Donald Trump has shattered the false consensus of the Republican Party, the hitherto unrecognized tautology that GOP is conservative because conservative is GOP, and vice versa. In the process, we’ve been confronted by an embarrassing reality: We really have no idea what we mean by the word conservative. There can be little doubt that Hillary...
Month: September 2016
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The Empire Strikes Back
This is a brilliant and disturbing book. Its opening sentence is “Europe is doomed.” If you think that this is simply colorful rhetoric, read on. Hasta la Vista Europe is not alarmist; it is alarming, making its case in great detail ranging over many issues and countries. The pseudonymous author represents a number of researchers...
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Midwife Crisis
A few things can be said with certainty of the BBC’s Call the Midwife: None of those babies are swaddled tightly enough. Car births aren’t the greatest, but I’ve seen worse than the one in Season Four. And if Sister Evangelina doesn’t know why Sister Monica Joan paired the ass and the angel in her...
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Soldier Girls and the Stakes of War
President Obama is keeping his promise of “fundamentally transforming” the nation, especially when it comes to the military. Women have been voluntarily serving in the Army officially since 1901, but today, with new policies being introduced at a rapid pace, the modern major generals in the Pentagon are changing the nature of combat units. To...
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Of Sam and Siddiqui
“You know,” he said, “I wouldn’t have let your family in, either.” Standing in a conference room at the Congress Hotel in downtown Chicago, Sam held my gaze in that sideways glance of his, waiting to gauge my reaction. “I understand,” I said. “And I agree. You shouldn’t have. But I’m here now, so let’s...
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Taking Care of Business
Starting January 1, every abortion clinic in Illinois will be required to refer those who come seeking its services to one of the many nonprofit pregnancy-care centers in the state, established to help pregnant women understand that there are alternatives to abortion, and to provide those alternatives. Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner signed the bill into...
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Confronting Jihad
Paris (twice in ten months), San Bernardino, Brussels, Orlando, Nice, Ansbach, Munich, Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray: Hundreds of people blown up, pulverized, shot, knifed. Who is next? That such attacks will continue is certain. That the political class has no strategic blueprint for dealing with the scourge of jihad terrorism is obvious. That all Western security services have...
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Not Nice
The Negresco is a beautiful rococo, belle époque hotel built around the turn of the last century on La Promenade des Anglais in Nice, in the south of France. Even under today’s plebeian standards, when backpacking and sandal-wearing tourists invade its elegant quarters, it stands as a monument to a world that no longer exists. ...
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A Question of Identity
Most people have multiple identities, and contemporary America is tolerant of almost all of them, including men who think they are women and women who think they are men. There is one notable exception, though, to this general tolerance: people who attach any importance to the fact that they are white. The left, of course,...
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Holy Among Fools
In his latest novel, Derek Turner, author of Sea Changes and Displacement, takes his readers on a seriocomic journey with a latter-day Holy Fool. Along the way, Turner takes aim at the insanity of political correctness, celebrity culture in the Age of Twitter, and the spiritual wasteland that results from a denial of truth. A...
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Dallas in the Dock
The whole world appears to have gone nuts again—for about the ten millionth time in human history—but Dallas, unaccountably, you might say, has reaped enormous respect for keeping its cool and staying sane. You know—as sane as can be expected of any nest of right-wing, gun-toting, big-haired, president-killing yahoos. I know such news is hard...
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Dupe or No
Chronicles falls short of its usual high standards by giving so much space to “Faulkner in Japan: The ‘American Century’” in the August issue (Society & Culture). As far as I can tell amidst all the unanchored theorizing, the author wants to make America’s greatest writer out to be a clueless dupe of postwar “American...
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Making Poetry Great Again
Please let this note serve as a belated acknowledgement that Dr. Allen Frederick Stein’s poem “Ralph Waldo Emerson Meets John Brown,” which appeared in the January issue, served as an enlightening study tool for 65 of my students at Warren Hills Regional High School in northern New Jersey during the recently concluded school year. Several...
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Turkey Purge
Democracy isn’t freedom—and in today’s Turkey some people realize that, as amazing as that may seem. Not ordinary folks, but the mid-level officers of the Turkish army, who have been watching with a jaundiced eye the steady Islamization of their country by an elected leader. The recent history of the Turks is rife with intrigues,...
