 48 hours away from the wedding.

We have a busy week, this week. I have two podcasts today, Acton University tomorrow, and a few more podcasts and interviews on Wednesday. On Thursday, the Birzer family heads west for a week of vacation.

Please keep us in your prayers, and know that you are always in mine.

Yours, faithfully, Brad

++++++++++++

Cicero never hid the fact that he wrote his own On the Republic in imitation of, and as a corrective of, Plato’s more famous Republic. Indeed, Cicero reveled in the idea. Yet, his own work is never slavish. In book four of Cicero’s version—of which, sadly, very little survives and much of it only in fragments quoted in other works—Cicero openly criticizes Plato for several things. Even in his criticisms, though, Cicero is playful, with the participants of the dialogue noting that Plato seems to be exempt from all wrong doing.

Not so, Cicero declares.

First, he regrets that Plato seems to advocate common ownership of property. Of course, the ugly word communism had yet to come into being, but it’s clear that communism would best describe what Cicero despises. Rather, Cicero believes, at least as expressed in the dialogue, that the best economic situation comes from citizens themselves saving their own money and shaping and determining their own finances. “The best source of revenue both for private families and for the commonwealth is frugality,” he notes with some finality. Additionally, property in the control of the many becomes a means by which the majority can subvert virtue to its own will and manipulations. The man of integrity will always resist such appeals as though given for flattery alone. “Too many foolishly desire to abolish this useful system in their search for a new distribution of money through some resolution of the plebs providing for their return of the horses,” Cicero laments, realizing that Plato’s ideas have crept into the social fabric of Rome. Though he wants Greek philosophy and drama to make inroads into Rome, these are not the Greek ideas he wants.

Second, and even more importantly, though, Cicero admits through dialogue that Plato’s culture and times—if not necessarily Plato himself—promoted sexual impurity. Labeling the Greek sexual norms as “defilement” and “lust,” Cicero considers the Greeks immoral to the extreme. Why, he asks, would any society allow their grown men to appear naked in public, allow them to embrace one another, and, most tragically, encourage them to sleep together. “The athletic exercises of young men in the gymnasia are really idiotic,” he states without trepidation.

In contrast, the Romans may be accounted superior on sexual matters, as they “bestow” gratitude and praise upon “frugality and self-control, on faith in the marital bond, on chaste, honorable, and upright character.” In such a nurturing environment, he continues, women do what they can to avoid alcohol and any sense of impropriety. “And besides, if any woman had a bad reputation, her relatives refused to kiss her,” a sure sign of disrespect, and “thus impudence is derived from seeking, and shamelessness from demanding.”

Of all the writers who came at the end of the republic and at the beginning of the empire, most make note of the loss of traditional morality. Cicero is certainly not alone in worrying about the corruption of traditional marriage and marriage norms. Livy defined the empire itself by its inability to take marriage and traditional morality seriously.

Taking this even further, Tacitus, only two generations later than did Cicero, praises the Germanic (Barbarian) tribes for their fierce defense of traditional marriage, observing without blatantly stating it, that the Roman imperials could learn much from those they consider inferior. Germans, much to his delight, not only sheltered women from sexual impropriety, but they considered all abortion murder and they frowned upon even the possibility of divorce. In other words, the German Barbarians were, to Tacitus, the ideal men, spirited and righteous.

In opposition to what the Roman republicans considered the overrationality and abstract longings of the Greek Platonic era and Plato’s thought—which could be summed up as an improper love of and lust for things disordered—Cicero advocates an adherence to nature and the order provided by recognizing the proper meaning of a thing within and around the very existence of that thing.

In this, nature (or God) has armed us well. After all, he claims, the human mind is the perfect instrument to enable man to be man. It allows him to see the past and, thus, understand the present and the future. “If there is no one who would not prefer death to transformation into an animal of any sort, even if he could retain the mind of a man,” he asks, “how much more wretched is it to have the mind of a beast while retaining human form!” We follow the seasons for survival, he argues: “Since in the autumn the earth has opened for the sowing of crops, in the winter has loosened for preparing them, and in the ripeness of summer has softened some and parched others,” reason equally demands that we follow the order and patterns of human existence. Just as God created nature to promote our happiness, so men have created society to promote our happiness. “Consider furthermore how wisely all the rest has been foreseen in order to promote the citizens’ shared association in a happy and honorable way of life,” he explains. “That is, indeed, the first cause of the creation of society, and it ought to be accomplished on the authority of the commonwealth in part through institutions and in part through laws.” Here, again, Cicero reminds the reader of the Platonic errors of educating the young through perverse sexuality and through insatiable desires. However gifted Greek philosophy might prove, it ultimately succumbed to the basest desires of the human soul and mind and body.

It is worth remembering that the Roman republicans defined their very existence and explained their very essence by the very traditional notions of manhood and womanhood. For the Romans, a man was a man, and a woman was a woman. When men on the march behaved in an effeminate manner, Cato the Elder had over six hundred of his own men beheaded. And, when the Jewish family Maccabees denounced the Greek sexual practices before the Senate, the Romans responded by sending troops to liberate the Jews from Alexandrian oppression. Such views of manhood were never marginal. They were central to Roman identity.

It’s a truly gorgeous day in southern Michigan, with low temperatures and, more importantly, low humidity. I hope and trust and pray that you’re each doing well. One week from today, child no. 3 (daughter no. 2), Maria Grace, gets married. She’s my first to do so, and I’m not entirely sure I’m ready for this next stage of life. As we approach the date, I would so appreciate prayers from you for Maria Grace, her fiancé, and all our friends and family traveling to Hillsdale for the big event. I’d take a prayer or two as well!

As always, if you’re looking for more Brad Birzer, there’s more out there. Here’s a review I wrote of Ben Reinhard’s brilliant The High Hallow, a study of Tolkien and the Catholic liturgy. And, here’s an interview with the great Phil Keaggy and wonderful Kevin Belmonte about their forthcoming album.

Thanks, everyone, for your immense support and your good wishes. I feel like there’s more to say, but I should probably get ready for the day. I have a 1:00 podcast about my Declaration book, and then I have a 2:00 wedding to attend! The wedding is right downtown, but I’ll be cutting it really close!

Yours, Brad

P.S. For my image today, I had to include this photo from fifteen years ago yesterday. Yes, I’m showing off, but I think I have a beautiful family.]

As much as St. Augustine admired Cicero (and, “admire” is, admittedly, a weak way of describing his adulation of the Roman republican), he believed he had failed in his attempt to define a republic in On the Republic, a book that dramatically and profoundly shaped The City of God. The republic, at least as Cicero defined it in On the Republic, is essentially a fantasy in this world, Augustine argues. “If this definition be true, there never was a Roman republic, for the people’s weal was never attained among the Romans.” There are too many confusions about justice and rights in this world, and no worldly government, no matter how wise, can attain either justice or right. Yet, Augustine argues, no one could fault Cicero for his well-ordered and proper desires. He wants only the best for the human person. Cicero, no matter how wrong, “advocates the cause of justice against injustice with great force and keeness.” In the end, Augustine fears, the Romans—no matter how well intentioned—served the cause of anti-Man and anti-Christ.

