Year: 2017

During the presidency of Barack Obama, George W. Bush generally avoided public criticism of his successor. Bush’s reticence could be read as a recognition of how calamitous his presidency had been, marked as it was by a disastrous war in Iraq that cost thousands of American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives, wasted...

Asked to name the defining attributes of the America we wish to become, many liberals would answer that we must realize our manifest destiny since 1776, by becoming more equal, more diverse and more democratic—and the model for mankind’s future. Equality, diversity, democracy—this is the holy trinity of the post-Christian secular state at whose altars...

Counterinsurgency, Policing, and the Militarization of America’s Cities “This . . . thing, [the War on Drugs] this ain’t police work . . . I mean, you call something a war and pretty soon everybody gonna be running around acting like warriors . . . running around on a damn crusade, storming corners, slapping on...

With his declaration Friday that the Iran nuclear deal is not in the national interest, President Donald Trump may have put us on the road to war with Iran. Indeed, it is easier to see the collisions that are coming than to see how we get off this road before the shooting starts. After “de-certifying”...

From the June 2010 issue of Chronicles. Two politicians get conservative fundraisers’ juices flowing like no others.  One, the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, was surely mourned as much by ambitious Richard Viguerie imitators as by teary-eyed, Camelot-addled liberals.  The other, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, they hope will be a gift that keeps on...

On October 13, President Trump declared that the only way to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons was to abrogate the multilateral treaty which has been provenly effective in preventing Iran from developing such weapons. This is potentially the most serious mistake of his foreign policymaking thus far. According to Trump, “the longer we ignore...

Three decades ago, as communications director in the White House, I set up an interview for Bill Rusher of National Review. Among his first questions to President Reagan was to ask him to assess the political importance of Barry Goldwater. Said Reagan, “I guess you could call him the John the Baptist of our movement.”...

Harvey Weinstein was just expressing his little ol’ self, right? That is what you do, even when it gets you fired, as happened to Weinstein, or suspended, as happened to Jemele Hill at ESPN, or threatened with suspension, as in Jerry Jones’ blunt warning to his Cowboys about “taking a knee.” The rule-less disorder of...

Your Tax Dollars Support Troops of Defense Contractor CEOs Here’s a question for you: How do you spell boondoggle? The answer (in case you didn’t already know): P-e-n-t-a-g-o-n. Hawks on Capitol Hill and in the U.S. military routinely justify increases in the Defense Department’s already munificent budget by arguing that yet more money is needed...

To attend the Indianapolis Colts game where the number of the legendary Peyton Manning was to be retired, Vice President Mike Pence, a former governor of Indiana, flew back from Las Vegas. With him in the stadium was wife Karen. In honor of Manning, she wore a No. 18 jersey as “The Star Spangled Banner”...

Consider, if you will, these two indisputable facts. First, the United States is today more or less permanently engaged in hostilities in not one faraway place, but at least seven. Second, the vast majority of the American people could not care less. Nor can it be said that we don’t care because we don’t know....

On Saturday, tens of thousands of Poles gathered on their country’s borders to pray the rosary. The event was too large for the media to ignore, but most news reports made clear how offensive this combination of Christian faith and patriotic sentiment was to those who write the news. In their headlines, the BBC referred...

What was his motive? Why did he do it? Why did Stephen Paddock, 64, rent rooms at the Mandalay Bay hotel, sneak in an arsenal of guns, a dozen of them converted to fully automatic, and rain down death on a country music concert? “We will never know,” writes columnist Eugene Robinson. “There can be...

We were already roaring down the road when the young man called to me over his shoulder. There was a woman seated between us on the motorbike and with the distance, his accent, the rushing air, and the engine noise, it took a moment for me to decipher what he had just said: We might...

From the June 2002 issue of Chronicles. There are probably more judicial biographies of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall than of all the rest of the Supreme Court justices combined, so why another one?  R. Kent Newmyer, historian and law professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, undertook to write a work...

“An act of pure evil,” said President Trump of the atrocity in Las Vegas, invoking our ancient faith: “Scripture teaches us the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” “Our unity cannot be shattered by evil. Our bonds cannot be broken by violence,” Trump went on in his...

[This piece has been adapted and expanded from Alfred W. McCoy’s new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.] For the past 50 years, American leaders have been supremely confident that they could suffer military setbacks in places like Cuba or Vietnam without having their system...

Over the past nine days two important referendums on independence were held, in Iraqi Kurdistan (September 25) and in Catalonia (October 1). Both were met with overwhelming disapproval of the outside world. In both cases the local authorities—in Erbil and Barcelona respectively—had a short-term political agenda other than the stated grand objective. That is where...

Dunkirk Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers  Written and directed by Christopher Nolan Chuck Produced by Millennium Films  Distributed by IFC Films  Written by Jeff Feuerzeig and Jerry Stahl  Directed by Philippe Falardeau  You wouldn’t think a director who’s made three extravagantly fanciful Batman movies would be interested in turning his hand to a realistic...

