Many conservatives have become disenchanted with national politics. This disenchantment is understandable. Strong support for Republicans seeking the White House and seats in Congress has done little to conserve the type of society most of those voting Republican wanted to conserve. By almost any measure, American society has moved steadily leftward in recent decades. Social...
Year: 2017
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Splendid Dishonesty
Stephen B. Presser, Chronicles’ legal-affairs editor, identifies a crisis in American legal education. In his book Law Professors, he shows us why a newly minted graduate of an elite American law school has no clue how to handle a case or provide useful legal services. This is not a matter of just being young or...
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Who Hates Trump?
From the November 2015 issue of Chronicles. Politics is all about hatred. Never mind who you’re voting for: It’s who you’re voting against that really counts. And that’s why any disagreement I may have with Donald Trump’s actual policies is completely irrelevant. Because what really matters is that all the people I really hate—the media,...
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Is Trump Entering a Kill Box?
Given the bravery he showed in stepping out front as the first senator to endorse Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions deserves better from his boss than the Twitter-trashing he has lately received. The attorney general has not only been loyal to Trump and his agenda, he has the respect and affection of ex-colleagues in Congress and,...
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The Life of the Mind in Glitter Gulch
From the October 2000 issue of Chronicles. For seven years (1989-96), I was a full time faculty member at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). I grew up in Las Vegas, earning a B.A. in philosophy from UNLV in 1983 before going to graduate school. In August 1996, my wife and I left Nevada...
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The Hidden Costs of “National Security”
You wouldn’t know it, based on the endless cries for more money coming from the military, politicians, and the president, but these are the best of times for the Pentagon. Spending on the Department of Defense alone is already well in excess of half a trillion dollars a year and counting. Adjusted for inflation, that...
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Are America’s Wars Just and Moral?
“One knowledgeable official estimates that the CIA-backed fighters may have killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies,” writes columnist David Ignatius. Given that Syria’s prewar population was not 10 percent of ours, this is the equivalent of a million dead and wounded Americans. What justifies America’s participation in this slaughter? Columnist Eric Margolis...
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The Condottiere
From the October 1997 issue of Chronicles. We live in an age when biography flourishes, contrary to earlier expectations. The reason for this is the decline of the novel and the rise of popular interest in all kinds of history, and biography belongs within history. The problem is “all kinds”: for appetite may be fed...
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Is Iran in Our Gun Sights Now?
“Iran must be free. The dictatorship must be destroyed. Containment is appeasement and appeasement is surrender.” Thus does our Churchill, Newt Gingrich, dismiss, in dealing with Iran, the policy of containment crafted by George Kennan and pursued by nine U.S. presidents to bloodless victory in the Cold War. Why is containment surrender? “Because freedom is...
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Empire of Destruction: Precision Warfare? Don’t Make Me Laugh
You remember. It was supposed to be twenty-first-century war, American-style: precise beyond imagining; smart bombs; drones capable of taking out a carefully identified and tracked human being just about anywhere on Earth; special operations raids so pinpoint-accurate that they would represent a triumph of modern military science. Everything “networked.” It was to be a glorious...
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Up, Up, and Away
From the June 1998 issue of Chronicles In a recent PBS documentary about the exploration of Mars, a NASA scientist lectured, “We are, after all, one planet. . . . Once we get ofFour planet, especially once there’s a colony on another planet, national boundaries start to become really insignificant. . . . The New...
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The Real Crimes of Russiagate
For a year, the big question of Russiagate has boiled down to this: Did Donald Trump’s campaign collude with the Russians in hacking the DNC? And until last week, the answer was “no.” As ex-CIA director Mike Morell said in March, “On the question of the Trump campaign conspiring with the Russians . . ....
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The Russia Question—About Hillary Clinton
I invite readers of this blog to review this article by Peter Schweizer, author of Clinton Cash (Harper Collins, 2015), in light of the stories about Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with the Russian lawyer, Miss Veselnitskaya, in Trump Tower a year ago last June: At stake in this meeting is the word “dirt” that Trump...
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Russia Baiters and Putin Haters
“Is Russia an enemy of the United States?” NBC’s Kasie Hunt demanded of Ted Cruz. Replied the runner-up for the GOP nomination, “Russia is a significant adversary. Putin is a KGB thug.” To Hillary Clinton running mate Tim Kaine, the revelation that Donald Trump Jr., entertained an offer from the Russians for dirt on Clinton...
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Tyranny in Our Time
From the December 2013 issue of Chronicles. There is a saying among jurists that hard cases make bad law. Similarly, every book critic knows that the best books make for hard reviewing. Faced with a truly fine work, the reviewer is tempted simply to reproduce the author’s thesis in abbreviation, while scattering as many of...
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Trump, the West and the Left
The political left really, really, really doesn’t approve of Western civilization. If you doubt it, reference the maledictions poured out by the left on Donald Trump’s Warsaw speech last week. Trump had the effrontery to say, “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” Followed by rhetorical inquiries:...
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Alone Perhaps, but Is Trump Right?
