“The name is Pride. Colonel Pride.” Out of the mists of English history a figure emerges whom we can recognize today. We would call him an “enforcer,” a man ordered to carry out a harsh policy determined by his superiors. In December 1648 Colonel Pride rid the Long Parliament of members unwanted by the Army...
Sunday, the 80th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland, Vice President Mike Pence spoke in Warsaw’s Pilsudski Square of “five decades of untold suffering and death that followed” the invasion. Five decades! What Pence was saying was that, for Poland, World War II did not end in victory but defeat and occupation by an...
Back in Barcelona after almost three years, and an obvious novelty is that there are fewer Estelada flags fluttering from the city’s balconies and windows. Some are still out there, tired and pale, but Catalonia’s separatists seem to have run out of steam. Spain has weathered the storm of 2017-18, and it’s all for the...
Seconds (1966) Produced by Joel Productions; Directed by John Frankenheimer; Screenplay by Lewis John Carlino, adapted from a novel by David Ely; Distributed by Paramount Pictures The Art of Self-Defense Produced by Andrew Kortschak; Directed and written by Riley Stearns; Distributed by Bleecker Street After Life Produced, written, and directed by Ricky Gervais; Distributed by...
One evening in the fall of 2015, with the unlikely Donald J. Trump already dominating the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, I ran into Ross Perot, Jr., at an exclusive charity event in Dallas. Perot is a billionaire real estate developer and the only son of H. Ross Perot, who campaigned for president...
Just about everybody I know, especially Republicans, is planning an exit strategy from California. A Los Angeles County firefighter I met at a party said all those guys, too, are planning to leave, despite their high salaries and pensions. Many grousers no doubt will stay, in particular those whose children remain. But the calamities hitting...
My husband and I touched down in Venice in late March, rented a Fiat 500, and drove through a rolling Italian countryside spotted with vineyards. Our destination was the medieval town of Verona. Verona has become something of a political flashpoint lately. It is the symbolic home of the Lega Nord, the now-leading conservative half...
For those who may have noticed, I’ve been absent from this venerable magazine for more than 12 years. Upon returning, I feel obliged to give an account of what I’ve learned in the intervening time. Aside from visiting my family and doing research for several monographs, I’ve been pondering the vicissitudes of the American right....
It was my penultimate summer in California when two friends from Germany crossed the pond to visit. They rented a room in San Diego not far from the beach, nestled in a palm-tree lined suburb. At some point between setting their bags on the curb and checking in to their summer digs, a man was...
Canada has not done much to assure the world it is anything other than a dog in search of a lap. Americans declared independence from England in 1776, but Canadians still haven’t mustered the gumption to cut ties with the mother island 522 years after John Cabot planted the flag on Newfoundland for Henry VII....
Many years ago, Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson was challenged by a mathematician to name a single proposition in all social science that was both true and nontrivial. Samuelson proposed the principle of comparative advantage, first developed by economist David Ricardo in 1817. It was true, Samuelson argued, as a matter of mathematical deduction, and yet its...
Sailing in Homer’s wine-dark Aegean Sea, and traipsing all over the Acropolis and the marvels of antiquity, is the best antidote I know to the brouhaha over “The Squad.” It makes these four publicity-seeking, opportunistic mental dwarfs seem even pettier than they are. Mind you, these petulant females wouldn’t know the difference between Corinthian and...
It is an inconvenient fact—and one studiously neglected by proponents of unrestricted global migration—that the main military participants in the politically incorrect and toxically masculine medieval Crusades were migrants. Nubian infantry, Egyptian cavalry, Armenian Turcopoles, European knights, and Turkic horsemen from the Eurasian steppes all migrated to the Levant during the High Middle Age period...
As a boy, your author lived in a working-class neighborhood just outside Houston’s city limits. My parents were the children of rural people who had come to Houston looking for work during the Great Depression. They lived in frame houses sitting on cinder blocks in Houston’s West End, a community of people Larry McMurtry called...
During Russell Kirk’s fruitful lifetime I regularly took his sage advice concerning books I ought to read. Dr. Kirk had seemingly perused everything worth perusing. Thus, on his say-so in 1968, I read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested T. S. Eliot’s The Idea of a Christian Society (1939). I hate to tell you, but many...
Chronicles’ editors should be commended for publishing several hard-hitting articles on the left’s pernicious censorship and particularly for providing an interview with a young friend of mine, Michael Millerman, who has been victimized by academic bigots (“Interview with a Condemned Academic,” Chronicles, August 2019). Like Michael, I have written on Leo Strauss and Martin Heidegger...
