A MarketWatch story this summer let us in on why millennials stash so little cash in 401(k) accounts. Like, given climate change, what’s the point? “The weather systems are already off,” a woman named Lori Rodriguez told a MarketWatch reporter, “and I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to be a little apocalyptic.” A few days later,...
We have been long-time subscribers and readers. Chronicles is one of many periodicals, newspapers, journals, magazines, books we read expressing thoughts that span the political idea spectrum. You state that you are a magazine of American culture. I do not know how you define that and would like your definition. I find your articles perplexing....
Justin Raimondo, long-time Chronicles columnist, vociferous anti-war activist, and a leading member of the paleolibertarian political movement, died June 27 at age 67 after a long battle with lung cancer. An influential champion of anti-interventionist foreign policy within the Libertarian and Republican political parties, Raimondo lobbed broadsides at warmongers left, right, and center from his...
The first level of online censorship happens without the victims even knowing it’s happening. Tweets, posts, articles, videos, comments, and websites of political content are all uploaded without resistance. But they aren’t seen, aren’t suggested, and are swiftly buried under a pile of competing content. After the 2016 election delivered a result that shocked Silicon...
Michael Millerman was a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto when he got into trouble. The trouble wasn’t drugs or alcohol, debt, or academic improprieties. Nor was he troubled by poor academic performance. The trouble was that he was reading, examining, and translating the works of controversial political thinkers influenced by Martin Heidegger. His...
Schoolchildren all across America are taught they live in the Land of the Free and that freedom of speech is a bedrock right. This is patently untrue, especially if one falls into any of these unfortunate demographic categories: Christian, white, Southern, or male. God help you if, like me, you fall into all four. Aside...
To say I was a difficult child is something of an understatement: I was a wild child. In retrospect, I can only feel sorry for my poor parents, who had no idea what to do with me. I was simply unmanageable. Unwilling to sit still in class, or to obey the simplest instructions, I did...
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...
A wise man recently said: Our youth love luxury, they have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect for their elders, and no longer rise when a lady enters the room. They chatter instead of exercising, gobble up their food, and tyrannize their teachers. That was Socrates, 2000 years ago, which I suppose qualifies...
Should Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram or other purveyors of internet content be liable for damages if they fail to ensure that what they disseminate is not inaccurate, libelous, or otherwise dangerous and pernicious? There is a bit of law on this, but we are only now beginning seriously to consider this question. And only...
As President Donald Trump starts his reelection campaign in earnest, a major segment of his 2020 platform remains ambiguous. In the field of foreign and security policy, the next five or six months present Trump with the last opportunity to become his former self: to reverse some of his many surrenders to the neoconservative agenda,...
How many times will naive voters fall for the old “when elected I will shrink the federal government” lie? If our Solipsist-in-Chief can’t “drain the swamp,” you can bet your last VHS Jazzercise tape that myriad new laws, middle-class tax cuts, and feeble protests will never stem the federal Leviathan’s metastasis. With that reality in...
Most Americans know of Doc Holliday only as Wyatt Earp’s sidekick. He was much more than that. He was not only one of the most colorful characters in the Old West but also one of the most feared. He acquired the nickname “Doc” honestly, earning a degree in dentistry and practicing in several towns. However,...
The topic of slavery and reparations has been much in the news of late and might feature prominently in next year’s presidential elections. Slave ownership taints the reputations of historical figures, to the point of provoking campaigns against their commemoration. Modern dismay over slavery is quite justified, but a couple of reality checks might be...
[This article first appeared in the September 1988 issue of Chronicles.] “Le reve est une seconde vie.“ —Nerval T.S. Eliot has become so thoroughly exalted, especially among conservative intellectuals, as the greatest poetic avatar of Western civilization in modern times (a role he must share, though, with Yeats and Pound) that it may shock many...
My personal experience with Jesuits has been overwhelmingly positive. I was reminded of that this past Sunday, as I attended Mass at my high school alma mater. I enjoyed my four years as a student there, and the friendships I made and the lessons I learned have continued to bless me, year in, year out....
Did President Donald Trump launch his Twitter barrage at Elijah Cummings simply because the Baltimore congressman was black? Was it just a “racist” attack on a member of the Black Caucus? Or did Trump go after Cummings after a Saturday Fox News report that his district was in far worse condition than the Mexican border...