Truth be told, of course, Cicero could not help being born into a Pagan era, and, if any Pagan ever got it right, Cicero came the closest, perhaps only behind Socrates. Just as Augustine takes him seriously, so should we, especially given his influence on all republican thinkers since.

In book three of On the Republic, Cicero lays the foundation for all natural law thought, before or since. In an often quoted, lengthy passage that has survived the ages, he explains:

True law is right reason in agreement with Nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrong-doing by its prohibitions. And it does not lay its commands or prohibitions upon good men in vain, although neither have any effect upon the wicked. It is a sin to try and alter this law, nor is it allowable to attempt to repeal a part of it, and it is impossible to abolish it entirely. We cannot be freed from its obligations by Senate or People, and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it. And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and for all times, and there will be one master and one rule, that is, God, over us all, for He is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge.

Dissertations and books could be written about nearly every sentence of this paragraph, and one can actually imagine Supreme Court Justice Thomas stating this, word for word.

For the sake of convenience, let me break the quote down into three parts.

First, Cicero is referencing his desire for a balanced and mixed government as he had explained in books one and two of On the Republic, taking Plato’s three divisions of the soul and anticipating C.S. Lewis’s desire for men with chests. One could easily write “true law is right reason in agreement with nature” as “rationality is imagination in agreement with the passions,” or as “the executive is the aristocracy in agreement with the democracy.” That is, Cicero is calling for a harmony not only in the human person but in the commonwealth as a whole. A proper action—one that is just and good—demands the harmony of the three faculties of man.

Second, real law comes not from the mind of man but from the essence of creation itself. That is, man does not create law, he discovers it. It has always been there, though man has ignored, mocked, distorted, or forgotten it. And, as it is always there, it can never be destroyed, while it can always, critically, be remembered. A people might go two thousand years in ignorance (willful or not) of the true law, but the true law remains. If it fails in Troy, it can be remembered in Rome. If it fails there, it can be remembered in London. And, if it fails there, it can be remembered in Philadelphia. Truth, after all, is permanent and nothing man does can destroy it, no matter how vicious our intentions.

Finally, third, the true does not vary from place to place, time to time, or person to person. It must remain the same across nations, cultures, religions, eras, and regions. It can not be one thing for the ancient Athenian and another thing for the modern Houstonian. If it is law, it is true, and if it is true, it must be true for all times and all places and all persons, regardless of the accidents of birth.

Were chapter three of On the Republic only this paragraph, it would be nothing short of astounding, one of the most important observations on the world ever made. As it is, however, there is much great in the chapter, but nothing as great as this paragraph. One could establish a just rule for eons with only this paragraph, so brilliant is Cicero in this moment.

Another critical point that Cicero makes—though a repeat and regurgitation of Plato in the Republic—is that democracy is almost always nothing but the rule of the ephemeral emotions of the mob. The “rabble is just as tyrannical as one man, and all the more repellent in that there is nothing more monstrous than a creature which masquerades as a public and usurps its name.”

This truth, of course, bears repeating endlessly, though it will never be accepted by the very people it criticizes. Instead, the very people will prove Cicero correct in their denunciation of him and their acceptance of his martyrdom by the strong man who fights in their image and through their heinous folly. Marc Antony is the people, and the people are Marc Antony.

Much to our shame.

My lovely bride is traveling with me, and we’re actually coming from a conference in South Dakota. That one was on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. We had a wonderful time—as we always do—in the Great Plains. The land is gorgeous, and the people are kind. We also got to experience some tornadic weather.

If this—the third of my six-part series on Cicero—doesn’t satisfy your “Brad Birzer interest”, I also have a couple of other things you can look at. First, I wrote a review of the gorgeous new movie from Hillsdale College, Revolutionary America. You can access it here. Second, I posted a somewhat optimistic piece at The Imaginative Conservative on the future of the American republic. Third, several of my closest friends and I reminisced about our college love of music.

Ok, fair friends, please know that you are always very much in my thoughts and prayers. For now, my wife and I are going to enjoy the afternoon by walking along the Miracle Mile.

Yours, faithfully, Brad]

As Cicero critically notes, during all of its history, Rome came about by trial and error, custom and habit, not by design. “Our commonwealth, in contrast, was not shaped by one man’s talent but by that of many; and not in one person’s lifetime, but over many generations.” Livy, later, argued the same point, but in Polybian fashion. Cicero notes that through On the Republic he hopes to “show you our commonwealth as it is born, grows up, and comes of age.” By implication, of course, Cicero anticipates the decay, corruption, middle-age, and eventual death of the republic. Unlike in the American experience, the Roman republicans could not appeal to its “founders” or its “founding” or its specific constitution. Instead, all things came into being over time and through incredibly difficult and painstaking work. America’s Republic might be a mighty fortress, but Rome’s was poetic. Only in the divine, Cicero claims, could one find an origin of Rome. The rest was, simply put, experience and tenacity.

Being natural as well as divine in origin, the republic must follow the paths of nature and of god. “At this point you will see the political circle turning; you should learn to recognize its natural motion and circuit from the very being,” he explains through a Platonic dialogue. “This is the essential element of civic prudence (the topic of our entire discussion): to see the paths and turns of commonwealths, so that when you know in what direction any action tends, you can hold it back or anticipate it.”

As such, the true statesman—like the gardener—knows when to plant, when to fertilize, when to water, when to weed, when to prune, and when to harvest. There is, to be certain, a season for everything. And, as with every living thing, a republic must be born, mature, and, ultimately, die.

As a commonwealth, the republic must demand allegiance of each of its citizens. “In preserving the liberty of citizens,” he writes through dialogue, “no one is a private person.”

Also reflecting nature (in this case, the nature of the human person and his faculties), the best government mixes monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. “I showed that no one of these is best,” he writes, “but that a state that is properly blended from the first three types is better than any of them.”

Though many in Cicero’s time called for a strong man to establish order upon the disorder of the late republic, Cicero balked. “The people that is ruled by a king lacks a great deal, and above all it lacks liberty, which does not consist in having a just master, but in having none.” The king too easily becomes the tyrant, Cicero warns. “No animal can be imagined that is more awful or foul or more hateful to gods and men alike. Although he has the appearance of human, through the viciousness of his character he outdoes the most destructive beasts. Who could rightly call ‘human’ someone who desires no bond of shared law, no link of human nature with his fellow citizens or indeed with the whole human race?”

Even better than rules, Cicero claims, are customs. A people unaccustomed to tyranny provide the best bulwark against it. A society, after all, is ordered not from its rules, but by its habits. While this has its faults—such as the irrational laying of some claim to a free society—true authority must come from “custom and precedent” not ego.

As described in previous essays here at The Imaginative Conservative, Cicero’s On the Republic was lost to the West for a millennium and a half! Stunning, especially given how much it influenced St. Augustine and, consequently, the West since St. Augustine. Additionally, it must be noted, it seems rather clear that Cicero wrote On the Republic and On the Law at the same time, perhaps even seeing them as two halves of a whole, works of nostalgia for a world long lost but, at least in Cicero’s art, idealized.

