Month: July 2016

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Diary of a Driftless Conservative
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Diary of a Driftless Conservative

“Hillsboro’s a conservative community,” said Robert, and for three days and three nights I attempted to figure out what he meant. He said it right after we arrived at his shop, high atop a lush, sylvan hill off Beaver Creek Road, five miles south of Hillsboro in Western Wisconsin, the “Driftless Area.”  It’s called “driftless”...

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Immigration and Ideology

It was the first meeting of The John Randolph Club, held somewhere in the wilds of Texas.  I was there at the urging of Murray Rothbard, who was enthusiastic about this gathering of libertarians and paleoconservatives in the wake of the Cold War’s end.  With the commies out of the Kremlin, said Murray, the Old...

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Orwell in Chains

George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” remains a lighthouse, the beam sweeping past the scene for a moment of blinding illumination before passing on to darkness.  Though Orwell enjoined us against cliché, Hamlet’s “More honoured in the breach than the observance” applies: Everybody lauds Orwell, but few appear to have read him.  And of...

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Trump and the Stakes of Power

My undergraduate and graduate degrees are both in political science, but the chief work that helped me to understand the practice of politics is one of history: The Stakes of Power: 1845–1877, by Roy F. Nichols.  Political science shares with sociology a bias toward presentism, describing political structures as they currently exist with no sense...

A Big Beautiful Horse
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A Big Beautiful Horse

As an experiment in social reconstruction, ObamaCare was nothing compared with what’s coming down the line as a result of the Obama administration’s Friday the 13th diktat that all public schools in the United States must allow every student to use the bathroom of his/her/zis/zir choice, or risk federal civil-rights lawsuits and the withholding of...

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The Devil You Know

One of the ways in which Bill Clinton presented himself as a “New Democrat” was his insistence that he wanted abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare.”  Twenty-four years after Clinton’s election to the presidency, the national Democratic Party has given up any attempt to claim that they believe abortion is anything other than a...

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Strategic Crossroads

The aftermath of the Cold War has seen the emergence of what Robert Kagan and William Kristol have called “benevolent global hegemony.”  The leaders of both major U.S. political parties have asserted that America’s unchallengeable military might is essential to the maintenance of global order.  This period of “primacy” was marked by military interventions in...

The Efficient Destruction of Flyover Country
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The Efficient Destruction of Flyover Country

Ideologues tend to place a great value on economic laws.  I started out my undergraduate career hoping for a double major in political science and economics.  My goal was to administer a breadline and to understand why it was necessary.  I was doing very well in political philosophy and public administration, but lagging a bit...

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Laughing at Harry

Things have never been grimmer.  Wall Street wolves have become billionaires while rigging the system, rats like William Kristol are showboating on television and spreading lies about The Donald, and the most dishonest couple since Bonnie and Clyde are getting themselves ready to reinhabit the White House. In times like these, there is only one...

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Not Your Mother’s Weasels

At the United Nations in the fall of 2009, Barack Obama acknowledged, with customary self-regard, “the expectations that accompany my presidency around the world,” no doubt referring to his pledge about the receding oceans, healing the planet and reviving the animal kingdom, and the unprecedented wisdom of his associates and himself.  Sure enough: The Russian...

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A Lannister Always Pays

After twice reading what so far has been available of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and viewing the first five seasons of Game of Thrones, I do not share Douglas Wilson’s impression that these are “rootless entertainment for a rootless people, lost entertainment for a lost people, and vile entertainment for...

One More From the Ace
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One More From the Ace

Roger McGrath’s excellent account of the career of movie actor/naval aviator Wayne Morris (“Hollywood’s Lone Ace,” Sins of Omission, April) is not quite complete, in that Morris’s service to the Navy and the nation did not end with his discharge in 1945.  A movie in which he played an important part helped save the important...

Dealing With Hitler
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Dealing With Hitler

Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning has received exceptional attention and nearly universal praise.  Prof. Timothy Snyder’s knowledge of the holocaust is almost encyclopedic.  This is his second large book devoted to the horrible history of much of Eastern Europe during World War II.  His main inquiry and subject is what happened to...

