Images of those traumatized by the election of Donald Trump are indelible. I mean specifically the sight of empaneled experts, red-eyed, choking, and stuttering as they said things like “CNN is now prepared to call the state of Wisconsin for Donald Trump.” Or of rainbow mobs of sign-wavers in urban centers declaring (absurdly and solipsistically)...
Apart from Iceland, a European country lying far out in the North Atlantic, the east-west extremes of Europe are Ireland’s coast at 10 degrees west longitude and Russia’s Ural Mountains at 60 degrees east. Twenty-five degrees east is the central meridian of these 70 degrees of longitude, and Poland, Germany, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech...
Do great men make history? Or does history make great men? One thing’s for sure: History sometimes smothers great men, as Thomas Gray suggests in his famous elegy written in a country churchyard, and as the rows of endless graves from Arlington to the Somme demonstrate with brutal candor. “Some mute inglorious Milton here may...
For the first time since the Reagan years a Republican took Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and even Michigan. After years of waiting for the rise of the MARs (Middle-American Radicals), I hear the ghost of Sam Francis chortling with unrestrained mirth. Trump took on the Clinton machine, the Republican Party, the media, the oligarchs, the neocons, and...
I have decided that the only way to understand American liberal society is through the mystical practices of Asia’s ancient religions. Let me explain. Hundreds of millions of the world’s Buddhists have at the heart of their faith a seemingly irreconcilable mystery. For two millennia, they have been taught that emptiness (sunyata) is a fundamental...
If one were to believe the mainstream media—and who doesn’t believe the mainstream media?—Donald J. Trump will be inaugurated as the 45th President of these United States this month because over 60 million Americans are unable, and possibly unwilling, to tell the difference between true, objective reporting, filled with facts and designed only to help...
I have a long-standing habit of picking up books from secondhand shops that I have no intention of reading in the immediate or even foreseeable future, and pulling them off the shelf according to whim, sometimes years later. One such title is Love and the English, by Nina Epton, which I came across almost by...
“Crony capitalism” is the new buzzphrase, now that Donald Trump is cutting deals to keep jobs in the United States. When previous presidents cut deals to allow companies to build new factories in Mexico and overseas while shutting down factories here, no one called it crony capitalism, even though it was; we called those deals...
History never repeats itself, but we may compare certain pivotal events in the quest for meaning and order in an apparently chaotic world. Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980 and Donald Trump’s unexpected triumph in 2016 differ in countless, relatively insignificant ways, but they share one key characteristic: True Americans have risen against an anti-America of...
It had the same effect on them that a man sitting in a front-row seat and banging a gong has on the lead flutist in a Mozart concert. “Them,” needless to say, are the “elites,” a poor description if ever there was one of the rabble that is Hollywood types, engaged ladies who lunch, cheap...
Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election was greeted with shock and disbelief in many quarters. My favorite example of this occurred at my law-school alma mater, where students traumatized by the thought that ideas regularly denounced by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post had triumphed in a national...
On a hot day in late June, looking to buy some cheap tires for an old car of mine, I pulled into a tire shop on a stretch of highway near Fort Worth. We’d recently had a lot of rain, and the sun was glaring, seeming to draw a screen of haze off the pavement...
I found Scott P. Richert’s article “Taking Back the Culture” (The Rockford Files, December) very interesting. It brings to mind Robert Nisbet’s central thesis that the medieval was an era of higher civilization, since it had power spread over a wide field, rather than the concentration of everything in one institution. Nisbet, as I understand...
The pro-life movement today almost completely identifies with the Republican Party, despite its support by a few Democrats such as Pennsylvania Sen. Robert Casey (sometimes). It wasn’t always so. In 1972, at the age of 17, I worked against Michigan’s Measure B, which would have legalized abortion in the state. It lost, with 61 percent...
We often smile when we hear of Victorian prudery regarding sex. A mother’s advice to her daughter before her marriage regarding conjugal relations—“Just lie back and think of England, dear”—evokes laughter. We chuckle when we learn that our ancestors referred to chicken breasts as “white meat,” to chicken legs as “drumsticks.” In our sexually charged...
People sometimes seem to be prejudiced against opera for reasons that are arbitrarily unconvincing. These reasons turn out to be an antipathy based on class (opera is the province of the privileged), or antipathy resulting from sheer musical ignorance. (Trained voices don’t appeal to the contemporary ear.) These two specious reasons are important because the...
In the immediate aftermath of their drubbing on November 8, and following Hillary Clinton’s career-ending injury, the Democrats faced the question every rebuilding team faces: Who is the quarterback of the future? DNC interim chairperson Donna Brazile is not the answer. She’s still undergoing the concussion protocol, after a helmet-to-helmet collision with WikiLeaks in October,...
Colin Kaepernick, the former star quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, made the decision during the 2016 NFL preseason to kneel during the playing of the National Anthem. Other athletes quickly followed suit, some by kneeling, others by raising a fist to protest “racial injustice” in America. Outrage predictably followed, with opinion polls suggesting that...
My title is a bit of a stretch, as I did not travel all the way round the world, nor close to it, and the trip took 19 days, not 80. Still, it was my world, extending roughly from the American Mountain West across Western Europe, and I traveled by ship and train and motor...
Prospective readers should not be put off by the words “women writers” in the title of this book. Catharine Savage Brosman’s emphasis is not on the ideological but rather on the intellectual and artistic identity of her subjects, which complement the masculine sensibilities of their male counterparts—Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Tom Lea, John S. Van...
Against Democracy, by Jason Brennan (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press; 288 pp., $29.95). I found this a disappointing book, as the subject is a critical one in the 21st century. Brennan begins with Schumpeter’s well-known assertion that The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters...
November was a bad month for the left. First, Hillary Clinton was defeated in the presidential election by Donald Trump. Then, Fidel Castro died at 90 after a long illness that had forced him some years before to surrender the presidency of Cuba to his brother Raúl. So far as Cuban politics goes, Fidel might...
The country is near unanimous in feeling that the elections of 2016 were unique in American history. Some say for the unlikability of the two principal candidates; others, for the rhetorical violence and vitriol on all sides. Still others cite the general volatility of the political year from its beginnings, in its wide swings left...
I recently attended a rock concert where the headline act—an artful blend of political correctness and antic comedy dressed in a leopard-skin overcoat under a silver wig—lectured us at some length on the need to respect women. His remarks were repeated at intervals throughout the performance, and at one point were illustrated by images of...
According to pious American folklore, there was in 1787 a “Miracle at Philadelphia” in which demigod Founding Fathers gathered and gave the world the “U.S. Constitution”; thereby, as chanted by former Chief Justice Burger in a juvenile bicentennial panegyric, they changed human history forever—and got rid of the awful Articles of Confederation, which stood in...
President and five-star Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower said that a man must “believe in his luck” in order to lead. Jeff Sessions is such a man. He has not only survived multiple setbacks, considered career ending by many, but has consistently come out ahead. Most recently, his early and conspicuously vocal endorsement of Donald Trump...
Donald Trump is making the world go crazy. Here in Westminster, the political and media establishments are still convulsing following his election. And the angry shock at the top is rippling through British society. Most Brits remain convinced that, while Brexit and Trumpism were driven by similar forces, the two phenomena are not one and...
Arrival 21 Laps Entertainment Directed by Denis Villeneuve Screenplay by Eric Heisserer based on Ted Chiang’s novella Distributed by Paramount Pictures Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk Produced by Film4 and TriStar Pictures Directed by Ang Lee Screenplay by Jean-Christophe Castelli from Ben Fountain’s novel Distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing When is the last time you...
