“Traitors’ words ne’er yet hurt honest cause.” —Scottish Proverb The destruction of Sen. Joe McCarthy, says M. Stanton Evans, was never about what he did: The real issue has always been the larger question of what happened to America—and the world—at the midpoint of the twentieth century, what it meant, and who was responsible for...
Quite a few years ago (1977, to be exact), a colleague tried to convince me that the best way to make our college conservative was to set up a curriculum and a program in Christian studies that would appeal to conservative Catholics. There are lots of Catholics who are fed up with the “R.C. lite”...
There is an element of cognitive dissonance in the way that many members of the reality-based community in Washington tend to approach U.S. policy in the Middle East. Many of my colleagues in Washington have urged policymakers to adopt a sense of realism about the American ability to achieve reconciliation between the ethnic and religious...
A nine-year-old boy in Phoenix earned a three-day suspension from the Abraham Lincoln Traditional School for committing a “hate crime,” reports the Arizona Republic. The boy reportedly used the phrase “brown people” while arguing with another student. He was then questioned by a detention-room officer—the mother of the offended “brown person”—who demanded to know “why...
Westerns have never enjoyed much of a highbrow audience or much literary distinction. Many people tend to sneer at the traditional form, because it seems to represent something obvious and a little dumb. As one of my students responded to my discussion of western historical fiction as a viable and valuable category of popular culture,...
When he was governor of Texas, President George W. Bush presided over the execution of 152 murderers. Yet today, as if to turn the phrase “Don’t mess with Texas” on its head, El Presidente wants to stop the Lone Star State from giving the hot shot to a Mexican murderer and rapist. As disturbing as...
“It ain’t over till it’s over,” said Yogi Berra at his most Chestertonian. Charles de Gaulle, in more meditative style, observed: “Les fins des régimes sont toujours tristes.” Both maxims are relevant in the context of Australia’s general election on November 24, 2007, which saw John Howard—prime minister since 1996—crushed by an untried but personally...
Some time around 800 b.c., Homer put the heroic tales of the Achaeans into lyric form: battles, expeditions, adventures, conquests. The tales were inspiring, heroic, tragic, triumphal. Greeks recited Homer’s iambic pentameter for centuries; so, too, did we as schoolchildren—as inheritors of Western civilization. We Americans, however, also have our own Homeric Era. While the...
When confronted with an American convert to Islam who has studied overseas, it’s hard not to think today of the celebrated case of John Walker Lindh, “the American Taliban” captured by U.S. troops in Afghanistan and brought back to the United States to stand trial. “Abdul” knows that, yet he’s chosen to be brutally honest...
Last December 10, after four months of futile shuttle diplomacy, the mediating effort by the U.N. Contact Group “troika” to reach an agreement on the final status for Kosovo predictably collapsed. “Neither party was able to cede its position on the fundamental question of sovereignty,” the U.S.-E.U.-Russian group reported to the U.N. Secretary General. The...
In an English court of law 21 years ago, I had the opportunity to discover firsthand how touchy judges can be when challenged from the dock. It was a case of libel that caught both the tabloid and broadsheet imagination, not to mention the BBC’s. I had referred to a very rich old woman as...
The issue of Kosovo, which has been simmering since the United States waged a war of unprovoked and unjustifiable aggression against the former Yugoslavia, is boiling over. While Serbian “public opinion” is said to be more interested in economic questions, the resentment against the international community is real. As one senior advisor to Prime Minister...
Strange as it may sound, one of the best antidotes to the angry atheism of such disaffected Britons as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins is the recent science-fiction novel Eifelheim by Michael Flynn. The book, dedicated to Jean Buridan—the Paris scholastic who described inertia, a scientific concept unknown to the ancients, in the 14th century—focuses...
In “Freedom of Conscience” (Perspective, December), Thomas Fleming states that Thomas Jefferson’s “‘Wall of Separation’ existed only in his mind.” This phrase, of course, was included in Jefferson’s 1802 letter to a group of Baptists from Danbury, Connecticut, as Dr. Fleming has pointed out in previous Perspectives. Rather than implying exclusionary intent, the “Wall of...
HARD RIGHT The Suicide of the West by Thomas Fleming VIEWS The Everlasting Frontier by Chilton Williamson, Jr. Wilderness democracy. The Curious Career of Billy the Kid by Gregory McNamee The man behind the myth. Westerns by Roger D. McGrath America’s Homeric era on the silver screen. The Death of the Western by Clay Reynolds Back-trailing for affirmation. REVIEWS He ...
