Looking objectively at the legacy of Billy Graham in the wake of his passing is virtually impossible, especially for me personally. I know several people who answered the altar call at a Graham crusade, “just as I am without one plea, but that Thy blood was shed for me,” and mark that occasion as their...
Month: April 2018
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Fiddling on the Brink
A standard theme in the literature on the Great War is that hardly anyone expected it at the time. Europe’s last summer, balmy and idyllic, suddenly brought the guns of August. This view is not historically accurate—Germany willed the war, and her leaders engineered the July crisis—but for most other actors the catastrophe did come...
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The Quest for Community
“A sense of the past is far more basic to the maintenance of freedom than hope for the future. The former is concrete and real; the latter is necessarily amorphous and more easily guided by those who can manipulate human actions and beliefs. —Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community The trouble with labels—whether adopted voluntarily...
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Hang ’Em High
I was recently watching Westward Ho, one of the many dozens of B Westerns I have in my collection, and it struck me that until the 1940’s vigilantes were most often portrayed in the movies as the good guys. Following the credits at the beginning of Westward Ho we read, “This picture is dedicated to...
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Mencken and After
If Noah Webster was the father of English-language spelling reform, H.L. Mencken was the strong son making good his inheritance. Mencken’s claim was to be the father of the American language. He named it. As with mountains and planets, the one who names is honored with immortality, and The American Language, first published in 1919,...
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“Only Connect!”
Niall Ferguson is a distinguished historian of Scottish origin who specializes in big arguments, and contrarian claims. His books are always provocative, frequently infuriating, and often (if not always) correct in their analyses. Unlike most academic historians, he genuinely understands issues of business and finance, both in the contemporary world and in the historic past,...
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A Billion Sordid Images
Disconnected is not an amusing book. The subtitle’s “digitally distracted” doesn’t hint at its grim findings. This short text—a long one might be too dispiriting—is nevertheless lengthy enough to expose the digital revolution as an outright calamity, though the author generally eschews the apocalyptic tone. Of course, there is the familiar boast that children now...
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Large Is Ugly: Why America Is Not a Democracy
Of course it is ludicrous for anyone to consider the government in Washington, D.C., a democracy, no matter how often it is declared to be one. The reason is perfectly obvious: With a population of nearly 330 million people, no nation could have a government with anything resembling a true democracy. Let us consider. With...
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Lost Near the Beltway
Whatever happened to the libertarian movement? Since the age of 14 I have been a self-conscious libertarian. That’s when I started reading libertarian tracts (Rand, Mises, Hayek). I say reading, but at least in the case of Mises, reading was not the same as understanding at such an early age. I was no child prodigy. ...
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A Ruthless Charm
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was bred in the bone for his role on the stage of 20th-century American history. His father, the historian Arthur Meier Schlesinger, was already a rising academic star when Arthur Jr. was born in 1917 in Iowa City, while, on his mother’s side, the prominent 19th-century historian, George Bancroft, was said to...
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Muslim Migrants and the Religious Left
Why are so many Western Christians either silent about, or actually complicit in, the Muslim hegira to the West? One would think Christians would be at the forefront of opposition. Some are, but most are not, and these latter include Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, mainline “Protestants,” and evangelicals in America. These churches have made four...
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Tariffs and Delusions
Lenin may or may not have said that the capitalists would sell him the rope by which he would hang them, but the proverb is assigned to him for good reason. Any revolutionary who dreams of destroying the free-enterprise system can count on a valuable ally within the system itself, in the form of the...
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The Second Risorgimento
The national Italian elections so feared by Brussels, European liberals, and other would-be unifiers across the Continent have come and gone after having given the officials of the European Union “une mauvaise soirée,” as Marine Le Pen expressed it. The results are a dramatic victory for the right, for “populism,” and for antiestablishmentarianism generally. The...
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America’s Death Wish
Parkland, Florida, came and went, bringing a new St. Valentine’s Day massacre, another unspeakable horror, and another opportunity for hashtags and political maneuvering over guns in America. It very quickly became obvious that liberal activists had prepared and somewhat organized a campaign against the National Rifle Association ahead of time, waiting for the next mass...
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