For just about the last half-century, since Earl Warren became chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the American legal academy has pondered something usually referred to as the “legitimacy problem.” Law-school professors have believed that there is a difficulty inherent in the fact that an unelected, isolated body of nine jurists working in a...
In a sane world, the sight of more than a half-million immigrants—many of them illegal—flooding the streets of downtown Los Angeles and waving Mexican flags would have been something of a wake-up call for Southern Californians. It wasn’t. No matter how in-your-face the protesters have become, conventional wisdom argues that these nice folks are simply...
George W. Bush campaigned for the presidency on a pledge not to engage in the nation-building experiments that characterized the Clinton years, and, like every other president of the 20th century, he did not simply break his major promises: He did exactly the opposite. Naturally, his administration has plenty of excuses. Failing to discover those...
Why do empires fall? Nearly everyone has a theory. Some focus on external challenges. For example, the Soviet Union collapsed under the pressure of the arms race that Ronald Reagan heated up; the British were forced out of India by Gandhi and by the rising tide of Indian nationalism. Others seek the cause in the...
The Bush administration could be cooking up an “October surprise”—an attack on Iran—to boost the lagging fortunes of the President and the Republican Party, according to a recent editorial by Patrick J. Buchanan. With midterm elections coming in November, the Bush White House has been cranking up the anti-Iran rhetoric, presenting Tehran’s nuclear program as...
Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) received a letter on March 23 from a gaggle of organizations representing the financial industry. The group included the American Bankers Association, the Bankers’ Association for Finance and Trade, the Investment Company Institute, the Securities Industry Association, the Bond Market Association, the Financial Services Forum, and the Financial Services Roundtable. They...
In his review of my book, The Strange Death of Marxism (“The Two Faces of Marxism,” April), Paul Belien writes that I have overstated the hypothetical distance between Marxism and post-Marxism. The “cultural Marxists” in the Frankfurt School were supposedly right to claim for themselves a Marxist pedigree because of their hatred for Christian and...
In his article in the March issue on property takings (“Does the Federal Government Protect Private Property?” Views), Stephen B. Presser exhibits the fuzzy thinking that prevents our side from gaining traction. He equates corporate property with personal property when, in fact, corporate property, like government property, is nearly the opposite of personal property and...
PERSPECTIVE Imposing Utopiaby Thomas FlemingConcealing despotism. VIEWS Cincinnatus, Call the Office!by Clyde WilsonPublic service versus the American System. Judging for the Peopleby Stephen B. PresserDemocracy, the Supreme Court, and the Constitution. Democracy: The Enlightened Wayby Claude PolinThe your-fault society. REVIEWS A Government We Deserveby H.A. Scott Trask Sean Wilentz: The Rise of Democracy: Jefferson to...
If George Barna, by far the most prominent head counter among American Christians, is correct, 35 percent of “born-again Christians” have experienced (to borrow from Tammy Wynette) “pure h–e-double-l.” A decade-long study on the Barna Group’s website, published first in 2004, reveals that, “among married born again Christians, 35% have experienced a divorce. That figure...
Wendell Berry’s latest harvest of essays contains characteristically wise observations on mobility, industrial agriculture, and other maladies of our age, but it also displays a Berry seldom glimpsed—that is, Wendell Berry as a rural Kentucky Democrat reluctant to quit a party that long ago quit rural America. He even titles one short piece “Some Notes...
A politician’s life—Héctor was discovering—is, like that of any celebrity, not a happy one. Even before he’d announced his candidacy for the open seat in New Mexico’s First Congressional District, Tomasina Luna issued a campaign statement announcing her endorsement by the National Council of La Raza, accusing the Republican Party of racism (amounting possibly to...
Remember “Elisa’s Law”? In 1996, New York Gov. George Pataki signed this legislation, which removed, in the words of then Speaker of the New York Assembly Sheldon Silver, “archaic confidentiality laws” pertaining to juvenile-court and medical records. The law also extended the period during which records of unfounded reports of child abuse were to be...
A friend who sells high-end real estate tells the story of a well-heeled Northern couple who were enchanted by the idea of owning an antebellum Southern mansion. He met them at the airport and took them to one of our charming old South Carolina towns—one that, having failed to be liberated by the U.S. Army in...
India, during the Cold War, was officially nonaligned. She was closer to the Soviet Union, which saw her as a natural “anti-colonialist” ally and also wanted a regional counterbalance for China—and accordingly assisted India militarily and politically, especially during U.N. debates over the Kashmir conflict. Later, in 1998, India’s continued refusal to sign the 1970...
There are many critics of the flaws in the U.S. approach to the “War on Terror” and the merits of our interventionist war in Iraq. Much of the criticism predictably comes from liberals, but the most important, in challenging the status quo within a Republican administration, comes from traditional conservatives and libertarians asking why a...
