From Tom Pauken’s article at the Selous Foundation for Public Policy Research: I disagreed with President Lyndon Baines Johnson on many issues, but I respected him for his efforts to prevent a Communist takeover of South Vietnam. What would LBJ or Walt Rostow, the former LBJ national security advisor who was Dean of the LBJ...
Year: 2016
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If God Is Dead . . .
In a recent column Dennis Prager made an acute observation. “The vast majority of leading conservative writers . . . have a secular outlook on life. . . . They are unaware of the disaster that godlessness in the West has led to.” These secular conservatives may think that “America can survive the death of...
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Dishonoring General Jackson
In Samuel Eliot Morison’s The Oxford History of the American People, there is a single sentence about Harriet Tubman. “An illiterate field hand, (Tubman) not only escaped herself but returned repeatedly and guided more than 300 slaves to freedom.” Morison, however, devotes most of five chapters to the greatest soldier-statesman in American history, save Washington,...
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Is the GOP Risking Suicide?
Donald Trump has brought out the largest crowds in the history of primaries. He has won the most victories, the most delegates, the most votes. He is poised to sweep three of the five largest states in the nation—New York, Pennsylvania and California. If he does, and the nomination is taken from him, the Republican...
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Neocons Mangle Conservative History
Two neocons have put up inadvertently hilarious potted histories of the conservative movement, in particular National Review. They are “The Voice of Principled, Thinking Conservatism Needs Your Support,” by NR roving (around his laptop) correspondent Kevin Williamson, whose vicious attack on the American people themselves I dissected two weeks ago. And “The Coming Conservative Dark...
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America’s Imperial Overstretch
This week, SU-24 fighter-bombers buzzed a U.S. destroyer in the Baltic Sea. The Russian planes carried no missiles or bombs. Message: What are you Americans doing here? In the South China Sea, U.S. planes overfly, and U.S. warships sail inside, the territorial limits of islets claimed by Beijing. In South Korea, U.S. forces conduct annual...
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The Duopoly vs. Trump
We bring you an abbreviated transcript of Srdja Trifkovic’s recent interview with Serbia’s Public Media Service on the U.S. election campaign. It was broadcast live on “Agora,” Belgrade Radio II flagship current affairs program primarily aimed at college-educated audience. (Audio. Translated from Serbian by ST) ST: Hillary Clinton is immune from critical scrutiny by the American...
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Will Trump Be Swindled in Cleveland, Too?
In the race for the Republican nomination, Donald Trump would seem to be in the catbird seat. He has won the most states, the most delegates and the most votes—by nearly two million. He has brought out the largest crowds and is poised for huge wins in the largest states of the East, New York...
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Obama’s Svengali
In an interview with FOX News aired on Sunday, April 10, President Barack Obama said that failing to prepare for the aftermath of the ousting of Libyan leader Col. Muammar Qaddafi was the worst mistake of his presidency. He added that intervening in Libya nevertheless had been “the right thing to do.” The second part...
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Can the GOP Get Together in Cleveland?
After winning only six delegates in Wisconsin, and with Ted Cruz poaching delegates in states he has won, like Louisiana, Donald Trump either wins on the first ballot at Cleveland, or Trump does not win. Yet, as that huge, roaring reception he received in his first post-Wisconsin appearance in Bethpage, N.Y., testifies, the Donald remains...
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The Unitary State of America
Our country’s name, the United States of America, is plural. Yet a more accurate description at this late date would be the Unitary State of America—singular, not plural. Consider some recent events: • “The Obama administration released a warning Monday telling the nation’s landlords that it may be discriminatory for them to refuse to rent...
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What Trump Has Wrought
Should Donald Trump fall short of the delegates needed to win on the first ballot (1,237), there is growing certitude that he will be stopped. First by Ted Cruz; then, perhaps, by someone acceptable to the establishment, which always likes to have two of its own in the race. But Washington, the city of self-delusion,...
Issue
April 2016
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The Modern Papacy
For many, Pope Francis is still a puzzlement, to use the words of the song from that great musical The King and I. If you are among those puzzled, this is the book you’ve been waiting for. The Great Reformer presents the man, the experiences that shaped him, and his responses to those experiences with...
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Rebranding the Gun Culture
During the five years of the 1990’s that I served on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, one other member and I would occasionally upset the others by asking why the ACLU did not defend the Second Amendment rights of individuals. My colleague asked because he was an 80-year-old Hollywood...
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A Real Place
Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land! —Sir Walter Scott This work reminds me, on an appropriately more modest scale, of John Lukacs’s book on Philadelphians. Both hearken back to a time when Americans were a semicivilized people who lived in...
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Parties
Contrary to popular belief, political parties are not democratic institutions. They are extraconstitutional instruments of elite control, machines for corralling and pacifying the voters with platitudes. The appearance of advertising, public relations, and polling has strengthened this aspect of their character. This has particularly been the nature of the Republican Party, as should be evident...