In the second book of On the Republic, Cicero also considers the question of foreign influence on a republic. After all, one might understand the growth of a thing, but what happens when foreign influence—much like the unanticipated severity of a storm—descends upon one, even if one unwittingly invited such wrath upon one’s garden (or society)?

This was a critical question for Cicero, but it remains one equally important for Americans. By its very nature—unlike the very nature of a democracy—a republic is insular looking. The res publica (the common good or good thing) demands vigilance and introspection, perhaps even to a fault. The republic, after all, began in 509 B.C. as a rejection of the decadent Etruscan rule. The Latins, in contrast, sought simplicity and honor, valuing hard work and traditional families and marriage over immediate gratifications and untoward pleasures. Yet, in its many conquests and adventures abroad over the following four centuries, Rome encountered innumerable customs and arts and manner and religions and laws. True, it assimilated most of these, but, in doing so, it also changed radically what had been its own virtue and original strength.

Cicero, to be certain, is as much to blame for bringing in foreign influence as any other Roman. After all, it was Cicero’s speeches, orations, and writings that acclimated the Romans to Greek ideas and ideals.

Americans were not immune from foreign influences and corruption. From the very beginning, what would eventually become the party system formed by siding with either Revolutionary France or Imperial England during the Napoleonic Wars. And, writers as diverse as James Fenimore Cooper and Ralph Waldo Emerson feared that an artistry inherited from Europe might well corrupt the simple, republic manners of Americans.

Sound familiar? It should. America is the new Rome in more ways than one. We must pray for the rise of our own Cicero, a charismatic figure who fights for all that is good, no matter the cost.

A couple of things before I get into today’s writing adventure. I’ve spent much of the week in podcasts, mostly for the Declaration of Independence book, but some for Tolkien as well. If you’re interested, here’s my podcast with the brilliant Kelley Vlahos. Here’s one with the mighty Culture Warrior! If you’re interested in prog rock, here’s our 62 minute interview with the wonderful Steve Babb of Glass Hammer.

Finally, over at The Imaginative Conservative, I had the privilege of writing on the deadly trinity of progressivism, ideology, and modernity. Here’s the one on modernity.

This coming week, I travel to South Dakota for a lecture on the Founding, and then I head to Chicago for a Liberty Fund on Adam Smith. Amazingly enough, this will be the 100th Liberty Fund seminar I’ve attended. And, I’ll be with meaningful friends.

Ok, everyone, I hope you’re each doing well! Blessings, Brad]

In his profound treatise on government, On the Republic—taking Plato’s Republic as a model while strongly disagreeing with his exemplar’s conclusions—Marcus T. Cicero reiterates the basics regarding a republic. It must, he notes somewhat didactically, follow the basic forms of a republic, incorporating, through a delicate and ordered balance, aspects of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy.

In this, the republic reflects the very nature of man and his ability to know things through the three faculties of the mind: through the head (rationality); through the soul (imagination); and through the stomach (passion). A republic, by its very essence, imitates the highest of creation, man endowed with understanding and free will.

Simply reflecting the three parts of man, though, does not a republic make! “Any one of these three forms of government (if only the bond which originally joined the citizens together in the partnership of the State holds fast), though not perfect or in my opinion the best, is tolerable, though one of them may be superior to another. For either a just and wise king, or a select number of leading citizens, or even the people itself, though this is the least commendable type, can nevertheless, as it seems, form a government that is not unstable, provided that no elements of injustice or greed are mingled with it.”

Taken alone, each of these forms of government will fail, ultimately, especially if given undue weight in a commonwealth. After all, Cicero wisely argues, even the wisest king knows only himself, while an aristocracy more often than not treats those not of its class as slaves, and the democracy of Athens failed because of mediocrity. “I am now speaking of these three forms of government, not when they are confused and mingled with one another, but when they retain their appropriate character,” Cicero explains. “All of them are, in the first place, subject each to the faults I have mentioned, and they suffer from other dangerous faults in addition: for before every one of them lies a slippery and precipitous path leading to a certain depraved form that is a close neighbor to it.” By its simple existence, a community will always mirror the strengths and weaknesses of its rulers. Communities that allow monarchies or aristocracies to rule, he continues, never understand true liberty, free will, and proper choice. “Hence liberty has no dwelling place in any State except that in which the people’s power is the greatest, and surely nothing can be sweeter than liberty; but if it is not the same for all, it does not deserve the name of liberty,” he concludes with a certain finality. After all, a true republic should exist as “an association or partnership in justice.”

Yet, in this greatest of strengths also resides the deepest of weaknesses. When the people enjoy true liberty, they often fail to identify its source, admiring its effects rather than its causes. In particular, they misunderstand the necessity of virtue to the health of a society, misbelieving it the possession of the haughty and elite. “For when, on account of this mistaken notion of the common people, the State begins to be ruled by the riches, instead of the virtue, of a few men, these rulers tenaciously retain the title, though they do not possess the character of the best,” he laments. “For riches, names, and power, when they lack wisdom and the knowledge of how to live and to rule over others, are full of dishonour and insolent pride, nor is there any more depraved type of State than that in which the richest are accounted best.”

Additionally, being ill-informed, the people also often misunderstand liberty as license. “This exaggerated licence, which is the only thing such a people call liberty, tyrants spring up as from a root, and are, as it were, engendered.” In turn, as with natural things, there can always be too much. “Thus everything which is in excess—when, for instance, either in the weather, or in the fields, or in men’s bodies, conditions have been too favourable—is usually changed into its opposite; and this is especially true in States, where each excess of liberty either in nations or in individuals turns into an excess of servitude.”

Harsh, but true words, to be certain.

If a republic must privilege one branch of government over the other—something Cicero hopes always to avoid—it should choose rule by the several, aristocracy, over rule by the one or rule by the many. “Thus, between the weakness of a single ruler and the rashness of the many, aristocracy has occupied that intermediate position which represents the utmost moderation; and in a State ruled by the best men, the citizens must necessarily enjoy the greatest happiness, being freed from all cares and worries, when once they have entrusted the preservation of their tranquility to others, whose duty it is to guard it vigilantly and never to allow the people to think that their interests are being neglected by their rulers.”

Yet, despite having asserted this, Cicero explains his views regarding balance and imbalance in much greater depth in On the Republic. “When the king begins to be unjust, that form of government is immediately at an end, and the king has become a tyrant,” Cicero claims. “This is the worst sort of government, though closely related to the best.” Yet, even a tyrant might be preferable to a rebellion of the Demos against the tyrant. “If the people ever rebel against a just king and deprive him of his kingdom, or, as happens more frequently, taste the blood of the aristocracy and subject the whole State to their own caprices . . . then we have a condition” of horror as first understood and explained by Plato.

In sum, Book One of On the Republic offers us a brilliant—if not necessarily fashionable—critique of the world. We ignore it—no matter how unfashionable—at our own peril. After all, who could claim the present executive of the U.S. as anything less than Cicero’s greatest excess?