“And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.” —Genesis 3:20 The first time I ever visited Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, it was in the company of a pretty Irish-American girl from Massachusetts named Evelyn. Her father was some kind of Democratic politician back home. She and...
Crash Produced by Bull’s Eye Entertainment Directed by Paul Haggis Screenplay by Paul Haggis and Robert Moresco Distributed by Lions Gate Films Last month, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held its 78th annual awards ceremony. Dreamt up by Louis B. Mayer in 1927, the Academy’s advertised mission was to confer legitimacy on...
“War is a perpetual struggle with embarrassments.” —Colmar von der Goltz The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq by George Packer New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 480 pp., $26.00 George Packer’s The Assassins’ Gate aptly exposes the incompetence of the Bush administration’s occupation of Iraq. The author has traveled to Iraq many times to talk...
Abortionists are apt to be a mite diffident in speaking of their calling—hardly surprising, given the nature of their work and its attendant hazards. How many abortionists have you encountered socially? None, I’d wager. After all, open avowal of their daily labors would hardly invite exchange of further pleasantries. Picture the scene over the hors...
In late January, I led a nine-member congressional delegation on a whirlwind trip to Switzerland, Poland, Rumania, Kosovo, and Morocco. In Bern, at the Embassy Country Team Briefing, we were told that 90 percent of the Swiss were opposed to our occupation of Iraq. In Morocco, our ambassador happily told us that pro-American feelings had...
In 1989, a volume of H.L. Mencken’s journals was published. The contents revealed, among many other things, impolite utterances by the Sage of Baltimore about blacks and Jews. (Mencken also sailed into the ways of “lintheads” and “mountaineers,” but that bothered no one.) The denunciations came fast and furious. As I recall, one journalist refused...
Robert A. Taft, in a speech delivered at Kenyon College in October 1946, expressed strong opposition to the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials that were just ending. Taft argued that the defendants, the architects of the Nazi regime who had been found guilty of waging a war of aggression and had been sentenced to death, were...
Cesar Rodriguez, a 27-year-old unemployed security guard, had it in for 7-year-old Nixzmary Brown, the daughter of Nixzaliz Santiago, his common-law wife. After losing his job a few days before Christmas, Rodriguez increased the frequency of his daily beatings of the helpless, undernourished four-foot-tall girl. Police records indicate that Rodriguez had been beating her for...
Leon Hadar has written a short, dispassionate, and gently theoretical sort of book on American policy in the Middle East. It is not, chiefly, about military operations, terrorists, prisons, and headlines but about policy at the “geo-political” and “geo-economic level” and about predictions. Though dry, Sandstorm is accessible to the general reader. Hadar believes that the...
If you want to see how America’s liberal elites would like to reshape the United States, look at Western Europe. For decades, they have dreamed of importing European social models, of a Swedish welfare society, and of comprehensive sexual tolerance à la Hollandaise. But the liberal vision is most perfectly manifested in the form of...
The schadenfreude in watching society collapse comes from knowing that leftist ideology, by way of the law of unintended consequences, ushered in the fall. Fifty years ago, no one would have thought that real men who instinctively protected women and children would transmogrify into eunuchs who send women into combat and murder the unborn. Yet,...
“Thou shalt not honor a white man,” says the first commandment of the politically correct—unless, of course, the white man in question is hastening the destruction of Western civilization or, perhaps, preserving the habitat of the pupfish. A recent example of dishonoring an American hero occurred at the University of Washington, when a student senator,...
Last year, an arresting headline on page three of Tokyo’s Daily Yomiuri newspaper read “Japan Heading for Extinction.” The article bemoaned the contents of a government white paper addressing Japan’s declining birthrate. The average number of babies born to a Japanese woman during her reproductive years dropped to a record low of 1.28 in 2004,...
Next month will mark the fourth anniversary of the adoption, by the U.S. Catholic bishops, of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People. The protocol document was the bishops’ response to allegations of long-standing clerical sexual abuse of minors over the past 50 years. While the media, victims’ advocates, and not a...
For the past two-and-a-half millennia, our civilization has cultivated tragedy as an art form that articulates some of the key problems of our existence. Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III—these works speak timeless truths in an ever-contemporary language. In the case of Serbia’s former president Slobodan Milosevic, reality has proved equal to inspired imagination. His life, which...
While the United States is preoccupied with Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, a far more dangerous crisis is brewing: the prospect of an armed confrontation between Taiwan and mainland China. Unfortunately, Washington’s current policy places us in the middle of that quarrel. If U.S. leaders do not change course, America could find herself in a...
Suppose a wife is dying or has been lying for years in a coma: Who has ultimate authority to decide what medical treatments will be used to prolong or not to prolong her life? Suppose a child of divorced parents is taken out of the country by his mother, who then dies, leaving the child...