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End of the Liberal Dream
Hell hath no fury like a peaceable liberal whose peaceable cause seems to be losing—especially when that cause is represented by the liberal himself, as Hillary Clinton’s tirade in the guise of a concession speech in Manchester, New Hampshire, demonstrated. Liberals and liberalism are currently under siege in Western countries. So liberals are in a...
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What the Editors Are Reading
I discovered the novels of Henry Rider Haggard as a boy living in London, where I came across them in a public library. His name was unknown to me, and I can no longer remember why I first pulled one of his books from the shelf and took it home. I must have devoured five...
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Books in Brief
Digital Is Destroying Everything, by Andrew V. Edwards (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 232 pp., $34.00). Edwards, a digital-marketing executive, states at the beginning of this book that it was not his intention to write “a rant against all things digital.” Nevertheless, his evaluation of what the digital revolution has wrought comes closer to an...
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Trumpsteria: Dislike!
Chaos dominates the political scene today thanks to the success of the Trump campaign and the Trumpsteria that has accompanied it. This chaos is the subject of myriad essays, commentaries, and—most significantly—power grabs both brand new and repackaged. It was, in many senses, inevitable. Donald Trump is attracting large crowds, and his poll numbers are...
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Lock Out the Establishment in Cleveland!
The Wisconsin primary could be an axle-breaking speed bump on Donald Trump’s road to the nomination. Ted Cruz, now the last hope to derail Trump of a desperate Beltway elite that lately loathed him, has taken the lead in the Badger State. Millions in attack ads are being dumped on the Donald’s head by super...
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Two Wrongs Don’t Make a White
Editor Chilton Williamson’s critique of the identitarian position delivers a typical conservative philippic from cloud level. “Identity politics, whether for whites or for others, is a form of narcissism that focuses the mind almost exclusively on the self and its vanities, precluding a true apprehension of society, solid intellectual activity, and a true understanding of...
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Elliptical Critique
In the February issue, the editors take aim at people they call white nationalists, although their targets repudiate the name. As Richard Spencer explained to the Chicago Tribune (August 31, 2015), “I call myself an identitarian and not an American. I think whites will need to be post-American,” because for him America is a “failed...
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Hollywood’s Lone Ace
He is virtually unknown to Americans today, though he appeared in 65 movies and was the only actor to become an ace during World War II. Born in Los Angeles in 1914 to Nebraskan Bert DeWayne Morris and Texan Anna Fitzgerald, he would be christened with his father’s name but go by Wayne Morris. While...
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The Hail With It
Hail, Caesar Produced by Mike Zoss Productions and Working Title Films Written and directed by Ethan and Joel Coen Distributed by Universal Pictures In Ethan and Joel Coen’s latest film, Hail, Caesar!, we’re taken back to the Hollywood of the early 1950’s, lovingly recreated but set darkly askew. That was when the dream factories were...
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Persons, Places, and Things
“Because I was born in the South, I am a Southerner. If I had been born in the North, the West, or the Central Plains, I would be just a human being.” —Clyde Edgerton OK, let us admit that Mr. Edgerton exaggerates. Yet throughout the better part of the 20th century...
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The Price of Being Human
In her tenth volume of poetry, Catharine Savage Brosman has given readers a wide array of skillfully written and insightful poems that capture the poet’s keen observations of nature, her journeys from New Mexico to Antarctica, and her sense of humor and wit. Framed by travel adventures in the United States and a series of...
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Paris Holds Her Breath
In the days that followed the November terrorist attacks, many here in Paris were paralyzed. Friends of mine refused to leave their homes. Businesses stayed closed. This is a level of violence and death to which those of us in the First World are simply unaccustomed, though modern jihad threatens to change that very quickly. ...
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China’s Win-Win Regional Strategy
Faced with a fresh barrage of threatening rhetoric by North Korea, its fourth nuclear test (January 6), and its subsequent successful launch of a ballistic missile capable of reaching the mainland United States, on March 31 President Barack Obama advocated closer security ties among America’s chief allies in the Far East. More significantly, he also...
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A Necessary Realignment
As I write on the morning of Super Tuesday, March 1, the Republican establishment is in hysterics. The writing is on the wall. By the end of the day, Donald Trump will have all but sewed up the 2016 Republican nomination for president. And I write those words confidently, even though voting has just begun...
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How to Win at Tennis
Althea Gibson was a black American lady tennis player who won Wimbledon and many other major championships during the late 50’s. She was also a very good singer and a friendly soul, carrying none of that anger and fury many of today’s blacks exhibit the minute the spotlight shines on them. She passed away some...
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No News Is Good News
Why does anyone follow the news? I am not referring to people who more or less have to know what is being said about current events. Investors, naturally, want to know about the rumors that can drive markets up or down, and politicians and their advisors have to study the media the way a deer...
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Turkey’s Recklessness
In the millennia-long “tragedy of great power politics” we encounter a recurring phenomenon. An ambitious leader comes to power, successfully pursues an expansionist policy for a few years, succumbs to hubris, starts making risky decisions, and finally pays the price of not balancing his state’s strategic ends and means. Classic examples are provided by Cleon...
