Daniel J. Flynn

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

What Is Liberalism?

“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...

A CNN Host Does History

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...

Why Nineteen Eighty-Four still matters

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...