The Soviet Union and the Soviet Empire have been gone for 26 years, yet American internationalists, Democrats and Republicans alike, persist in speaking of the “Free World,” quite as if Earth continues to be divided between the liberal-democratic-capitalist and the communist camps. We have been hearing a great deal more of this Free World talk...
Month: May 2017
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Where Honor Is Due
I got a call from a Washington-based journalist the other day who wanted to know if Pat Buchanan had any influence on the platform of our current President. What a question! The guy sounded fairly young—at least, younger than me—so he doesn’t remember. Yes, but aren’t there books, articles, easily accessible on the internet? Has...
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The Electoral College: Rooted in Racism?
Prof. Akhil Amar of Yale Law School launched a salvo against the Electoral College. In a piece published on December 12 at the website of Time, Amar claimed that the Electoral College has pro-slavery origins. James Madison preferred it to a nationwide popular vote because he wanted Southern slaves to count in the tally of...
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Churchill in Africa
“Half-alien and wholly undesirable” was Lady Astor’s assessment of Winston Churchill. For Winston’s father, Randolph Churchill, had taken an American wife, “a dollar princess,” as many cash-strapped members of the English aristocracy did in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But Lord Randolph, dead at age 46, left no inheritance. Poor Winston had to...
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Conspiring With Terror in the West
The liberal paradigm is dying before our eyes. At twelve midday on March 22, Theresa May announced at Prime Minister’s Questions that she had sent her condolences to the family of Martin McGuinness, who had been the capo di capi of the IRA. She had been preceded at the BBC by a high priest of...
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Power to the People!
The world is broken. There was a time when those words would have been considered unremarkable—a truism, even. Of course the world is broken: Our first parents, Adam and Eve, broke it. They did so by their sin. They had everything that any man or woman could ever reasonably want: a paradise to live in,...
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#FillTheHotTub
There’s an ancient adage—ancient in terms of our Internet Age, at least: If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. Do you think Facebook is free? Take a look at those ads in your Facebook feed, and over on the right-hand side of the page. Ever wonder why so many of them...
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Confronting Russophobia
There is a paranoid, hysterical quality to the public discourse on Russia and all things Russian in today’s America. The corporate media machine and its Deep State handlers have abdicated reason and common decency in favor of raw hate and fear-mongering. We have not seen anything like it before, even in the darkest days of...
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Big Macs, A-bombs, and Trump
William F. Buckley, Jr., spent his adult winter months in Rougemont, an alpine resort next to its chicer neighbor Gstaad, now the Mecca for the nouveau riche and vulgar. Throughout the 60’s and 70’s, however, the area was known for its music festival run by Yehudi Menuhin, and for celebrity writers like Buckley, my mentor,...
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If the Center Cannot Hold
The surprising triumph of Donald Trump has produced what can only be described as an extended temper tantrum by much of the American left, which fully expected a victory by Hillary Clinton to be followed by unending political dominance, as the white, Christian parts of America that generally vote Republican are gradually eclipsed demographically by...
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Wall of Baloney
Anne Williamson is being generous to Jeffrey Sachs (“The Many Reinventions of Jeffrey Sachs,” View, February). I was in Poland on sabbatical from Rice University in the same time frame working (gratis) for Unido in the introduction of Deming Statistical Process control. I trained economists and mathematicians in the Deming paradigm and then sent them...
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Did Populism “Lose”?
After the Dutch election on March 15, both Dutch and international media delivered a unanimous verdict: Prime Minister Mark Rutte had “won the election.” Rutte’s Liberal Party “won” by losing eight seats, while his coalition partner, the Labour Party, suffered an historic loss of 29 seats. Geert Wilders, on the other hand, “lost” because his...
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War on Louisville—or War on Kentucky?
In one corner, there is Kentucky’s upbeat governor, whose attractive wife, five biological children, and four adopted children compose a family too large to fit into the traditional governor’s mansion. New England-bred Matthew Bevin speaks out for religious freedom, promotes infrastructure on behalf of orphans in Africa and India, and has tried every trick in...
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The Bruckner Problem
There is a Bruckner Problem, yes, or there are even Bruckner Problems, but I think that the longer we consider these problems, the less problematical they are. The first problem is, where to start? We might suppose that Anton Bruckner (1824-96) is remarkable in the fascinating quality of his work. Hardly any composer except Mahler...
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What the Editors Are Reading
In spring, my thoughts turn first to the Southwest, that most beautiful and haunting part of it especially, the canyon country of southeastern Utah. There was a time when I pulled my horses down there every year toward the end of March and spent a week or ten days riding and camping south of Moab...
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Books in Brief
John Adams’s Republic: The One, the Few, and the Many, by Richard Alan Ryerson (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press; 555 pp., $60.00). This very excellent and elegantly written book by the editor of the Adams Papers between 1983 and 2001 draws on the second American President’s entire corpus of political writing, from his books...
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The Seven-Year Itch
It has been seven years since the Democratic members of Congress, ridden herd by their majority leader, Nancy Pelosi, passed the Affordable Care Act, inaccurately nicknamed ObamaCare. During those years, four things happened: President Obama and his party insisted that the law was proving itself a success, Obama Care developed an increasing number of serious...
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The End of Something
It is remarkable how little notice the advent in America of the self-driving car has drawn. Who would have imagined that mobile, road-obsessed, and by-auto-possessed Americans whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents made their prized automobiles the center of their recreational lives and prided themselves on their prowess behind the wheel and their supercharged engines would...
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No Place for Humanity: Our Free-Chosen Dystopia
By the time of Donald Trump’s inauguration, George Orwell was at the top of Amazon.com’s best-seller list. Readers had developed a sudden passion for antitotalitarian literature, it seemed—not only for Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four but for Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism as well. And with the surge of interest in Orwell came a sales revival for...
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On Deaf Ears
Picture this: A president, working partly through a political appointee at CIA headquarters, presses the intelligence community to come up with the “right” intelligence that this president needs to justify his actions. The president has singled out a particular foreign leader for demonization, has convinced himself that this leader is the embodiment of evil, and...
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The Fun of Brexit
Arron Banks looks out proudly and pugnaciously from the cover of Bad Boys of Brexit like a character in a Hogarth engraving, flanking the equally Hogarthian Nigel Farage in a photo taken as Farage faced the globe’s agog media on the auspicious morning of June 24, 2016. The four men pictured—Banks, Farage, Richard Tice, and...
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The Vanity Press Remains
When, in 2009, a shady Russian oligarch and his foppish son took over London’s Evening Standard, the great British journalist Perry Worsthorne remarked, “I think it’s one more example that we are no more a serious nation.” Well, Perry, you were right, but I suspect even you didn’t see how silly British high society could...
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Racial Follies
Get Out Produced by Blumhouse Productions Written and directed by Jordan Peele Distributed by Universal Pictures Fences Produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures Directed by Denzel Washington Screenplay based on August Wilson’s play From what I had read in advance of seeing Get Out, a film written and directed by Jordan Peele, I had...
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Blurred Lines
What’s with Pope Francis? What has been his effect on the Church? To understand the situation we need to look at secular culture, the state of the Church, and Francis himself. Public culture today is atheistic. It excludes God, natural law, and higher goods; bases morality on individual preferences; and views reason as a way...
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