At the G-20 in Hamburg, it is said, President Trump was isolated, without support from the other G-20 members, especially on climate change and trade. Perhaps so. But the crucial question is not whether Trump is alone, but whether he is right. Has Trump read the crisis of the West correctly? Are his warnings valid?...
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Putin: Trump Understands
Transcript of Srdja Trifkovic’s RT interview in the immediate aftermath of President Putin’s press conference in Hamburg at the end of the G20 summit in Hamburg on Saturday afternoon, July 8. [Watch video] RT: President Vladimir Putin has addressed the media after two days of talks with the world leaders at the G20 summit in...
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U.S.-Russia: A Glimmer of Hope
Considering the toxic Russophobic atmosphere nurtured by the Beltway establishment, the first meeting between presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin last Friday went reasonably well. Contrary to the mainstream media pack’s predictions and predictable post mortems, there were no “winners” or “losers.” The encounter was not perceived by its principals in terms of zero-cum game....
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Patching It Up With Putin
President Donald Trump flew off for his first meeting with Vladimir Putin—with instructions from our foreign policy elite that he get into the Russian president’s face over his hacking in the election of 2016. Hopefully, Trump will ignore these people. For their record of failure is among the reasons Americans elected him to office. What...
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Buy American: Compelling Reasons
From the August 2014 issue of Chronicles. For years, the media and Hollywood have sent the message that anyone who wants to be fashionable should eschew American products and buy foreign ones. Recently, Mike Rowe, the host of Dirty Jobs, put a different message on Facebook: “If you want to live in a country that...
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Is America Still a Nation?
In the first line of the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, Thomas Jefferson speaks of “one people.” The Constitution, agreed upon by the Founding Fathers in Philadelphia in 1789, begins, “We the people . . . “ And who were these “people”? In Federalist No. 2, John Jay writes of them as “one...
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Conquista and Reconquista
As its subtitle indicates, this book dispels a number of imprecisions, equivocations, and outright lies regarding the Islamic conquest of Spain in late antiquity or the early medieval period. (The Romans called it Hispania, a word that evolved into the medieval Latin Spannia and eventually the modern España.) Its author, for many years professor of...
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Farewell to P.C.
“It is true that Professor Esolen enjoys academic freedom,” said Madame Lafarge, who now numbers among my former colleagues, “but academic freedom must be used responsibly.” The assembled students, almost all of them from the political left, cheered and clicked their “clickers,” a form of public approbation I had not witnessed or even heard of...
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Devil Take the Hindmost
“High on a throne of royal state . . . Satan exalted sat, by merit raised To that bad eminence.” —Paradise Lost Hell is a meritocracy. Yet in America the meritocratic ideal is universally applauded. Everyone agrees—or pretends to agree—that the angel of justice smiles upon the triumph of merit. Indeed, the hopes enshrined in...
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The World as Imagination
Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 Produced by Marvel Studios Directed and written by James Gunn Distributed by Walt Disney Studios The Lost City of Z Produced by Plan B Entertainment Directed and written by James Gray, based on David Grann’s book Distributed by Amazon Studios Mixed-race romance has become profitably au courant in popular...
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Chesterfield and Chesterton
Much of life may come down to a choice between the respective views of Lord Chesterfield, who urged his son always to excel at whatever he did, and G.K. Chesterton, who once wrote that, “If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.” The issue, of course, is what the “thing” in question is. ...
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What the Editors Are Reading
Confined to a three-man tent on a rainy day in the canyons of southeastern Utah, I continued by lantern light my rereading of Cormac McCarthy’s novel All the Pretty Horses, first published a quarter-century ago as the first volume in The Border Trilogy, and got a good start on its immediate sequel, The Crossing. McCarthy’s...
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Books in Brief
Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty, by John B. Boles (New York: Basic Books; 626 pp., $35.00). This excellent, very well-written, and highly readable book is the “full-scale biography” the author set out to write. It succeeds further as an affirmation of the historian’s (and his readers’) need to accept the past on its own terms...
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Who’s Appropriating Whom?
All immigrants to America demand a good deal of us, some more than others. Mexican immigrants (and after them the Muslim ones) demand the most. St. Patrick’s Day parades date from the late, prerevolutionary 18th century and have been an American institution ever since as a celebration of Irish history, culture, and cuisine. Cinco de...
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Theresa May’s Anglo-Saxon Appeal
The British have a penchant for women leaders: Queens Elizabeth I & II, Victoria, Margaret Thatcher, and now Theresa May. The current Prime Minister isn’t just well liked: People seem to love her. Conservative MPs report that, when canvasing for the general election, voters stop them to say how proud they should be of her. ...
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Unnumbered Years
Ravens over North Berwick Law—could any phrase be more hyperborean? I turned the words over lazily as I watched them 50 feet above, circling and diving on one another, flicking expert wings, commenting incessantly on their sport as they alternately dropped or upheld the thin blue vault. Below the volcanic cone of its Law, the...
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Second Appomattox
A visitor to the United States from abroad, ignorant of recent American history, might find himself perplexed by the fact that the further the War Between the States recedes into the past, the larger it looms as the angry obsession of “progressive” Americans—the same people who insist at every turn that the country needs to...
