As Chronicles editor Chilton Williamson, Jr., noted, Mr. David Brooks of the New York Times has written an editorial in praise of (and perhaps blaming) our late colleague and friend Sam Francis for accurately describing the American proscenium and providing profound structural analyses of the cultural and economic plight of Middle Americans. Dr. Francis shared...
Year: 2017
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Don’t Defund ‘Sanctuary’ Jurisdictions, Prosecute their Officials
Letter from Pergamum-on-the-Potomac One of President Donald Trump’s first actions after taking office was his Executive Order of January 25, 2017, instructing the Departments of Justice (DOJ) and Homeland Security (DHS) to deny federal grant money for local law enforcement activities to cities and counties refusing to cooperate with the federal government in dealing with...
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Merkel’s Mutilated Victory
German general elections are usually rather boring affairs, with polite debates, disagreements over minor issues and predictable outcomes. The one last Sunday was an exception. It was interesting not because the incumbent, veteran “center-right” Chancellor Angela Merkel (a nominal Christian Democrat), and the “center-left” opposition leader Martin Schulz (a nominal Social Democrat) differ on any...
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Trump—American Gaullist
If a U.S. president calls an adversary “Rocket Man . . . on a mission to suicide,” and warns his nation may be “totally destroyed,” other ideas in his speech will tend to get lost. Which is unfortunate. For buried in Donald Trump’s address is a clarion call to reject transnationalism and to re-embrace a...
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Sam Francis at the New York Times
David Brooks devotes his column in the New York Times today (22 September 2017) to a generous appreciation of Sam Francis, whom he calls “one of the most prescient writers of the past 50 years.” Francis’s name surfaced unexpectedly during the presidential campaign last year when the media took note of the role he and his...
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Killing Due Process in the War on Terror
From the October 2013 issue of Chronicles. One striking feature of the U.S. Constitution is the number of procedural rights guaranteed to individuals accused of criminal behavior before they can be deprived of life, liberty, or property. The overall guarantee of due process of law contained in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments constitutes the basic...
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The Old Ways Were Better
Harking back fondly to the standards of half a century go—aah, weren’t those the blithe, happy days?—won’t get you much of a hearing from today’s self-appointed arbiters of college and university moral questions. I don’t care. Let’s do it anyway. The standards of half a century ago concerning male-female relationships were infinitely better—galactically better—than the...
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Who Truly Imperils Our Free Society?
“The Barbarian cannot make . . . he can befog and destroy but . . . he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.” Hilaire Belloc’s depiction of the barbarian is recalled to mind as the statues honoring the history and heroes of...
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Kim’s Challenge
[Credit: By Roman Harak (North Korea – Kumsusan) [CC BY-SA 2.0]] As President Trump makes his UN General Assembly debut this week—the body he has rightly called weak, incompetent, bad for democracy, and no friend of the United States—North Korea still dominates the headlines. It presents a problem in need of sober management. While it is...
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A ‘Read-My-Lips’ Moment for Trump?
“Having cut a deal with Democrats for help with the debt ceiling, will Trump seek a deal with Democrats on amnesty for the ‘Dreamers’ in return for funding for border security?” The answer to that question, raised in my column a week ago, is in. Last night, President Donald Trump cut a deal with “Chuck...
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Remembering Moynihan
From the December 2015 issue of Chronicles. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) was the most substantial intellectual to reach high political office in the United States since Woodrow Wilson. Thus his life, writings, policy deliberations, and political efforts, and the effects of these, deserve the most careful and respectful attention. If the apocalyptic era of European...
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The American Military Uncontained
When it comes to the “world’s greatest military,” the news has been shocking. Two fast U.S. Navy ships colliding with slow-moving commercial vessels with tragic loss of life. An Air Force that has been in the air continuously for years and yet doesn’t have enough pilots to fly its combat jets. Ground troops who find...
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Tribalism Marches On!
Recently, a columnist-friend, Matt Kenney, sent me a 25-year-old newspaper with his chiding that my column had been given better play. Both had run in The Orange County Register on June 30, 1991. “Is there no room for new nations in the New World Order?” was my title, and the column began: “In turning a...
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The Pentagon’s New Wonder Weapons for World Dominion
Mongol airships fire disintegrator rays to destroy America. (Buck Rodgers, 2429 A.D., 2-9-1929, Roland N. Anderson Collection) [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.] Not quite a century ago, on January 7, 1929, newspaper...
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Trump Dumps the Do-Nothing Congress
Donald Trump is president today because he was seen as a doer not a talker. Among the most common compliments paid him in 2016 was, “At least he gets things done!” And it was exasperation with a dithering GOP Congress, which had failed to enact his or its own agenda, that caused Trump to pull...
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Carry On
From the August 2014 issue of Chronicles. The modern world abounds in modern heresies. One might say that modernity itself is a heresy—modernity understood in the broadest possible terms as the antithesis of the traditional: the fundamental distinction, as Claude Polin recently argued in this magazine, overlying all subordinate political and cultural oppositions, beginning with...