First, the Christian is one who, in faith, becomes aware of the reality of the triune God. Second: the Christian strives, in hope, for the total fulfillment of his being in eternal life. Third: the Christian directs himself, in the divine virtue of love, to an affirmation of God and neighbor that surpasses the power of any natural love. Fourth: the Christian is prudent; namely, he does not allow his view on reality to be controlled by the Yes or No of his will, but rather he makes this Yes or No of the will dependent upon the truth of things. Fifth: the Christian is just; that is, he is able to live “with the other” in truth; he sees himself as a member among members of the Church, of the people, and of any community. Sixth: the Christian is brave, that is, he is prepared to suffer injury and, if need be, death for the truth and for the realization of justice. Seventh: the Christian is temperate; namely, he does not permit his desire to possess and his desire for pleasure to become destructive and inimical to his being.

In other news, I’ve been doing a number of podcasts about the new Declaration of Independence book. And, I’ve been having a blast. I’ll post these as they happen. The most recent one was with my great friend, Ben Jones and his 605 Podcast. I’m not quite sure how to link it—as it’s up on Apple’s podcasts.

Here’s the Facebook link. I hope this gets you there. It was a wonderful interview.

I want to continue to take from Pieper. Below are my favorite quotes from a favorite book, The End of Time.

Ok, everyone, please know you are always in my prayers. Yours, Brad]

Notes on Josef Pieper, The End of Time: A Meditation on the Philosophy of History (1954; Ignatius Press, 1999).

Aristotle was still able to hold the opinion that the process of history, like that of nature, is a cycle that continually repeats itself—so much so that, as he explicitly states, even men’s opinions are identically repeated, “not once or twice, not a few times, but an infinite number of times”. It is no longer possible however, post Christum natum, seriously to think thus. We can “omit” neither the concept of the beginning, of the creation out of nothingness (nor this concept of nothingness itself, which is the truly radical one), nor the concept of the end. This, it seems to me, is to be numbered among the changes that entered into the world of man on the basis of the event “revelation in Christ”. Page 13

The history of man—this is rather the unique commingling of free decision and fate; the encounters which fall to his lot in this unrepeatable moment of fife; man’s “path”, insofar as it is determined by his particular response to what destiny causes to befall him (whether this is a beloved person, a teacher, an antagonist or the gain or loss of possessions, health, beauty, or the innate gift of aptitudes, temperament, “constitution”). The concepts associated with the essential nature of history are freedom, decision, uniqueness, unrepeatability, un-interchangeability, unpredictable capacity for variation, the individually solitary; by these, historical happening is distinguished from the unhistorical happening of nature. Because this is so, however, because history is not simply the “unfolding” of something previously given that was not yet unfolded, because it is not simply “development”—for this reason, in the sphere of history the concretely future cannot be calculated in advance, neither by the stars nor by statistics. Page 33

I experience things as being knowable, penetrable, accessible to the human cognitive faculty. This fact, however, that things can be “entered upon” in cognition and by the person exercising cognition (a fact which is undoubtedly given in things themselves!)—this fact becomes really apprehensible in its core only when it enters the beam of light of the revealed word, namely, that of the Logos, in whom all things have their source. This word states that the inner manifestness, accessibility, lucidity of things has flowed into them out of the creative knowledge of the Divine Logos, simultaneously with their being, indeed as their being itself; and that it is this lucidity, stemming from the Logos, through which things become perceptible to human cognition; and that in this sense, according to the magnificently simple formulation of Thomas Aquinas, “the reality of things themselves is their light.”19 Undoubtedly, therefore, when I reflect upon this structure of things, their knowability, their “truth”, their luminosity, I am looking the things themselves in the face; the direction of my gaze is toward the reality before my eyes; but it is equally certain that I should not descry this inmost disposition of existent things if they did not he in the light of the Logos, by which everything was made in the beginning, which shines down, as it were, from behind my back, over my shoulder. Hence what is involved here is certainly an intelligere, a perception in the encounter with things—but it is an intelligere grounded on a credere. Pages 54-55

Every creature is, of itself, capable of being brought back into nothingness; more accurately speaking, the creature is, of itself, incapable of persisting in being. Page 61

It is, therefore, this realm of the untemporal-eternal upon which human history, that happens through time, continually and immediately borders. The expression “borders upon” is, of course, far too weak, indeed positively inapt: the temporal is inwardly sustained, saturated, pervaded by the untemporal. Because of this, the gaze of the man philosophizing about history does in truth fall, as it were, into a chasm (the same thing, however, happens in all philosophizing, in all reflective contemplation, whether it is revelation or historical reality itself that is contemplated—insofar, of course, as the inquiry is directed upon their roots!). Page 69

Should we not, on the contrary, concur with the diagnosis of Christopher Dawson, who, in respect of this coordination of technology and culture, says: “We have entered on a new phase of culture . . . in which the most amazing perfection of scientific technique is being devoted to purely ephemeral objects—It is obvious that a civilization of this kind holds no promise for the future save that of social disintegration.” In this utterance the present’s real sense of the future is speaking. It already announced itself in far-seeing figures like the Spaniard Donoso Cortes, who in 1849 said: “Mankind is hastening with great strides toward the certain fate of despotism. . . This despotism will evolve a power of destruction greater and mightier than anything we have heretofore experienced” (January 4, 1849). The aged Jacob Burckhardt could also be named. Likewise John Henry Newman, who speaks in a letter of the “great prophesying” of a friend, which is apparently beginning to reach fulfillment: “He asked, who would be the Goths and Vandals destined to destroy modern civilization. . . . He gave himself the following answer: The lowest class, which is very great in numbers and unbelieving, will rise up out of the depths of modem cities and be the new scourge of God” (autumn 1871). The great Vladimir Solovyev in his last book, Three Conversations from the year 1900: “I am of the opinion that progress, that is, noticeably accelerated progress, is always a symptom of the end”; the same book contains the “Narration concerning the Anti-christ”, of which we shall have more to say later; in it there occurs a well-aimed remark concerning the century “which was so advanced that it was even vouchsafed it to be the last”. Theodor Haecker prefaced his book Virgil, the Father of the West, which first appeared in 1931, with the terrifying epigraph: “In times like these, my friends, let us consider before it is too late what we shall take with us out of the horrors of desolation. Well, then, as Aeneas took first the penates, so we shall take first the cross, whose sign we can still make before it crushes us. And, then, well, whatever each of us loves most dearly. But let us not forget our Virgil, that goes into a jacket pocket.” Pages 75-76

All the same, in the revealed prophecy of the end of history a catastrophic end within history is foretold. Whoever believingly accepts this prophecy, that is to say, whoever takes it to be revelation, has no possibility of ignoring the fact that the end of Time, within history, will be a downfall, a catastrophe. Nonetheless, his attitude to history, his attitude to the future, may not be one of despair—and this for reasons arising out of that very same faith. The hope of him who thus believes, of him who believes in the “transposition” as deliverance, is by no means a hope directed purely upon the “beyond”. It is, rather, a hope that renders the believer able and willing to act here and now, within history, indeed even to see in the midst of the catastrophe itself a possibility of meaningful action within history. Admittedly, this attitude, as really lived, can flourish only on the soil of that believing understanding of the end of Time—an end which, although catastrophic, does not mean disaster. Pages 78-79

