Charles C.W. Cooke > Quotes

“Far from merely being a larger England, the United States had become something quite different: an incubator of lost or diluted British freedoms. As the Liberty Bell was originally cast in England but rang out in America, so those guarantees of the 'rights, liberties, and immunities of free and natural-born subjects' have found their truest expression across the Atlantic. 'That rifle on the wall of the labourer’s cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy,' wrote George Orwell in 1941. 'It is our job to see that it stays there.' In Britain and beyond, that rifle has long been taken away. England’s bell has fallen silent. Americans would do well to ensure that the crack in theirs grows no larger.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke

“Like George Washington, we are quick to dismiss politics. This is naïve. Conflict in politics is not only inevitable; it is axiomatically imperative. Politics is division. Political parties do not exist arbitrarily, but are a rational, practical response to dispute. As long as we keep our republic — and in fact even if we do not — people will form cliques in order to forward their agendas. The only way to remove the need for parties, and the disruption they cause, is to remove the capacity for disagreement completely. One cannot help but suspect that for some who claim to find antagonism so tiring, this is the latent desire.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke

“Brutally put, it makes little philosophical sense for the elected representatives of a government that is subordinate to the people to be able to disarm those people. As an enlightened state may by no means act as the arbiter of its critics’ words, it may not remove from the people the basic rights that are recognized in the very document to which it owes its existence. “Shall not be infringed” and “shall make no law” are clear enough even for the postmodern age. To ask, “Why do you need an AR-15?” is to invert the relationship. A better question: “Why don’t you want me to have one?”
― Charles C. W. Cooke

“When progressives argue that the Constitution belongs to another era, they are effectively contending that mankind has evolved beyond error and greed, and that the precautions taken by America’s careful revolutionaries are no longer necessary.”
― Charles C.W. Cooke, The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right's Future

“Free speech is a unitary issue in which there are no possible divisions. The moral standing of the speaker has no relevance, other than in our correlated free right to judge him in turn for his actions, and it should not matter whether the person speaking is the finest man who has ever lived or the worst, nor whether or not a majority concurs with his sentiment. It must not matter whether a writer is brilliant or moronic, or a cartoonist witty or bigoted, because it is not up to power, authority, plurality or orthodoxy to make that distinction. Parliament can not be the architect of its own opposition, nor the offended the authors of their own offense. Put bluntly, the law must not distinguish between the writings of Hitler and those of Shakespeare.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke

“The hard-fought victories in America's checkered history were won neither with parchment nor with words, but with guns, with blood, and with unimaginable suffering. Slavery, like Nazism and other totalitarian horrors, was vanquished by flying steel, by heartbreak, and by brute force—by whites and blacks who together smashed the institutions that had hijacked American liberty and perverted it for their own profit. But triggers are ultimately pulled by men, and successful campaigns require their practitioners to carry with them more than merely bombs and water. 'Europe was created by history,' Margaret Thatcher liked to say, but 'America was created by philosophy.' That philosophy, established by the founding generation and routinely recruited by the excluded ever since, remains extraordinarily potent—a North Star for wandering discontents within America's borders and without.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke, The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right's Future

“I don’t know why I love the open spaces in the Southwest or Grand Central Terminal or the fading Atomic Age Googie architecture you see sometimes when driving. I don’t know why merely glimpsing the Statue of Liberty brings tears to my eyes, or why a single phrase on an Etta James or Patsy Cline record does what it does to me. It just does. I have spoken to other immigrants about this, and I have noticed that there is generally a satisfactory explanation — religious freedom, the chance at self-expression, the country’s size — and then there is the wistful stuff that moistens the eyes. Show me a picture of two canyons, and the fact that one of them is American will make all the difference. Just because it is American. Is this so peculiar? Perhaps.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke

“To propose earnestly in any of those places that individuals should be permitted to own military-grade firearms, that the established educational system is an authoritarian disaster, and that the answer to what ails America is a return to a thriving and diverse localism is, invariably, to be met with raised eyebrows.”
― Charles C.W. Cooke, The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right's Future

