The use of the word “evil” continues to surface, in remembering Ronald Reagan’s pronouncements on the Soviet Union and in characterizing our current enemies in the war on terror, particularly in the tactics they employ, such as beheadings of innocents. New Yorker columnist Hendrik Hertzberg would like us to believe that this term as Reagan […]

Notwithstanding the talk show debates ad nauseum about the reasons for the U. S. intervention for regime change in Iraq, WMDs, etc., it cannot be denied that a high priority, maybe the highest priority, for George Bush is the expansion of freedom in the world and the introduction of democracy in the Arab Middle East. […]

Most Pilgrim subscribers know that I am pretty heavily involved in public education reform and, in my work in this arena, at least one Texas teachers’ union has described me as a proponent of education “privatization”. An interesting characterization, no doubt intended as a pejorative in my case, and I assume it is assigned to […]

From the outset, one of the underlying themes of The Texas Pilgrim has been the notion that “ideas have consequences”, and one of the thinkers who inspired that notion in me is Richard M. Weaver, whose book of that name, published in 1948, has been an invaluable source of the wisdom of that aphorism. Weaver […]

My instincts, political and otherwise, have been conservative for as long as I can remember (Goldwater ’64, etc.), although, at least until lately, my definition has not always been as clear as I would have liked. For me, conservatism consists in dispositions and habits of mind and heart encompassing the accumulation of experience and wisdom […]

Is America a culture or an idea? This is a question that has occupied many of our leading intellectuals at least since the re-founding of our country beginning in the period immediately preceding the Civil War. We don’t typically think of ourselves as a single people as the Germans or French do (although my friends […]

“Truth is something outside yourself, something to be discovered, and not something you can make up as you go along.”—George Orwell, 1944.“There are no facts.”—Michael Foucault, 1968 The two quotes above illustrate both the wide divergence of views of truth that have come to prevail and the drift in the conception of truth from the […]

During the second half of 1999, my monthly political philosophy discussion group took on an exploration of the nature of man as it relates to political philosophy. Political philosophy, as our group defines it, seeks to answer the questions: “how should we order our lives together?” and “what is the best regime?” In fact, it […]