A visit to Cyprus helps to dispel the myth that the British Empire died of natural causes half a century ago. It did nothing of the sort. The empire rebranded itself as the Commonwealth of Nations, and carried on much as before. The Commonwealth countries—53 in all, including two, Rwanda and Mozambique, that were never...
Year: 2016
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‘The Great White Hope’
“Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group . . . death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.” The big new killers of middle-aged white folks? Alcoholic liver disease, overdoses of heroin and opioids, and suicides. So wrote Gina Kolata...
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Global Trumpophobia
At a press conference at the G-7 summit in Japan on May 26, President Barack Obama declared that world leaders are “rattled” by Donald Trump, “and for good reason. Because a lot of the proposals that he’s made display either ignorance of world affairs or a cavalier attitude or an interest in getting tweets and...
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Is Scarborough Shoal Worth a War?
If China begins to reclaim and militarize Scarborough Shoal, says Philippines President Benigno S. Aquino III, America must fight. Should we back down, says Aquino, the United States will lose “its moral ascendancy, and also the confidence of one of its allies.” And what is Scarborough Shoal? A cluster of rocks and reefs, 123 miles...
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Why the EU needs Brexit
Today is exactly one month from the day that Brits go to the polls for one of the most important decisions in their modern history: the referendum on membership in the European Union. The question is a dagger looming over the heart of the European Union, as it currently exists, and those paying attention realize...
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Who’s the Conservative Heretic?
In his coquettish refusal to accept the Donald, Paul Ryan says he cannot betray the conservative “principles” of the party of Abraham Lincoln, high among which is a devotion to free trade. But when did free trade become dogma in the Party of Lincoln? As early as 1832, young Abe declared, “My politics are short...
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Is Mitt on a Suicide Mission?
“It’s a suicide mission,” said the Republican Party Chairman. Reince Priebus was commenting on a Washington Post story about Mitt Romney and William Kristol’s plot to recruit a third-party conservative candidate to sink Donald Trump. Several big-name Republican “consultants” and “strategists” are said to be on board. Understandably so, given the bucks involved. With the...
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Davutoglu’s Demise
Ahmet Davutoglu has served Recep Tayyip Erdogan loyally for over a decade, first as his chief advisor (2003-2009), then as foreign minister (2009-2014), and finally as prime minister until his forced resignation on May 5. Loyalty is no longer enough: Erdogan now demands unquestioning obedience from his team, and Davutoglu’s willingness to provide it has...
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Trump or Ryan: Who Speaks for the GOP?
“No modern precedent exists for the revival of a party so badly defeated, so intensely discredited, and so essentially split as the Republican Party is today.” Taken from The Party That Lost Its Head by Bruce Chapman and George Gilder, this excerpt, about Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964, led Thursday’s column by E.J. Dionne of...
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World War II: “The historical narrative is distorted with every generation”
In his latest interview with Radio Sputnik International marking the V-E Day, Srdja Trifkovic discusses the gap between public perceptions of the Allied powers’ relative contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany and historical reality. [Audio file] Sputnik: In recent opinion polls in the U.S. and Europe, only 15 percent of respondents named the USSR as the country...
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Who Promoted Private Ryan?
Forty-eight hours after Donald Trump wrapped up the Republican nomination with a smashing victory in the Indiana primary, House Speaker Paul Ryan announced that he could not yet support Trump. In millennial teen-talk, Ryan told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “I’m just not ready to do that at this point. I’m not there right now.” “[T]he bulk...
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The Cam Newton Republicans
Cam Newton’s petulance after the Carolina Panthers lost to the Denver Broncos largely eclipsed the splendid season Newton had had before the Super Bowl. Since Donald Trump essentially clinched the GOP nomination after winning over 50% of the vote in seven consecutive primaries, a number of conservative pundits and Republican politicians have begun emulating Newton’s...