“Liberty as we understand it in the United States has been the exception not the rule — and its survival over the past three centuries the consequence not of happy foreordination but of the good guys in the world having enjoyed unmatched military and financial supremacy. Having known little else, the historically myopic will find it tempting to presume that our present global order represents the immutable state of nature. It does not. Just as the primary reason that the forces of liberty have prevailed since 1815 is that they have acquired and maintained unrivaled power, the relative peace and buzzing international trade that we currently enjoy is the product not of the West’s moral dominance, but of the prepotency first of the British Empire and then — after a seamless and invisible handover — of an ascendant United States.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke

“It is a truth all-too-infrequently acknowledged that disaffected and bored young men will always be tempted to reject the bourgeois comfort of the capitalist West and yearn instead for absolutism. Rich, poor, religious, atheistic — where there is testosterone and antipathy there will be loyalty to pernicious ideology. We can hold all the graduate seminars we like in Raqqa; none will change the fact that some men aspire to smash things.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke

“Conservatives are fond of employing foreign examples of the cruelty and terror that governments may inflict on a people that has been systematically deprived of its weaponry. Among them are the Third Reich’s exclusion of Jews from the ranks of the armed, Joseph Stalin’s anti-gun edicts of 1929, and the prohibitive firearms rules that the Communist party introduced into China between 1933 and 1949. To varying degrees, these do help to make the case. And yet, ugly as all of these developments were, there is in fact no need for our augurs of oppression to roam so far afield for their illustrations of tyranny. Instead, they might look to their own history. 'Do you really think that it could happen here?' remains a favorite refrain of the modern gun-control movement. Alas, the answer should be a resounding 'Yes.' For most of America’s story, an entire class of people was, as a matter of course, enslaved, beaten, lynched, subjected to the most egregious miscarriages of justice, and excluded either explicitly or practically from the body politic. We prefer today to reserve the word 'tyranny' for its original target, King George III, or to apply it to foreign despots. But what other characterization can be reasonably applied to the governments that, ignoring the words of the Declaration of Independence, enacted and enforced the Fugitive Slave Act? How else can we see the men who crushed Reconstruction? How might we view the recalcitrant American South in the early 20th century? 'It' did 'happen here.' And 'it' was achieved — in part, at least — because its victims were denied the very right to self-protection that during the Revolution had been recognized as the unalienable prerogative of 'all men.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke

“The sad truth is that, at one level or another, a majority of Europeans still believe in the inherent inferiority of the United States and its people, and they reject all evidence to the contrary. In the public imagination, America is the brash young houseguest: violent, forthright with opinion, unimpressed by pretentious tradition, and permanently unable to shake off an unfortunate background in trade. Europeans sigh patronizingly at the United States as a knowing parent would at an unruly child. They are envious of America’s success, yes. But envious in that peculiarly hateful sort of way in which a man might resent his ex-wife’s newfound riches.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke

“There have been approximately 200,000 years of what we generally regard as 'human history,' and in less than 1 percent of those years has it been broadly agreed that it is not entirely copacetic to remove a man’s head because he refuses to pray to your favorite god.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke

“To look at the last century and conclude that the problem was a surfeit of individual rights is to be a bloody fool.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke

“It is said that the chief virtue of the Internet age is that anybody may express himself and be heard — regardless of his relationship with the gatekeepers. But it is also fair to say that the chief vice of the Internet age is that . . . anybody may express himself and be heard — regardless of his relationship with the gatekeepers”
― Charles C. W. Cooke

“The primary weakness of libertarianism is that it can become unreasonably ideological and unmoored from reality. At their very worst, libertarians can behave like Jacobins: disrespectful of tradition, convinced that logic-on-paper can answer all the important questions about the human experience, dismissive of history and cultural norms, possessed of a purifying instinct, and all too ready to pull down institutions that they fail to recognize are vital to the integrity of the society in which they wish to operate.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke, The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right's Future