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Desperate NeverTrumpers and the Constitution
A year ago the op-ed writers who present themselves as tutors to the nation insisted that Donald Trump could not and would not become president. Progressive pundits were certain of this—after all, they didn’t know anyone who was voting for him. The Republican wing of the commentariat, however, was equally sure that Trump would fail:...
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Progress Amid the Chaos
The foreign policy of the Trump administration remains a mass of contradictions, with the White House evidently divided among nationalists, pragmatists, and certain advisors who prescribe an ever expanding hegemony. These rivals have clashed in recent weeks over the question of sending a surge of U.S. troops into Afghanistan—some 5,000 more to supplement the 8,400...
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End the Feds
James Comey’s curious and unorthodox contributions to the media’s rumor-fueled hysteria over the legitimacy of the Trump presidency—and perhaps the fate of the U.S. government and the American people—ought to raise a fundamental question in the minds of conservatives: Why did he have a job to begin with? It matters little whether we like the...
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The Discarded Image
Mitch Landrieu and his growing coalition of disgruntled minorities and public-school-educated leftists give us an idea of where a divided, majority-ruled America is heading. In May, the mainstream media sacrificed valuable airtime and column space normally devoted to unsourced White House leaks to laud the New Orleans mayor’s effort to remove four monuments to the...
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The Esolen Option
If we don’t like the way of life around us, why not live differently? Why go along with something so inhuman and unrewarding? So asks Anthony Esolen in his new book. Good criticism calls for a conception of what should be as well as an analysis of what is. Esolen provides both. Like any social...
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Wahhabism First
President Donald Trump started his first foreign tour on May 20 in Saudi Arabia. His two-day visit was punctuated by a series of embarrassingly poltroonish statements and gestures to his hosts. It culminated in a macabre sabre-rattling spectacle, the moral equivalent of tossing Zyklon B canisters into a Silesian compound in 1944. For his part,...
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Economy and Independence
The president of the little village in West Michigan where I was born and raised (Spring Lake, population 2,360, sal-ute!) no longer wants to be village president. The obvious solution to this conundrum seems to have eluded the 84-year-old Joyce Verplank Hatton. Rather than resign the office, President Hatton has decided to take the road...
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Demolition Day
The 150th Anniversary (or Sesquicentennial) of Canadian Confederation will be celebrated on July 1. That holiday was traditionally denominated “Dominion Day,” as Canada was officially called “the Dominion of Canada”—a term which has now fallen into disuse. The holiday is now called Canada Day, and on nearly all state documents, the Canadian state is identified...
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A Free Ride to Clown College
Not content to suffer quietly under a $352 billion state debt, a crumbling post-World War II infrastructure, and a $65 billion unfunded pension liability in its largest city, the state of New York hastened its impending financial devastation this spring by announcing the latest Blue State special: free college tuition. Under its preposterous Excelsior Scholarship...
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The Devil We Know
If Ryszard Legutko is correct, there is increasingly little difference between the devil we know and the devil we don’t. He makes a compelling case for this claim. The totalitarian temptation, regardless of differences in time, place, and ideology, is ever present. The fact is especially troubling as modern man is aided by unprecedented technological...
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The Wrong War
The assault on American history continues apace, with the further removal of Confederate monuments and symbols, and the expunging of anything relating to slavery or slaveholders. Mounting any defense against this cultural warfare has been next to impossible, because it would seem to demand justifying slavery. The same considerations prohibit any criticism of the Union...
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The Coming Backlash
The media frenzy that greeted the victory of Donald Trump is now reaching a pinnacle of manic hysteria. Every single day, it seems, there is some new toxic, trumped-up accusation: He’s a Russian agent! He’s obstructing justice! He’s wants to repeal the First Amendment! Members of the media, who are indeed playing to Trump’s characterization...
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Long Live the Queen!
Tempus Fugit. A recent ABC program on the death of Princess Diana reminded me that 20 years have gone by in a jiffy. She died August 31, 1997, following a car crash in the underpass of Place de l’Alma, and sent a nation, and the world, into mourning. Mind you, Princess Di is no longer...
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How He Did It
Roger Stone is a longtime political operative who has worked for every Republican president since Richard Nixon, and numerous presidential and other candidates as well. Stone retains great admiration for Ronald Reagan, but now has only disdain for the Bush family. The Making of the President 2016 recounts what he saw during the Trump campaign,...
Issue
July 2017
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If It Can Happen Here . . .
As a Texas resident and an alumnus of the University of Texas, I can attest that Jon Cassidy’s dreary assessment of the situation there is totally accurate (“Scandalous Education: UT’s War on Standards,” Correspondence, June). Sadly, Cassidy’s exposé merely scratches the surface of the transformation of UT into what he aptly calls “Berkeley South.” Chronicles...
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Dance With the Devil in the Pale Moonlight
There was a notable convergence some decades ago, one that was noticed musically as two separate and distinct phenomena, but not as a convergence—or even as a conspiracy, or a rivalry. I never heard or saw any acknowledgment that two of the foremost instrumentalists in the world were fiddling around pretty much at the same...