The three articles about the destructive character of Silicon Valley (Chronicles, August 2019) were right on the mark and reminded me of how the area has changed over the years. I first visited Santa Clara Valley nearly 70 years ago while temporarily serving as a young officer at a nearby naval base. It was beautiful...
Allensworth and Frye do a wonderful job dispelling human ignorance concerning the walls that have protected civilizations from barbarians (“Against the Barbarians,” Chronicles, July 2019). But, one thing mentioned bothers me: “Endless warfare, savagery, and sudden, violent death.” The prevailing wisdom concerning Hunter-Gatherers, completely betrays common sense. Our Stone Age ancestors, who had no sophisticated...
Boris Derangement Syndrome has broken out in Britain. It is similar to the more widely documented American affliction, Trump Derangement Syndrome. BDS and TDS epidemics spread when the media and political classes are confronted with an empowered leader they cannot stand. Boris Johnson, the new Prime Minister, makes his critics so angry they become demented....
Charles the Great looms out of the swirling obscurity of post-Roman Europe like the Great Lighthouse of Alexandria, signaling simultaneously radical renewal and an alteration of everything that came before. As Janet Nelson illuminates in her new book, it is impossible to imagine the West without Charlemagne as figurative and literal progenitor. The King of...
The field of Democrats aspiring to be their party’s presidential nominee resembles what the Republican field of four years ago would have been, had Donald Trump not entered the race. With more than 20 contenders, Democrats have had to break up their first two presidential debates into two sets of ten candidates, each airing on...
Chronicles readers may recall my “Old Route 66” (September 2013) and “Keep the Water on Your Right” (February 2015) motorcycle travelogues, in which I rode through small towns and rural areas to reconnect with the land and people of America. A road trip can do this like no other kind of journey, and doing one...
[above, Seth Moulton] This week, we were served some less-than-breaking news. Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., dropped out of the race for the Democratic nomination. If you’ve never heard of him, that’s OK. Few Democrats have. He served in the Marine Corps for four tours in Iraq, but other than that, he hasn’t done much. What’s...
What winter quarters were to the soldier, summer vacations are to the politician of today. The fall campaign has now opened with a surprise Government offensive. Boris Johnson has made the brusque announcement that Parliament will be prorogued for most of September and the first part of October. That will limit to a few days...
Facing a Parliamentary majority opposed to a hard Brexit–a crashing out of the EU if Britain is not offered a deal she can live with–Boris Johnson took matters into his own hands. He went to the Queen at Balmoral and got Parliament “prorogued,” suspended, from Sept. 12 to Oct. 14. That’s two weeks before the...
[This view first appeared in the October 1986 issue of Chronicles.] The obscurest epoch is today. —Robert Louis Stevenson Taken together, these three books serve nicely as a kind of group portrait of Clio and her several faces. In reverse order we have the historian as diarist and memoirist, as documentarian, and as reflective sage....
President Donald Trump, who canceled a missile strike on Iran, after the shoot-down of a U.S. Predator drone, to avoid killing Iranians, may not want a U.S. war with Iran. But the same cannot be said of Bibi Netanyahu. Saturday, Israel launched a night attack on a village south of Damascus to abort what Israel...
“Wir schaffen das”: I admire the cool cheek of Boris Johnson. He spoke those loaded words to Angela Merkel, who had famously spoken them in defence of her open invitation to a million migrants. The massed ranks of the German Press corps were slow to take it in, and there was a brief pause. Then...
To those of us of who learned our U.S. history from texts in the 1940s and ’50s, President Donald Trump’s brainstorm of acquiring Greenland fits into a venerable tradition of American expansionism. The story begins with colonial officer George Washington’s march out toward Fort Duquesne in 1754 and crushing defeat and near death at Fort...
“How Much Damage Have Republicans Done in the States?” Gosh! Worlds of damage, you’d imagine, if you’re a typical client of The New York Times nursery school system, where more and more government is good and less and less government is very, very bad—evidencing a failure on your part to appreciate the joys of governance...
An anti-Brexit Government of National Unity falls at the first hurdle: its acronym. The political classes had found the dodo useful, as a widely accepted symbol for Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement. Now Theresa has gone the way of the dodo herself. Unlike the dodo, the gnu continues exist. It is an African antelope, often known...
An important foreign story consistently underreported in the U.S. is the remarkable rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the eastern states of the Federal Republic. Regional elections will be held on September 1 in two of them, Brandenburg and Saxony. Angela Merkel’s “center-right” Christian Democratic Union (CSU) and her “center-left” coalition partners (Sozialdemokratische...
