A week after President Donald J. Trump’s return from his 12-day tour of Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam and the Philippines, its fruits are uncertain. Trump called the trip “very epic.” On the other hand, the media and establishmentarian analysts have predictably declared that he has failed to achieve anything significant. Joshua Kurlantzick of the...
Year: 2017
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Unserious Nation
How stands John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” this Thanksgiving? How stands the country that was to be “a light unto the nations”? To those who look to cable TV for news, the answer must at the least be ambiguous. For consider the issues that have lately convulsed the public discourse of the American republic....
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Graham Crackers, Corn Flakes, and Other Grrrrreat American Heresies
From the August 2002 issue of Chronicles. “Dad,” the inquisitive youngster is bound to ask, “where do corn flakes come from?” In today’s economy, where farms are something you drive by on your way to Disneyland, the most common answer might be “Kroger” or “the 7-Eleven” instead of “from the farm, son, from cornfields.” The...
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Is America Up for a Second Cold War?
After the 19th national congress of the Chinese Communist Party in October, one may discern Premier Xi Jinping’s vision of the emerging New World Order. By 2049, the centennial of the triumph of Communist Revolution, China shall have become the first power on earth. Her occupation and humiliation by the West and Japan in the...
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Roy Moore and the Augean Stables
We were going to have this conversation one of these days—if you consider a barrage of claims, assertions, denials and calls for resignation a conversation. However, I digress. We were going to find ourselves tied in knots eventually over matters plucked from a traditional moral matrix and handed over for consideration to you and me...
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Reining in the Rogue Royal of Arabia
If the crown prince of Saudi Arabia has in mind a war with Iran, President Trump should disabuse his royal highness of any notion that America would be doing his fighting for him. Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, the 32-year-old son of the aging and ailing King Salman, is making too many enemies for his...
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Trump’s Asian Tour
In his latest Sputnik radio interview Srdja Trifkovic assesses the significance of President Donald Trump’s five-nation tour of the Asia-Pacific region which lasted almost two weeks and ended with his departure from Manila on Tuesday afternoon, November 14. (Video; The first Trifkovic segment starts at 2 minutes 20 seconds; verbatim translation from Serbian.) The first...
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Nationalism, True and False
From the December 1997 issue of Chronicles. Ruling classes exercise power through combinations of coercion and manipulation—what Machiavelli called force and fraud, or the habits of the lion and the fox that he recommended to princes who wish to stay in power. Like most princes, most ruling classes tend to be better at one than...
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That Bloodbath in the Old Dominion
The day after his “Silent Majority” speech on Nov. 3, 1969, calling on Americans to stand with him for peace with honor in Vietnam, Richard Nixon’s GOP captured the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey. By December, Nixon had reached 68 percent approval in the Gallup Poll, though, a year earlier, he had won but...
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Pietas and the Southern Agrarians
From the December 2000 issue of Chronicles. Pietas—the ancient virtue of respect for family, country, and God—is becoming increasingly difficult to practice in a nation driven half mad by guilt. Our nation’s past, once uncritically revered, is now uncritically condemned. Families are regarded as breeding pens of bigotry. And God is forever sticking His nose...
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Red Lines & Lost Credibility
A major goal of this Asia trip, said National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, is to rally allies to achieve the “complete, verifiable and permanent denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.” Yet Kim Jong Un has said he will never give up his nuclear weapons. He believes the survival of his dynastic regime depends upon them....
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A Grim Centennial
Exactly one hundred years ago—in the early hours of November 7, 1917—the Bolsheviks staged a successful coup d’etat in Petrograd. “The main operations began at 2am,” Leon Trotsky remembered five years later. “Bolshevik groups occupied the rail stations, the lighting station, military and food warehouses, the water systems, the Palace bridge, the telephone exchange, state...
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Congress’s Romance with Cowardice
War Without War Powers (the Not-So-New American Way) On September 1, 1970, soon after President Nixon expanded the Vietnam War by invading neighboring Cambodia, Democratic Senator George McGovern, a decorated World War II veteran and future presidential candidate, took to the floor of the Senate and said, “Every Senator [here] is partly responsible for sending...
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Their America, and Ours.
“Meet you at Peace Cross.” In northwest D.C. in the 1950s, that was an often-heard comment among high schoolers headed for Ocean City. The Peace Cross, in Bladensburg, Maryland, was a 40-feet concrete memorial to the 49 sons of Prince George’s County lost in the Great War. Paid for by county families and the American...
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Burnham Agonistes
From the July 2002 issue of Chronicles. “Who says A must say B.” —James Burnham Most adult conservatives as well as many educated people know that James Burnham was an anticommunist author and columnist for William F. Buckley’s National Review; a number of others will be aware that Burnham’s name seems to flap through the...
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A Great Perhaps
“I am going to seek a great perhaps . . . ” —François Rabelais Sale’s theme is the restoration of “human scale” in all our works: architectural, political, economic, educational, and technological. His thesis is that only radical decentralization can achieve this aim. Sale first ventured into this territory with a book called Human Scale,...