This is true, for instance, of Herder, who attacked Iselin and yet himself says: “By the laws of their inner nature, with the passage of ages, reason and equity must gain ground among men and foster an enduring humanity.” Now this idea of an “everlasting advance of our kind” (Fichte) is ubiquitous; it dominated European thought and evoked “all the ardour and faith of a genuine religion”. Whether Kant speaks of a realm of true culture and perpetual peace (although Kant, being a truly great thinker, also discerned the counterpart of this idea—of which more will be said later); whether Friedrich Engels prophesies that an organization of production will come, “in which productive labour, instead of being a means to the subjection of men, will become a means to their emancipation, by giving each individual the opportunity to develop and exercise all his faculties, physical and mental, in all directions; in which, therefore, productive labour will become a pleasure instead of a burden”; whether Kalinin says, in a speech in 1933, that mankind is approximating, in the measure of Communist reconstruction, “more and more to a new, really human society, with which history first really begins and understanding guides the world”; whether, finally, the Atlantic Charter speaks of a peace “which shall guarantee that all men in all countries can live the whole of their lives free from fear and want”—in all these formulations the common idea of progress within history is still alive. This idea expresses the opinion that the historical process itself, with greater or lesser necessity, but in any case on the basis of forces operating within history, is leading to an end-situation “in which all demands of a religious, moral, artistic, economic, and political nature are mlfilled”. All these opinions rest upon the dissolution of the Christian view of history, from which the element of the catastrophic end within history has been expunged, while the notion of a “City of God” outside Time has been completely inverted to reemerge as the concept of an ideal social condition which can be realized within Time through cultural, political, and economic progress (or, as Stalin36 reformulated this bourgeois term: forward march). Pages 89-91

This is the last sentence of the whole essay. The mingling of biblical, more exactly spoken Apocalyptic, ideas with “enlightened” notions and valuations is here so singular that it seems necessary to pause and consider this last passage. What does it actually say? It says: Christianity will (possibly) forfeit the sympathy of men by losing the lovableness specific to it, in other words, by being untrue to its own essential nature. The Apocalypse (and the New Testament as a whole) states exactly the reverse: The Church forfeits the sympathy of the overwhelming majority by the unadulterated realization of her essential nature. To be consistent, Kant would have to say that the “great apostasy” of men who turn away from this degenerate Christianity is right. In the Apocalypse, the mass flight from the Church appears almost a confirmation of her truth; for the thought of the Enlightenment, it is, of course, an unthinkable idea that the truth may be fought although, or indeed because, it is the truth. Let us reconsider for an instant Kant’s discrimination between “ecclesiastical creed” and “religion of Reason”: The approach of the Kingdom of God on earth consists in the suppression of ecclesiastical creed by the religion of Reason—must not the contrary movement, then, the suppression of the religion of Reason by ecclesiastical creed, appear, conversely, as the approach of the Antichrist? This is not merely an abstractly proximate, or even an inescapable, consequence. Kant made the following explicit formulation: In that priests “make observances and historical belief an essential duty” (by these he means public worship, sacrament, and belief in the events of the history of salvation), instead of “taking to heart ethical principles”, they are doing “what is required to introduce him (the Antichrist)”.61 Thus the Antichrist appears as a positively ecclesiastical figure! Nevertheless, he is still under discussion, for the last time in the context of the philosophy of history; until now, quite recently . . . an awkward and embarrassed silence having reigned throughout the whole of the nineteenth century up to the threshold of this present moment—the possibility is discussed, in all seriousness and by no means “rapturously”, that “a world organization might become the most deadly and impregnable of tyrannies, the final establishment of the reign of anti-Christ.” Pages 107-108

Here, as Donoso Cortes put it, lies a special opportunity for periods of catastrophe: Ages of uncertainty are those in which one experiences the greatest certainty of how one stands vis-à-vis the world. Page 117

The name “Antichrist” may at first ring strangely on the modern ear. The meaning of this name in terms of historical reality is, however, very familiar to the contemporary man—to the contemporary man, which does not mean every man who is alive today on earth; it means whoever has observed and shared the experience of the most recently past events of human history (the totalitarian regime, “total war” and its concomitants) with awakened senses and from within. That familiarity, which it will be easy to demonstrate, is something new. In the spiritual history of “modern times”, the notion of the Antichrist has met with the same fate as the whole notion of a catastrophic end-situation within history. It was looked upon as something belonging simply to the “Dark Ages”. Page 119

We understand nothing about the Antichrist if we do not see him, despite all his power within history, as one who is fundamentally already defeated. Page 124

Just as the martyr, historically speaking, is a figure of the political order, so, too, the Antichrist is a phenomenon of the political sphere. The Antichrist is not something resembling a “heretic”, who is of importance only to ecclesiastical history and to whom the rest of the world need pay no attention whatever. Potentia saecularis, worldly power—this, says Thomas, is the specific instrument of the Antichrist; he is a worldly potentate. Tyrants, in their persecutions of the Church, Thomas states further, are prototypes (quasi figura) of the Antichrist. The latter, then, is not conceived as a phenomenon on the brink of the historical field; rather is the Antichrist, insofar as history is primarily political history, an eminently historical figure. This also implies that the End will not be chaos in the sense that the opposition and conflict between numbers of historical powers will cause a progressive dissolution of historical ties and structures and, finally, putrefaction. On the contrary, the End will be characterized by one single governmental structure equipped with prodigious power, which, however, fails to establish any genuine order. At the end of history there will be a pseudo-order maintained in being by the exercise of power. Nihilism, because, unlike anarchism, it is distinguished by a “relationship to order”, “is more difficult to see through, better camouflaged”—this perspicacious observation, contained in the diagnosis of Ernst Junger, holds a very strong, though concealed, eschatological reference. The description “pseudo-order” is also valid in the sense that the “illusion” is successful; it is an element in the prophecy of the End that the “desert of order” of the Antichrist will be regarded as a true and authentic order. The notion of a purely organizational social integument, in which everything “technological”, from the production of goods to hygiene, “functions smoothly” and which is nevertheless fundamentally a phenomenon of disorder, is not very remote from contemporary experience. Perhaps the pseudo-order of the Dominion of the Antichrist, after a “period of chaos” on a vast scale, such as, in Toynbee’s view, always precedes the establishment of a universal State, will be greeted as a deliverance (which would exactly confirm the character of the Antichrist as a pseudo-Christ). The Antichrist is to be conceived as a figure exercising political power over the whole of mankind; as a world ruler. Once, and as soon as, world dominion in the full sense has become possible, the Antichrist has become possible. To this corresponds the other, coordinate fact that the Christian gospel must have reached the totality of the peoples of the earth, who have been rendered accessible to it politically: “This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come” (Mt 24:15)—which is not construed by theology to mean that the Christian religion will spread in triumph over the whole earth but that the decision for or against Christ will become possible (or urgent) over the whole globe. Here a misunderstanding must be eliminated: The traditional doctrine of the Antichrist does not include any possibility of knowing the date of the end of time; nor does it state that there can be no world dominion save that of the Antichrist! The establishment of a World State, which is today well within the bounds of historical possibility, may quite possibly come to be looked upon as a legitimate goal of political endeavor. What this doctrine does state is that once this step has been taken, mankind will find itself in a condition in which the Dominion of the Antichrist has become more acutely possible than ever before: “a world organization might become the most deadly and impregnable of tyrannies, the final establishment of the reign of anti-Christ” (we have quoted this once before). Seen from this angle, another pronouncement concerning the Antichrist, likewise contained in tradition, takes on a special appearance. The Antichrist will realize upon the earth a prodigious increase of power, and that not only extensively, but also intensively. The World State of the Antichrist will be in the extreme sense a totalitarian State. This is determined, however, not only by the lust for power and the superbia of the Antichrist, but at the same time by the nature of the World State itself. To become overnight a totalitarian State—that is the inner peril, arising directly out of its very structure, that threatens a World Empire, which, per definitionem, is devoid of neighbors and thereby unexpectedly conforms to the political islands of the Utopias. Thus the liberal Gibbon said of the Imperium Romanum that within it freedom could have been torn up by the roots “because there was no possibility of flight”; “if dominion fell into the hands of one individual, the world became a safe prison for his adversaries.” To this a diary of the last war adds the conclusion that the objection can be raised to the “unitary organization of the world”, which is certainly imminent, “from the standpoint of liberty, that it will leave no place to which one might emigrate”. The Kantian ideal of the abolition of truly ‘external’ wars, which would be attained in a World State, has its reverse side: the place of external wars should be taken by internal ‘police actions,’ the character of which would approximate very closely to the extermination of pests. This tendency of a world organization to become “totalitarian’ in consequence of its structure, has been frequently characterized—the evaluation given to it having been just as often positive as negative. There is “Lenin’s dictum: ‘The Whole of society will be one office and one factory, with the same work and the same wages.’

