Good story in @ModAgeJournal on #Mahan, the leading naval theorist in American #history. #Navy

A great piece in @ModAgeJournal on the fault lines within American #Conservatism that Frank Meyer tried, & for a time did, create a bridge between, especially #Traditionalism & #Libertarianism. modernagejournal.com/frank-s… Excerpt, "Meyer’s influence upon contemporary American conservative philosophy was considerable. By 1960 the conservative philosophical house was in a state of disorder. A split existed in the movement between libertarians, led by figures such as Friedrich von Hayek and Ayn Rand, and traditionalists, led by Russell Kirk. Libertarians championed freedom as the highest good and focused on the primacy of a minimalist government and the worth of the individual person. Traditionalists, however, emphasized the need for order. They argued that the state, while not being omnipotent, should still seek to instill virtue and order in society in the midst of a "revolutionary age.'" The challenge today for conservatism is that the Fusionist model only really worked during the Cold War and the Soviet threat papered over the fractures between libertarians and traditional conservatives during a time of external threat, and in many cases internal subversion. Those fractures became gaping chasms after that threat disappeared, however. I think Frank Meyer did great work to keep Humpty Dumpty together. But now Humpty has fallen and the pieces don't fit back together. I see a revival of Faith as the only way to overcome what are actually deep, essentially existential differences where people speak and understand America in language that comes from different moral universes.

Excellent @ModAgeJournal piece of #traditionalism. I certainly feel part of the below excerpt. These are once more the debate lines for #conservatism- embedding the market within a deeper moral framework. "From Kirk’s perspective, there is a partial truth in liberalism’s claims: liberty is a genuine element of the human good, and individual human beings are worthy of a respect which is roughly, imperfectly realized in a doctrine of rights. But to Kirk and to the American traditionalists he inspired, liberals ultimately fail to understand the partiality of their core principle. Their account of human nature excludes too much of what can be known, and is known, about the human good. The homogenization of the whole of the human world on the basis of the contract theory, thought Kirk and his traditionalist allies, is the dehumanizing threat we ultimately face, made all the more dangerous by the fact that America’s political discourse has lacked any terms which would enable us to recognize the ideological or dogmatic character of liberalism... "Besides the family, we might consider here one other area of inquiry in which the approach of traditionalist conservatives has differed from others allied with them in the American conservative movement: economics. Traditionalists typically have taken private property, market exchange, and the price mechanism all as something more or less natural. But they have advanced no particular doctrinal commitments, and they are sensitive to the artificial abstractions of modern corporate capitalism. During the second half of the twentieth century, traditional conservatives did oppose socialism, the growth of the welfare state, and most government regulation of the economy—but they did not necessarily do so for reasons of classical liberal political economy. Their primary concern was with the culture of socialism or of welfarism. In a similar way, many traditional conservatives today have begun to voice reservations about the culture of globalizing capitalism. The economic theorist with the greatest appeal to the traditionalists has been Wilhelm Röpke. A German-Swiss Protestant, Röpke’s work proceeded in dialogue with the Catholic social thought tradition, especially the papal encyclicals Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931). While fundamentally a defender of the free market, Röpke nonetheless embraced talk of a 'third way' between socialism and capitalism. He warned of a kind of consumer materialism and social anomie arising from the totalizing reach of market 'logic.' He thus emphasized the need to embed the market amidst strong social institutions and structures—boxing in liberalism in its economic dimension. Withal, traditionalist conservatives have often written in favor of a widespread distribution of productive capital, and in favor of smaller units of economic production. The question is not whether markets will be regulated; the question is what values shall structure that regulation."