We’ve lost, I regret to inform you, yet another civilization-shattering battle. I mean the one over your daughter’s right to use a public restroom without worrying whether there is a dude doing his business in the stall next to her. This would be the same as the battle over your wife’s right to undress and...
The evidence of the end of the Cold War around 1990 was clearer than evidence of its beginning had been around, say, 1947. By “Cold War” we mean the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union—not that between the United States and China, which was the outcome of civil war in the latter...
Open Every Door: Mary Mottley-Mme. Marie de Tocqueville, by Sheila Le Sueur, translated by Claudine Martin-Yurth (Mesa, AZ: Dandelion Books, 340 pp., $26.95). Alexis de Tocqueville’s wife was Mary Mottley, an Englishwoman. His biographers have never written more than a couple of sentences about her. This is regrettable because Mary was an extraordinary woman, because...
As Donald Trump moves closer to the magic number of 1,237 delegates, the panic of the political class is a wonderful sight to behold. GOP donors meet in secret conclave, plotting various scenarios designed to steal the nomination. A “brokered” convention, a “contested” convention, a last-minute rules change, and a “conservative” third party run by...
“Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.” This line from Section 2 of the 14th Amendment must have seemed fairly straightforward to its authors. In light of the first section’s elevation of blacks to full citizenship...
Over the past two decades a great chasm has opened up between the tenured American professoriate specializing in the humanities and social sciences, and the meaningful discussion of its subjects in the public arena. It is hard to find a recent work by an academic authority on social, historical, and cultural anthropology in general, or...
The two jihadist attacks in Brussels on March 22, which killed 32 people and injured 300 others, have changed the tenor of European media commentary. While many editorialists have routinely bewailed “alienation” among Muslim youths and warned against “Islamophobia” and “intolerance,” a significant minority are considering the causes of terrorism with courage and frankness. In...
Is Donald Trump a Burkean? Would Russell Kirk vote for him for president? Can a paleoconservative legal scholar imagine any benefit to a Trump presidency? Of course, the neoconservatives are piling on Trump. Most notable was National Review’s January 21 issue, “Against Trump.” “Trump,” say the editors, “is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would...
Once upon a time, the New York Times called herself the Old Gray Lady; now, truth be told, she’s much closer to a Bitter Old Bag. Long-winded, overexplained, tendentious, and biased against anything normal, the Times is more to be pitied than loathed. And like a festering boil on an old bag’s backside, Donald Trump...
When you have over an hour to kill downtown in a major city, time seems to slow to a stop. Fortunately, the Roman houses beneath the Palazzo Valentini, which we were waiting to visit, are a stone’s throw from the column of Trajan. On that warm and sunny day in February, we took over an...
As I write, we have reached the stage of the Republican primary cycle that, since at least 1988, requires a pronouncement from the highest levels of the GOP: Now is the time for other candidates to back out and for all Republicans to support the frontrunner. Continuing the battle for the nomination will serve no...
On Palm Sunday, I took a walk. It’s the first day of spring, and the sky is china blue, decorated with small cotton-like puffs of clouds. Flowers are blooming, and the ducks at the pond have laid their eggs. The beaver are back—I can tell by the trees they have gnawed down near the pond,...
I thoroughly enjoyed the March issue (“Against Ideology”), and it is among the best Chronicles has produced. The kind of economy that Jack Trotter (“Capitalism: The Conservative Illusion,” View) and Scott P. Richert (“Economic Patriotism,” The Rockford Files) would consider ideal is the one that I would truly love to see. And unlike the proposals...
New Orleans has a complicated past, a reality made evident in a politically manufactured controversy that has been building since last July. Our mayor, a term-limited white Democrat and the flickering end of a political dynasty, asked the city council to consider removing four prominent monuments shortly after the murders of black members of a...
How very vulgar I have been—I am sorry, and I apologize! I am just terrible, and it is all my fault. And I accept the responsibility. And how could I accept my own shame if I had not done so in public? Yet my own vulgarity has been hedged, because I neither sinned nor confessed...
Asked by a Lutheran-pastor friend to recommend some fiction for summer reading, I immediately thought of Ole Rølvaag’s trilogy. I’d been thinking about revisiting these novels for some time, as questions surrounding the just and humane treatment of immigrants and immigration to the United States have swirled around in my head. How does immigration change...
The Panama Papers appeared in April, promising to be the biggest bombshell dropped on the international community since Nagasaki. Combing through the 11.5 million documents that were (what follows is a euphemism for stolen) leaked by a purported whistleblower to the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, an international team of journalists has connected a lot of...
About 20 years ago, there was an interesting left-handed pitcher for the Duluth-Superior Dukes, a very bad team in a league beneath the status of “minor”—minuscule, I might call it, though I am glad to know that there are still a few small-town baseball teams not in serfdom to the majors. The pitcher’s name was...
In the early years of the Republic Americans focused their efforts on democratic government, geographic expansion and settlement, and a program of national improvements intended to promote them. In the decades immediately following the War Between the States they concentrated on industrializing and amassing national wealth. Then, in the 1880’s and 90’s, they began to...
Almost since the passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, critics of American immigration policy have been suspicious of the political advantage the Democratic Party was taking of this crucial piece of legislation. Though Congress’s motive in passing the bill was, in political terms, more symbolic than partisan and tactical, the replacement of...
Brussels has been cackling like a hen that has just laid an Easter egg, but the cackling will stop when the egg cracks and a turkey buzzard sticks its red rubbery head through. In accordance with the agreement that was reached between the European Union and the Turkish government last winter, Greece and the E.U....
We all have our perspectives. In London recently, I found that many of the locals had stayed up until the early hours of a wet Monday morning to watch Super Bowl 50 on television, and judging from the T-shirts being paraded around town there seems to be a particular groundswell of support among British youth...
Twice a finalist for the Pulitzer, H.W. Brands, in Reagan: The Life, describes the 40th president as a conservative Franklin Roosevelt. What Roosevelt was to the “first half of the twentieth century, Reagan was to the second half.” The description occurs with enough frequency to become a recurring theme. A short chapter at the book’s...
So what is objectionable about Game of Thrones? In posing the question, please note that I am assuming that something is objectionable. So let me count the ways. If we are talking about the books, the prose is klonkingly pedestrian—although in fairness it must be said that George R.R. Martin, author of the internationally best-selling...
When Allardyce Nicholl, then professor of English at Birmingham University, founded the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1951, he intended from the beginning that it should have an international flavor. When I was a student there in the late 50’s, there were always some international students in residence—Indians, Yugoslavs, a Greek, and a number of...
At the end of last summer, British Conservatives looked to be in their strongest position in decades. In May, David Cameron’s Tories defied the polls and the experts to win a majority in the general election. The Labour Party then went bananas and elected as its leader an unreconstructed far leftist with a beard called...
Risen Produced and distributed by Sony Pictures Directed by Kevin Reynolds Screenplay by Kevin Reynolds and Paul Aiello 10 Cloverfield Lane Produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures and Bad Robot Directed by Dan Trachtenberg Screenplay by Josh Campbell, Matthew Stuecken, and Damien Chazelle You could hardly choose a more unvarnished title for a retelling of...