I have some great news. On Thursday, I had the privilege of lecturing to a Catholic group in Traverse City about Catholicism and the American Founding. Just as I was heading to the opening dinner, I received an email from the Heritage Foundation. Amazingly, they awarded me a 2026 Freedom and Opportunity Academic Prize. The letter stated: “Given your past contributions to your field, your current areas of study, and the future promise that your academic career holds, we are delighted to commend you as an outstanding scholar.”

I will admit, I’m rather thrilled about this.

Additionally, the first review of The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment came out this past week from a great scholar and friend, Josh Herring. Please click here to see it. Crazily enough, the book—even after three weeks—is still the number one new release in Modern Western Philosophy at Amazon.

Ok, what about this post? This is the first of six posts about Cicero, the greatest of the Roman Republicans. I love the man and find his thought and his example edifying and inspiring. In our deeply troubled times, we should not be afraid to look to our ancient ancestors.

Yours, Brad]

Usually remembered for his political triumphs and defeats as well as for his stunning rhetoric, Marcus T. Cicero probably did more to introduce philosophy into Roman culture than did any other citizen of republic or empire. His travels abroad as well as the relatively recent Roman conquering of the remnants of ancient Greece helped his cause considerably. In his many travels, Cicero had sought out Philo and Antiochus of Ascalon, the two leaders of the Academy. Generally identified with the skeptical New Academician school of thought, following his studies as just mentioned, Cicero also studied and taught—through his many speeches and books—Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Polybius (one of two Greeks “who were perhaps the best versed of them all in politics”). In particular, though, Cicero had given shelter to one of the most famous Stoics of his day, Diodotus the blind, and had learned from and debated with him for years upon years.

In two of his last dialogues—On the Republic and On the Laws (most likely meant to be part of one larger work)—Cicero offered some of his most Stoically-influenced thoughts on the nature of man, the community, and the divine. Yet, as the names of each dialogue reveals, Cicero also took Plato as his exemplar, though his Roman republican conclusions differ considerably from Plato’s. The text of the former, fascinatingly enough, faded from western history from sometime in the seventh century until 1819! An early medieval monk erased a copy of it, recording St. Augustine’s commentary on the psalms atop of it. Thankfully, Angelo Mai recognized this two hundred years ago and recreated what he could of the palimpsest. During the missing eleven centuries, On the Republic only existed as a variety of quotes and commentary as written by St. Augustine in The City of God, and as a memory in the minds of a few other scholars who had had access to the manuscript before it got erased.

“Nature has implanted in the human race so great a need of virtue and so great a desire to defend the common safety that the strength thereof has conquered all the allurements of pleasure and ease,” Cicero claims at the very beginning of Book One of On the Republic. Given that he was living in the last moments of the republic, the words scream irony and pain, as he imagines a golden age in the past that produced the noble farmers of the early republic. The American of 2019 is immediately reminded of Benjamin Franklin’s enthusiasm during the 1787 Constitutional Convention, expressing his belief that the rise of George Washington inaugurated a new order of the ages, each generation producing three or four such men of character. If only, the American patriot in me silently screams. From Cicero’s point of view, however, the comment makes sense. Virtue, he argues, exists in every being, but few realize it or cultivate it, thus losing it over time. “Though it is true that an art, even if you never use it, can still remain in your possession by the very fact of your knowledge of it, yet the existence of virtue depends entirely upon its use.” Virtue, Cicero notes, makes men, men. It allows them to be free. “To do of their own accord what they are compelled to do by the law,” he quotes from Xenocrates. Indeed, Cicero continues, any society that has had to rely upon force and law rather than custom and habit has already declined to near destruction if not into destruction itself.

The best society, Cicero continues, cultivates us as free individuals, not for our benefit, but for the benefit of the community. “For, in truth, our country has not given us birth and education without expecting to receive some sustenance, as it were, from us in return; nor has it been merely to serve our convenience that she has granted to our leisure a safe refuge and for our moments of repose a calm retreat,” he argues forcibly and persuasively. “On the contrary, she has given us these advantages so that she may appropriate to her own use the greater and more important part of our courage, our talents, and our wisdom, leaving to us for our own private uses only so much as may be left after her needs have been satisfied.” Though unpalatable to modern libertine ears, Cicero’s words certainly anticipate those of Edmund Burke. Additionally, Cicero notes, a man must act not merely on behalf of his own republic, but on behalf of the universe as seen through the republic and the actions of its citizens. “Do you not think it important for our homes that we should know what is happening and being done in that home which is not shut in by the walls we built, but is the whole universe, a fatherland which the gods have given us the privilege of sharing with them.”

One must presume, especially given his other writings, that Cicero means an example not only for the world of any one person’s generation, but for all generations, past, present, and future. Scipio, one of Cicero’s characters, states as much when he famously argues: “A commonwealth is the property of a people. But a people is not any collection of human beings brought together in any sort of way, but an assemblage of people in large numbers associated in an agreement with respect to justice and partnership for the common good.” In this, he echoes the future views of Edmund Burke, again, in the Anglo-Irish statesman’s explanation of the eternal contract between those dead, those living, and those yet to be born. “The first cause of such an association,” Scipio continues, “is not so much the weakness of the individual as a certain social spirit which nature has implanted in man.” As with Aristotle, Scipio claims “man is not a solitary or unsocial creature, but born with such a nature that not even under conditions of great prosperity of every sort” does he choose to leave the company of others, permanently.

Today is a big day in the Birzer house. Child no. 4, Harry, turns 21 today. It’s been so amazing to see him grow from a clever kid into a serious adult. I’m incredibly proud of him. Also, child no. 3, Maria Grace, is celebrating the 15th anniversary of her taking her first communion.