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Homeland, Homesick, Homework

In 1836, Robert Schumann told the composer who had dropped by that his favorite of Chopin’s compositions was the Ballade in G minor, Op. 23, and the composer agreed with his judgment.  Anton Rubinstein thought that everything to be revered in music died with Chopin in 1849, and for this declaration, he has been condemned...

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Bad Investments Pay Off

Money Monster Directed by Jodie Foster  Screenplay by Jamie Linden, Alan DiFiore, Jim Kouf  Produced by TriStar Pictures  Distributed by Sony Pictures  Mustang Directed and written by Deniz Gamze Ergüven  Produced by CG Cinema  Distributed by Cohen Media Group When I graduated from college with a degree in English literature, it occurred to me I...

Obama’s Atomic Wedgie
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Obama’s Atomic Wedgie

April may be the cruelest month, but this year May took the cake.  It was then that we were reminded that human life is a political football, and that players on both sides of the line of scrimmage are suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy. When word came that President Obama was scheduled to appear at...

With the GOP—Or Without It
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With the GOP—Or Without It

Donald J. Trump is the political issue of our time.  Yet Mr. Trump is, in a very real sense, peripheral to present events.  He is a result, not the effective cause; a symptom, not the disease.  The significant thing is not the rebel candidate but the crisis of the Republican Party, so long arriving, which...

Books in Brief
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Books in Brief

Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire, by Peter H. Wilson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard, 942 pp., $39.95).  Professor Wilson of Oxford University argues that the history of the Sanctum Imperium Romanum, despite its centrality to the history of Europe and its immense longevity (it lasted for more than a millennium, twice as...

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What the Editors Are Reading

As usual, there are too many books on my reading table.  As I continue with Les Trois Mousquetaires,which gets better with every page, I’m also finishing La parabola di Giobbe, a work of Christology (among other things) by David Maria Turoldo, a very holy man heavily inspired by Teilhard de Chardin, in whose own work...

That Bloody Woman
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That Bloody Woman

Margaret Thatcher, one of the most successful British prime ministers of modern times, was known to her enemies and detractors as “That Bloody Woman” (see Derek Turner’s review in this issue).  America’s equivalent for Republicans and conservatives for the past 30 years has been Hillary Clinton, so much Mrs. Thatcher’s inferior in intelligence, talent, and...

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Qin, Hadrian, Trump

A frequent English correspondent from Stratford-upon-Avon who contributes regularly to this magazine wrote recently to express the frustration mockers of Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Wall have been causing him.  Hadrian’s Wall, he pointed out, begun in a.d. 122 by the Roman Emperor Hadrian to keep the Picts and other barbarians from invading England from the...

The Sentinel
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The Sentinel

“Don’t mention the war,” my grandfather told me a few minutes before our guest, an old friend from the Business Administration faculty at the nearby university, joined us for lunch.  This was in Tacoma, Washington, in the summer of 1975, and I was visiting from England, on vacation from college.  In that particular summer, it...

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Lament for a Lost Love

Oh, England!  How have I loved thee, even though most of my forebears came from the doubtful Scots and Welsh borders, and not a few were 17th-century refugees from the turmoil of the German states.  I am old enough to remember when many, many of us regarded you as our Mother Country, despite all the...

Iron Lady on Her Mettle
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Iron Lady on Her Mettle

At the end of the first volume of Charles Moore’s lapidary trilogy, we left Mrs. Thatcher standing in St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1982, surrounded by the shades of past national leaders, bathed in public approval and growing global respect as the victor of the Falklands War and standard-bearer for a new and dynamic kind of...

Not That Bad: My Experience With British Public Healthcare
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Not That Bad: My Experience With British Public Healthcare

A sign hangs in the waiting room of my doctor’s office.  It advises patients how many appointments were missed in the previous month and how many work hours this cost the staff.  The practice has no recourse against patients who fail to turn up.  There was no cost for the appointment in the first place. ...

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Why the Muslim Won

London is more pleased with itself than usual at the moment, which is saying something.  The city has just elected its first Muslim mayor, and people here are calling it our “Obama moment.”  The Great British Multicultural Experiment, which many thought had failed, is alive and well, they said.  Sadiq Khan, the new mayor, is...