On the American political era of the early 1990s: “More than ever, politicians had started to become permanent Washington fixtures. Far from the Jeffersonian ideal of citizen legislators, many of the people who ran the nation had never lived or worked outside of Washington; most of the members of Congress were lawyers who had gone straight from law school to government work.” - A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to America’s Age of Entitlement, Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen

On Boomers: “By their very size, ‘whatever age bracket Boomers have occupied has been the cultural and spiritual focal point for American society as a whole'.’ More bluntly, it was always about them, and most of the cultural and spiritual trends were troubling: the boomer generation’s death rates from suicide, drunk driving, illegitimate births, and crime set records, relatively and absolutely.” “It’s from this background of abundance, self-centeredness, and permissiveness, combined with instability and lack of direction, that the boomer students arrived on university campuses in the early to mid-1960s.” “By the end of the 1960s, nearly half of all young men were going to college, while at the same time a striking grade inflation had started, which was more pronounced for the boomer generation than any other in history.” “Enhancing the freedom from responsibility and the associated notion that normal activities such as holding jobs and raising families were somehow meaningless, the new drug culture spread throughout the underculture like wildfire.” - A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to America’s Age of Entitlement, Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen

“In 1950, 88 percent of white families and 78 percent of black families consisted of a husband and wife in a traditional marriage. … Put another way, the war on poverty managed to destroy black marriages and family formation at a faster rate than the most brutal slaveholder had ever dreamed!” - A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to America’s Age of Enlightenment, Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen

“Curiously, containment introduced a diametric inversion of V.I. Lenin’s own Marxist hypothesis from the turn of the century, when European nations still engaged in creating overseas empires. Lenin’s Imperialism (1916) sought to explain why there were no communist revolutions in capitalist nations, as predicted by Marx. According to Marx, the overproduction of the capitalist’s boom-and-bust business cycle would lead to a wide depression, yet no such revolutions had occurred. Why? Lenin reasoned that imperialism explained this glitch — that capitalist countries exported surpluses to the underdeveloped sections of the globe through the process of acquiring empires. Without this expansion, capitalism would die.” - A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to America’s Age of Entitlement, Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen

“Humanitarianism therefore turns out to be not the adoration of the human but the obliteration of the human.” - Ian Tuttle, “States of Grace,” Claremont Review of Books

It looks like I picked my confirmation saint.

People ask the vibe of my book club. My friend @tigerjvideo captured this moment of me doing a livestream discussing a book to my members. If you wish to join, find the link below:

“Aristotelian political science took the real possibility of free deliberation and action as its starting point. But [Pierre] Manent argues that human agency has been crowded out of political philosophy by a ‘hypertrophy of theory.’” - Ian Tuttle, “States of Grace,” Claremont Review of Books