I followed James Lindsay for a long time. I've been in this fight probably about as long as him, and we came from extremely similar places in terms of Atheism, Liberalism, and so on. I nearly shared a stage with him in Nashville about three years ago. It must be a year or two now since James publicly anathematized me as "anti-American" for disagreeing on strategy and having different interpretations of our present circumstances. I'm willing to bet there's pretty much nobody who has digested more of James' work than I and also significantly disagrees with him on a few very important things. As such I think I'm uniquely qualified to diagnose the failure mode involved here. James is a Classical Liberal who holds up the Scottish Enlightenment and Scottish Common Sense Realism as the foundation of the American Revolution and American Constitutional system. He holds these things up as first-principle presuppositions - they are the foundations of his worldview and anything that cuts against them must be dismissed or destroyed. There was a time when I thought similarly. It was only a brief point on my journey, and it did significantly come from holding up the American Constitution (as I understood it) as ultimate. That, in turn, led me to try to identify the thoughts that undergirded that Constitution - just as I believe it did lead James on that same journey. Where we departed can only be summed up with this: Jesus Christ. You see, any thing that you hold up as ultimate is the thing that you are putting in the place of God. I once held up our Constitution in that place - something I feel rather silly for in hindsight given that our Constitution itself points to God as the source of our rights and its rightful authority. However, the rejection of God as that supreme rule of faith does, necessarily, send you looking in strange places for upholding and legitimizing our Constitutional system. I don't even argue with the basic intellectual lineage that Lindsay and others (many his acolytes) have proposed from the rise of Scottish Common Sense Realism (SCSR) and some significant structural components of the Constitution as drafted. The problem is that SCSR itself, like the whole of "Liberalism" as it exists, stands atop a system that preexisted it, set the conditions for it to rise, then denies that very foundation while parasitizing it to entirely predictable and catastrophic effect. For SCSR that system it stood atop and parasitized was the Scottish Presbyterian Reformation best known by John Knox. These SCSR philosophers, themselves calling themselves Presbyterian Shepherds in the vein of Knox, utterly denied the fundamental tenets of the Solas in importing a lazy and superficial version of Thomism that opened the door to all manner of gnostics and grifters. We see the fruits of their betrayal in modern Scotland. In America, as very much like in Scotland before, the average soldier of the American forces, having been rallied by the fiery sermons of the Black Robe Regiment, were overwhelmingly Reformed, mostly Presbyterian, and fought to restore the self government that Britain had overthrown (in effect, more counter-revolution than revolution). The framers and founders, however, being more elite, more educated, and more connected to all manner of social organizations, were themselves far more steeped in Natural Law theories and affected by the Enlightenment (including SCSR). This did seep through in the Constitution. The second major disconnect comes from an unwillingness to separate what is from what ought to be. James has been thoroughly unwilling to recognize the reality of our present circumstances as post-constitutional. This is not a moral prescription. It's just an analysis of facts on the ground. The trouble really comes at the next step: if you reject that America is post-constitutional (which, for my part, means that we experienced a revolution that overthrew the republic and installed democracy) you would be inclined to fight tooth-and-claw to preserve the current system. However, if you recognize the reality that we are overthrown, that the Constitution does not reign in any meaningful way, then fighting to preserve the status quo is fighting to protect an illegitimate, tyrannical regime, and the correct path lies elsewhere (for my part in figuring out how to make the Constitution our governing document once more). All these things you see and, perhaps, don't quite understand flow directly from these errors, I believe. I hope James repents, comes to Christ, and allows for a high-fidelity understanding of our current circumstances to trump his wish casting and willful blindness. In the absence of that James has made his bed over and over again.