For the American Founders, unalienable rights—not property—was the overarching concept. How is this so hard for modern scholars to grasp?

An investigation of those who made an impression on James Madison reveals the forgotten impact of two Founding Era philosophers: David Hume, and Adam Smith.

Thomas Jefferson’s first draft held that our rights were ‘sacred and undeniable.’ What did we lose or gain by this change to America’s founding document?

Americans in 1913 showed by their votes they had forgotten the purpose of the Framers’ design for the Senate. We today, by and large, have even forgotten that generation’s forgetting.

Progressives have a different purpose for government than securing citizens’ natural rights. They want to use the vast powers of government to change America.

By failing to appreciate the free market’s gift of prosperity and the American founders’ gift of liberty, we put ourselves in jeopardy.

The Scottish Enlightenment was an explosion of creative intellectual energy. It arrived just in time to have a decisive influence on the American Founders.

The readily observable fact that we no longer think politically in terms of unalienable rights is a perfect measure of how much we have abandoned the Founders’ vision.

The Left decided they faced not a verdict but a choice: Marxism or rationality. So great was their attachment to Marxism that they chose to abandon rationality.

‘The pursuit of happiness’ shouldn’t confuse people who study the American founders.

What has happened at The New Republic is happening in progressivism itself. The more progressivism advances, the more its illiberal postulates are revealed.