Sorry about the scanty output: it’s summer, and I’m on a reduced schedule.
I have begun reading The Political Theory of the American Founding, which you may recall from our link to, and subsequent discussion of, Michael Anton’s review. The book directly addresses several questions I have been stewing over for a long time now, for example: Are natural rights defensible in the absence of religious belief? Is America’s current predicament due to a rejection of the founding principles, an increase in secularism, demographic change, abandonment of a sense of civic duty, or some combination of the above? Or did the Enlightenment itself (and the Founding itself) contain a “poison pill’ whose lethal effects we are only now seeing?
I should have a good deal more to say about the book in a little while.
Meanwhile, Michael Anton has been at the center of a brouhaha brought on by his making the argument, in a public forum, that the Fourteenth Amendment does not grant birthright citizenship to anyone whose mother managed to get herself across our border in time to deliver a baby. He is completely right about this, of course, and he responds to his critics here. See also his related essay on the American social compact.
Back soon.