Year: 2017

Asked what he did during the French Revolution, Abbe Sieyes replied, “I survived.” Donald Trump can make the same boast. No other political figure has so dominated our discourse. And none, not Joe McCarthy in his heyday in the early ’50s, nor Richard Nixon in Watergate, received such intensive and intemperate coverage and commentary as...

From September 2000 issue of Chronicles. “The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation.” —William McKinley In his classic study of “isolationism,” Not to the Swift, Justus Doenecke takes note of a phenomenon called “Asia Firstism”—the view of conservative politicians and publicists of the postwar era who opposed meddling in Europe but...

The original question the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign was to answer was a simple one: Did he do it? Did Trump, or officials with his knowledge, collude with Vladimir Putin’s Russia to hack the emails of John Podesta and the DNC, and leak the contents to damage Hillary Clinton and elect Donald Trump?...

President Trump, every Republican senator, and the GOP majority in Speaker Paul Ryan’s House just put the future of their party on the line. By enacting the largest tax cut since the Reagan administration, the heart of which is cutting the corporate rate from 35 to 21 percent, Republicans have boldly bet the farm. They...

On December 20 the European Commission (EC) took the unprecedented step of activating Article 7.1 of the Lisbon Treaty against Poland. The EC accuses the Law and Justice (PiS) government in Warsaw of “putting fundamental democratic rights at risk” by enacting 13 laws to reform the country’s judiciary which make it easier to replace the...

From the December 2014 issue of Chronicles. It has been argued that, after Shakespeare, Charles Dickens is the finest writer in the English language.  His works have forged their way into the canon to such a degree that it is much more difficult to know which of his novels to leave off the recommended reading...

In the run-up to Christmas, President Donald Trump has been the beneficiary of some surprisingly good news and glad tidings. Sunday, Vladimir Putin called to thank him and the CIA for providing Russia critical information that helped abort an ISIS plot to massacre visitors to Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg. Monday found polls showing Trump...

Last week I saw an article about a proposal, currently part of the tax bill, to levy a 1.4% tax on investment income earned by private colleges with endowments of more than $500,000 per student. Thirty-two colleges currently have such enormous endowments, including Harvard, whose endowment is an astonishing $38 billion. One might think that...

In his latest interview with the Iranian English-language Press TV network, Srdja Trifkovic discusses the latest developments in connection with President Donald Trump’s stated intention to scrap the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA). Video (Trifkovic segment starts at 52 seconds) ST: Before the election in November of last year, reneging on the [Iran nuclear] deal was...

On Aug. 9, 1974, Richard Nixon bowed to the inevitability of impeachment and conviction by a Democratic Senate and resigned. The prospect of such an end for Donald Trump has this city drooling. Yet, comparing Russiagate and Watergate, history is not likely to repeat itself. First, the underlying crime in Watergate, a break-in to wiretap...

From the July 2001 issue of Chronicles.         “The feeling between this city and the hayseeds. . . is every hit as hitter as the feelings between the North and South before the War. . . . Why, I know a lot of men in my district who would like nothin’ better...

A Harvey Weinstein Moment for America’s Wars? What makes a Harvey Weinstein moment? The now-disgraced Hollywood mogul is hardly the first powerful man to stand accused of having abused women. The Harveys who preceded Harvey himself are legion, their prominence matching or exceeding his own and the misdeeds with which they were charged at least...

“We will never accept Russia’s occupation and attempted annexation of Crimea,” declaimed Rex Tillerson last week in Vienna. “Crimea-related sanctions will remain in place until Russia returns full control of the peninsula to Ukraine.” Tillerson’s principled rejection of the seizure of land by military force—”never accept”—came just one day after President Trump recognized Jerusalem as...

In his latest interview for Serbia’s National Public Service Radio, Srdja Trifkovic discusses the geopolitical significance of the Balkan Peninsula, through the centuries, in the context of today’s complex strategic equation in Southeastern Europe. Audio (Interview starts at 2 minutes 50 seconds. Unedited translation from Serbian) Q: The Balkan Peninsula is an area where empires,...

Even interventionists are regretting some of the wars into which they helped plunge the United States in this century. Among those wars are Afghanistan and Iraq, the longest in our history; Libya, which was left without a stable government; Syria’s civil war, a six-year human rights disaster we helped kick off by arming rebels to...

From the June 1997 issue of Chronicles. The global industrial revolution being engineered by multinational firms and the dismantling of international trade barriers have produced wrenching social changes and will unleash more. Rolling Stone National Editor William Greider, author of Secrets of the Temple (on the Federal Reserve) and Who Will Tell the People (on...

President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to the Holy City has been criticized on many grounds, most of them ostensibly sensible, in America and abroad. In the Western media, over the past two days, we have encountered six chief objections:...

Why did Gen. Mike Flynn lie to the FBI about his December 2016 conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak? Why did he not tell the FBI the truth? As national security adviser to the president-elect, Flynn had called the ambassador. Message: Tell President Putin not to overreact to President Obama’s expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats....