Back in the Eternal City after three years, and there is another political scandal on the horizon. Or at least the local media machine (every bit as bad as its U.S. equivalent) would have us believe there was. The target: Matteo Salvini, Italy’s famously Euroskeptic interior minister. The accusation: corrupt dealings between his Lega party...
“The washing of the spears,” was the Zulu term for victory in battle. The latest phase in the Tory civil war has seen a brutal triumph of the Brexiteers, with no quarter extended to the vanquished. Of Theresa May’s Cabinet of 23, 16 have fallen as in an Elizabethan Revenge tragedy. It turns out that...
The Democrats who were looking to cast Robert Mueller as the star in a TV special, “The Impeachment of Donald Trump,” can probably tear up the script. They’re gonna be needing a new one. For six hours Wednesday, as three cable news networks and ABC, CBS, and NBC all carried live the hearings of the...
[This review first appeared in the June 1987 issue of Chronicles.] To 18th-century Britons and Americans who devoted any serious thought to the subject of human nature—and a great many did—the conventional starting point was the theory of the passions, or drives for self-gratification. Rousseau to the contrary, man was not naturally good but was ruled...
Farewell the plumèd troop, and the big wars, That make ambition virtue!… Farewell! Othello’s occupation’s gone! (Shakespeare 3.3.349-357) Here I intuit the thoughts of Theresa May, as she prepares to leave office. For her though the office of Prime Minister is not an “occupation,” it is the self. Take, for example, being welcomed on...
[This article first appeared in the June 1985 issue of Chronicles.] “Fuimus Troes, fuit Ilium et ingens Gloria Teucrorum.” (We once were Trojans, there once was Troy, and the vast glory of the Teucrian race.) -Vergil Peter Ackroyd: T. S. Eliot: A Life: Simon & Schuster; New York. “Ackroyd’s is the most comprehensive full-length critical biography...
“Send her back! Send her back!” The 13 seconds of that chant at the rally in North Carolina, in response to Donald Trump’s recital of the outrages of Somali-born Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, will not soon be forgotten, or forgiven. This phrase will have a long shelf life. T-shirts emblazoned with “Send Her Back!” and Old...
Last Sunday President Trump triggered off a major controversy with a series of tweets directed at Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA). The president berated the far-left quartet for “telling the people of the United States…how our government is to be run,” and suggested that they should...
In October 1950, as U.S. forces were reeling from hordes of Chinese troops who had intervened massively in the Korean War, a 5,000-man Turkish brigade arrived to halt an onslaught by six Chinese divisions. Said supreme commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur: “The Turks are the hero of heroes. There is no impossibility for the Turkish Brigade.”...
The time for Theresa May’s political obituary is at hand. I write it with relish. There never was a politician on whom the gods lavished such favors, and who squandered their gifts with such perverse determination. She was presented with the leadership of the United Kingdom on a silver plate, without having to fight for...
Recently, Americans were implored to pay attention to a sport most of us do not follow for reasons that have little to do with the dramatic nature of the competition. Turning on a computer brought regular reminders of this sport, with Google Doodles dedicated to each of the participating teams and news feeds filled with...
It’s always the oil. While President Trump was hobnobbing with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the G-20 summit in Japan, brushing off a recent U.N. report about the prince’s role in the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was in Asia and the Middle East, pleading with...
When Sir Kim Darroch’s secret cable to London was leaked to the Daily Mail, wherein he called the Trump administration “dysfunctional … unpredictable … faction-riven … diplomatically clumsy and inept,” the odds on his survival as U.K. ambassador plummeted. When President Donald Trump’s tweeted retort called Darroch “wacky,” a “stupid guy” and “pompous fool” who...
This piece first appeared in the December 1985 issue of Chronicles. “Liberty, the daughter of oppression, after having brought forth several fair children, as Riches, Arts, Learning, Trade, and many others, was at last delivered of her youngest daughter, called FACTION.” —Jonathan Swift There are many things wrong with this book, beginning with its title. The...
