“Breathitt County in east Kentucky is the only county in the United States not to have had selective service enforced during the Second World War. That was because there were so many volunteers.” —Gordon McKinney Since I have long been convinced that the Appalachian South embodies a grounded yet radical alternative to the American mainstream,...
Abortion politics has consumed my adult life, starting in 1972 when, at 17, I helped defeat the abortion-legalization Measure B on Michigan’s ballot. A few weeks later, on January 22, 1973—like December 7, 1941, a date that will live in infamy—the U.S. Supreme Court dive-bombed the country by erasing all state abortion laws—including in those...
Aaron D. Wolf has written the best summary I have seen of the moral confusion of the Millennials (“Rise of the Alt-Left: After This, the Deluge,” View, January): “Their morality is . . . entirely relativistic and personal. They are the world.” Wolf asks, “Who will teach them otherwise?” Yes, a very difficult reeducation problem...
One symptom of decline and confusion at the end of an age is the prevalent misuse of terms, of designations that have been losing their meanings and are thus no longer real. One such term is public opinion. Used still by political thinkers, newspapers, articles, institutes, research centers, college and university courses and their professors,...
It was a clarion call to his supporters and a hard slap in the face to his adversaries—the latter being gathered just a few feet behind him as he delivered his Inaugural Address. Donald J. Trump never minces words, and on January 20 he showed that he isn’t about to start, now that he’s President...
We are living in a racially charged climate. Problems associated with the relations between the races seem endemic to all areas of our sad and beleaguered culture. Discussions of law enforcement are dominated by the alleged racism of police officers and whether “black lives matter.” The ongoing debate on immigration seems centered on the alleged...
The founding fathers of the Munich Security Conference, said John McCain, would be “be alarmed by the turning away from universal values and toward old ties of blood, and race, and sectarianism.” McCain was followed by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov who called for a “post-West world order.” Russia has “immense potential” for that said Lavrov,...
State Department Foreign Service Officers are an elite group. Well-educated, fluent in foreign languages, knowledgeable of foreign cultures, they help inform U.S. foreign policy and carry out its day-to-day implementation. Entry into the Foreign Service is highly competitive. Annually, over 20,000 hopefuls take the Foreign Service exam: in recent years the State Department has hired...
As the culture war is about irreconcilable beliefs about God and man, right and wrong, good and evil, and is at root a religious war, it will be with us so long as men are free to act on their beliefs. Yet, given the divisions among us, deeper and wider than ever, it is an...
At the security conference in Munich over the weekend and at the EU headquarters in Brussels on Monday, VP Mike Pence offered profuse assurances to the European elite class that the Trump administration supports unity and cohesion in the face of various threats allegedly facing the Western alliance. His remarks amounted to an explicit repudiation...
Among the reasons Donald Trump is president is that he read the nation and the world better than his rivals. He saw the surging power of American nationalism at home, and of ethnonationalism in Europe. And he embraced Brexit. While our bipartisan establishment worships diversity, Trump saw Middle America recoiling from the demographic change brought...
When Gen. Michael Flynn was forced to resign as national security adviser, Bill Kristol purred his satisfaction, “If it comes to it, prefer the deep state to the Trump state.” To Kristol, the permanent regime, not the elected president and his government, is the real defender and rightful repository of our liberties. Yet it was...
The resignation of General Michael Flynn as President Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor is just the beginning. Trump is the real target. Trump is hated in Washington at all levels, including the Republican Party leadership, which cannot wait to backstab him, as well as the federal bureaucracy, the intelligence agencies and foreign policy establishment, the...
To those who lived through that era that tore us apart in the ’60s and ’70s, it is starting to look like “deja vu all over again.” And as Adlai Stevenson, Bobby Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey did then, Democrats today like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are pandering to the hell-raisers, hoping to ride their...
The Western world in general, and Europe in particular, are threatened not only by a numerically small, overtly jihadist cadre of “radicalized” individuals engaging in terrorism. The West is in mortal peril from a demographically explosive, ideologically highly developed, yet decentralized and structurally amorphous Islamic movement. To discuss the world-historical implications of this movement—which has...
As he completes his third week in office Donald Trump has already stunned the world with his “shock and awe” campaign to keep promises made when he was a candidate. The mere fact of a politician doing what he said he would do seems to have unsettled the nerves of his opponents. What is called...