I’ve at times found the great English writer and apologist G.K. Chesterton wearisome for his seemingly unending parade of paradoxes, some of which strike me as the discovery of paradoxes for paradox’s sake.  Yet paradox, as Peter Kreeft notes in his Foreword to ABCs of the Christian Life: The Ultimate Anthology of the Prince of...

At the University of Toronto, one man has shown us just how uphill the climb is against political correctness, and what sort of reaction we may expect if we fight it.  He may also have shown us how to win. In September 2016, in a series of lectures uploaded to YouTube, Jordan B. Peterson, an...

Not everyone here in the Bluegrass State was delighted by the 2007 opening of the Creation Museum in Boone County.  “There’s been such a push in recent years to improve science education,” a representative of the Kentucky Paleontology Society gloomily observed, yet creationism “still hangs around.”  Church-state separation activists were particularly upset that the government...

Sheriff Joe Arpaio, hated by the open-borders crowd but loved by those who want to uphold America’s immigration laws, has always been surrounded by controversies—they whirl around him like dust storms in the Arizona desert.  Now an even bigger storm is brewing around him, in the wake of the Trump administration’s pardon. And what, you...

The first thing to say about the Romantic Revival is that the phrase itself is a bit ambiguous, though I haven’t meant to be misleading.  Romanticism originally had an aspect of revival of the medieval, as in the Gothic revival and the revival of medieval romance.  And the phrase could also denote the return to...

Portland and Seattle have developed sizeable communities of disaffected leftists who are antagonistic toward everything that is traditional America.  Hundreds of young folks are ready at a moment’s notice to flood into the streets to protest the offense du jour.  They block traffic, vandalize cars and stores, break windows, start fires, and attack people.  They...

Russell Kirk frequently warned those who read his essays and books and attended his lectures not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.  Even at the most mundane level of everyday life, the Sage of Mecosta offered good advice.  If we spend all of our days dreaming about what might be—let alone...

We don’t need to be convinced of the European Union’s bureaucratic overreach.  Its administrative and regulatory impulses, particularly in its largest and wealthiest member states, have long been a problem.  Still, despite the ongoing challenges posed by the European “deep state” headquartered in Brussels and Strasbourg, some member states have managed to preserve a little...

When the Germans smuggled arguably the world’s most evil man into Russia 100 years ago, they did not imagine the harm they were springing on the human race.  Once Lenin had prevailed, he decided to forge a new consciousness, a New Man, as the Bolshies called it, one that would overcome “the antinomies of subjective...

In Our Interest Another Chronicles read cover to cover, with great delight.  Srdja Trifkovic’s essay “Travel Ban, and Beyond” (The American Interest, August) was a thoughtful and excellent argument for a closer examination of immigrants and visitors to our great land.  Thank you for another excellent issue.         —Mayor David Theiss Ellaville,...

A hundred years ago, in the early hours of November 7, 1917, the Bolsheviks grabbed power in Petrograd.  Within weeks they took advantage of Russia’s collapsing political and social structure to impose control over the country’s heartland.  The result of the coup was a tragedy of world-historical proportions.  A vibrant, flourishing culture (see “Remembering the...

Beethoven’s Symphonies: Nine Approaches to Art and Ideas, by Martin Geck, trans. by Stewart Spencer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 197 pp., $26.00).  Beethoven wrote his nine symphonies between 1800 and 1824 at the height of the Romantic movement that overlapped the end of the Enlightenment.  In Professor Geck’s opinion, the “First Symphony marks the...

When elected chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court in 2000, Judge Roy Moore installed in his courthouse a monument with the Ten Commandments that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai carved into it. Told by a federal court his monument violated the separation of church and state, Moore refused to remove it and was...

I have attended many professional sporting events, and I have no memory of any of my fellow spectators failing to stand for the National Anthem. Standing for “The Star-Spangled Banner” is widely recognized as a matter of common courtesy. It also represents a moment of unity, even between fans who will be cheering for different...

From the October 2012 issue of Chronicles. He was an all-American boy who became an American hero in World War II.  Born in 1920 to a father who, at the age of five, had immigrated to the United States with his family from Sweden and an American-born mother of Irish, Scottish, and English descent, Dick...

Let’s not stress out, shall we, while endeavoring to make sense of the fuss and foolishness over mass NFL boycotting of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” That would be because the fuss and foolishness themselves make no sense: save as a window for viewing the lunacies of 21st century life. Are we a nation or a holding...

“America refuses to address the pervasive evil of white cops killing black men, and I will not stand during a national anthem that honors the flag of such a country!” That is the message Colin Kaepernick sent by “taking a knee” during the singing of “The Star Spangled Banner” before San Francisco ’49s games in...