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The Trumping of the GOP
There were two reasons to support Donald J. Trump in the presidential campaign last year. The first was the man himself, whom one could trust to deliver a much needed shock to the utterly narcissistic, self-involved American political system that would knock it off stasis and get it moving again in a sane and responsible...
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Not for Hunting
The Las Vegas shooter who murdered some five-dozen country-music fans and injured over 500 more had barely cashed in his chips when Democrats, celebrities, and the punditocracy—not yet knowing exactly which guns the killer used—began calling for their favorite gun-control measures and blaming the NRA, Republicans, and even country-music fans themselves for this latest episode...
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The Birth of National-Globalism
Following President Trump’s maiden speech to the U.N. General Assembly on September 19, ideologically incompatible analysts have found similar reasons to cheer or condemn the 40-minute oration. To Breitbart’s Adam Shaw it was a powerful, nationalist, full-throated defense of Trump’s “America First” agenda. To the far more numerous Trumpophobic pundits—like the Chicago Tribune’s David Rothkopf—it...
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The Convenient Religion
Everyone in America today—right, left, or middle, if there still is one—can agree that the explosive political response to Donald Trump’s presidency is unprecedented in American political history. Liberals’ clinically hysterical reaction to the President’s plans for The Wall, to the travel ban, to his response to the Charlottesville affair, and to his cancellation of...
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An Uncertain Trump
During the seemingly endless presidential campaign, Donald Trump was often both courageous and decisive, repeatedly refusing to back down from “gaffes” that were unpopular with the media because they were actually expressions of the populist nationalism that won him the White House. Since entering the White House, though, it often seems that, rather than draining...
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Love Thyself: The West’s Fatal Flaw
I am told President Trump has said that “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” In the September issue of Chronicles, several authors, such as Aaron Wolf, either directly or indirectly dealt with this same crucial question. What follows is a mere snippet of additional reflection. What...
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Too Steep a Price: Why the Liberal Family Died
Over half a century ago, the family system advocated by John Locke and modeled on Lockean liberalism seemed to have triumphed completely in the United States, in Western Europe, and globally. In that model, marriage is viewed as a contract between equals, in which fathers are allowed to take on the “soft patriarchal” roles of...
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The Terminal Playboy
When he died on September 27 at the age of 91, Hugh Hefner was no playboy. He was an old man trapped in what amounted to a factory, surrounded by silicone, plastic, and hydrogen compounds. Playboy’s circulation had peaked 45 years earlier with its November 1972 issue. Even before then, Hef’s magazine had long ceded...
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Rediscovering the Paterfamilias
Cicero wrote De Officiis to his son, Marcus, a student of philosophy who had just finished his first year in Athens. Though Cicero does not state it directly, the work is meant to supplement what, to his mind, Greek philosophy lacked most: good practical sense and the principles of action. He sought to fuse Greek...
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Of Places and Ideas
Bravo to Jason Michael Morgan for his essay “The Pernicious Myth of Two Americas” (View, October). I am one of those people who live in America, the place, not America, the idea. Specifically, Middle America—the Heartland, some would say. I am not a Facebooker, so I was unaware, until I read Mr. Morgan’s article, of...
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Mad Bombers of the Amazon
photo of Jeff Bezos by Steve Jurvetson (CC BY 2.0) Instead of getting life without parole in one of those white isolation cells in the toughest of jails for aiding and abetting terrorism, he is fêted the world over and is among America’s wealthiest men, after Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Step forward, Jeff Bezos...
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America Mispriced
Warren Buffett once joked that only when the tide goes out do we realize who’s been swimming naked. Hurricane Harvey’s gale force winds and 50-plus inches of rain will give Houstonians a similarly embarrassing realization. Cable news channels fire-hosed viewers with minute-by-minute coverage of the Bayou City’s destruction, raking in advertisers’ dollars by pandering to...
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German Shock
The liberal faith in the power of incantation is but one of many ways in which liberalism reveals its essentially religious nature. Following the politically complex Dutch elections and the relatively poor showing of the Front National in the French ones last spring, Western liberals were in a hurry to suggest that “populism” in Europe...
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Checkmating Middle America
America’s descent into banana republicanism continues apace, and on two fronts. To begin with, we learn that President Trump’s much-disdained assertion that Trump Tower was being wiretapped during the election campaign turns out to be absolutely true. On September 19, CNN reported that Paul Manafort, who lived in Trump Tower and was Trump’s campaign manager...
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Bleached Chicken, Brexit, and Trump
Will he? Won’t he? Ever since Donald Trump emerged as a serious presidential contender last year, the British have been excited at the thought of his arrival in the motherland. Better yet, we have delighted ourselves with the possibility of denying him a visit to meet the Queen. That sort of thing makes us Brits...
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No Time for Indulgences
Back in the good old days, we could afford to argue among ourselves about justification by faith alone, indulgences, and the intercession of the Virgin Mary. But now, with abortion, gay marriage, and illegitimacy exalted in popular culture and protected by law, and with religious freedom under assault, we should set aside our differences so...
