Steven Alan Samson

Ph.D. in Political Science, researcher and publicist

Capturing the Commanding Heights

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

Early Christendom: Crysalis 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

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

Penetrating the Fog of Culture War

Steven Alan Samson

Protracted conflict is a historical phenomenon. It attends upon every systemic breakdown and the ensuing quest for a new equilibrium. Every revolutionary movement issues from a position of physical inferiority vis‑a‑vis the defender of the status quo. The revolutionary movement, to assure its final victory, must perforce rely more upon the breadth of its vision than the strength of its arms. Its strategy derives from a superior understanding of the total historic situation; the spectrum of revolutionary conflict techniques is as wide as the entire scale of social change. Within that spectrum, a central intelligence organizes and phases the instruments of conflict ‑‑ political, economic, psychological, technological and military. That central intelligence discerns potential weapons where the defender of the status quo sees only the tools of peace; in short, it turns plowshares into swords.[1] More

Transatlantic Exchange: Introducing Francis Lieber

Steven Alan Samson

It is remarkable how quickly America was transformed from an isolated agrarian republic in 1800 into a hegemonic industrial power by 1900. Intellectual and cultural changes that began taking root in the early half of the century yielded a cornucopia of new fruits in the latter half, including tax-supported public libraries, the rise of the scientific professions, and German-style graduate education. The impact of democracy, nationalism, industrialization, the reform crusades, sectionalism, urbanization, commerce, and immigration together gave new urgency to Crevecoeur’s old question: “What is this new man, the American?” More

Binding Leviathan: The Case for Institutional Liberty

Steven Alan Samson

In political theory, as in any inquiry, a question must begin with a perception or a premise. The question is this: How can the identity and integrity of a self-governing institution – whether a church, business, school, even a family – be maintained independently of the public agenda of a pervasively secular modern state? The perception that frames the question is that the American system of constitutional government, in particular, originated with specific reference to – and derived its essential character from – the covenant tradition of the Bible.[1] More

The Power of Vague Things: A Cautionary Tale

Steven Alan Samson

Paul Valery contends that power is founded on belief (a “vague thing”). Harold J. Berman believes the rule of law relies more on moral force than a police force. Yet the modern positivist worldview emphasizes the practical rather than the moral dimension of power. What are some consequences of this positivist belief? More

A Strategy of Subversion

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 an ongoing strategy of cultural subversion.Directed towards the “conquest of the system,” the revolutionary strategy depicted by Schelsky, which was inspired by the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci and implemented by Rudi Dutschke, is premised on destroying the most significant features of political democracy. It bids to root out the fundamental political and social ideals and the corresponding patterns of life of the major groups within the system by discrediting the values, intellectual outlook, and institutional foundations of these groups, their ideals, and even the most ordinary interactions of their members. A useful comparison may be drawn with what Thomas Farr calls “China’s Second Cultural Revolution,” where Xi Jinping’s government controls the commanding heights and is endeavoring to introduce a utilitarian, soft-power “social credit” system to fine-tune its control. More

Engines of Liberty: American Experiment in Self-Government

Steven Alan Samson

Brague’s Challenge. In an American Spectator blog post, “Sin No More,” dated May 1, 2008, Rémi Brague stated a thesis worth exploring: “What cultures that were influenced by the Jewish and Christian religions made of the ideal of liberty that I have been finding in both Testaments is a task for historians. Impartial historians will observe how miserably the ideal and its realization often jarred with one another. On the other hand, they will have to acknowledge that free institutions hardly ever developed in places that were not influenced by Jewish and Christian ideas. Outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, it has been rare for thinkers to suppose that God endowed us with a nature of our own, that freedom is part of that nature, and that it is through the exercise of freedom, and the errors that inevitably stem from it, that we fulfill God’s plan… And when Lord Acton tells us that ‘liberty is not a means to a higher political end; it is the highest political end’, he is echoing voices that can be heard in all the sacred books of our tradition, from the Torah to the epistles of St. Paul”. 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 illustrates the practical ways the ideal and its realization have been imaginatively developed even as they “jarred” with each other. More

The Crisis of Our Age: A Retrospective Glance

Steven Alan Samson

As a political philosophy and system of governance, liberalism is a product of Western Christian civilization. Yet some of its roots are decidedly illiberal. Thomas Hobbes offered an intellectual framework for our burgeoning Provider State, reducing people to hedonistic machines that accept the oversight of a Sovereign who serves as theologian-in-chief. Jean-Jacques Rousseau cited man’s natural compassion in support of rendering everyone collectively dependent on a sovereign General Will, which Jacques Maritain later called an “immanent social God”. Frederic Bastiat dismissed these pretensions by noting how self-serving lawmakers bend morality to justify—via greed and false philanthropy—the legal plunder that divisively empowers them. More

A Primer on Political Economy

Steven Alan Samson

Economist Walter E. Williams learned a principle of success by missing lunch. “At 13, I was a typical barbarian growing up in the slums of Philadelphia”, he recalls. “My mother supported us by working as a maid. Frivolous consumption often meant that I’d used up my school‑lunch funds by midweek, so I’d go to Mom to borrow money. Finally, one day Mom said ‘You knew you’d have to buy lunch when you spent the money’ and refused to fork over a dime. Saddled with what I was sure was the most callous mother on Earth, I went without lunch the rest of the week. I never frittered away my food money again – taking my first step toward civilization.” More

Revolt of the Disdained: Sovereignty or Submission

Steven Alan Samson

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. Donald Trump’s political fortunes rest to a considerable degree on his ability to secure broad public support while maintaining the loyalty of his original coalition of the disdained. More