“Disheartening and demoralizing,” wailed Judge Neil Gorsuch of President Trump’s comments about the judges seeking to overturn his 90-day ban on travel to the U.S. from the Greater Middle East war zones. What a wimp. Did our future justice break down crying like Sen. Chuck Schumer? Sorry, this is not Antonin Scalia. And just what...
Is Donald Trump to be allowed to craft a foreign policy based on the ideas on which he ran and won the presidency in 2016? Our foreign policy elite’s answer appears to be a thunderous no. Case in point: U.S. relations with Russia. During the campaign Trump was clear. He would seek closer ties with...
When Gen. Michael Flynn marched into the White House Briefing Room to declare that “we are officially putting Iran on notice,” he drew a red line for President Trump. In tweeting the threat, Trump agreed. His credibility is now on the line. And what triggered this virtual ultimatum? Iran-backed Houthi rebels, said Flynn, attacked a...
On November 8 last year, Donald Trump prevented a resurrection of the Clinton administration 16 years after it left office. That same day, in an election paid scant attention by the national media, the spirit of George W. Bush’s administration was given new life in Wyoming, where Liz Cheney, a daughter of former Vice President...
The only way the American political class will ever accommodate itself to the reality of post-Soviet Russia would be if that country succumbed to the second leftist revolution it has been trying for years to incite. Whether the revolutionaries called themselves communists or “liberal democrats” would make little or no difference so long as the...
Taking up one of Graham Greene’s many novels has for me always been a hit-or-miss affair. Over the Christmas holidays I read The Honorary Consul, a copy of which I’ve owned for years. The Third World setting, this time Argentina, will be familiar to Greene’s admirers, and so will the author’s abiding preoccupation with religious...
August 1914: France, the Great War, and a Month That Changed the World Forever, by Bruno Cabanes; translated by Stephanie O’Hara (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; 230 pp., $27.50). This superb and marvelously readable work of social and political history, drawn from a wide variety of personal and official documents and records, recounts the...
The Democrats and the rest of the left are taking the results of last November’s election no better than they predicted the Republicans and the right would do if their man lost. The street riots, lawsuits, recounts, constitutional challenges, furious denial, and refusal to accept the electoral decision in a spirit of peace, resignation, and...
“Jeff Sachs is like the March Hare in Alice in Wonderland, moving from cup to cup. He can never return to any country that he advised, since they all hate him. It happened in Latin America, in Slovenia, in Poland, a few of the Baltic States, and it was the same in Russia. They maintain...
Returning to the embrace of the Eternal City is never difficult. Its many charms make one easily forget the minor inconveniences: the strikes, noise pollution, and general chaos. The city’s many glories, both pagan and Christian, are always on display, easily accessible, even to the most unsophisticated of visitors. Over the past decade, my wife...
Gilbert & Sullivan’s enduring operetta The Mikado is funny because it skewers Victorian British society by allowing us to laugh at the absurdities of the fictive Japanese town of Titipu, where flirting is a capital offense, according to the autocratic rule of the emperor (Mikado). Nanki-Poo loves Yum-Yum, who is pledged to Lord High Executioner...
Are addictions real? We talk as if they are. Many women say they are addicted to chocolate. Actor David Duchovny has been diagnosed with having a sex addiction. In the early 90’s, when crack was all the rage, one Christian pop singer encouraged young people to get off drugs and get “Addicted to Jesus.” What...
Call me old fashioned, and I will thank you for the compliment. Call me a fool for rosy nostalgia, and more thanks will be in order. Yes, Fred and Ginger are my favorite movie couple, and last year while recuperating from a broken leg, I watched four of their movies back to back, shown on...
To address the main question first: Yes, they really can. That’s the definitive answer to America’s burning cultural debate of the 1960’s about whether or not the Monkees could actually play their musical instruments. Perhaps you remember the general contours of the arguments pro and con: on the one hand, that the Monkees were four...
Nocturnal Animals Produced by Fade to Black Productions Directed and written by Tom Ford, based on Austin Wright’s novel Tony and Susan Distributed by Focus Features Doctor Strange Produced by Marvel and Disney Studios Directed and written by Scott Derrickson Distributed by Walt Disney Studios Erstwhile fashion designer turned film director Tom Ford seems to...
The election of Donald Trump has upended the expectations of what paleoconservatives and others have long called Conservatism, Inc. The influence of establishment conservatism all but evaporated during the primaries, as its chosen champions—Bush, Rubio, Cruz, Jindal, and the rest—fell one by one. As President-Elect, Trump moved away from an unthinking reliance on Republican lobbyists...
