Dear Reader (including any of you who might have caused earthquakes in Seattle last weekend), 

Greetings from the United Kingdom. I’ll save the travelogue stuff for the end. 

“We’re seeing a conservatism that emphasizes freedom give way to a conservatism that emphasizes authority,” a prominent, albeit somewhat heretical, conservative wrote a while ago. “For a hundred years we debated the economic reach of the state, but that debate’s basically done. The next one will be over where the state should erect guardrails in a mobile and fragmented world.”

In another column he wrote about the need to strengthen the state to combat new concentrations of corporate power and to promote a new standard of American “greatness.” Teddy Roosevelt was the lodestar for this new rethinking.