Daniel J. Flynn, a senior editor at the American Spectator and visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the author of the forthcoming The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer.
Posts by Daniel J. Flynn
May 27, 2025
The first paragraph of Daniel J. Mahoney’s
The Persistence of the Ideological Lie: The Totalitarian Impulse Then and Now redeems the $29.99 price of admission. In a sentence therein, Mahoney states his thesis:
The “ideological” project to replace the only human condition we know with a utopian “Second Reality” oblivious to—indeed at war with—the deepest wellsprings of human nature and God’s creation has taken on renewed virulence in the late modern world, just thirty-five years after the glorious anti-totalitarian revolutions of 1989.
Continue Reading...
November 20, 2024
“When the enemy is Hitler,” F.H. Buckley writes, “and the world is divided between Schmittian friends and enemies, everything is permitted.”
Such divisive contemporary issues as Black Lives Matter, the Israel-Palestine war, and trans rights leave little room for compromise and much for demonization.
Continue Reading...
July 16, 2024
Fareed Zakaria acknowledges in
Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present, that “scholars who detail the way that material conditions and individual freedoms have improved over the centuries are often dismissed as peddlers of ‘Whig history.’”
Continue Reading...
March 22, 2024
For the past two and a half years, Republicans have used the phrase “Let’s Go Brandon” as shorthand for a profane phrase that begins with an “F” and ends with the president’s name.
Continue Reading...
August 30, 2023
A song addressing such salient political issues as currency debasement, the displacement of miners in our green economy, and the Fudge Rounds Question achieved a feat Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero” and Miley Cyrus’s “Flowers” could not.
Continue Reading...
June 07, 2022
June 8 marks the anniversary of George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four. That a greater gap separates us from 1984 than 1984 from
Nineteen-Eighty Four’s 1949 publication staggers.
The book, at least in terms of pundits’ invoking it, seems so very 2022 even if the script dictated that its peak as a cultural touchstone would occur in 1984.
Continue Reading...
