In recent years some scholars on the Right have begun to emulate those historians of the Left who reject that American Founding as the best source for America’s core principles on liberty and order.

On his last Friday in office, President Biden announced that he had “amended” the Constitution by holding that the Equal Rights Amendment, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, had met the criteria for ratification.

In the past two Reflection essays I’ve pondered the question as to whether American had a founding and, if so, what difference it makes to think so.

In Federalist No. 1, Alexander Hamilton claimed that the Americans had to determine once and for all whether the formation of political institutions could result from reflection and choice or would forever be subject to fate and chance.

The American founders were acutely aware that human beings desire power. Like Lord Acton, they believed that power tends to have a corrupting effect on those not only who attain it but those who reach for it.

A story, perhaps apocryphal, has an audience member ask Albert Einstein why so many advances had been made in physics and so few in our understanding of politics.

The New York Times’s “1619 Project” renewed debates over the nature of America’s “founding.”

The eccentric essayist and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard famously asserted, “Our age is essentially one of understanding and reflection, without passion, momentarily bursting into enthusiasm, and shrewdly relapsing into repose."

Hamilton concluded his meditations on taxation by introducing two ideas that gained little traction at the time but would down the road.

In 2022, a group of historians and political scientists advocated for replacing the U.S. House's single-member district system with proportional representation to promote a multiparty system, but this proposal is criticized for misunderstanding the purpose of representation and for the practical instability it could create, as seen in other countries with multiparty systems.

Imagine saving some money to buy an iPhone on Thanksgiving only to realize its price has doubled in one year. Made-in-China goods and services across all U.S. industries would face similar price hikes, from basic kitchen appliances like toasters to sneakers like Nike Air Force 1.

Further exploring the issue of the federal government’s “indefinite power of taxation,” Hamilton in Federalist 35 waded into some new waters.

T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, published in 1922, four years after the end of World War One, is probably the most influential and controversial poem of the past century.

Fifty years ago, in February 1975, U.S. President Gerald Ford made a statement. He did so not primarily through words but in action, swearing in his nominee for the office of U.S. Attorney General.

It is not my habit to go into contemporary politics, especially in these essays, but the power of taxation being — along with death — two of the certainties of life, and the twig having long been bent, it seems worth thinking about the relationship of Federalist 34 to the perennial problem of debt, one of the main themes of the essay.

I’ve heard it said that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. I’ve also heard that people these days are pretty stressed out, and I have to wonder if that’s because we’re all being so damned vigilant.

A list of Presidents with Congressional, Military or Law experience and a breakdown of who had family ties to the White House, and more.

Jeff Polet examines Federalist papers no. 33, written by Alexander Hamilton in 1788.

How President Ford’s track record reflects Civil War history.

I want to remind the reader that The Federalist consists of essays written for average citizens, mostly farmers, many of whom had to have the essays read to them, published in local newspapers.