The near future of British politics is unnervingly poised. The law as it stands is that Britain must leave the European Union on October 31st. This law can only be changed by another law, which requires a Parliamentary majority. Can this be accomplished by the Government’s many enemies? If the Conservative Party in the Commons...
One thing about tragedies: They reveal people for who they really are. In the past two weeks, we’ve learned a lot about our media and political class. Our country endured two separate and horrifying mass shootings, one in El Paso, Texas, and the other in Dayton, Ohio. Between them, at least 31 people were murdered....
President Donald Trump’s reelection hopes hinge on two things: the state of the economy in 2020 and the identity of the Democratic nominee. The further left the Democrats go to select their candidate, the greater the probability Trump wins a second term. Thus Trump got good news this week. The verbal flubs of Joe...
[This review first appeared in the June 1991 issue of Chronicles.] Red Love is “third generation Leninist” porno star Suzie Sizzle’s yet-unmade dream project, the love story of her aunt and uncle, the Rosenberg-like spies Dolly and Solly Rubell. Until Suzie’s industry develops a revolutionary consciousness, we’ll have to settle for David Evanier’s novel of...
The Port of Aden The war in Yemen is like the drought in the Sahel or the carnage in the streets of south Chicago: an ongoing unpleasantness of which we are but vaguely aware, a regrettable but irrelevant fact of life. It is nevertheless remarkable that the capture of Aden by southern Yemeni separatists on...
“The liberal idea is obsolete,” said President Putin in a recent interview with the Financial Times (27 June 2019), “it has outlived its purpose. When the migration problem came to a head, many people admitted that the policy of multiculturalism is not effective and that the interests of the core population should be considered.” Of...
Those who believed America’s racial divide would begin to close with the civil rights acts of the 1960s and the election of a black president in this century appear to have been overly optimistic. The race divide seems deeper and wider than at any time in our lifetimes. Most of the aspiring leaders of the...
[This review first appeared in the November 2007 issue of Chronicles.] It is a cliché among Byzantinists that too few people in the world, especially in the West, know anything about Byzantium, so there is no doubt that more works of “popular synthesis” that make this Christian successor to the Roman Empire in the East...
[This article first appeared in the December 1992 issue of Chronicles.] In the second segment of the several-part BBC documentary on his life, Malcolm Muggeridge smoothed his white feathery hair away from his cherubic face, smiled cryptically, and said in his deep, rolling, gentle English voice, “There’s nothing in this world more instinctively abhorrent to...
It was two days of contrast that tell us about America 2019. In El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, following the mass murders of Saturday and Sunday morning, the local folks on camera—police, prosecutors, mayors, FBI and city officials—were nonpartisan, patient, polite and dignified in the unity and solemnity of their grief for their dead...
Last Thursday President Donald Trump announced that his administration would impose a 10 percent tariff on $300 billion of Chinese imports starting September 1, in addition to the existing 25 percent tariff on $250 billion in goods introduced last spring. Virtually everything the Chinese export to America may soon be subject to some level of...
Brecon & Radnorshire was an encounter battle, unplanned and unwanted. This obscure border constituency has just seen a by-election whose occasion was absurd—the sitting MP was recalled after some minor expenses claims transgressions and was allowed by his Conservative party to stand again—but which, as is the way with more famous encounters, stood for much...
In his opening statement at Wednesday’s Democratic debate in Detroit, Joe Biden addressed Donald Trump while pointing proudly to the racial and ethnic diversity of the nine Democrats standing beside him. “Mr. President, this is America and we are strong and great because of this diversity, not in spite of it. … We love it....
This scrupulously objective book may be considered a gift to conservatives who have long despaired about the possibility of principled legal tenets regularly prevailing in Supreme Court opinions. For decades this long-suffering group has watched Republican Supreme Court appointees concur in various left-wing crackpot decisions that have become the law of the land. Thankfully, such...
I have been a subscriber to Chronicles for roughly twenty-five years. I love the print magazine, which I intend to take until I pass on to my reward, its publication ceases, or its “voice” becomes indistinct from that of National Review, whichever comes first. But it seems to me that, beginning about the time of...
One clear winner of the recent European Parliament elections was Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, whose party won roughly a third of the votes, finishing well ahead of any other party. Salvini’s party, the Lega, began as a regional party in Lombardy, but won numerous votes in southern Italy, including carrying many municipalities and several...
When I caught a seventh student in the classroom trying to bury his Chromebook in his crotch, clumsily angling the screen below the desk to hide the networked game he was playing, I wondered whether there’s any evidence that Chromebooks actually help educate schoolchildren. As it turns out, there is none. No longitudinal studies have...