It must surely embarrass John Miller and the other Francophobic neocons to realize that one of the quintessential American institutions was founded by an intrepid French missionary, who offered this vision for his action: “I have raised Our Lady aloft so that men will know, without asking, why we have succeeded here.” And it is...
It was a great surprise to me to find something in the February issue of Chronicles with which I disagree. (Normally, I find myself nodding vigorously in assent while reading each new issue.) In his piece in Cultural Revolutions, R. Cort Kirkwood argued that the recent defeat of the intelligent-design crowd in Dover, Pennsylvania, should...
I agree with much of the premise of Clay Reynolds’ piece “The Real Crisis of Higher Education” in the February issue (Vital Signs): Certainly, as he indicates, education at all levels in the United States is failing. High schools no longer prepare students for life and work but “to take standardized tests” for advanced learning....
PERSPECTIVE New Wine in Old Bottlesby Thomas FlemingThe Christian war on the family. VIEWS The Perpetual Familyby Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.From Rome to Las Vegas to Blackheath and back. Love on the Rocksby Aaron D. WolfA new covenant. Rejecting Marriageby Christopher J. CheckThe elephant in the room. NEWS Staying the Courseby Edward A. OlsenThe unintended consequences....
“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools . . . ” —Romans 1:22 Man, by nature, is limited by time, space, and biology. I can only be where I am, live for my appointed time, and accomplish what I am physically capable of accomplishing—which, according to the natural order, means, chiefly, having a wife...
The first question that comes to mind regarding the Minutemen movement is: “What do these people imagine they’re actually doing, sitting camped out down there on lawn chairs on the Southwest border?” The second is: “What do they mean to accomplish by doing it?” I imagine a representative Minuteman’s answer to the first question would...
The few reviews I’d read of Cormac McCarthy’s new novel, including the lead in the New York Times Book Review, though laudatory, had little more to say than that No Country for Old Men would (will) make a terrific screenplay. So much for the art of book reviewing these days. Another way to say it...
Vice President Cheney’s mishap on the Armstrong Ranch in Texas last February is every hunter’s nightmare come true. The humiliation following that mishap is every politician’s worst dream realized. An easy metaphorical reach allows us some fun at the expense of the Vice President, the apparently careless shotgunner who once held the office of secretary...
When I first heard of the topic “Small Is Beautiful,” I thought of the wonderful motto of Chilton Williamson’s friend Edward Abbey: “Growth Is the Enemy of Progress.” Abbey went right to the heart of the matter. The false but pervasive premise of American life is that progress and growth are the same thing and...
The vociferous and, at times, incendiary uproar that suddenly erupted in early February with the publication in Paris of 12 “satanic drawings,” supposedly caricaturing Muhammad, offered the world one more proof of the extent to which, thanks to radio, television, and computers, our rapidly shrinking planet has now become a global village. It also offered...
“Liberalism is too often merely a way of speaking.” —Oscar I. Janowsky Until the day he died in April 1964, John T. Flynn insisted that he was a liberal. Once, that self-designation had not been controversial. This was a man who, as a member of the New York City Board of Higher Education in the...
When Vasco da Gama’s three battered little ships dropped anchor off Calicut on May 20, 1498, after a voyage of over ten months, they had finally found the sea route between Europe and India so long sought by Portugal’s kings and explorers. Apart from the desire for knowledge, Da Gama’s tatterdemalion mini-armada had come for...
Brokeback Mountain Produced and distributed by Focus Features Directed by Ang LeeScreenplay by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana from a story by Annie Proulx An enlightened colleague recently asked me what I thought of director Ang Lee’s film Brokeback Mountain. When I told him I thought it a dreary, sappy soap opera, he smiled pityingly...
Stephen Harper, a 43-year-old politician from Calgary, became the leader of the newly formed right-wing Canadian Alliance in 2002. One year later, he managed to unite his party with the Progressive Conservative Party to form the Conservative Party of Canada. On January 23, 2006, Mr. Harper—against all odds—brought an end to 12 years of Liberal...
Contrary to Washington’s official rhetoric, the U.S. government is an ally, not an opponent, of Islamic extremism—a foe, not a defender, of Western civilization. Not since the Turkish siege of Vienna (1526) has Europe faced the threat of a Muslim occupation of significant portions of the continent; it does so now because of the foreign...
Today, as state-sponsored American corporatism is being extended around the globe, we are witnessing a gross overproduction of official ideology—the rhetoric of human rights, democracy, and free trade—which conceals some sordid realities. With the state replacing God as the source of all values, human rights and democracy have become key justifying themes for our overseas...
Does anyone really remember what sort of president Bill Clinton was? Have we all forgotten his amazingly sordid character so soon? He disgraced the Oval Office like no president before him; he was only the second to be impeached; he embarrassed America before the world; known as Slick Willie in his native Arkansas, he almost...