Over at NRO, an entertaining spat has developed between Ramesh Ponnuru and David Frum over Ponnuru’s criticism of Frum’s book Comeback. Ponnuru writes that “none of [Frum’s] facts can be trusted without independent verification” and that Frum’s pose as a “bold truth-teller” is “insufferable.” Frum, for his part, describes Ponnuru’s “distinctive Grand Panjandrum manner” as...
Veterans of South Carolina politics have been waiting and wondering what the last minute stunt would be leading up to Saturday’s First-in-the-South bellwether Republican primary. I predicted it would be a Confederate flag stunt and begged the Ron Paul campaign to make his positions on the War Between the States better known, early on. The...
Most people believe the history of race relations in the United States is neatly divided by geography. Those states north of the Mason-Dixon Line were paragons of equality and liberty, where race was not an issue and diversity flourished in all its glory. ...
Welfare reform was supposed to discourage unmarried childbearing. However, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) recently disclosed that out-of-wedlock births are at a record high. The Census Bureau also reports that, for the first time, married couples constitute less than half of ...
There was a time when National Review had standards and vauled decorum. No more. In his zeal to take down Ron Paul, David Frum has approvingly cited and linked to a piece describing Ron Paul as
Take heed, ye red-blooded American males. The police are operating a new sting designed to destroy your life. The police are planting attractive women half-naked in parks. They entice passing males, engage them in conversation, lay back, spread their legs and rest their feet on the men’s shoulders. After being as friendly and suggestive as...
The huge Democratic turnout in the Iowa Caucuses, over twice that of the GOP, and the stampede by independents to vote in the Democratic precincts, suggests that Iowa, a swing state carried by President Bush in 2004, may be lost irretrievably to the GOP in ...
“Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind.” Emerson’s couplet comes to mind as the New Year opens with Pakistan, the second largest Muslim country on Earth, in social and political chaos, trending toward a failed state with nuclear weapons. Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, whom the White House pressed to return home from exile...
Lebanese restaurants in London used to position their shawarma near the front window, so that a passerby could always tell the time of day by the volume of the orotund mass of diced lamb remaining on the spit. Now that many of them have become gentrified, that traditional enticement has been replaced with potted palms...
For as long as democracy has existed in the modern world, universal education and rapid mass communication have been highly regarded in democratic societies. An educated people, democrats have assumed, is a people capable of informing and governing itself. And a society in close and regular communication with its own citizens, and with foreign societies,...
There is a popular superstition that defines America as a “Proposition Nation,” created and proclaimed by the obiter dicta about “all men” in the second sentence of the 1776 Declaration that the 13 colonies “are and of right ought to be free and independent States.” Is America a Proposition Nation? No, for the very simple...
The 2008 presidential contest has dominated political news for over a year, starting almost immediately after the 2006 midterm elections. Most of the coverage has devolved, as it always does, to discussion of the “horse race” among the candidates, the competition for fundraising, and an insufferably large number of debates and fora that few actual...
Ideology is an intellectual pathology that has gripped the West for about three centuries. At times, we have been told that ideology is at an end. This was said after the close of World War II, when the most ideological age yet, the Cold War, was just beginning. After its collapse, some 50 years later,...
Lions for Lambs Produced and distributed by United Artists Directed by Robert Redford Written by Matthew Michael Carnahan Bulletin: The neocon pundits are going to war! Not to Iraq or Afghanistan, though. No, they’re landing in our local movie theaters and pounding away at all those treasonous antiwar movies being thrust on the unsuspecting public....
In 1958, when the first barbed-wire barricades were rolled out by the British colonial government across Ledra Street in the capital of Cyprus, it seemed inevitable that the seeds of division would yield a bitter harvest of intercommunal conflicts, regional tensions, and, finally, the partition of the whole island. Where minarets and churches once jostled...
For some time, my friends Jeff and Rebecca Calcutt (a pair of Southern patriots sans pareil), had urged me to pay a visit to Bob Jones University in Greenville. I have no interest in driving to Greenville, I told them. I don’t like mountains, not even little ones. I don’t like Clemson fans, with those...
Was it a famed pre-Socratic philosopher or was it Mae West who declared that the way down and the way up are the same? Whoever said it first sure got that right. And if you don’t believe it, then have I got a book for you. I mean, what do you do when they pick...
When you get intimately familiar with any artist’s work, you become delightedly aware of the development of his style. I was reminded of this lately while working on a book about Shakespeare; more than ever, I was impressed by the vast difference between the “middle” Shakespearean style and the later style (or styles). The pithy...
