The Brion McClanahan Author & Historian Blog

Is the Constitution broken? Two Ivy League professors think so. Of course, I have argued it has been broken since 1789. Southerners said it was broken in the 1850s. Asking this question is nothing new, but the fact that two leftist law professors have broached the question means something has shifted in the United States. You see, now that progressives no longer control the federal …more

Victor Davis Hanson’s laughable piece at The New Criterion is the gift that keeps on giving, at least if you need a muse. His conclusion is particularly noteworthy for its ahistorical tone: “Or, to put it another way in an ironic fashion, the obdurate blue-state North is reminiscent of the mulish Old South, while the red-state new South is beginning to resemble the dynamic old …more

Yesterday I told you about my latest class at McClanahan Academy, Radical Republicans, and how it was essential that you understand that group of men. Why? Because so many modern “conservatives” simply regurgitate what these leftists had to say about the War, the South, and American society. Charles Sumner, for example, wanted to remake the United States in the image of New England. He believed …more

I am going to say something that might surprise you: The most important men in American political history were the Radical Republicans of the 1850s-1870s. It’s not even close. The immediate response, I am sure, will be, “But what about the Founding Fathers?” I greatly admire the founding generation, and I consider them to be the greatest generation in American history. But the Radical Republicans …more

Yoram Hazony recently published a new intellectual history of American conservatism. This is a worthwhile topic, but one that Hazony doesn’t seem to understand. Russell Kirk did a much better job in The Conservative Mind nearly seventy years ago. Why? Because Kirk included Southerners like Calhoun and Randolph. Hazony argues that American conservatism is tied exclusively to the nationalists of the founding generation, meaning Washington, …more

The New York Times published an expose on the Claremont Institute and its influence on modern American conservatism. Anyone paying attention to conservative politics since 2016 would recognize the wide ranging impact on the conservative movement from Claremont and its programs. The quickly abandoned 1776 Commission Report might as well have been stamped, “Produced and Approved by the Claremont Institute.” Claremont provided most of the …more

In 2015, the Christian Science Monitor interviewed me about the push to remove Confederate symbols across the United States. I argued that the next step would be removing the Jefferson Memorial or renaming Washington D.C. It hasn’t exactly come to that–of course there is a push to remove Washington’s name from George Washington University–but it seems everything traditional in America is under assault. This is …more

In 2012, Barack Obama signed the NDAA into law, a bill that suspended the writ of habeas corpus in the United States. Not many noticed, and Obama himself tried to downplay the significance of the bill by issuing a “signing statement” designed to soften the blow to civil liberties. For those that don’t understand the terms “signing statement” or habeas corpus, I’ll help. A “signing …more

Last week I talked about the situation with Ann McLane and the witch hunt in Virginia to take her down. It worked. McLane resigned from her appointed position, probably at the instance of the spineless governor. We should have expected as much. Youngkin is just another establishment Republican. I pegged him for that a while back. But the real issue at hand is something bigger, …more

Thomas Jefferson famously charged King George III with sending over “swarms of officers” to the American colonies with the sole purpose of “harassing” and “eating out the substance” of the American colonies. These would be called bureaucrats, or the “Deep State”. The general government operated with a very small paid cadre of employees for most of the early federal period. Alexander Hamilton had ONE employee …more