It will take some time that I do not have at the moment to do this with the thoughtfulness and care that your original post merits.  Plus I want to read and think about your post more carefully.  I'll try to get to it in the next week or so...if I can figure out how to post a free-standing post.  Please be patient. 

Professor Rahe,

You have given us much to digest and not a little to dispute, not least the idea that 'limited government', whatever its virtues, is the 'foundation of religious liberty'--at least as Dignitatis Humanae understands it.  Since I have only 2oo words with which to disagree, let me simply suggest that there is a tragic irony in the primacy accorded by classical liberals to 'negative rights' for the very reasons you suggest:   " it is the task of government to defend us against those who would interfere with our exercise of those rights..."  This effectively makes the state the mediator of all relationships in civil society insofar as they potentially threaten that exercise, and so it increases rather than decreases the scope of state power. 

Obviously much more must be said to make good on this, but if it's true, then the contemporary trend toward absolutism isn't simply the result of a fall from a 'golden age' or even the nefarious Obama, but belongs to the DNA of classical liberalism.  It is rather that great deeds, as Nietzsche says, take time.

We desperately need a much more rigorous discussion of religious liberty.  Thank you for initiating one.

Thanks Emily.  There is a lot to think about in what you say.  You also provide an appropriate occasion to revisit the piece written shortly after his death by my friend Peter Candler, which is still the best tribute that I have seen.  So good, in fact, that I've always sort of wished I had written it myself.

http://www.firstthings.com/print.php?type=article&year=2007&month=01&title_link=johnny-of-the-cross-44

OK State lost to the 8th place team in the Big 12 and only beat Stanford because their kicker choked.  Give me a break. 

Alabama and LSU were the two best teams in the country, as much as this system allows us to say that about anybody and as much as I hate to say it.  LSU dominated against an incredible schedule, and yet Bama should have beaten them the first time.  So what if they happen to reside in the same conference?   This isn't little league where everyone gets a trophy.  They deserved to play each other so long as we have this lousy system. 

Go Hogs.

See Joseph Ratzinger's The Spirit of the Liturgy for a beatiful explanation of the signifcance of this date.  Sorry I don't have the exact reference immediately to hand. 

You are right that this sort of coverage is as tiresome as it is predictable.

Hmm. Am I reading you right? I have never noticed anyone subtracting $.05 for every grocery bag I say I don't need.  Maybe that's because I always forget my environmentally sensitive tote bag and end up paying the tax after all.  Perhaps when I stop off at the store on the way home, I'll say I need a bag but don't need a thousand of them and see where that gets me. 

I will say this.  I'm guessing that those who complain about the bag tax have never paddled around a slalom course of them floating on the surface of the Anacostia.  If they actually do what they say are going to do with that money, namely, clean those bags out of the river, then I don't mind so much. 

 This post conjurs up a lot of great memories.  Thank you for that.

Once my dad and I rented a team of pack horses and hired a ranch hand--Slim, believe it or not--to pack us deep into the wilderness northwest of Steamboat for an elk hunt.  When the big day arrived, Slim was in jail, and I had to lead the train to a spot I had only seen once several months before. It snowed two feet on us as we were packing in.  We lost the trail; one of our pack horses got down in the snow; my dad had terrible altitude sickness, and we missed our camp by miles.  We dumped our stuff in an aspen grove and barely got our tent up before dark.  But when we woke up the next morning our camp was overrun with elk.  Two days later we were quartering a nice bull at midnight.  I've never had more fun in my life.

You can help remove the gamey taste from venison or anything else by soaking it overnight in salt water. That helps tenderize it too.  If you're roasting it, you might try larding it with salt pork.

 Flagg,

Though I only quickly skimmed his piece, I have to say at first glance that I was a little underwhelmed by Lawler's response.  I gathered that by "totalitarianism" you meant something fairly subtle, since you seem to suggest that one could live in a totalitarian milieu without knowing it and that it needn't overtly manifest itself in, or perhaps as, a state structure.  (Could totalitarianism and democracy coincide, for instance?)   I'm not sure that the notion of totalitarianism which Lawler attributes to you does justice to that subtlety, though certainly he's hit on part of the equation.

Am I just reading my own predilections into your original post, or Is this a fair assessment? And if it is the latter, would you care to specify more precisely what you mean by "totalitarianism" and its relation to the "technological ontology" that you attribute to Descartes, Bacon, et al?  I have my own ideas on this, but I'd like to know what you think.

Or I suppose I could just buy the book.

Being neither a true conservative (that is, a true liberal in the classical sense) nor a libertarian and thus unsure of what if anything my presence could add here, I have sat on the sidelines for months as a (nevertheless appreciative) reader of Ricochet.

This excellent post has finally forced me to cough up the price of a latte to join in the discussion.  Though I would quibble perhaps with the implied premise of Mr. Taylor's question, namely that some subtle form of totalitarianism is not already upon us, it seems to me that his is a question that desperately needs to be asked and to be rigorously thought through. As I understand it, the question you have posed is whether there is something in our most fundamental and cherished notions, perhaps even in our notion of freedom itself inasmuch as this underlies the modern 'technological' approach to nature, that leads ineluctably to its opposite and whether our immersion in and commitment to this notion serves largely to conceal the fact from us. 

Actually, your post suggests more than this.  But is that a fair restatement of at least part of the dilemma?