“Socialism will bring in an efflorescence of morality, civilization, and science such as has never been seen in the history of the world.” —Ferdinand Lassalle Modern American conservatism has been marked by a fascination with ideology. Despite arguments that conservatism is not an ideology or is opposed to all ideology, American conservatives have regularly attempted...
Year: 2008
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Wogs
A review of Iron Man (produced by Marvel Studios; directed by John Favreau; screenplay by Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby; distributed by Paramount Pictures) and The Visitor (produced by Groundswell Productions; directed and written by Thomas McCarthy; distributed by Overture Films) [amazonify]B00005JPS8[/amazonify]It is always reassuring when a big-budget superhero film fulfills its responsibility to edify...
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Church and Nation: A Credal Nation, Part 3
At the heart of Barack Obama’s “Patriotism Tour” speech (discussed recently by Dr. Fleming and Dr. Trifkovic) lies the concept of credal nationhood. In the previous two installments of “Church and Nation,” I have mentioned that credal nationhood makes no sense whatsoever without reference to the state, because the promotion of credal nationhood has always...
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Even More Questions About the Way We Are Now
If you were a patriotic “American” of Mideast origin, wouldn’t you willingly cooperate with “ethnic profiling” since it would help to save the lives of your “fellow” citizens? Want to know how many traffic deaths in my State last year were caused by aliens, mostly drunk illegals? 807. How many Americans are aware that Osama...
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Out With the Old
[Aaron D. Wolf on the revolution in the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, grandfathers, the Devil, and the fate of Issues, Etc.] My grandfather has congestive heart failure. I hate to say it, but I probably won’t see him this time next year. “Gramp,” as I’ve called him since I can remember, taught me how to shoot...
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Socialists and Democrats Will Rule Serbia
The political situation in Serbia is both unprecedented and unexpected. No analyst had predicted, three or four months ago, that the election on May 11 would result in such impressive gains by the Democratic Party (Demokratska ...
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Out With the Old
My grandfather has congestive heart failure. I hate to say it, but I probably won’t see him this time next year. “Gramp,” as I’ve called him since I can remember, taught me how to shoot and hunt, taught me how to change the oil, taught me how to drive a truck, taught me how to...
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Seeing Clear
X.J. Kennedy is admired for his great skill in treating contemporary topics in traditional forms and especially for his cultivation of light verse. The high quality, abundance, and breadth of his writing—poetry, children’s work, fiction, textbooks—and his long presence on the literary scene make him one of the most important American poets today, as is...
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The Fortune Teller
“I don’t want to be married any longer.” “What does that mean?” “What I said.” “You don’t love me.” “I don’t love anybody.” “You loved me. Or said you did.” “Nobody’s responsible for what they said twenty-five years ago.” “I love you.” “I wish you wouldn’t.” “Am I so tough to get along with?” “Not...
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Ruth M. Besemer, R.I.P.
Ruth Miller Besemer of Boulder, Colorado, and I exchanged letters for several months before we met. She sent the first in 1999, when The Rockford Institute held the annual meeting of the John Randolph Club in Georgetown. The Saturday-evening debate topic was: “Resolved: Conservatives in D.C. haven’t done a damn thing.” To a check for...
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Mark Royden Winchell, R.I.P.
Mark Winchell, literary scholar, biographer, essayist, and occasional contributor to Chronicles, passed from this realm in May after a brave two-year battle with cancer. With four books out in just the last two years and at barely 60 years of age, Mark was just coming into the prime of his productive career. His official title,...
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What Civilization Remains
We once had a book about Eastern Europe at home, in between the encyclopedias and Robinson Crusoe. I do not remember its title nor the author’s name, but it contained highly atmospheric black and white photographs of Rumanian scenes. There were baroque chateaux, sturgeons, eagles, wolves, bears, wild boar, bends in the Danube, flowered meads...