The sensationally miscast Sir Kim Darroch, H.M. Ambassador to the United States, has now gone, followed by a grieving cortège of the Foreign Office. Their clan spirit is that of Macbeth. Even Sir Christopher Meyer, a pretty good Ambassador in his day (his memoir DC Confidential is highly readable), went in hard for Darroch within...
Since the Democratic debates in June, the tide seems to have receded for the party and its presidential hopefuls. In new polls, only Joe Biden leads President Donald Trump comfortably. The other top-tier candidates—Sens. Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, and Mayor Pete Buttigieg—are running even with Trump, a measurable drop. A Washington Post-ABC...
Sir Kim Darroch’s epic misjudgment has as good as ended his time as H.M. Ambassador in Washington, and his career. His dispatch to the Foreign Office complaining of the utter ineptitude of the Trump administration has been leaked with devastating consequences. “He has not served Britain well,” said the President, showing a capacity for understatement...
Last Wednesday China completed a major naval exercise in the disputed waters of the South China Sea. On July 3 it was reported that China was testing a new naval helicopter which “could fill a big gap” in its expanding fleet. Over the weekend, Australian media reported that the country’s navy was monitoring a Chinese...
The elephant in the next room is Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party. For a graphic proof, look at the media, TV, and newspapers lately. The European Parliament met in Strasbourg for the first plenary session of its newly-elected members. Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”—a title engrafted by the EU upon the last movement of the 9th Symphony,...
Despite all the grousing and griping about his “politicizing” of the Fourth of July and “militarizing” America’s birthday, President Donald Trump turned the tables on his antagonists, and pulled it off. As master of ceremonies and keynote speaker at his “Salute to America” Independence Day event, Trump was a manifest success. A president acting as...
This article first appeared in the December 1987 issue of Chronicles. American conservatism in the late 18th century was unlike the European species, where popular “peasant” and articulate “aristocratic” conservatism were able to develop together and to maintain a common front against the ascendant bourgeoisie. With the exile of loyalists and the waning of the...
“The liberal idea has become obsolete. … (Liberals) cannot simply dictate anything to anyone as they have been attempting to do over the recent decades.” Such was the confident claim of Vladimir Putin to the Financial Times on the eve of a G-20 gathering that appeared to validate his thesis. Consider who commanded all the...
When the 751 Members of the new European Parliament (MEPs) gather in the French city of Strasbourg on July 2, the largest national group present in all the EU will be the MEPs of Britain’s new Brexit Party led by Nigel Farage. While the 29 newly elected Brexit Party MEPs intend to upend the EU,...
One hundred years have now passed since both houses of Congress passed the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting women the right to vote. For a long time, both major parties were ready to grant the suffrage, should American women clearly ask it of them. The question was never whether women were worthy of...
In “Protectionism as a Path to Piety” (May 2019 issue), John Howting appears to assert that protective tariffs are acts of piety. Where is the justice in the politically powerful forcing, ultimately under the penalty of death, the politically weak to subsidize them—which is what a protective tariff does? Protective tariffs require politicians to pick...
In the beginning was the Word. (Not the picture. Or the number.) —John Lukacs, “The Reality of Written Words,” Chronicles (January 1999) The last time I visited John Lukacs at Pickering Close, his home just outside of Phoenixville, Penn., he greeted me in Hungarian. My knowledge of that language is confined to goulash and paprikash...
For a pacific, commercial republic protected by two giant oceans and two peaceful neighbors with small militaries, America sure has fought a lot of wars. Michael Beschloss’s Presidents of War details eight American leaders beginning in 1807 who took us to war and just one, Jefferson, who didn’t. The text wraps up after the Vietnam...
Every man, whether he is conscious of it or not, has drawn a line in the sand behind which he will not retreat. Most Americans have ancestors who defended that line when it was crossed by government tyranny. It is now being crossed in Colorado. Colorado Governor Jared Polis signed into law in April an...
In early June, border agents near San Diego did what they do a lot these days. They collared two previously deported sex criminals who had re-entered the United States illegally. Both men were convicted of sex crimes against children, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported. Yet the two are somewhat unusual in one respect: they...
Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey From a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League, by Dan-el Padilla Peralta (New York: Penguin Books; 320 pp., $17.00). I read Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s memoir of his illegal residency in the United States last week while on vacation in Germany, another country arguing about immigration. The book answered several questions...