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Antonin Scalia’s Flexible Constitution
Who is to decide? This question animated Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, who died of natural causes in mid-February. He was the longest-serving member of the current Supreme Court. Nominated by Ronald Reagan in 1986, Scalia was known for his acerbic wit and fidelity to the text of the Constitution, as understood by those who ratified...
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Lord Dunmore’s Revenge
In great historic cities like Charleston and Savannah, it is all but impossible to avoid memories of the Revolutionary War. At every turn, you find commemorations of the triumphs and disasters of those years, of the heroes and villains of the national struggle. On my recent journeys, though, I have seen those monuments and plaques...
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White and Wrong
In the February issue, “My Country—White or Wrong,” Chilton Williamson and Scott Richert criticize white nationalism. I write in reply as someone who has been called a “white nationalist”—whatever that term may mean. First, Mr. Williamson’s sensibilities are so close to my own that his critique may be based on a misunderstanding. He writes of...
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A Paleo Moment
While it looks like the much-touted Libertarian Moment has passed—if it was ever here to begin with—we can say with some degree of certainty that the Paleoconservative Moment has arrived. And we can pinpoint the date of its arrival with impressive specificity: The day of the South Carolina Republican presidential debate, when Donald Trump dropped...
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The Loss and Recovery of Truth
“Philosophy of history is a concept coined by Voltaire,” Gerhart Niemeyer said to me in the spring of 1977, repeating the first sentence of his lecture, “The Loss and Recovery of History,” delivered at a Hillsdale College seminar a few weeks before and later published in Imprimis (October 1977). He went on to say that...
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Between Fear and Conceit
H.M. Maisky was the Soviet ambassador to Britain from 1932 to 1943. In June 1943 Stalin ordered him to quit London. After returning to Moscow, Maisky was posted henceforth to unimportant positions. In 1953 he was imprisoned; two years later he was released. He died in 1955. In London (and from time to time in...
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No Piety, No Justice
“Human rights are not isolated, private, and ‘at war’ with each other,” explained Sue Ellen Browder, former journalist for Cosmopolitan and author of Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement. “Human rights are indivisible.” The occasion for Browder’s reflection was the 43rd anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, a date...
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There’s More Where That Came From
When I first heard chamber music, it seemed an acquired taste, and subsequently a taste I acquired. So I will recite some personal history without any illusion that it matters because it was my experience. On the contrary: I think the story I know could be related to everyone’s exploration of music, because however you...
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Call It ‘Gender Insanity’
The girls aren’t signing up for combat roles in the Marines Corps as fast as the sisterhood would like, NPR reports. The Marines will begin training the first women for ground combat jobs in June. But it could be a challenge because so far no women recruits have signed up for armor, artillery or infantry...
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Is Trump Right About NATO?
I am “not isolationist, but I am ‘America First,'” Donald Trump told the New York Times last weekend. “I like the expression.” Of NATO, where the U.S. underwrites three-fourths of the cost of defending Europe, Trump calls this arrangement “unfair, economically, to us,” and adds, “We will not be ripped off anymore.” Beltway media may...
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Selective Justice at The Hague
Srdja Trifkovic discusses on Radio Sputnik International the sentencing of Dr. Radovan Karadzic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. [Audio] Trifkovic: The verdict had been written well in advance of Karadzic’s arrest in 2008. All key points in the verdict had been prepared well in advance based on a previous sentence, against General [Radislav] Krstic, when...
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NR’s Jihad Against Trump—and America
National Review’s jihad against Donald Trump turned against Americans themselves with Kevin Williamson’s screed, “Chaos in the Family, Chaos in the State: The White Working Class’s Dysfunction.” He writes about such working-class cities as Wayne, Mich., where I grew up after I was born in 1955. To this day, one-sixth of the city is the...
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Trump Is Right about NATO, Brussels Attacks
This week Donald Trump ignited another furor, this time for asking the simple question of whether America’s commitment to NATO is worth it. The following day, Brussels was hit by jihad terror attacks. Johnny on the spot, Senator Ted Cruz accused Trump of surrendering to ISIS and to Putin in the face of the...
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Is ISIS Faithful to Islam?
“We are not at war with Islam,” said John Kasich after the Brussels massacre, “We’re at war with radical Islam.” Kasich’s point raises a question: Does the Islamic faith in any way sanction or condone what those suicide bombers did? For surely the brothers and their accomplice who ignited the bombs in the airport and...
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The Rule-or-Ruin Republicans
“Things reveal themselves passing away,” wrote W. B. Yeats. Whatever one may think of Donald Trump, his campaign has done us a service—exposing the underbelly of a decaying establishment whose repudiation by America’s silent majority is long overdue. According to the New York Times, super PACs of Trump’s GOP rivals, including PACs of candidates who...
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Suicide of the GOP—or Rebirth?
“If his poll numbers hold, Trump will be there six months from now when the Sweet 16 is cut to the Final Four, and he will likely be in the finals.” My prediction, in July of 2015, looks pretty good right now. Herewith, a second prediction. Republican wailing over his prospective nomination aside, Donald Trump...