Steven Alan Samson

Ph.D. in Political Science, researcher and publicist

Revolt of the Disdained: America’s 2016 Presidential Election

No. 51, Jan.-Feb. 2025 The 2016 presidential election hinged on the return of overlooked or marginalized middle-class and working-class Democrats and independents – many of whom had earlier supported Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan – to reinvigorate traditional patriotism and help form a new “populist-conservative fusion in rural and industrial areas” within the Republican party. Eight years later, following his successful reelection, Donald Trump’s political fortunes still rest to a considerable degree on his ability to secure broad public support while maintaining the loyalty of his original coalition of the disdained.This article is drawn from “Revolt of the Disdained: America’s 2016 Presidential Election,” The Western Australian Jurist, 9 (2018). https://walta.net.au/wajurist/vol9/revolt-of-the-disdained-americas-2016-presidential-election/.An 2020 update of the original conclusion was published as “Revolt of the Disdained: Sovereignty or Submission,” The Market for Ideas, 23 (May-June 2020). https://www.themarketforideas.com/revolt-of-the-disdained-sovereignty-or-submission-a589/. More

Framing the American Commonwealth

Steven Alan Samson

No. 49, Sep.-Oct. 2024 Historically, American political and religious liberty can neither be divorced from each other nor be understood apart from the struggle between church and state that wracked early modern Europe. The American constitutional tradition of liberty and self-government is rooted in the biblical concept of the covenant. Sixteenth century Reformers used biblical and historical models to carefully develop the idea of covenanted self-government into a pillar of the ecclesiastical and political order, thus giving rise to covenant (or federal) theology and the idea of political federalism. What follows is a lightly edited excerpt from this writer’s Crossed Swords: Entanglements Between Church and State in America (1984), chapter 5, “The American Commonwealth.” It is a sequel to “Engines of Liberty: American Experiments in Self-Government,” The Market for Ideas, 25 (Sept.-Oct. 2020). More

An Uneasy Partnership: Medieval Church and State

Steven Alan Samson

No. 48, Jul.-Aug. 2024 Western civilization, which emerged during the late Roman imperial period, is a mixture – perhaps even a synthesis – of Roman and Christian elements. Christianity rejuvenated the Roman world by introducing a dynamism and resilience lacking in earlier civilizations. The adoption and spread of the Christian faith inspired cultural, moral, and technological innovations within a Roman legal and administrative architecture which, through the generations, have transformed everyday life nearly everywhere. This article is drawn from the first part of chapter 3, “Early Christendom,” of Crossed Swords: Entanglements between Church and State in America (unpublished dissertation, University of Oregon, 1984), 101-19. It is a companion piece to “Early Christendom: Chrysalis of the West” published in the Mar./Apr. 2023 issue. More

Models of Historical Interpretation

Steven Alan Samson

No. 46, Mar.-Apr. 2024 [Originally serving as two introductory lectures to my history courses, the following article was published at request of the editor in Contra Mundum 11 (Spring 1994): 12-20 under the same title. Long out of print, I hope these observations will prove to be of some value to another generation of readers.] More

Human Rights and America’s “Empire by Invitation”

Steven Alan Samson

No. 45, Jan.-Feb. 2024 The idea of universal human rights is part of the borrowed capital the West secularized from its Biblical origins as the eternal kingdom of Christ. Cut off from its source is becomes sentimental, utopian, ideological and sometimes apocalyptic. Most of the damage to the idea of universal human rights was done more than 75 years ago through the ideological twist which was added at the insistence of the Soviet Union after the Second World War.The first twenty-one points of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) are classified as civil and political rights: “freedoms from.” These are best regarded, first of all, as liberties which deserve protection rather than rights which have standing in courts of law. The next seven, which the Soviets insisted upon, are social and economic rights – “obligations to” – various social and economic categories. These might best be characterized as collective rather than individual rights, sometimes as claims upon the government treasury. They are rights other people – ultimately taxpayers – owe to a distinct class of people rather than liberties for all which governments are obliged to protect. More