Things are not so bad with the National Anthem as James O. Tate might think (“The Twilight’s Last Gleaming,” The Music Column, December). In October I attended the fall meeting of Keeneland Racetrack in Lexington, Kentucky. On one of the days, the announcer told us that the anthem would now be sung by a young...
As a new subscriber to Chronicles, I was drawn to Chilton Williamson’s reply to Mr. Patterson in the December issue (“Start Somewhere,” Polemics & Exchanges). He wrote that “ideology by definition is silly.” It made me recall my late Austrian friend, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. Mr. Williamson may be aware of Erik’s 1981 article, “The Portland...
Just after 6 p.m. on Super Bowl Sunday, February 7, 2016, a tuxedo-clad Alex Smith sat alone on stage at a grand piano near the 50-yard line in Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, set to accompany Lady Gaga as she sang the National Anthem to introduce the championship game between the Carolina Panthers and...
Knowing what is going on in the Hobbesian world of international politics is an essential function of the state apparatus. Detecting, assessing, and countering external threats, real and potential, helped the Byzantine empire survive a thousand years longer than its Western counterpart—well beyond its strictly geopolitical potential for endurance. Essential to its longevity was its...
After five days of MSM hysteria, President Trump remains justifiably unruffled by the establishment organs’ opprobrium. His January 27 executive order on immigration and refugees is reasonable and legal, and it enjoys strong popular support. In the medium-to-long term Trump has much bigger fish to fry than a temporary ban on citizens from seven failed,...
When people compare politics to sports, they do not mean the comparison to be flattering. Voters, we are told, treat politics as irrationally as sports fans do football, baseball, basketball, and hockey. (The less said about soccer, the better—a good principle for life in general.) In this analogy, the Democratic and Republican parties are the...
Fake news, as I discussed last month (“Faking It,” The Rockford Files), is a very real problem, though less for the reasons commonly given (the potentially destructive effects it may have on our “democracy”) and more for the fact that it both flows from a lack of concern for truth (and thus says something about...
For years I taught a course on the history of World War II. I liked to ask the students if any of them had ever flown into Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Invariably, one or more in each class had. This was not surprising, because for the last 40 or 50 years O’Hare has been the...
George Goodwin’s new book on Benjamin Franklin explores the 18 years Franklin spent in England working as a printer (1726-28) and as an agent representing the Pennsylvania assembly and other American colonies (1757-62, 1766-75). The author of this excellent book is an Englishman who offers fresh insights into the period from a British perspective. Benjamin...
As I write, the attempted CIA coup against the Trump administration is ongoing. Yes, you read that right: We’re getting awfully close to Seven Days in May territory. Through a series of leaks to the “mainstream” media, the Langley spooks have launched a propaganda campaign that outdoes any of their overseas operations by a long...
A subplot of the 2016 presidential campaign was the Green Party’s ability, for the second time in the 21st century, to achieve balance of power in a close race won by a Republican. Physician Jill Stein, 66, earned 1.4 million votes, or one percent—a miniscule amount, but more than the difference between Republican Donald Trump...
The statistics that break down the consumption of music into types and groups are not very comforting to consider. But if we really want to know what the musical situation is, rather than to entertain a fantasy of what it ought to be, we would have to acknowledge the realities of musical art in our...
On December 7, 2015—Pearl Harbor Day—candidate Donald Trump called “for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.” After applause from the large crowd at a campaign rally in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, Trump emphasized, “We have no choice. ...
In the Winter 2015/2016 issue of the Claremont Review of Books, William Voegeli argues, Conservatives have been firing shots across the bow of higher education for years, but the Ship of Fools has never turned back, or changed course. It’s time either to surrender or to shoot a round into the engine room. While the...
That hysterical reaction to the travel ban announced Friday is a portent of what is to come if President Donald Trump carries out the mandate given to him by those who elected him. The travel ban bars refugees for 120 days. From Syria, refugees are banned indefinitely. And a 90-day ban has been imposed on...
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” wrote poet Robert Frost in the opening line of “Mending Walls.” And on the American left there is something like revulsion at the idea of the “beautiful wall” President Trump intends to build along the 1,900-mile border between the U.S. and Mexico. The opposition’s arguments are usually...
As the patriotic pageantry of Inauguration Day gave way to the demonstrations of defiance Saturday, our new America came into view. We are two nations now, two peoples. Though bracing, President Trump’s inaugural address was rooted in cold truths, as he dispensed with the customary idealism of inaugurals that are forgotten within a fortnight of...