“It is becoming more obvious with each passing day that the men and the movement that broke Lyndon Johnson’s authority in 1968 are out to break Richard Nixon,” wrote David Broder on Oct. 8, 1969. “The likelihood is great that they will succeed again.” A columnist for the Washington Post, Broder was no fan of...
My question for Paul Ryan, Republican Speaker of the House, is this: Do you believe in Judgment Day? Here’s why I ask. Our GOP-controlled Congress passed an Omnibus Spending Bill valued at $1.3 trillion in order to keep the government from shutting down. This bill preserves Medicaid “reimbursements” and Title X funding for “family planning.”...
“Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his Christian name a synonym for the Devil.” —Thomas Babington For those readers who know very much about Niccolo Machiavelli, the most striking feature of Michael Ledeen’s new book, which tries to explicate a number of Machiavelli’s precepts with...
Six Questions for A.G. Sulzberger March 20, 2018 Dear Mr. Sulzberger: Congratulations on assuming the reins of this nation’s—and arguably, the world’s—most influential publication. It’s the family business, of course, so your appointment to succeed your father doesn’t exactly qualify as a surprise. Even so, the responsibility for guiding the fortunes of a great institution...
In the aftermath of last Sunday’s presidential election in Russia, which he attended as an observer, Srdja Trifkovic gave an interview to the media group Politnavigator.net with his assessment of the overall problem of Western elite perceptions of Russia. Article (in Russian) Video (in Russian and Serbian) ST: In the mainstream Western media there will...
Britain has yet to identify the assassin who tried to murder the double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury, England. But Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson knows who ordered the hit. “We think it overwhelmingly likely that it was (Russian President Vladimir Putin’s) decision to direct the use of a nerve agent on...
After the victory of Donald Trump in 2016, the GOP held the Senate and House, two-thirds of the governorships, and 1,000 more state legislators than they had on the day Barack Obama took office. “The Republican Party has not been this dominant in 90 years,” went the exultant claim. A year later, Republicans lost the...
Last week saw one-hundredth anniversary of an event which greatly impacted the destinies of Europe and America for decades to come. It passed unnoticed by the media. On March 3, 1918, the Bolsheviks signed a peace treaty with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk. Far from sealing the Kaiserreich’s historic triumph in the East, its brutal...
Robert Bartley, the late editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal, was a free trade zealot who for decades championed a five-word amendment to the Constitution: “There shall be open borders.” Bartley accepted what the erasure of America’s borders and an endless influx or foreign peoples and goods would mean for his country. Said...
From the October 1998 issue of Chronicles. “Michael, we’re bigger than U.S. Steel,” boasts gangland mastermind Hyman Roth to his (quite temporary) partner, Michael Corleone, in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Part II. Hyman, however, was not the first to say it, and those familiar with the life history and achievements of the gentleman on...
Unless there is a late surge for Communist Party candidate Pavel Grudinin, who is running second with 7 percent, Vladimir Putin will be re-elected president of Russia for another six years on March 18. Then we must decide whether to continue on course into a second Cold War, or engage Russia, as every president sought...
From the August 1996 issue of Chronicles. “Poetry is the language of the state of crisis.” —Stéphane Mallarmé When Cleanth Brooks died at 87 in 1994, a great era of American literary criticism ended. Brooks had been one of John Crowe Ransom’s prize students at Vanderbilt, and when Ransom issued the call for a method...
“Peace in the Middle East” is like the unicorn: we can envisage the beast, paint it in detail even, but we can’t groom a living specimen. The problem transcends geopolitics and ideology, it is also metaphysical. The people inhabiting the region are vying for limited resources, such as land and water. In addition, many also...
From Lincoln to William McKinley to Theodore Roosevelt, and from Warren Harding through Calvin Coolidge, the Republican Party erected the most awesome manufacturing machine the world had ever seen. And, as the party of high tariffs through those seven decades, the GOP was rewarded by becoming America’s Party. Thirteen Republican presidents served from 1860 to...
President Trump’s announcement that he intends to impose tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum produced what can only be described as hysteria across the admittedly narrow spectrum of establishment opinion. Missing from all this commentary was any recognition that Trump’s recent tariffs on foreign washing machines and solar panels had already brought favorable results for...
“We got China wrong. Now what?” ran the headline over the column in the Washington Post. “Remember how American engagement with China was going to make that communist backwater more like the democratic, capitalist West?” asked Charles Lane in his opening sentence. America’s elites believed that economic engagement and the opening of U.S. markets would...