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A Theory of Fairness
From the December 1998 issue of Chronicles. “Mine is better than ours.” —Benjamin Franklin Tom Bethell, here as often before, uses sturdy common sense to challenge experts in their own field. In a controversial article many years ago, he dared to suggest that evolutionary biologists have exaggerated the evidence for Darwinism. Though...
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Should Japan and South Korea Go Nuclear?
By setting off a 100-kiloton bomb, after firing a missile over Japan, Kim Jong Un has gotten the world’s attention. What else does he want? Almost surely not war with America. For no matter what damage Kim could visit on U.S. troops and bases in South Korea, Okinawa and Guam, his country would be destroyed...
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The Meaning of Macron—and the “Right” in the West
“He is on the right.” “That party represents the right.” These are standard expressions that are familiar today in the West, including France. But as usual, few understand or even care about the precise meaning of the word. Most people either hurl it as an insult, or claim it as a virtue. For example, after...
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The Abnormal Nation
Since the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990, Germans have debated the question of whether their country can ever be a “normal” one again. A current best-selling book—Finis Germania, by Rolf Peter Sieferle, a former left-wing intellectual who committed suicide before its publication—argues that since 1945 the German people have made scapegoats of...
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Gloriously Complicated
On June 8, British democracy did everything it wasn’t supposed to do. Having called a snap general election, Prime Minister Theresa May was expected to sweep everything before her. She did not. The Tories were said to be on the verge of the largest electoral landslide in postwar British history. They were not. May’s opponent,...
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Still Unexplained
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), dean of St. Patrick’s Church of Ireland cathedral in Dublin, was a most remarkable man. To begin with, he wrote two of the cleverest, most original books in English, Gulliver’s Travels and A Tale of a Tub, in prose that David Hume described as “the first polite prose we have,” i.e., the...
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Nothing in the Middle
Have you noticed? Newspapers and television channels across the land have discovered a new kind of human-interest story: the business-owning, family-man illegal immigrant who gets deported after living in this country for decades as a productive noncitizen. CNN’s website headlined the story of one Joel Colindres, “This is the face of deportation: A dad with...
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The Future of Politics
It is a healthy and encouraging sign when politicians don’t know where they’re going because they have no idea what’s coming next, which pretty much describes the state of politics in the West today. Among the various political groupings, only liberals know where they wish to go—and that is simply where they’ve been going for...
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Make Yourself at Home
“Unless you were born here, you will never really be at home in this city.” Amy and I heard those words (or a variation thereof) over and over again in early 1996, as we met new people in our adopted hometown of Rockford, Illinois. We continued to hear them occasionally through the years; the last...
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Unflinching Women
Lady Macbeth Produced by Sixty Six Pictures, BBC Films, and The British Film Institute Directed by William Oldroyd Screenplay by Alice Birch from the novel by Nikolai Leskov A Quiet Passion Produced by Hurricane Films Written and directed by Terence Davies Distributed by Music Box Films The reviews of Lady Macbeth have been nearly unanimous, proclaiming it a...
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Eine Kleiber Ist Genug—Nicht
When Carlos Kleiber died in 2004, the world didn’t find it out until he had been gone for six days. The elusive maestro/uncanny conductor had escaped the exploitative notice of the press for one last time. There were the predictable reactions to the passing of the mystery man, but there was a difficulty in comparisons,...
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The Tragedy of Richard Nixon
Pat Buchanan’s new biography of Richard Nixon’s presidency is the first volume anyone looking at that tumultuous time should turn to. Having served as Nixon’s researcher and speechwriter starting in 1966, Buchanan, not yet 30, followed the victorious President into the White House in 1969. In Nixon’s White House Wars, Buchanan makes it clear that...
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The Tragedy of Richard Nixon
Pat Buchanan’s new biography of Richard Nixon’s presidency is the first volume anyone looking at that tumultuous time should turn to. Having served as Nixon’s researcher and speechwriter starting in 1966, Buchanan, not yet 30, followed the victorious President into the White House in 1969. In Nixon’s White House Wars, Buchanan makes it clear that Nixon’s tragic...
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Opposite Directions
History not only repeats itself but inverts itself. When these things happen simultaneously, the result is precisely what is happening today, as conservatives return to their “isolationist” roots and progressives return to their warmongering ways. That’s the repetition. The inversion comes into play with the current anti-Russian hysteria, which we haven’t seen since the icy...
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What I Saw (and Prayed) in New Orleans
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always...
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Outdated
Albert and David Maysles’s classic documentary Grey Gardens provided a disturbing snapshot of 1970’s American upper-class life, replete with mentally ill dowagers, feral cats, and a crumbling estate. In early 1971, the Maysles brothers started filming the daily activities of Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale, “Big Edie,” and her daughter, Edith Bouvier Beale, “Little Edie,” the...
