Against "Promethean Politics"

"For basically my entire adult life, the default mode of Republican speechifying has been a kind of reheated 'optimism' with lots of waxing poetic about the great reserves of American can-do waiting to be tapped. These attempts to recapture 'Morning in America' have been delivered through clenched, Prozac-like smiles by men who promptly enter black SUVs to be hurried off back to their gated communities. I've always accepted that this is the way of electoral politics, which doesn't have much to do with a conservative intellectual disposition that tends to be more dour, or at least skeptical.
"But Hawley's speech went from those baleful statistics to a prophetic critique of a cult of the individual and self that is 'so thoroughly ingrained in American culture.'"

Michael Brendan Dougherty at National Review praises a speech by Sen. Josh Hawley.

"I Would Exterminate"

"Although we think of the Civil War as fought by armies, the historian Daniel E. Sutherland has recently reminded us that it was also marked by extensive guerrilla warfare that spread throughout the Confederacy and into Northern border areas. Such fighting occurred first and most virulently in Missouri. Another historian, Matthew C. Hulbert, calls the guerrilla war in Missouri 'hyper-violent,' making it a 'uniquely different wartime experience' from that of ordinary soldiers. Even the name given to the guerrillas, 'bushwhackers,' carried connotations of a different kind of fighting—attacks from ambush. Indeed, Hulbert argues that Quantrill’s biographer 'concocted' the exchange between his subject and Seddon in part 'to legitimize the brutality' of the Missouri guerrillas."

Nicole Etcheson in The New York Times discusses Confederate William Clarke Quantrill.