Nicolas McAfee

Every day, one stumbles upon new examples of the commonsense yet commonly-forgotten wisdom: rulers and ruled must know each other, or there will be hell to pay. An ongoing thread:

@suzania 🎵 "You may say I'm a doomer / But I'm not the only one." 🎵

Possibly I’m a little bit fanatical huh But you see I’m CORRECT

@HorcherF @Princeton @MadisonProgram @McCormickProf Congratulations! Looking forward to having you on this side of the pond.

Professional update: I won a visiting research fellowship 2026, to the Politics Department of @Princeton University, generously sponsored by the James @MadisonProgram, led by @McCormickProf. My research topic is: Township, Subsidiarity, Oikophilia: In Defence of the Local. 2/1

@JoshHochschild @CatholicPods Claiming, wielding, and cultivating the healthy use of temporal power is a central part of the laity's role of sanctifying earthly life. Unless you spoke of the Church as shorthand for the clergy?

@CatholicPods If so, only as a gift, and not because power was claimed, wielded, or cultivated

The Church gains in moral authority as she declines in political power

@NickAllmaier @PIrelandEcon Campion's "Brag" is absolute 🔥🔥🔥

@PIrelandEcon I've just learned about Campion and he's fascinating. And I recall Campion at BC, especially studying Montesquieu there.

Goes insanely hard

@MatthewJFranck @JamesLucasIT

@JamesLucasIT The face of my wife on our wedding day.

What is the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen in your life?

@PaulRDeHart @roddreher @SecRubio Which should give us all *deep* caution about importing his analysis, or Thomas's for that matter, to our enormous governing apparatus.

@PaulRDeHart @roddreher @SecRubio Aristotle himself says a city that is too large can no longer be said to have a regime at all. If that was true for him of Babylon, I cannot imagine him saying differently of 2026 America.

It is a mighty thing that @SecRubio could go down in history as Cuba’s liberator.

@PaulRDeHart @roddreher @SecRubio I say this as a lover of representative self-government, a friend of the rule of law, and one who shares completely your originally-stated concern about American foreign policy interventionism.

@PaulRDeHart @roddreher @SecRubio 4) I had some difficulty sorting your reply for what is description and what is prescription. It reads in parts as though constitutional regimes are and ought to be theoretically invincible & immutable, apart from legal process - which seems descriptively untenable.

@PaulRDeHart @roddreher @SecRubio I agree with almost all of this. But to play devil's advocate: what would you say to the argument that 1) custom makes and unmakes laws and regimes, and 2) custom has clearly undone this feature of our order, with no foreseeable prospect of its recovery?

But surely we must ask whether it will happen in accordance with just war criteria (ius in bello and ius ad bellum). And also whether it will happen in accordance with constitutional order--the required Constitutional authorization. Surely the Court was absolutely right in Youngstown Sheet & Tube, which still stands as precedent. Truman was unequivocally wrong. The rule of law, after all, is to make those in official position, who administer the government, slaves of the law (as the Athenian Stranger says, in Plato's Laws), to subordinate them to law, to make it so law is not what they say or make (Plato says a regime in which law is the decree of those in government is one very close to complete collapse). When it comes to politics, many Christian officials or who comment on it have become functional Hobbesians / modern sovereigntists who think that law is the decree of government, of the sovereign, of the prince. If our officials want to act consonant with republican form, self-government, constitutional order then they need to act with and not without the authorization of those authorized by the people: Congress. According to James Madison, republican form requires legislative supremacy to the other branches of government (which is why we cannot and must not give equal checks to all the branches of government, according to Federalist 51). If we take seriously the rule of law under this political order, we must wish for the reestablishment of Congressional supremacy to the other branches of government. If we care about the rule of law, we must hope those in government are made to be slaves of the law and not the other way around.

@PhilCatholic @UntoldFortune "Yet nature is made better by no mean But nature makes that mean: so, over that art Which you say adds to nature, is an art That nature makes."

@UntoldFortune You are not far from the truth - in a certain sense no. And this objection, if taken pushed enough will lead to the best possible critique of my initial post.

Bread isn’t a natural substance

If you missed this delightful event, you can find the link to the video recording of our conversation in the tweet below ⬇️

No one tells you that parenting is just relearning the world through someone who thinks worms are friends & birds are miracles. It’s the most healing thing I’ve ever done. My daughter looked out the window this morning & said, everything is green & growing. I told her, you too. And something inside me whispered, so are you. Now I’m watching her hold flowers up to the sun while the light bends like it recognizes her. It’s funny, every spring I think I’m teaching my child about the world & every spring she proves she’s the one teaching me how to see it.

@SWGoldman @zenahitz The greatest invention of the 21st century is the form that forces you fill out every item of your resume *in addition to* uploading your resume.

@zenahitz That's why I get so annoyed by institutions that aren't clear about how much information they want at what stage of the process. It's an abuse of people's time.

My experience is that a personal, detailed rec letter is worth more than anything in a file (apart from a beautiful writing sample)

If you don’t give over your intelligence to them in the first place you will not have to buy it back. You do not need what they are selling. You need your own mind and body and friends and books and a place outside to walk and think.

And I'm excited to continue participating in the work of the newly-minted Association for the Renewal of Catholic Political and Social Thought, whose work you can follow here: catholicpost.eu

I'm about to fly home from a wonderful conference on "The Renaissance of Catholic Social Teaching," made possible by the excellent efforts of @HorcherF and @uni_nke.