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Wogs
Iron Man Produced by Marvel Studios Directed by John Favreau Screenplay by Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby Distributed by Paramount Pictures The Visitor Produced by Groundswell Productions Directed and written by Thomas McCarthy Distributed by Overture Films It is always reassuring when a big-budget superhero film fulfills its responsibility to edify the young. Iron...
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Are We Rolling Downhill. . .
Republican partisans’ joy at an estimated 0.6-percent increase in U.S. Gross Domestic Product in the first quarter of 2008 has been diminished by the continued contraction of two key economic indicators used to determine whether a recession has started. These are non-farm payroll employment (compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics), which peaked in December...
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The Best Government Money Can Buy
All of our history is now “indoctrination by historical example.” The academicians who write the officially approved, politically correct distortions of it have failed history, and us. They are of two types: the courtiers, smiling sycophants such as “presidential historian” Michael Beschloss and the insufferable Doris Kearns Goodwin; and their envious colleagues, politically correct pedants,...
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Pickwickian Popery
I’ve been reading Garry Wills for more than 40 years now, with mixed admiration, delight, and alarm. In the early 60’s he wrote for National Review, the youngest of its many brilliant contributors. He then seemed to be an orthodox Catholic and political conservative; but that began to change in 1968, when he suddenly matured...
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Supreme Subjectivism and Arbitrary Abortion
A half-century ago, in Cooper v. Aaron (1958), the Supreme Court referred to the “basic principle that the federal judiciary is supreme in the exposition of the law of the Constitution” as “settled doctrine” and “a permanent and indispensable feature of our constitutional system.” If the Founding Fathers were rolling in their graves in 1958, they...
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Neo-McCainism: The Highest Stage of Neoconservatism?
It is difficult to imagine, but there was a time when pundits in Washington were tagging John McCain as the ultimate unneoconservative Republican figure whose nationalist yet pragmatic approach to foreign policy was being viewed with suspicion by your average global democratic crusader—not to mention the members of what Pat Buchanan described as Israel’s Amen...
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What’s Good for Rockford Acromatics
Dean Olson, the chairman of Rockford Acromatic Products, an after-market auto-parts manufacturer, is a longtime supporter of Republican candidates. Still, he is not optimistic about the November election: “Even though the Democrats are in full rout, we’re not able to mount an effective challenge. I don’t see the leadership there.” While Rockford voters lean Democratic,...
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The Dream Ticket
“While the natural instincts of democracy lead the people to banish distinguished men from power,” Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, “an instinct no less powerful leads distinguished men to shun careers in politics, in which it is so very difficult to remain entirely true to oneself or to advance without self-abasement.” Some 170 years...
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Olmert’s Troubles
Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been in trouble many times in the course of his long and colorful political career. As mayor of Jerusalem, he was suspected of accepting bribes in the “Greek-island affair” involving former premier Ariel Sharon and his son, Omri (who was eventually convicted and jailed for seven months); but the...
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Art in the Loo
Christie’s, the auction house, took a full-page ad in the New York Times to publicize the record sale of a painting by a living artist, Lucian Freud, to the tune of $33.6 million. Thirty-three million greenbacks for a portrait of a horribly fat woman lying naked on a misshapen sofa. The mind reels. It is...
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John McCain on Foreign Policy
Over the years, John McCain has acquired a reputation as a maverick Republican. Independents and even some Democrats who loathe George W. Bush’s foreign-policy record seem to believe that McCain would be a significant improvement. In several GOP primaries earlier this year, most notably those in New Hampshire and Michigan, nearly one third of voters...
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Bush’s Whips, McCain’s Scorpions
“He [John McCain] did everything that we asked of him, including arming the KLA.” —Albanian lobbyist Joe DioGuardi When I hear the word Belgrade pronounced, I can almost smell the soft coal smoke tainting the chilly air of early spring. Waking in the Palace Hotel on Toplicin Venac, the slightly sour smell has filled the...
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Texas: Exes and Sexes
When Texas Child Protective Services seized the children of mothers belonging to the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, I wondered if the Independent Republic was turning Yankee. The seizure was an abuse of power against the fundamental institution of all human societies—the family. Fortunately, the ruling on May 23 by the state’s Third Circuit...