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What Harvey Wrought
Like 9/11, Hurricane Harvey brought us together. In awe at the destruction 50 inches of rain did to East Texas and our fourth-largest city and in admiration as cable television showed countless hours of Texans humanely and heroically rescuing and aiding fellow Texans in the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. On display this week...
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A Small Victory for Europe
As the new French President, Emmanuel Macron seems determined to hitch opposites together, combine like with dislike, compatibles with incompatibles, and otherwise fudge his policies as he did during the electoral campaign. As a candidate for the office, he praised Angela Merkel’s decision to accept a million “refugees” from the Middle East and elsewhere—but has...
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What the Editors Are Reading
As the author of a travel book as well as many novels, I’ve often suspected that writing a superior work in the first category is a greater challenge than writing one in the second. The comparative difficulties become clear when you develop the same material, as nonfiction first and then again as a novel, with...
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Books in Brief
The Retreat of Western Liberalism, by Edward Luce (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press; 240 pp., $24.00). Almost by the author’s admission, the title of this book is a falsehood. Liberalism is not retreating. It is being pushed back by “populists,” which is what liberals call people who are against liberalism because they are, for the...
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Still Printing the Legend
I have to admit, I began reading Roger D. McGrath’s article “The Real McCoy,” (Sins of Omission, August) about Tim McCoy with the suspicion that he was just pulling my leg, but was drawn in enough to read it to the end. There really are people in this world like Tim McCoy, whose lives keep...
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Parties and Strange Bedfellows
London summer parties are a dime a dozen. The moment the weather turns hot, Englishmen cast aside their brollies and head for a garden party. This year was no different. I spent from the latter part of June until mid-July in England, and went to more parties than there are Trump haters in New York...
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A Conservative Tax Code
Few American objects attract more scorn than the federal Internal Revenue Code. When initially drafted in 1914, it contained 11,400 words, about the length of a long magazine article. Today, the Code weighs in at about four million words, with another six million in supportive regulations. Its garbled syntax is easily ridiculed. Tax attorney Joseph...
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The Poison and the Antidote
No historian worth his honoraria ascribes major social change to a single factor. That is ideology, not history. Nonetheless, an ideology has been and remains a large cause of America’s cultural and moral decline over the past half century. It is an ideology whose origins, history, and goals are known only to a few academics,...
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Rumors of War
By the seventh month of Donald Trump’s presidency a surreal quality to U.S. foreign policy decision-making had become evident. It is at odds with both the theoretical model and historical practice. When we talk of the “behavior” of states, what we have in mind is the process of decision-makers defining objectives, selecting specific courses of...
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Get Out
This September marks 16 years since the fateful day we simply call 9/11, when 19 Islamic jihadists caused the deaths of some 3,000 people in New York, D.C., and Pennsylvania. Less than a month after that horrible day, Operation Enduring Freedom began, as the United States invaded the “land of the Pashtuns,” Afghanistan. We’re still...
Issue
September 2017
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Remembering the Old Russia
This Fall marks the centennial of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Although few commentators today are likely to glorify that event or its aftermath, most will assume that the revolution was a regrettable necessity, which swept away a repressive and stagnant ancient regime. Such a view is false. Culturally and spiritually, that lost pre-revolutionary Russia was...
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A Terrible Twilight
George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England was published in 1935. It is an exceptionally well-written book and became a cult classic, its haunting title suggesting a mysterious crime, as in a thriller. Dangerfield’s theme was the decay of the civilization created by the British Liberal movement in the years that led up to...
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Taking a Stand in Warsaw
With a monument to the 1944 Warsaw Uprising as his backdrop, President Trump delivered a forceful speech on the eve of the G20 Summit, sounding themes that would not be welcome by most other leaders of the world’s most economically powerful countries. Trump identified “the fundamental question of our time” as whether “the West has...
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The Return of ‘Fellow Feeling’
You might say it has not been much of a month for the human race. I might myself contend that signs of life float on the flooded streets of Houston, Texas. People are acting the way people used to act, back before we were all required, seemingly, to stake out a political position and hate...
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The Unmaking of a President
The aftermath of the Cold War has seen the emergence of what neocon gurus Robert Kagan and William Kristol have called “benevolent global hegemony” of the United States. Throughout this period, key figures of both major parties have asserted that America’s unchallengeable military might was essential to the maintenance of global order. This period was...
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Can the GOP’s Shotgun Marriage Be Saved?
Wednesday morning, Nov. 9, 2016, Republicans awoke to learn they had won the lottery. Donald Trump had won the presidency by carrying Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. All three states had gone Democratic in the last six presidential elections. The GOP had won both houses of Congress. Party control of governorships and state legislatures rivaled the...
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Alfred Hitchcock’s Empty Suit
From the August 2008 issue of Chronicles. In 1939, a short, fat Englishman named Alfred Hitchcock arrived in Hollywood at the invitation of David Selznick. Impressed by Hitchcock’s work in British film, Selznick thought he would be perfect to direct Rebecca, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. Things did not go well. Selznick was among...