The most interesting part of President Vladimir Putin’s two hours long state of nation address on March 1 was his announcement—accompanied by a video presentation—that Russia has developed a hypersonic state-of-the-art missile 20 times faster than the speed of sound, as well as a nuclear-powered cruise missile, both supposedly safe from interception. Putin claimed that...
The debate regarding President Trump’s sanity is echoed at a slightly less hyperbolic level by liberals’ fervent insistence that he is “not a normal president.” What, exactly, does this mean? That Trump is an “abnormal” president? That he is an “abnormal” man? An “abnormal” human being? Or is their argument simply that he is an...
From the late 19th or early 20th century down to the present day, liberalism has been progressively oriented to psychology and therapeutic technique. Yet advanced liberalism in the 21st century is as materialist a creed as classical liberalism was in the 19th, and liberal psychology remains as firmly grounded in a materialist philosophy as it...
The Last 100 Days: FDR at War and Peace, by David B. Woolner (New York: Basic Books; 368 pp., $32.00). The author of this engaging, highly interesting, and extremely well-written book is senior fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian at the Roosevelt Institute, in addition to holding academic professorships at both Marist and Bard College. ...
Outside of my regular reading for the courses I’m teaching—this semester, this week, Livy’s History of Rome, Books 1-5, and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book 1—I have been reading mainly books and articles with some relation to nostalgia, broadly speaking. That has included what for me have been some gratifying discoveries, such as Thomas Molnar’s...
I’ve been sent on a fool’s errand: to explain Italian politics. As those of you who have spent extended periods of time in the “Mediterranean boot” know, this is a challenging task. Understanding it requires doggedness—and a bit of masochism, too—given the internecine struggles for power and influence, the political divisions, intrigue, and tensions that...
Professional Democrats, like the proverbial dog who returns to his vomit, cannot quit the idea that their grotesque caricatures of those who hold traditional views of marriage and family, men and women, borders and citizenship, and meaningful employment will appeal to enough of the electorate to return control of the government to them. Donald Trump...
Year after year, a president gives a State of the Union Address, and year after year the minority party’s response is predictably awful. Admittedly, the quest to find a humanoid capable of speaking sensible and winsome words into a camera in a political context has always proved to be a remarkable challenge, even for the...
I took the diagnosis of non-small cell lung cancer (Stage 4) quite well, I thought. Except for occasional bouts of hysterical self-pity and thankfully rare gestures of melodrama. Oh, I’d resisted it, denied it, although I knew all along that I had it. I ignored the warnings of my hapless local doctors, and when I...
In his latest interview for the Iranian English-language TV network, live from their studio in Beirut, Srdja Trifkovic discusses the developments surrounding the Korean peninsula. [Watch interview here.] Q: Foreign affairs editor of Chronicles magazine Srdja Trifkovic joins us via satellite from the Lebanese capital Beirut . . . First of all, what are your...
John le Carré could hardly imagine a better scenario: a spy-for-hire—once a servant of Her Majesty’s government, now selling his services in a foreign market—takes payouts from two masters simultaneously, as both a police informant and a political dirty-tricks man. He feeds political intelligence to the police, who use that innuendo to justify covert surveillance...
Let’s give credit where it’s due. Linda Greenhouse, retired Supreme Court correspondent for the New York Times, is a brilliantly qualified journalist: hard-working, creative, dedicated to the needs of her profession as she understands them. Which seems really to be the problem here; a problem large and grave, requiring critical analysis. Greenhouse’s very personal sense...
Gee, this is the worst news I’ve had since the defeat at Stalingrad. More than 80 former ambassadors to African nations sent a letter of protest to The Donald. Even worse, Botswana, Ghana, Haiti, Namibia, Senegal, and the African Union have all protested Mr. Trump’s calling them shitholes. I also protest. Shithole is a term...
The Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy, which Defense Secretary James Mattis presented on January 19, envisages aggressive measures to counter Russia and China and instructs the military to refocus on Cold War-style competition with them, away from terrorist threats and “rogue nations.” This is in stark contrast to Barack Obama’s 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, which called...
After reading Aaron D. Wolf’s “Prince of Darkness” (Heresies, January) I can see that the author knows very little about Muslims. In every Islamic country, the strong rule. That is what the caliphate was and will always be. The rulers are and will always be ruthless. They follow their prophet in this regard. If you...
If you will forgive my dampening of Chilton Williamson’s Schadenfreude slightly (“The Job of Sex,” Editorials, January), I feel a need to note that there were women in the workplace long before the feminist movement insisted on putting them there. These women were usually in service roles—secretaries, stenographers, and the like. The feminists hated this...