From the June 2012 issue of Chronicles. Most retrospectives take the Swinging Sixties, and more particularly Swinging London, on their own terms.  “Society was shaken to its foundations!” a 2011 BBC documentary on the subject shouted.  “All the rules came off, all the brakes came off . . . the floodgates were unlocked. . ....

I was walking up Madison Avenue when I spotted two comely young women having tea at a sidewalk café.  It was a couple of days after the scandal, so I stopped and introduced myself as Harvey Weinstein and asked them if they wanted a drink back at my place.  Both roared with laughter.  This is...

The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, by Mark Lilla (New York: HarperCollins; 160 pp., $24. 99).  Professor Lilla’s book, which appeared originally as an essay in the New York Review of Books, has received much attention (almost all of it bad) from liberals angered by its thesis that identity politics as it has...

It has always surprised me that the last great gold rush in North America is mostly absent from American history textbooks, especially those of more recent vintage.  It’s as if the stampede to the Klondike never happened.  Part of the answer lies in geography: The Klondike region is in Canada’s Yukon Territory.  However, most of...

The country is currently suffering through a series of moral panics—or, more precisely, the coastal elites are, while the rest of us go about the business of ordinary living. There was the tearing down of the statues, an “antiracist” campaign to eradicate all traces of any historical figure who could be linked, even tenuously, to...

Exactly ninety-nine years ago—on December 1, 1918—the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes came into being. A decade later its name was changed to Yugoslavia. A generation ago the country disintegrated in blood and acrimony. The unification of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes came several decades too late. Had it happened during the era of Germany’s...

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women Produced by Boxspring Entertainment  Written and directed by Angela Robinson  Distributed by Annapurna Pictures  Blade Runner 2049 Produced by Columbia Pictures and Warner Brothers  Directed by Denis Villeneuve Screenplay by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green  Distributed by Warner Brothers  Watching director Angela Robinson’s Professor Marston and the Wonder Women,...

“Culture does not exist autonomously,” wrote Robert Nisbet in The Quest for Community; “it is set always in the context of social relationships.”  The implications of Nisbet’s statement should be obvious, but in the age of “social” media, when we speak of “long-distance relationships” with “friends” we have never met, the obvious too often gets...

Camps Regarding Jerry Salyer’s “Leftists, Creationists, and Useful Idiots” (Correspondence, October), I will paraphrase the excellent letter from Richard Mastio (“Trump and the GOP,” Polemics & Exchanges) that opened the issue: Are conservatives so blind, so self-serving, so cavalier, so very arrogant as to believe that by ridiculing Answers in Genesis and elevating Francis Collins...

“‘Shut up,’ he explained.” —Ring Lardner, The Young Immigrants This past year, certain reporters, some students and professors, and the Canadian government have hounded Jordan Peterson, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, for his protests against the government’s Bill C-16, passed with Royal Assent in mid-June, which makes the misuse of “gender identity...

In his infamous work The Myth of Mental Illness, the late Dr. Thomas Szasz argued that psychiatry was not a branch of medicine concerned with treating real illness, but rather an institution of social control.  He believed that psychiatry fulfilled this function by bringing under the umbrella of “disorder” those behaviors and beliefs that society...

In 2012, U.S. historian William H. Frederick sparked a fierce controversy about a horrible if largely forgotten episode in Asian history, the so-called Bersiap movement of the 1940’s.  The affair demands our attention for what it suggests about the politics of memory, and how we value human lives.  It also reminds us of the quite...

When I was in my teens I read a good deal in the realist school of American fiction: Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, and so on.  As a more mature reader, I found their work hopelessly dreary, dull, and dead.  Much later I discovered the French realist novelists of the second half of the...

That Europe is in mortal danger from the ongoing, overwhelmingly Muslim immigrant deluge and from its ruling elites’ spiritual degeneracy is beyond dispute.  This phenomenon of world-historical significance has several causes, but the most important one is in the divorce of reason from faith.  As a result, post-Christian Europe is rapidly sinking into self-destruction. The...

“If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith.” —Flannery O’Connor Patricia Snow cites the sentence above, taken from O’Connor’s introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann, in a brilliant essay that appeared recently in First Things (“Empathy...

From the November 2011 issue of Chronicles. Many people who consider themselves conservative are woefully ignorant of the culture they claim to defend.  The list of causes is long: Television has largely destroyed storytelling, public school denigrates the idea of a common culture, and the internet has killed off lingering remnants of community.  The music...

Letter from Pergamum-on-the-Potomac The campaign against memorials to long-dead Confederates seems to have taken a bit of a sabbatical. Perhaps the media have only paused the hype in favor the celebrity groping mania, or maybe pulling down or defacing outdoor art is not a cold-weather activity. In any case, the relative calm was a blessing...

Why would Christian conservatives in good conscience go to the polls Dec. 12 and vote for Judge Roy Moore, despite the charges of sexual misconduct with teenagers leveled against him? Answer: That Alabama Senate race could determine whether Roe v. Wade is overturned. The lives of millions of unborn may be the stakes. Republicans now...

Our aim is to “starve the whole population—men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound—into submission,” said First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. He was speaking of Germany at the outset of the Great War of 1914-1918. Americans denounced as inhumane this starvation blockade that would eventually take the lives of a...