Things have gone incredibly well for the release of my book, The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty. Over the first week, it’s been the no. 1 new release in Modern Western Philosophy at Amazon. I’ve also done (and loved doing) a whole series of podcasts and radio shows. I’ll share those as they become available online.

Also, I was able to get all the final edits done on Tolkien and the Inklings: Men of the West. It’s now going into page layout. The page designs look absolutely beautiful.

Ok, Substack Reader. That’s it for now. Again, I wish you nothing but the best! Yours, Brad

P.S. The image below is of the testimony of Lucretia, over whom the Romans rebelled against the Etruscans and established the Republic]

It was once true, unfortunately, that history was written by the victors. Now, it seems, we’ve gone terribly far in the other direction, and history, rather poorly, is written by the victims.

It’s not just our historians, I must admit, though academics as a whole contribute less than nothing to our society. After all, they care more about their own agendas and their own turf than they do about the common good.

As I look over social media, I see anger, emotion, more anger, sentimentality, victimhood, and even more anger. If social media is an accurate register, we have one very scary, atomized culture.

The same is true when I look at Washington, D.C. There, I also see anger, emotion, more anger, sentimentality, victimhood, and even more anger. But, I also see manipulation—manipulation of truth, manipulation of persons, and manipulation of the society. Imagine a group of people who have divided into two warring, Manichaean camps, each claiming to represent best the American republic, all the while diabolically pushing us into outrageous debt and social engineering.

And, the Church of the first quarter of the twenty-first century. . . well, let’s not even go near there. Enough said.

Where do we see the pursuit of virtue, or even the pursuit of the individual virtues, in any of this? Can most American politicos or academics even define virtue or name the virtues?

Most likely, the sad answer is no. Indeed, one must wonder when the word virtue—as a physical thing formed by the lips or as a concept flittering through the soul—has even arisen in the last several decades in our nation’s imperial city or in one of our ivy league schools.

I suspect that much of the neglect of virtue comes as much from its inconvenience for the powermongers as much as it does from its necessary reliance on free will. “Men will be good or bad builders as a result of building well or building badly,” Aristotle claimed. “For if this were not so, there would have been no need of a teacher, but all men would have been born good or bad at their craft. This, then, is the case with the virtues also.”Somewhat horrifically, though, for the last two-hundred years, western civilization, in particular, has moved steadily away from a belief in real choices and toward determinisms of various types.

The virtues, however, are rooted in nature, in creation, and in God’s will for us. They can be forgotten, mocked, or distorted, but, being real and true and beautiful, they can never be conquered. Russell Kirk argued that virtue “is [the] energy of soul employed for the general good.” Thus, there is never a bad time to remember the virtues, and our society desperately needs them. God distributes these, then, according to His Will, through His Economy of Grace. “For just as in a single human body there are many limbs and organs, all with different functions,” St. Paul wrote, “so all of us, united with Christ, form one body, serving individually as limbs and organs to one another.” Gifts such as teaching, counseling, or speaking “differ as they are allotted to us by God’s grace, and must be exercised accordingly.” Our gifts should be for the common good, for the Body of Christ–that is, the Church.

The Pagan Virtues

• Prudence: the ability to discern good from evil.

• Justice: to give each person his due.

• Fortitude: to espouse the good, no matter the cost.

• Temperance: to use the created goods only for good.

The Roman Virtues

• Labor: to do one’s best and pursue excellence at and in any activity.

• Fate: to accept one’s place in the order of things.

• Piety: to praise those who came before us—divine and mundane.

The Christian Virtues

• Faith: to believe in things unseen.

• Hope: to believe one’s life has meaning and eternal existence.

• Charity: to give of one’s self to another.

Clearly, many of the words employed for the virtues—such as prudence, temperance, and charity (love)—continue to hold great power in our society, but we have almost utterly perverted their meanings. We take prudence as timidity, temperance as abstinence, and love as lust. Each of these perversions is nothing short of a tragedy for the human person and for society.

Many of our greatest leaders have sought to remind us of the virtues. John Adams, certainly one of the greatest of the American Founding Fathers, argued that virtue is “a positive passion for the public good.” Further, it will serve as “the only Foundation of Republics.” In the Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson wrote unequivocally that virtue “is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigour.”

Long before the American founding, the great Roman Senator and republican Marcus Cicero espoused the virtues and decorum in his letters to his son, On Duties. One “must believe that it is characteristic of a strong and heroic mind to consider trivial what most people think glorious and attractive, and to despise those things with unshakable, inflexible discipline.” Furthermore, he stressed, one must “endure reverses that seem bitter” and “to endure them so that you depart not one inch from your basic nature, not a jot from a wise man’s self respect.”

Though we cannot bestow the virtues upon ourselves, we can—and should and must—pursue them in every activity of life: in family, in neighborhood, in church, in school, in business, and in government. We should teach them to our children, and we should encourage them in others. Indeed, just as we once demanded that each American child memorize the Declaration of Independence, we should do the same with the virtues. Ten terms and ten definitions—repeated, explained, and modeled—will eventually return them to common discourse and to the common good. After all, each one of the ten is true and, thus, as mentioned earlier, cannot be destroyed. We only have to remember them to reclaim the power they should and will wield.

Not the power of the mongers, but the power of the just.

Additionally, I’m so incredibly proud of child no. 3, Maria Grace. She graduated with high honors from Hillsdale College yesterday. I’ve always known she was incredibly smart, but I recently got to see her defend her senior honors thesis on Willa Cather, and she was simply brilliant. I was one truly proud papa.

Ok, onto the heart of this relatively short post.

First, I want happily to note that my Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty has been selling really well, and the entire week since its release, it has been the No. 1 new release in Modern Western Philosophy at Amazon. I’m not sure how Amazon determines such things, but I’ll take it!

Second, I’ve had a couple of wonderful radio interviews. Last week, I talked with Tim Glemkowski at Relevant Radio. It was excellent.

Then, this weekend, I got to talk for an hour with my old friend, ally, and hero, Deal Hudson. Deal really mentored me when I first started writing professionally. He was editor of one of the finest magazines in America, Crisis, and I absolutely loved writing for him. So, it was truly meaningful to catch up with him. Here’s that one. Again, Deal is just a great, great guy.

I have several shows forthcoming, including with my long-time friend, Kelley Vlahos. You can sign up to join the discussion for that one. Please do. That will be on May 28.

I’ll certainly let everyone know about other shows and podcasts as they happen.

Finally, I just want to direct everyone to my most recent piece at The Imaginative Conservative. It’s a bit controversial as I ask whether or not we Americans should be in NATO. Whatever its successes—and there are many—I’m not really sure we have the constitutional authority to align with other countries in such a fashion. Here’s the link. Please leave a comment here or there and let me know what you think.

Ok, everyone, that’s it for now. Blessings, Brad

The best news is that today is the release date of The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty (Stone House Press). If you’re interested—and here’s hoping you are—you can order it now from Amazon.

To celebrate, I took an excerpt—Tacitus in the Colonies—for today’s post. Here’s hoping you enjoy it.