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Bush Republicanism Is Dead and Gone
“The two living Republican past presidents, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, have no plans to endorse Trump, according to their spokesmen.” So said the lead story in the Washington Post. Graceless, yes, but not unexpected. The Bushes have many fine qualities. Losing well, however, is not one of them. And they have...
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Prophetic Sobran
From Fr. C. John McCloskey, via the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation: Joe Sobran had a Renaissance mind along with a moral sense, a genial wit, and a seemingly effortless flow of felicitous phrasing. Whatever the topic, he was capable of entertaining while instructing, always conveying to the reader of his columns, articles, and essays (without the...
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Telling the Truth About Vietnam
From the Selous Foundation: Geoffrey Shaw, author of The Lost Mandate of Heaven, has done us a great service in telling the truth about the American betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem and the tragic consequences it had for the Vietnamese people and for those Allied soldiers who gave their lives in that war. [Read Tom...
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The Two Faces of #NeverTrump: Those Who Know and Those Who Don’t
With his resounding victory in Indiana, the forces denoted by the Twitter hashtag #NeverTrump should fold up shop and accept the inevitable. Some of them will. Senator Ted Cruz had the sense to realize that his play to deny Donald J. Trump a first-ballot victory in Cleveland would find even less favorable ground in New...
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Why Russia Resents Us
Friday, a Russian SU-27 did a barrel roll over a U.S. RC-135 over the Baltic, the second time in two weeks. Also in April, the U.S. destroyer Donald Cook, off Russia’s Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, was twice buzzed by Russian planes. Vladimir Putin’s message: Keep your spy planes and ships a respectable distance away from...
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Fiat-Chrysler, Gold and Gas Prices
I’ve written several stories and blogs for Chronicles on the gold standard, in particular how leaving it in 1971 started an especially vicious boom-boost cycle for the American auto industry. When the dollar inflates, so do oil and gas prices; that tanks sales for trucks and SUVS and increases sales for small cars (as in...
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America First Controversy
Donald Trump’s foreign policy speech last Wednesday deserves at least a solid B+ and you can read my take on it in the June issue of Chronicles. It offered an eloquent argument for offensive realism, based on the fact that the international system—composed of sovereign nation-states pursuing their interests—is still essentially competitive and Hobbesian. Trump...
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See Dick Potty
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...
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Sharia, Not Shakespeare
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...
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Game of Bones
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...
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Easy Sell
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...
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Sizing Up the Feline Uproar
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...
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Had at the Souq
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....
Issue
May 2016
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The Hell With Spinach!
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...
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The More the Merrier
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...
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How the World Works
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...
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What the Editors Are Reading
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...
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Borders
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...
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Revelation and Portent
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...
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Overlooked?
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...
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Palm Sunday
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,...
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Falling In (and Out of) Line
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...
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On the Wings of a Snow White Dove
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...
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Terrorizing the Old Bag
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...
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Donald Trump, the Court, and the Law
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...
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Avoiding Europe’s Mistakes
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...
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A Myth Demolished
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...
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Un Hombre, Un Voto
“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...
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Snobs and Slobs
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...
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Living With the Iconoclasts
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...
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The Crucial Years
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...
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Books in Brief
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...
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A Conservative Party in Chaos
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...
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Prioritizing Threats
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...
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Let America Be America
Donald Trump claims he will make America great again. Hillary Clinton responds that America has never quit being great. Bernie Sanders seems to have his doubts that America has ever been great, but he would be happy to try to make her so if only the American people would give him the power to make...
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At Last, America First!
Whether the establishment likes it or not, and it evidently does not, there is a revolution going on in America. The old order in this capital city is on the way out, America is crossing a great divide, and there is no going back. Donald Trump’s triumphant march to the nomination in Cleveland, virtually assured...
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A Bizarre Choice
Four years ago, Mitt Romney lost the industrial Midwest, and the White House, in large part because the Democrats successfully used Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital to portray him as a champion of outsourcing American jobs. Bizarrely, Ted Cruz has chosen as his running mate Carly Fiorina, whose stint as CEO of Hewlett-Packard makes Romney...