CATEGORY: CULTURE (5 min)

Life is a battlefield

 “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction,” Ronald Reagan once urged. “It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for [our children] to do the same.”

This continued battle for political and religious freedom is often fulfilled by debates in the halls of Congress and, historically, even through armed conflict. But each of us can also fight the battle in our own religious and social life.

Francis X. Maier tells us this in First Things while reviewing a new book called Religious Freedom After the Sexual Revolution: A Catholic Guide by Helen M. Alvaré. Maier says the book helps Americans to fight a new brand of totalitarianism, one that is different from the Communist powers Reagan fought.

Maier, summarizing Alvaré’s book, argues each religious American has a duty to reject this new totalitarianism. The personal examples we set for others by becoming role models in everyday religious life can change the country, little by little.

“In the end, religious freedom survives only when religious practice remains vigorous,” Maier writes.

Hear more about Alvaré’s excellent work and what Maier calls the “three pillars” of the new totalitarianism right here.

CATEGORY: POLICY (6 min)

Stretching their power

President Biden’s administration has attempted many power grabs over the past two years, but one of the most overt may be the president’s plan to unilaterally force Americans to bear $400 billion in student loan debt. Thankfully, a Texas judge blocked the plan earlier this month, forcing Biden’s team to appeal the decision.

Writing for The American Mind, Jonathan W. Pidluzny details both the excellence of Judge Mark Pittman’s decision and the insanity of the government’s bailout plan.

The administration bases its authority to cancel debt on a decades-old law that was supposed to support the American military. Pidluzny says this basis is tenuous at best, and Judge Pittman agreed.

The judge applied a legal principle called the “major questions doctrine,” which forces bureaucratic agencies to find “clear congressional authorization” for any power related to a major question. Judge Pittman found no such authorization here, and he stopped the bailout plan.

Can this doctrine continue to stop the American bureaucratic glut? Pidluzny hopes so. Read his full article to find out why.

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CATEGORY: PHILOSOPHY (7 min)

Going quietly into the night

The totalitarianism that threatens America today is hardly as loud as a Soviet missile, but it might be just as dangerous. Power that sneaks in through bureaucratic regulation and guises itself as freedom is coming for our liberty.

Daniel Mahoney, who won ISI’s 2021 Faculty Award, reveals the invasive threat of “mild despotism” in our Intercollegiate Review archive. He goes back to Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic Democracy in America to discover that, like he did with many of America’s modern problems, Tocqueville had predicted this “mild despotism.”

One of the most insidious aspects of this threat, Mahoney writes, is that it has corrupted the very idea of freedom. Instead of the liberty to do the right thing and live within a moral order, freedom has become morally relativist and absolutely tyrannical in its enforcement of perceived “equality.”

Mahoney points to the authoritarian rules of Justin Trudeau’s Canadian government, the culture wars in the United States, and the constantly power-hungry European Union as modern examples of this bureaucratic tyranny.

What can we do to respond? Discover Mahoney’s solution in his full article here.

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