And, just so you know, I also have a piece on Ray Bradbury’s individualism at Modern Age and a piece condemning all ideologies at The Imaginative Conservative.

Finally, if you’ve not had enough Birzer, here are my final classes for the spring semester:

And

And

As always, a huge thanks to you each. Please know, you’re always very much in my prayers.

Yours, Brad]

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Tacitus was one of the most cited of all historians in Colonial North America. The colonists thought the world of him, preferring Locke only slightly more.^[1] For example, “Josiah Quincy, Sr., was an omnivorous reader of historical literature that praised liberty, and he bequeathed to his son, ‘Algernon Sidney’s works, --John Locke’s works,--Lord Bacon’s works—Gordon’s Tacitus,--and Cato’s Letters’ as well as the hope that ‘the spirit of liberty [might] rest upon him.”^[2] Historian Charles Mullett, argued persuasively, that the employment of the name and ideas of Tacitus opened many doors in terms of public debate. “Withal there was some posturing, some snobbery: to cite Tacitus was to give the password.”^[3] D.L. Jacobson wrote: “Measuring the full impact of Gordon’s Tacitus would, of course, be impossible. But the popularity of that work was great enough and the reputation of Gordon himself high enough so that it ought to be remembered by any-one attempting to analyze the intellectual climate of late colonial America.”^[4]

Though many colonials could not read Tacitus in the original Latin, they devoured Thomas Gordon’s translation. It’s fair to state that Thomas Gordon—the co-author of the Cato Letters and the Independent Whig—was as beloved by the colonials as was Tacitus. Gordon, a devout Whig, inserted his whiggish ideas and ideals into everything he wrote. Accompanying his translations of Tacitus was his “Discourses,” extensive Whiggish editorial comments on any thing and everything.^[5] Through Gordon, Tacitus gained relevance as a Roman Whig, equally conversant in the first century AD as well as in the eighteenth century AD.^[6]

Of the colonials, though, no one admired Tacitus and Thomas Gordon as much Thomas Jefferson did. Most famously, historian and biographer Gilbert Chinard proclaimed: “No greater mistake could be made than to look for his sources in Locke, Montesquieu, or Rousseau. The Jeffersonian democracy was born under the sign of Hengist and Horsa, not of the Goddess Reason.”^[7] Hengist and Horsa were the Anglo-Saxons who led the invasion of England in the fifth century.

Jefferson first encountered Tacitus through the two-volume History of England by Rapin.^[8] “About his favorite ancient historian, Tacitus, he wrote in 1808: ‘Tacitus I consider as the first writer in the world without a single exception. His book is a compound of history and morality of which we have no other example.’”^[9] Further, as Carl Richard has argued, “Since for Jefferson the purpose of history was the prevention of tyranny, the best historian was Tacitus, the Roman moralist of the first century A.D. who scorned the emperors and glorified both republican Rome (Annals of Rome) and what he perceived to be a primitive republicanism among the Germanic tribes of his day (Germania).”^[10] Additionally, it was Thomas Gordon’s translation and editorial comments about Tacitus that Jefferson so adamantly loved. “For Gordon, Jefferson’s praise was almost equally enthusiastic: the Works preserved the “spirit” of the original and Gordon’s “selection of Tacitus . . . for translation seems to have been dictated by the similar causticity of his own genius.”^[11] Trevor Colbourn expressed Jefferson’s admiration best: “Jefferson certainly gave Tacitus his undying affection and attention, and as a lawyer carefully pursued Blackstone’s injunction to study feudal law with diligence.²° Both subjects of study led him more surely to the whig historical viewpoint. Tacitus became one of the books that Jefferson most widely recommended: any inquiring law student would receive Jefferson’s suggestion to look to Tacitus as “the first writer in the world without exception,” since his work was “compounded of history and morality of which we have no other exception.”²¹

Jefferson also took the extraordinary step of having two sets of his favorite translation collated with the Latin text—the second being a replacement for that sold to Congress in 1815.²² The translation was indeed special, being prepared by the ardent whig pamphleteer, Thomas Gordon, who adorned his text with highly moralistic “Discourses” denouncing tyranny. Gordon was probably as fascinated with the message proclaimed by Tacitus as was Jefferson, for it was a clear description of a Germanic democracy in the northern woods of Europe, of a race which elected their monarchs and which lived “in a state of chastity well secured, corrupted by no seducing shews and public diversions, by no irritations from banqueting.” The fundamental of this idealized Ger-manic existence was an allodial land tenure, holding land in fee simple without the military and Labor obligations associated with feudalism.^[12]

Jefferson would go on to study, intimately, the Anglo-Saxon language and promote it at the fledgling University of Virginia, his own creation. As Jefferson wrote in an 1818 report to the college founders

It is too of common descent with the language of our Own Country, a branch of the same original Gothic stock, and furnishes Valuable illustrations for us. but in this point of View the Anglo-Saxon is of peculiar Value. We have placed it among the modern languages because it is in fact that which we speak, in the earliest form in which we have knowledge of it. it has been undergoing, with time, those gradual changes which all languages, antient and modern, have experienced: and, even now, needs only to be printed in the modern character and orthography, to be intelligible, in a considerable degree to an English reader. ^[13]

To study the Anglo-Saxon language, the third president thought, was to immerse oneself in the history of liberty itself. In 1825, to facilitate the learning of Anglo Saxon as a language, Jefferson wrote out an extensive essay on the language and its use.^[14]

^[1] Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 36

^[2] Colbourn, Lamp of Experience, 95.

^[3] Charles F. Mullett, “Ancient Historians and ‘Enlightened’ Reviewers,” Review of Politics 21 (July 1959): 551, 558.

^[4] D.L. Jacobson, “Thomas Gordon’s Works of Tacitus in Pre-Revolutionary America,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 69 (1965): 63.

^[5] D.L. Jacobson, “Thomas Gordon’s Works of Tacitus in Pre-Revolutionary America,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 69 (1965): 59-63.

^[6] Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 42. See also Herbert W. Benario, “Gordon’s Tacitus,” The Classical Journal 72 (December 1976-January 1977): 113-114.

^[7] Gilbert Chinard, Thomas Jefferson: The Apostle of Americanism (Boston: Little Brown, 1929), 87

^[8] Trevor Colbourn, “Thomas Jefferson’s Use of the Past,” William and Mary Quarterly 15 (January 1958): 60.

^[9] Meyer, “Thomas Jefferson and the Classical World,” 52. The original letter is dated December 8, 1808.

^[10] Carl J. Richard, “A Dialogue with the Ancients: Thomas Jefferson and Classical Philosophy and History,” Journal of the Early Republic 9 (Winter 1989): 442-443. See also Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics, 81-82.

^[11] D.L. Jacobson, “Thomas Gordon’s Works of Tacitus in Pre-Revolutionary America,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 69 (1965): 64.

^[12] Trevor Colbourn, “Thomas Jefferson’s Use of the Past,” William and Mary Quarterly 15 (January 1958): 61-62.

^[13] Rockfish Gap Report of the University of Virginia Commissioners, August 4, 1818.

^[14] Thomas Jefferson, “An Essay or Introductory Lecture . . . Dialects of the English Language,” 1825.