“Modern history has judged the British colonists to be moral monsters, and Hollywood has happily played along with the conceit. In our movies and our popular culture, we commonly attribute to the king’s soldiers a series of atrocities of which they were by no means guilty, and we overstate, too, the extent to which the colonists’ basic rights were being violated. But the harsh truth of American history is that, in comparison with the tyrannies that would come later, the colonists of the 18th century had it pretty good. Theirs were the problems of political representation and of interrupted commerce, not of death and enslavement. Their fight was with a foreign power that had unwisely elected to reverse its policy of salutary neglect and to re-involve itself in the affairs of men who had all but moved on; it was not an exterminating and totalitarian force that determined to hang dissenters from trees and to assert itself as superior no matter what the injuries to liberty or to decency.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke

“At its root, The Crucible is such a terrifying and illuminating piece of work not because it involves witches and because witches do not exist, but because it depicts the gradual victory of delirium over reason and of passion over truth. In the heat of a hysterical moment, a putatively civilized community elects to abandon the vital traditions that have been slowly built up over centuries and to hand over its institutions to the transient anxieties of an unruly and jealous mob. 'It were better that ten suspected witches should escape than one innocent person be condemned,' warned Increase Mather, a critic of the trials. 'Not on your life,' replied the crowd; for we have some evils to spike. Free expression? Damn you to hell. Presumption of innocence? Hie thee to a monastery. All that we have held dear? Abandon it now, for there are monsters at the gate, and they need to be destroyed post haste.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke

“If all men really are created equal, the anniversary of Selma must be treated as a date every bit as important to American history as is the end of the Siege of Yorktown.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke

“That in America the friends of liberty are called “conservatives” and the centralizing authoritarians are referred to as “liberals” is one of the great semantic jokes of history.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke, The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right's Future

“Every generation considers itself to be smarter than the ones that went before, and every generation is wrong.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke, The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right's Future

“Just as crucial as ensuring that the United States does not mistake the keeping of order for nation building is ensuring that the military is not permitted to get away with a carte blanche approach to spending and management that would be humored in no other part of the government.”
― Charles C.W. Cooke, The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right's Future

“The primary weakness of conservatism is that, relying as it does on the Burkean presumption that society is the way it is for a reason, it can refuse too steadfastly to adapt to emerging social and economic realities and it is apt to transmute solutions that were the utilitarian product of a particular time into articles of high principle.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke, The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right's Future

“To ensure that they had a working mechanism by which to resist the expansion of federal power, the architects of our Constitution hard-wired the state legislatures into its structure; with the 17th Amendment, progressives pulled out that wiring like punch-drunk Jacobins.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke

“A plumber is required to get his calculations right, or hot water will spray all over the place and he will be fired or sued. A soldier must learn to stick to a plan and to remember his training under pressure or he and his friends will die. A business owner must wake up every day and subject himself to the harsh and inescapable vicissitudes of the free market. A journalist or a compliance officer or a bureaucrat, on the other hand, is able to live almost entirely in his head. Are we to presume that this does not matter?”
― Charles C. W. Cooke

“It is liberty, not democracy, that is America’s highest ideal.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke

“British elections are mean-spirited and meretricious affairs that reveal what the country has become in its post-imperial form. In them, the focus flits between mercenary discussion of what the government is going to give the people and petty bickering over inconsequential details such as which schools the candidates went to and how much money they have. Few principles are at stake because classical liberalism is largely dead, so debates ultimately boil down to the question of who is going to run the welfare system more efficiently. The candidates’ arguments are full of nebulous, slippery words, such as 'fairness' and 'investment' — and the never-ending substitution of the word 'community' for “government.” You would never hear Kennedy’s famous 'Ask not what your country can do for you' line in a British political context because nobody would understand what he was talking about.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke

“In our hyper-technocratic era it may seem counterintuitive to record that there can be no great virtue in being the world’s most prolific exporter of grapefruits or in possessing the largest economy among nations or in improving healthcare outcomes at the margins if we are not in any meaningful way free.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke

“The modern American Left has become so relentlessly 'progressive' that it has begun in earnest to attempt to repeal the Enlightenment.”
― Charles C. W. Cooke

“Roughly one of three college graduates is in jobs the Labor Department says require less than a bachelor’s degree.”
― Charles C.W. Cooke, The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right's Future