The name Learned Hand may not leap readily off the tongue if one were asked to list the conservative luminaries of the 20th century. Few people today outside the legal profession have any idea just how profound his influence as
…
Month: September 2020
Post
Evil That Good May Come
I am surprised that in your generally conservative and pro-Christian magazine not one of the four articles debating the pros and cons of dropping the Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 2020 Chronicles) presents the orthodox Christian evaluation of
…
Post
Greek Statues, Molon Labe!
I write this under an Attic sun, its light reflected from the marbles of the Acropolis and into my living room. This was once the center of Western civilization, its stem just hundreds of feet from where I’m standing. Individual
…
Post
Put Not Your Faith in Judges
Are there Bush judges and Obama judges? “No!” said the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, John Roberts. Judges, he explained during his Senate confirmation hearings, are simply umpires, objectively attempting to follow the rules and call balls
…
Post
India, China, and U.S. Pacific Strategy
A major border clash took place between Indian and Chinese troops mid-June in the Western Himalayan region of Ladakh, on the disputed “Line of Actual Control” dividing the two Asian giants. Twenty Indian soldiers died, including a senior officer, and
…
Post
Old Story, New Resonances
A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution by Jeremy D. Popkin; Basic Books; 640 pp., $35.00
Zhou Enlai was asked in the early 1970s what he, one of the architects of the Chinese communist revolution, thought of
…
Post
That Damn Cowboy
His statue in front of the Museum of Natural History in New York City is scheduled for removal, which is certainly ironic for one of New York’s most accomplished, adventurous, self-sacrificing, and patriotic sons, Theodore Roosevelt. Although he never owned
…
Post
Books in Brief
Russian Conservatism, by Paul Robinson (Northern Illinois University Press; 300 pp., $39.95). Canadian historian Paul Robinson has written a highly accessible study of Russian conservatism that extends from the early 19th century down to the present time.
According
…
Post
Playing Pretend With the Founding Fathers
In a remarkably disjointed, bombastic defense of “the liberal order,” C. Bradley Thompson writes in American Mind about the dangers posed by “Pajama-Boy Nietzscheans” and the supposedly surging “neo-reactionary movement on the Right.” According to Thompson, “radical Left and Right
…
Post
What the Editors Are Reading
Everyone to Bernie Sanders’ right gasped in 1994 when radical British historian Eric Hobsbawm argued that Communist regimes who murdered millions “would still have been worth backing” had there been a “chance of a new world being born in great
…
Post
Catholic Comfort for a Wounded South
Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South by Gracjan Kraszewski; The Kent State University Press; 216 pp., $45.00
Brother Brutus J. Clay, S.J., was a fixture at Loyola University in the early-to-late 1990s. The wiry Southerner with
…
Post
What Civil Rights Hath Wrought
The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties; by Christopher Caldwell; New York: Simon & Schuster; 352 pp., $28.00
The social and legal order that emerged from the civil rights movement of the 1960s now dominates public life. While
…
Post
The Revolution, Televised
Mr. Jones
Directed by Agnieszka Holland ◆ Written by Andrea Chalupa ◆ Produced by Film Produkcja ◆ Distributed by Samuel Goldwyn Films
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1965)
Directed by Martin Ritt ◆ Written by John le
…
Post
Reparations: Blueprint for a Shakedown
Nothing talks quite like money, and Robert L. Johnson, a wealthy black man who cofounded Black Entertainment Television (BET) four decades ago, lately has been talking about $14 trillion.
That’s what it will take, he insists, for whites in this
…
Post
Ressentiment: He Hates, Therefore He Is
A few days ago, rioters in Boston defaced the Robert Shaw Memorial, a masterpiece in high relief wrought by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, whom I consider to be, alongside Frederic Remington, the most distinctly American of our sculptors. I am supposing that
…