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The Camelot-Chequers Axis
Christopher Sandford of this parish is not only an adorner of these pages but has also garnered considerable status as a cultural historian. His inquiring eyes range widely, playing over everything from cricket to Kurt Cobain, the Great War to The Great Escape, Conan Doyle to Eric Clapton, and countless other late-19th- and 20th-century Anglospheric...
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Breeding Mosquitos
“Where there’s no solution,” James Burnham used to remark, “there’s no problem.” That’s easy for him to say, the modern populist conservative replies. Burnham died while Reagan was still in office! What did he know about problems? Ah, the Golden Age of the 1980’s, when life was good. At least until we compare it with...
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What the Editors Are Reading
When I was growing up in Manhattan the generational text for the generation immediately before mine was The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger. My tastes in high school ran to Thomas Wolfe (of course), Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, and Faulkner, etc., and I took it actually as both a point and...
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Stepping Ashore
The best poetry—great poetry—happens when sound, rhythm, and image bring about a mysterious feeling of wholeness that somehow draws mind, body, and spirit together in what both Yeats and Eliot envisioned as a unified dance. What we call “the power of the word” is really a pattern of words in a rhythm originating in heartbeat...
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Worse at What It Is
New York is always changing: It’s the city that never sleeps. When local writer Kay Hymowitz wrote a book about Brooklyn recently she talked about “creative destruction” on almost every other page. She had a point, and the city has seen both sides of the process. Beginning in the 1960’s, the gales of creative destruction...
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The Vocal Scene
photo of Rosa Ponselle as Reiza in Oberon Of course my account of “the vocal scene” is not by the late George Jellinek—that cultured gentleman of Hungarian background. He had an extensive, even encyclopedic knowledge of the history of singing. His presentations of The Vocal Scene were the best things of their kind I have...
Issue
November 2017
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Unlovable Losers: The Left in Perspective
Not long after last fall’s presidential election, an entire wall in New York City’s Union Square subway station was plastered with hundreds of protestors’ Post-it notes, hailed by Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration as “subway therapy” for the losing side, but more akin to a billboard for the demented, all berserk with rage, contrived hysteria,...
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Allegorically Yours
mother! Produced by Protozoa Pictures Written and directed by Darren Aronofsky Distributed by Paramount Pictures The Unknown Girl Produced by Les Films du Fleuve Written and directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne Distributed by Sundance Select Wind River Produced by Acacia Filmed Entertainment Written and directed by Taylor Sheridan Distributed by The Weinstein Company I...
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Recessional
“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken . . . ” P.G. Wodehouse reached for Keats to describe his emotions when he read the first of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman saga. Fraser had already joined the glorious company of famously successful authors who were turned...
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Books in Brief
Ernest Hemingway: A New Life, by James M. Hutchisson (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press; 320 pp., $37.95). As readers and critics had learned everything that is important to know about Hemingway and his work decades ago, subsequent books about the novelist have concentrated on viewing and re-viewing him from various angles. Hutchisson admits...
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China: Xi in Charge
In the aftermath of last week’s finale of the Communist Party of China’s (CCP) 19th congress, many commentators have opined that President Xi Jinping is now the country’s most powerful leader since Deng Xiaoping. This is incorrect. Xi is the most powerful leader since Mao Zedong at home, and arguably the most influential Chinese player...
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That Other Plot—to Bring Down Trump
Well over a year after the FBI began investigating “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Vladimir Putin, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has brought in his first major indictment. Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort has been charged with a series of crimes dating back years, though none is tied directly to President Donald Trump or 2016....
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From America With Love
U.S. Commandos Are a “Persistent Presence” on Russia’s Doorstep “They are very concerned about their adversary next door,” said General Raymond Thomas, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), at a national security conference in Aspen, Colorado, in July. “They make no bones about it.” The “they” in question were various Eastern European and...
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It’s Trump’s Party Now
“More is now required of us than to put down our thoughts in writing,” declaimed Jeff Flake in his oration against President Trump, just before he announced he will be quitting the Senate. Though he had lifted the title of his August anti-Trump polemic, “Conscience of a Conservative,” from Barry Goldwater, Jeff Flake is no...
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China: Xi Fortifies Control
In an interview with the Iranian English-language network Press TV Srdja Trifkovic discusses the significance of President Xi Jinping’s emergence as China’s most powerful leader in decades, following the end of the Communist Party congress on October 25. Video (interview starts after 50 seconds) Q: What do you think of Xi’s reelection, considering the fact...
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Duty, Honor, Atrocity
George W. Bush Receives a Character Award at West Point In George W. Bush’s home state of Texas, if you are an ordinary citizen found guilty of capital murder, the mandatory sentence is either life in prison or the death penalty. If, however, you are a former president of the United States responsible for initiating...
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Are Our Mideast Wars Forever?
“The Kurds have no friends but the mountains,” is an old lament. Last week, it must have been very much on Kurdish minds. As their U.S. allies watched, the Kurdish peshmerga fighters were run out of Kirkuk and all the territory they had captured fighting ISIS alongside the Americans. The Iraqi army that ran them...