Civilization Is Built on Borrowed Capital

Steven Alan Samson

The historical dynamism and resilience of Western civilization bespeaks both the Christian faith that laid its foundations and its ability to transform the families, institutions, and cultures of the world into which it grew. As faith wanes within its realm, cultural revolutionaries vie for control over the estate and the distribution of its assets. The prospect of recovery or renewal of the West depends on the character and courage of its heirs to restore a depleted heritage. The following article is drawn from the first two sections of “Cultural Vandalism: Lust to Rule, Road to Ruin,” Wokeshevism: Critical Theories and the Tyrant Left, ed. Augusto Zimmermann and Joshua Forrester (Connor Court, 2023) 221-37. Reprinted with permission. More

The Rich Dynamic of Faith in Action

Steven Alan Samson

One of the most incisive analyses of the secular transformation of America’s – indeed the West’s – ruling ideology was published a century ago in 1923 by a Presbyterian theologian, J. Gresham Machen. James Kurth would later describe its evolution as “the Protestant Deformation.”[2]During the so-called Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy which began before the First World War, Machen was the most articulate critic of a theological movement known as Modernism or Liberalism: a secular religion of sentiment poached from Christianity. His critique begins as follows: “The type of religion which rejoices in the pious sound of traditional phrases, regardless of their meaning, will never stand amid the shocks of life. In the sphere of religion, as in other spheres, the things about which we are agreed are apt to be the things that are least worth holding; the really important things are the things about which men will fight. More

Edward Rozek: Bearing Witness

Steven Alan Samson

How do we develop the eyes to see and the ears to hear? The best teachers equip us to resist temptation and recognize deception. They enable us to develop the vision to discern truth and the voice to tell it. “Take everything with a grain of salt,” my father advised me more than once. As I went off to college in 1966, he urged me to get under the wing of Edward J. Rozek, a Polish emigré who fought first for Poland at the outset of the Second World War, then escaped his imprisoned country to serve as a reconnaissance officer under British command. Blinded in a tank explosion, he underwent several surgeries to remove shrapnel and restore his eyesight. More

A Walking Encyclopedia: Revisiting Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Steven Alan Samson

Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, an Austrian aristocrat who lived in the United States with his family for a decade after the Anschluss, was a journalist, linguist, novelist, encyclopedist, political scientist, theologian, and student of the human character who reported – on site – and bore even-handed witness to many of the great events of the mid-twentieth century, including the Ukraine famine, the Nazi revolution, the Spanish civil war, and Congolese independence. The first part of this retrospective appreciation is drawn from the first part of a review of Leftism Revisited published as “Yes, but…,” Modern Age, 34 (Spring 1992): 241-45.[1] More

Early Christendom: Chrysalis of the West

Steven Alan Samson

So powerfully did the transformational grammar of the new religion, Christianity, change the western world that Arnold Toynbee has described the church as “the chrysalis out of which our Western society emerged.”[1] Historians have both praised the church for preserving the artifacts of the pagan cultures it converted and faulted it for absorbing too many of their elements into its life’s blood. While Pitirim Sorokin regarded the resulting fusion as a genuine synthesis, others have just as firmly maintained that Christianity created an unstable syncretism, pointing to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment as evidence of cultural disintegration and growing secularization.[2] But this has always been a source of disagreement, even among Christians themselves, and the debate continues unabated. More

Capturing the Commanding Heights

Steven Alan Samson

Half a century ago the German sociologist Helmut Schelsky succinctly dissected the political strategy of left-wing radicals in West Germany and the West generally. His essay, “The New Strategy of Revolution,” remains one of the best summaries of a remarkably successful ongoing strategy of cultural subversion by way of a “long march through the institutions.” As a consequence, our present day is dominated by what Michael Polanyi called moral inversion – and Roger Scruton called a culture of repudiation – which redefine the common ethos and the rules of public discourse. Scruton argued that the West is characterized by “a political process generating corporate agency, collective responsibility, and moral personality in the state.”[1] Citizens of the West live in what he calls a Personal State, which protects their rights wherever they go. The question today is whether the new strategy of revolution is converting the Personal State into something akin to a reeducation camp and turning citizens into subjects. More

Technology’s Dominion: An Ever-Tightening Web of Dependency

Steven Alan Samson

Although some degree of indeterminacy circumscribes perception and communication, it does not follow that the information which filters through our perceptual screens must be false or illusory. Norbert Wiener characterized it as “the devil of confusion, not of willful malice.” His concern was with the loss or distortion of information – analogous to entropy – in the process itself. It is a problem which bedevils our best efforts to find a common ground for understanding. More