Locke and the American Founding

Locke's influence on America's founders is vastly overstated, and when Americans read him they understood him to be a thinker whose ideas were compatible with their Christian convictions. They may have misread him, but that is a different debate. https://t.co/UzRj8IvmUl

— Mark David Hall (@MDH_GFU) May 22, 2020

James M. Patterson on Roman Catholic Integralism

After Republican Virtue

Too much reliance on Tocqueville for a description and explanation of republican virtues in early America in this essay? But typical of a certain kind of American conservative.

Or tldr?

In the end, this is all integralism really is. It is an internet aesthetic of mostly young men alienated from the public life and consumed with the libido dominandi. In the absence of those institutions that had once made America a place of deep faith and committed to liberty, these young men have had recourse to the Internet and attach themselves to the sublime historical experience of sacramental kingship, Iberian Falangism, or straight-up fascism supported by the general ideas purveyed by Vermeule and the like. The only alternative is for the Church to train and appoint new bishops committed to participating in public life with their congregations and raising them up in the republican virtue that so defined American Catholicism.

The author is wrong to identify some of friendship or social virtue as "republican virtue." Republican virtue will include friendship and the social virtues, but it is more than those two, and his example of parish life doesn't even come close to giving a full illustration of what republican virtue involves and requires. He is correct to criticze the Latin integralists but he is ignorant of his own precarious situation vis-a-vis the state.

Overstating the Case

The Case for Confucianism in America: How an Ancient Chinese Philosophical Tradition Could Save Our Fraying Democracy by Alexander Zubatov

Was Confucianism sufficient by itself to prevent the Chinese imperial government from turning it into a state ideology and using it to support the imperial system? Or, for that matter, is it preventing the Chinese Communists from attempting to do the same? Confucianism does not address the origin of political authority, nor the nature of the relationship between ruler and ruled, and whether equality between the two is possible. Confucianism, as it currently exists in the classics and whatever tradition of commentary, simply does not have the resources to support republicanism. Perhaps someone can develop the tradition in that direction, though it will be the case that such novelties will be contested by some as not being part of the original tradition, even if the additional premises can be shown to be in harmony with the principles found in the classical texts.

Answerable to the People?

AmConMag: Byzantine Empire—or Republic?
The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome, Anthony Kaldellis, Harvard University Press, 312 pages
By Brian Patrick Mitchell