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The Forgotten Ideology
“Socialism will bring in an efflorescence of morality, civilization, and science such as has never been seen in the history of the world.” —Ferdinand Lassalle Modern American conservatism has been marked by a fascination with ideology. Despite arguments that conservatism is not an ideology or is opposed to all ideology, American conservatives have regularly attempted...
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A Case of Russophobia
John McCain does not like the Russians. Nearly 17 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, with Soviet-style communism safely tossed into the dustbin of history, Senator McCain loves to scare us with the Russkie boogeyman. Take, for example, this excerpt from his “An Enduring Peace Built on Freedom,” published in the November/December 2007...
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Anarcho-Tyranny in Action
In a recent column, Chuck Baldwin (lately nominated as the Constitution Party’s presidential candidate) pointed to something ominous that was largely ignored in the media reporting on the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal. Spitzer had been found out because of “suspicious” financial transactions his bank reported to the authorities. Dr. Baldwin (who is pastor of a...
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On Christmas in July
The June issue of Chronicles (“Surviving the Global Economy”) was simply outstanding. This is really saying a lot, since every issue is superb. I especially liked Jack Trotter’s article on the Abbeville, South Carolina, Christmas celebration (“Christmas in Abbeville,” Correspondence). While certain elements of our society feel compelled to demand hatred and shame for their...
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Bomb Iran—July 2008
PERSPECTIVE Bush's Whips, McCain's Scorpions by Thomas Fleming VIEWS John McCain on Foreign Policy by Ted Galen Carpenter Even worse than Bush. Neo-McCainism by Leon Hadar The highest stage of neoconservatism? The Dream Ticket by Srdja Trifkovic The most dangerous man in America, bankrolled by the most evil man in the world. A ...
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Obama the “Patriot”
“So should we vote for Obama?” Having devoted some thousands of words to the unveiling of John McCain low character and sordid record, online and in the current issue of Chronicles, I am asked this question with some regularity. Of course not, I reply; being anti-cancer does not make one pro-HIV. McCain is a neurotic...
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One Nation Under Obama
Barack Obama has kicked off his “Patriotism Tour” with a speech that is designed to depict the candidate as a thoughtful man who has meditated long and hard upon the history of our country and the meaning of patriotism. In fact, it reveals him for what he is: a knee-jerk Marxist who has swallowed hook-line-and...
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Hitler, Churchill, and Reagan
What an orgy of Churchill and Britain bashing we have had of late! One would almost begin to think that the Brits bear most of the blame for World War II and all its attendant horrors. (Actually there is nothing new here. The interpretations that have recently appeared were all debated vigorously in the immediate...
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African Democracy
Pundits and politicians have been sounding off, lately, about the cruel dictator Robert Mugabe and the imperfection of the democratic process in the Zimbabwe elections. On NPR, Dan Schorr–that thing that would not die–blames George Bush, because if he had not got us into a war in Iraq, we could be intervening in Zimbabwe. I...
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The Dream Ticket
[McCain and Soros: The Most Dangerous Man in America, Bankrolled By the Most Evil Man in the World] “While the natural instincts of democracy lead the people to banish distinguished men from power,” Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, “an instinct no less powerful leads distinguished men to shun careers in politics, in which it...
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The Eurabian Revolution
The modern age is the age of revolution, and the Eurabian Revolution is but a continuation of a process that hearks back to before the French Revolution of 1789. Today’s Eurocrats are on the verge of accomplishing what previous generations of revolutionaries, with all their evil genius, failed to bring about: the destruction of Europe...
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Who’s Planning Our Next War?
Of the Axis-of-Evil nations named in his State of the Union in 2002, President Bush has often said, “The United States will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.” He failed with North Korea. Will he accept failure in Iran, though there is no hard evidence...
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Looking for the Hen’s Tooth
“Politics is too serious a matter to be left to politicians.” —De Gaulle Some things are, as they say, harder to find than a hen’s tooth: An American college without a commercial sports program. A Republican politician who really believes in “family values.” A federal judge who actually follows the law. A federal judge who...