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Adventures in Education
Sir Thomas More: Why not be a teacher? You’d be a fine teacher; perhaps a great one. Richard Rich: If I was, who would know it? Sir Thomas More: You; your pupils; your friends; God. Not a bad public, that. —Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons Last spring, students at Chelsea Academy performed...
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What I Saw at Yasukuni
By now, we should all be familiar with the antitraditionalist left’s attempt to erase all traces of opposition to the liberal world order. Over the past decade or so, for example, the antitraditionalists have succeeded brilliantly in demolishing the understanding of marriage that has persisted in every civilized society since the dawn of recorded history. ...
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Bleep You, Liberals!
Political correctness has, since the 1990’s, been a tool the left has used to silence the proponents of traditional morality, society, and culture. Under the banner of “sensitivity,” which has the veneer of a Higher Morality, p.c. has infected the university, the high school, the grade school, the media, business, public office, and public discourse. ...
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Liberalism in the Headlights
The murder of five white police officers in Dallas, immediately following the fatal shootings of a black man in Louisiana and another in Minnesota, gave President Obama the opportunity to engage in still another of the flights of soaring clichés and wafting banalities for which his admirers celebrate him; Hillary Clinton the chance to demonstrate...
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Books in Brief
John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit, by James Traub (New York: Basic Books, 620 pp., $45.00). This well-written and highly readable biography, addressed to the general reader rather than to the academic historian, is nevertheless a substantial as well as a highly accessible work by a professor of foreign policy at New York University. Traub’s presentation...
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What the Editors Are Reading
Two years ago, while we were visiting friends in Tuscany 20 or so kilometers north of Florence, my host remarked that it was in those parts that Giovanni Boccaccio composed the Decameron, the first draft of which he completed in 1351. The Decameron was one of many books I’d thought for years to read, without...
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Merely a Pretext
Liberals say they believe in democracy, meaning government that represents and listens to the people whose instrument it is supposed to be. Yet democratic governments today clearly do not listen to the people, if “listening” means trying to understand what they have to say. The most obvious current example of Western politicians’ willful deafness to,...
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In Another Country
A vast, under-populated Western country. A densely populated neighboring one and member of the quasi-Third World immediately south of the border. Human labor in demand in the north, an overabundance of it in the south. A lazy, somewhat dissipated and decadent, aging northern population facing an energetic, youthful, and entrepreneurial one southward across a riverine...
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On Terrorism in the West Today
Every time a bomb explodes in the West it is a boon for journalists. They photograph weeping people, tell us how implacable the government will be, and, without breaking stride, warn us that more is likely to come. But so far I have never come across any serious reflection on the rationale for the bombings,...
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The “Punishment” of Women
Questions concerning the relationship between morality and law were reignited when, during the Republican primary campaign, Donald Trump commented on the matter of abortion and (implicitly) women’s rights. When pressed by a journalist, Trump stated that, yes, women should be “punished” if their behavior is illegal or contrary to prevailing community standards. Though abortion is...
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Brexit: What Now?
It’s been quite a summer in the United Kingdom. On June 23, we the British people surprised everyone—including, perhaps most of all, ourselves—by voting to leave the European Union. That wasn’t meant to happen. All year, the E.U. referendum polls had shown a consistent advantage for the pro-E.U. “Remain” side. Celebrities and important people spent...
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Counting on Rosary Beads
The Legend of Tarzan Produced by Jerry Weintraub Productions Directed by David Yates Screenplay by Adam Cozad and Craig Brewer from the Edgar Rice Burroughs stories Distributed by Warner Brothers The Conjuring 2 Produced by New Line Cinema Directed by James Wan Screenplay by Carey and Chad Hayes Distributed by Warner Brothers The Legend of...
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Twilight of the Gods
Robert Gordon occupies the Stanley G. Harris Chair of Social Sciences at Northwestern University and is the author of a number of works on economic growth, productivity, and unemployment. His present book has been eagerly awaited, owing to the publication of two “working papers” in 2010 and 2012 by the National Board of Economic Growth—papers...
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Another Touch of the Bubbly
Well, after 50 years and more in New York, I have heard the fat lady sing, and I know what that means. There have been some issues as the decades have zipped by, I must say; and I have dealt with the problems seriatim—riots, street crime, altercations, the murder of an elderly benefactor, and other...
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