Since he is my favorite American composer, I appreciated James O. Tate’s discussion of the music of Stephen Foster (“My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night!,” The Music Column, January), and thereby discovered the fine music offered by Thomas Hampson and associates. In return, I would recommend to you the Stephen Foster Song Book, done by...
Several years ago, aided by the wonders of modern technology and the principle of fair use, a number of people independently produced remixes of It’s a Wonderful Life as a horror movie. That this worked brilliantly is really no surprise, since the dystopian world of Pottersville in Frank Capra’s masterpiece foreshadowed such later classics of...
From his perch at FOX News, Tucker Carlson was beating back criticism from liberals and neoconservatives at the same time. The subject was immigration. “The point of our immigration policy, the point of all of our policies is to help Americans,” he told viewers. “Watching out for our citizens is the only reason we have...
At Midsummer 1631, Barbary pirates from North Africa raided the Irish village of Baltimore, and took several hundred local people into lifelong captivity. Such a distant projection of Islamic power might seem extreme and even bizarre, but it was no such thing. Forgotten today, the danger of Arab and Turkish assault remained a nightmare for...
Darkest Hour Produced by Perfect World Pictures Written by Anthony McCarten Directed by Joe Wright Distributed by Focus Features The Shape of Water Produced by Scott Rudin Productions Written by Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor Directed by Guillermo del Toro Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures Toward the end of Darkest Hour, we watch Gary...
Gordon Wood, regarded as the foremost historian of the American Revolution, has written a very fine account of the friendship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Though strained at times, their friendship extended through the turbulence of the War for Independence and through the adoption of the Constitution, went off the rails with the development...
Physicians of the Utmost Fame Were called at once; but when they came They answered, as they took their Fees, “There is no Cure for this Disease.” —from “Henry King,” by Hilaire Belloc I’ve spent the last few months hobbling around Manhattan, one of America’s last walkable cities. In keeping with New Yorkers’ well-deserved stereotype...
“Drain the swamp!” Donald Trump declared in every campaign speech of 2016. He meant, of course, the Swamp of Washington, D.C., home of the labyrinthine network of centralized bureaucracies that control our lives. It’s also called the Deep State and the Permanent Bureaucracy. Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as well as the two Republican...
Though too many years have gone by since I last crossed paths with Robert K. Wallace, that doesn’t mean I have forgotten that gifted and accomplished man. I remember him well from sites and scenes in graduate school at Columbia University; from his environment in northern Kentucky and at the old Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati,...
We had been dreaming about Andalusia. But plans sometimes must be altered, and so one August evening we found ourselves instead entering into Ulverston, 1,300 miles from Andalusia, and even more distant climatically, culturally, and historically. The Lake District—“England’s Switzerland,” Manchester’s playground, stamping grounds of Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter—is a magnet to millions of tourists,...
The British, like everyone else, enjoy feigning horror at President Donald Trump. Deep down, however, we know we need him, and we like him a lot more than we let on. The United Kingdom is in a difficult diplomatic position as it seeks to extricate itself from the European Union, and the transatlantic alliance with...
Dick’s Sporting Goods is using 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz’s evil act of killing 17 innocents and wounding many others in a child warehouse known commonly as a “public school” in Parkland Florida to boost its flagging sales and brandish its liberal bona fides. On Wednesday, the retailer issued a press release that could’ve been written by...
From the October 2016 issue of Chronicles. Business Insider recently reported “a mind-blowing demographic shift” that is about to occur. Considering the globe’s whole human population, the number of adults age 65 and older will in a few years be greater than the number of children under the age of 5. This unprecedented change should...
In a surprise overtime victory in the finals of the Olympic men’s hockey tournament, the Russians defeated Germany, 4-3. But the Russians were not permitted to have their national anthem played or flag raised, due to a past doping scandal. So, the team ignored the prohibition and sang out the Russian national anthem over the...
From the September 1994 issue of Chronicles. “The corruption of man,” Emerson wrote, “is followed by X the corruption of language.” The reverse is true, and a century later Georges Bernanos had it right: “The worst, the most corrupting lies are problems wrongly stated.” How pertinent this is about so many matters present, including the...
In days gone by, a massacre of students like the atrocity at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School would have brought us together. But like so many atrocities before it, this mass murder is tearing us apart. The perpetrator, the sick and evil 19-year-old who killed 17 innocents with a gun is said to be contrite....
Something for Everyone (in the Military-Industrial Complex) Think of it as the chicken-or-the-egg question for the ages: Do very real threats to the United States inadvertently benefit the military-industrial complex or does the national security state, by its very nature, conjure up inflated threats to feed that defense machine? Back in 2008, some of us...