In November, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops held their annual meeting in Baltimore, Maryland. Unfortunately, the document they produced, “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship,” is both disheartening and, frankly, politically useless. The bishops tell the reader that “The direct and intentional destruction of innocent human life from the moment of conception until natural death...
In this age when the foundational idea of American federalism has become all but defunct and the concept of states’ rights still has the whiff of Jim Crow about it, it is difficult to see how either individual states or regions can have any significant influence on the federal government—even if they had legislatures interested,...
This odd little book has a point to make—the title says it all—but it is a point that was made 34 years ago in a book that sold millions of copies and became famous around the world. Exactly why it needs to be restated isn’t clear, and Joseph Pearce never bothers to explain it. It...
Condi Rice had a vision: It was springtime in Pakistan, and love was in the air—which was an ideal time for a chick flick. From the lady who brought us the Shiite-Sunni Love Fest in Iraq, Fatah-Hamas: Isn’t It Romantic? in Palestine, The Amorous Cedars in Lebanon, not to mention the first season of Democratic...
After a decade of living in Europe and various locales in the United States, I returned four years ago to the place where my family has long resided. My great-great-great grandfather, John Maget, along with his brother Rufus, bought in to the Platte County Purchase in 1847, which included lands north of Kansas City. They...
Two years ago, Europe was in the middle of its cartoon jihad, as thousands of Muslims protested images believed to insult Muhammad. At the time, despairing observers saw the affair as yet another milestone in Europe’s descent into Eurabia, a graveyard of Christianity and Western civilization. In hindsight, though, it rather looks as if the...
Though Democrats in Virginia are generally more fiscally conservative than their brethren in such tax-and-spend environs as Massachusetts or New York, some issues require them to adopt the boilerplate liberal platitudes and positions. Immigration is one of them. Islam is another. Together, the two are a ticking time bomb, perhaps literally. The governor of Virginia...
A little less than a year ago, in the February 2007 issue, I introduced in these pages the story of Derrick Shareef, an African-American convert to mainstream Islam who was arrested on December 8, 2006, for plotting an attack on the largest shopping mall in the Rockford area during the height of the Christmas shopping...
Iraq will continue to top the list of American foreign-policy concerns in 2008. While tactical successes in Baghdad and the Anbar Province were achieved in 2007 through the U.S. forces’ marriage of convenience with various Sunni Arab tribal leaders and former Saddam loyalists who detest Al Qaeda even more than they dislike the Americans, translating...
Welfare reform was supposed to discourage unmarried childbearing. However, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) recently disclosed that out-of-wedlock births are at a record high. The Census Bureau also reports that, for the first time, married couples constitute less than half of the nation’s households. Thus, whatever the budgetary savings over the past ten...
“Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.” —Ecclesiastes 9:10 The Gilded Age still exerts a strange pull on the American imagination. It was a time of larger-than-life people and larger-than-life business entities. It featured conspicuous consumption—including palatial mansions, yachts, international travel, and international scandal—that seems almost to exceed anything we have...
As I wrote five years ago in another place, beginning a new column is like the first date with a girl you’ve had your eye on for a long time but never had the courage to ask out. One’s nervous. But this is a new year, 2008, and let’s start it off right by telling...
After wearing out the patience of television viewers over an entire year of premature campaigning, the two political parties will soon be informing us of their choices. Will the presidential election of 2008 really come down to a contest between two leftist anti-Christian senators representing New York? Or will Al Gore, even more bloated with...
Most people think agrarianism is synonymous with farming. As a result, agrarian thinkers spend much of their time defending what they really mean—namely, that agrarianism is not so much about agriculture as it is an integrated life in which farming plays a central or at least respectable role. Eric Freyfogle wisely avoids this pitfall and...
Though I agree with it on the specific topic of Iraq, whatever faint tinge of camaraderie I might once have had with the liberal antiwar movement has long since faded. The critiques of the Green Movement in your November issue (“Wanted! Enemies of the Planet”) inspire a similar reaction in me. Environmentalism does not even...
PERSPECTIVEThe Politics of Human Interestsby Thomas Fleming VIEWSAmerica as a Proposition Nationby Clyde WilsonFacing our superstition. The Most Desirable Option by Kirkpatrick SaleReeducating for secession. What Is Wrong With Ideology?by Donald W. LivingstonThe great inversion. NEWSMoving Targetsby Daniel LarisonThe trouble with early primaries. REVIEWSTwo American Livesby Stephen B. Presser David Cannadine: Mellon: An American LifeDavid...