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Morality—Trotskyite vs. Christian
Did Hitler’s crimes justify the Allies’ terror-bombing of Germany? Indeed they did, answers Christopher Hitchens in his Newsweek response to my new book, Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War: “The stark evidence of the Final Solution has ever since been enough to dispel most doubts about, say, the wisdom or morality of carpet-bombing German cities.”...
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Soundtrack to the New Old South
[A look at the Drive-By Truckers] Sometime in the early 1990’s, while attending an event called a “song swap” in Athens, Georgia, I met an extraordinarily gifted songwriter named Patterson Hood. The swap itself was essentially a ...
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The Decline and Fall of the American Economy: Offshoring Our Security
The United States has three large economic problems. The overarching one is that the U.S. dollar’s role as world reserve currency is wearing out from continuous and large trade deficits and from government budget ...
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Apostolic Fathers: Living in this our Exile
Between the conversion of Constantine and the French Revolution, most Christians in Europe and North America assumed that they lived either in a Christian society or at least in a society that was not alien or hostile to their faith. By now, we know better or at least we ...
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John Yoo, Totalitarian
John Yoo stands outside the Anglo-American legal tradition. His views lead to self-incrimination wrung out of a victim by torture. He believes a president of the United States can initiate war, even on false pretenses, and then use the war he starts as cover for depriving U.S. citizens of habeas corpus protection. A U.S. attorney...
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Sex and Marriage in San Francisco
The California Supreme, in a recent decision striking down the state’s ban on same-sex “marriage,” has issued a declaration of independence from the human race. Progressives have inevitably hailed this latest break-through, comparing it to the legalization of inter-racial marriage, but the same progressives just as inevitably will hail the inevitable legalization of cross-species marriage...
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Stop It
A review of Stop-Loss (produced by Paramount Pictures, Scott Rudin Productions, and MTV Films; directed by Kimberly Peirce; screenplay by Kimberly Peirce and Mark Richard; distributed by Paramount Pictures). [amazonify]B0013FSL1Q[/amazonify]On March 29, 2008, Suffolk County police officers vigorously fulfilled their sworn duty at the Smith Haven Mall in Lake Grove, New York. Alerted by the...
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If My Daddy Could See Me Now
September 11, 2001, we are often told, “changed everything.” In Washington, D.C., and Baghdad, Iraq, that may have been true. President George W. Bush and a handful of his advisors, who had been itching for a fight with Iraq since before the inauguration, now saw their opening. It would take another year and a half...
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John McCain’s Skeletons
The mainstream media is catching up with Chronicles. On Tuesday, June 17, the Chicago Tribune published a major article exposing Sen. John McCain’s connection with the Reform Institute (RI), a Washington think tank founded in 2001 ostensibly to promote transparency and accountability in government. But behind the scenes, the paper says, the Institute’s practices have...
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Ireland Rejects the Lisbon Treaty
The European Union’s Lisbon Reform Treaty was decisively defeated by the Irish electorate in a referendum on June 13. The Euro-federalist project will be at least delayed, if not derailed, thanks to the vote. The victory of the “No!” campaign was due to a variety of factors, but whatever its causes it reflects the fatal...
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It’s 2028, and All Is Well: The Diary of an Aging Counterrevolutionary
Thursday, June 1—My final American Interest was published today in Chronicles. In the aftermath of the Second Revolution, the column has outlived its purpose. Pontificating on the evils of one-worldism, empire, global hegemony, propositional nationhood, jihadist infiltration, foreign interventionism, and “nation-building” was a necessary and often frustrating task, back in the awful days of George...
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Curiosity as a Social Force
“Curious Barbara’s got her nose in a sling,” goes the Russian admonition against prurience, more puzzling, if anything, than the equivalent English adage concerning the killing, in similarly umbrageous circumstances, of the cat. Why should Barbara meet with such a fate? Just how did it happen that curiosity brought about the death of Fluffy? As...