“Exsilioque domos et dulcia limina mutant, Atque alio patriam quaerunt sub sole iacentem.” —Virgil, Georgics II.511-12 Honestly, why bother any more? If there is any unifying theme in the scribblings of genuine, bona-fide American conservatives, it is that our country is lost, whether to whoremongers or warmongers—or both. Drum sets in...
No one could accuse M. Stanton Evans, who lost his battle with pancreatic cancer at age 80 on March 3, of becoming a professional conservative. He was a trailblazing conservative, having been there, for instance, when William F. Buckley, Jr., launched Young Americans for Freedom at his estate in Sharon. Indeed, Stan was more than...
In the life of politicians, single moments stand out when a decision to act or not to act defines their character and shapes their future success. Calvin Coolidge’s stand against the Boston police strike of 1919 and Ronald Reagan’s firing in 1981 of striking air-traffic controllers defined who they were. Gov. Scott Walker’s stand in...
A galloglass was a professional warrior hired by an Irish chief. The practice of employing such men became common in the decades following the Norman invasion, when it became obvious that heavily armed and mail-clad fighters were needed to contest the battlefield. One Irish contemporary described how the Gaels of Ireland had gone into battle...
A dozen years ago (give or take), I tried to commission a piece for Chronicles on how Big Business was increasingly pushing a leftist social and cultural agenda. For years, the conservative orthodoxy in the United States had been that capitalist institutions, from mom-and-pop shops up to the largest corporations, were essentially conservative. (In the...
In the aftermath of Benjamin Netanyahu’s electoral victory last March, the “two-state solution” to the Arab-Israeli conflict is off the table for the foreseeable future. Netanyahu’s public disavowal of the two-state formula (despite his subsequent denials) was not a last-minute campaign ploy. It reflected his deeply held belief that Israel can survive and prosper by...
Latin America has repeatedly failed to achieve the kind of settled distribution of property that could support a middle-class society. This is a disjunction of subtle but increasing cultural importance as the United States becomes more of a Latin country. With Jeb Bush running for the 2016 Republican nomination based in part on his ties...
“There is no more potent instrument of fate in 19th-century fiction than the legacy.” So writes a female columnist in Britain’s best newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, before going on to say some rude things about trust-fund babies. According to the lady, a will stands as a symbol of the “baleful power of crabbed old age...
Michelle Parker, a young mother of two, disappeared from her Florida home in 2011 and has never been seen again. The only suspect in her disappearance is her husband, who has left the state with the two children. Michelle’s mother, who has not seen her grandchildren since 2011, has repeatedly petitioned the Florida legislature to...
In March, France was given a good spanking by the European Committee on Social Rights (ECSR). The issue under litigation was France’s brutishness in allowing the corporal punishment of children. The mission of the ECSR is to judge whether the signatories to the European Social Charter are in conformity with all of the charter’s provisions. ...
In “1865: The True American Revolution” (Views, April) Claude Polin asserts that Calvinism somehow led to the division between North and South. Such an assertion is unsupportable. The main flaw lies in his defining Calvinism as built upon self-confidence that leads men “to rely exclusively on themselves to steer their lives.” The key tenet of...
In a May 21, 2014, Washington Post column, Kathleen Parker alerted readers to a phenomenon in higher education termed “trigger warnings.” These are instructional caveats offered about class assignments that may contain language, situations, or expressed political, religious, or personal philosophy that might be “upsetting” to students, thereby giving them the choice to opt out...
I want to apologize to my readers, although I can only hope for forgiveness. I certainly don’t deserve it. OK, Justin—I can hear you now—what have you done this time? The sin of which I am guilty is optimism of the most fatuous sort—or, rather, projecting an inauthentic optimism onto a most unworthy object. The...
There is only one smell commonly found on earth that is worse than the chemical smell of rotting orange rinds. This, oddly enough, is a woman’s perfume—Chanel ?5. As it recently emerged from World War II archives that Mademoiselle Chanel was, in her spare time, Agent F-7124 of the Abwehr, the Nazis’ military intelligence, I...
Liberals love psychology, as a science and as pseudoscience, while being very bad at it. Indeed, the liberal persuasion and the discipline of psychology have a natural affinity for each other, grounded in their morally relativistic values, that partly accounts for their taste for social and personal engineering and other forms of “behavior modification.” Ideologically,...
In general I am not a fan of conspiracy theories. A good historian learns that, in regard to controversial events, the simplest explanation is the one most likely to be accurate. I long ago took to heart Napoleon’s maxim that you should not blame on hidden machinations what can be more readily explained by incompetence....
What a nasty lot of female would-be Masters of the Universe imperial America is turning out in these latter days! Messalina was the wife of the Roman emperor Claudius, and she was not only notoriously lewd but an active, behind-the-scenes power manipulator. She ended badly—executed by order of the senate. Historians still debate how many...
In America today, we seem to face two alternatives: accepting hordes of invaders with alien cultures and ideologies, who are unwilling to assimilate and whose presence endangers the vestiges of our civilization; or homogenizing America into a rootless, soulless melting pot—a “proposition nation” without a past or local or family customs. Families and learning matter. ...
The last 30 years or so have seen a remarkable shift in the understanding of English religious history at the time of the Reformation. There has always been a fringe minority of dissenters from the mainstream narrative of what Tennyson called England’s “rough island story,” but now some impeccably credentialed historians, among them Christopher Haigh...
A Most Violent Year Produced by Before The Door Pictures and Washington Square Films Directed and written by J.C. Candor Distributed by A24 I went to J.C. Chandor’s new film A Most Violent Year with high expectations. His first, Margin Call, was simply the best cinematic examination of the 2008 banking crisis we’ve had to...
Everyone in Moscow knew that the massive demonstration planned for March 1 was in some way meant to be dangerous. The mood harked back to the events that caused the 1917 Revolution, or the troubles on the streets that paved the way for Boris Yeltsin to seize power. The regime had already staged its Anti-Maidan,...
When a former colleague sent me a snippet from The New Yorker of September 22, 2014—a piece called “As Big As the Ritz,” by Adam Gopnik—the attention therein given to two recent books on F. Scott Fitzgerald caught my eye, not only because I had already acquired one of them, but because I was repelled...
One of the few parts of the U.S. Constitution that is still followed by the government concerns the granting of copyrights and patents. Article I, Section 8, reads, “Congress shall have the power . . . To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the...
