Promised Land: How the Rise of the Middle Class Transformed America , 1929-1968, by David Stebenne (Scribner; 336 pp., $28.00). Dear David: I used the title of Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly as my grading rubric for your submission on the 20th-century American middle class. Your work recaps the period’s economic, social, cultural, and...
Can a culture celebrate those who want to destroy it and still stand? We are about to find out in this fateful November. Until recently, I thought the word “demonic” no more than a figure of speech. It carried a chill dislodged from religious myth and absorbed into literary aesthetics. As an accessory to prose, I...
One sometimes feels obliged to contextualize a disagreement, because the point in dispute has still not been clearly stated. I have written critically more than once about the works of C. Bradley Thompson, first about his study of neoconservatism, Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea (2010), and more recently, about a book he completed on America’s Founders, America’s Revolutionary...
Liberals among the Catholic hierarchy are spending this election season decrying so-called “single-issue voters.” For example, Bishop Mark J. Seitz of the diocese of El Paso decried single-issue voters in America Magazine, the Jesuits’ platform for the Church’s modernist left. According to Seitz, Christian voters are called to consider all issues and the “greater common good”...
Of the presidents in the modern era, many have been dealt a difficult hand by history, but perhaps none more so than Donald Trump. In 1952, Harry Truman was in his third year of a stalemated war in Korea that was costing 200 American lives every week. He lost the New Hampshire primary to Sen....
Though I have spent my life in a relatively conservative area of Northern California, the specific neighborhood in which I presently reside seems to be greater than fifty percent pro-Biden, judging by the lawn signs. Several of these signs have accompanying rainbow flags, Black Lives Matter merchandise, and other announcements of commitment to the cultural...
If Joe Biden loses on Nov. 3, public interest in whether his son Hunter exploited the family name to rake in millions of dollars from foreign donors will likely fade away. It will not matter, and no one will care. But if Joe Biden wins the presidency, a prediction: By the Ides of March 2021,...
President Donald Trump has lost ground in the arena that gave him a victory four years ago: Main Street. Recent headlines are not shy in proclaiming this. But he can win Main Street back if he would commit to reining in Wall Street. A commitment to separate commercial and investment banking through a reinstated Glass-Steagall...
When Amy Coney Barrett was nominated to a judgeship on the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2017, Sen. Dianne Feinstein was taken aback by the Notre Dame law professor’s Catholic convictions about the right to life. “Professor,” said Feinstein, “when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within...
I recently took a trip to the German city of Constance, site of an important medieval Latin Church council that established the right to remove incorrigible popes. Some reflection on the city and its council may be of interest, given the news today that Pope Francis has apparently decided to endorse same-sex civil unions. Crossing...
In fiscal year 2020, which ended on Sept. 30, the U.S. government set some impressive new records. The deficit came in at $3.1 trillion, twice the previous record of $1.4 trillion in 2009, which was set during the Great Recession, and three times the 2019 deficit of about $1 trillion. Federal spending hit $6.5 trillion,...
Two long established Trump critics have recently berated the President quite differently. One, National Review Editor Rich Lowry, offered constructive criticism of the way Trump has handled himself in the closing weeks of his campaign; the other critic, a National Review Online Founding Editor and syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg, offered more of the same dyspeptic...
“Apres moi, la deluge,” predicted Louis XV after his army’s stunning defeat by Prussia’s Frederick the Great at the Battle of Rossbach in 1757. “La deluge,” the Revolution, came, three decades later, to wash the Bourbon monarchy away in blood and to send Louis XV’s grandson, Louis XVI, and his queen, Marie Antoinette, to the...
“The Indians are seeing 60,000 Chinese soldiers on their northern border,” Secretary of State Michael Pompeo ominously warned on Friday. He spelled out what he meant to commentator Larry O’Connor: “The Chinese have now begun to amass huge forces against India in the north. … They absolutely need the United States to be their ally...
Earlier this year, Joe Biden gave a lengthy interview to The New York Times, a venue as friendly toward Biden as Sean Hannity is to Donald Trump. In the course of this interview, Biden offered the following observation: Well, look what’s happened. Look what started to seep in, beginning and probably even with candidates during our administration. We stopped showing...
Before the first Trump-Biden debate, moderator Chris Wallace listed the six subjects that would be covered: The Trump and Biden records, the Supreme Court, COVID-19, the economy, race, and violence in our cities, and the integrity of the election. According to a recent Gallup survey, Wallace’s topics tracked the public’s concerns—the top seven of which...
What a difference a week can make. Saturday, Sept. 26, was among the best days of the Trump presidency, or so some of us thought watching the president introduce in the Rose Garden his sterling candidate for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court. The academic and professional credentials of Amy Coney Barrett, 48,...
On Monday, Oct. 5, our occasional contributor James G. Jatras gave a lecture at the Institute of European Studies in Belgrade entitled “Does America Have a Future? Options Before a Declining Hegemon.” He presented a complex and rather bleak picture of America’s condition to an audience of some 30 scholars and analysts from Serbia’s leading research...
In their first debate, the president of the United States, challenged by the former vice president, performed poorly—even by his own estimation. If memory serves, an instant poll showed that the American people, by 47-43, thought Walter Mondale had bested Ronald Reagan in the Louisville debate where the president made such gaffes as citing the...
Where then shall Hope and Fear their Objects find? Must dull Suspence corrupt the stagnant Mind? —Samuel Johnson, “The Vanity of Human Wishes” At the time of writing in late August, the coming U.S. election is hard to call, so that dull Suspence must indeed prevail for a few more weeks. One need not let...
“Covering American politics is like crack,” a veteran British journalist told me last year. “Once you’ve had a taste nothing else gives the same high.” I now think I know what he meant—though LSD might be a more apt comparison. In the age of Trump, it’s hard to watch American politics without wondering if you are...
American Conservatism: Reclaiming an Intellectual Tradition; Edited by Andrew J. Bacevich; Library of America; 663 pp., $29.95 A couple years after Russell Kirk’s death, I made a pilgrimage to his ancestral home in Mecosta, Michigan. My buddy and I looked at a map and plotted our course. We didn’t have an address but we didn’t...
Last month we wrapped up the first Chronicles reader survey conducted in quite some time. Overall, the survey reinforced what we sensed about you, our loyal readers, and the direction you’d like to see the magazine go. Thank you to everyone who took the time to complete and return the survey; the quantity of responses we received exceeded...
Despite an entire world of libertarian activists and theorists operating energetically for more than half a century, the idea of a sustainable libertarian movement never shone brightly until the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, which was marked by a severe financial catastrophe and popular frustration with America’s perpetual wars. For the rising generation faced with...
Retroculture: Taking America Back, by William S. Lind (Arktos Media; 212 pp., $18.95). One of the editors of this publication practically laughed in my face when I recently proclaimed myself a “city girl.” “You’re not a city girl,” he snorted, “you are Little House on the Prairie all the way!” Had he read Bill Lind’s latest,...
The death of George Floyd and the reaction that followed have seen an explosion of hysterical accusations, breast-beating, and lying that is extreme even by the standards of the last half-century. It is no exaggeration to say that reason and common sense have largely fled the scene, and there has been an incredibly weak reaction to...
Exactly 50 years ago last month I was lolling by the pool of the Saint Georges Hotel in Beirut, surrounded by bikini-clad women of uncertain virtue, spooks, pimps, journalists, and rotund Lebanese playboys. The scene was straight out of the movie Casablanca, except we all wore swimming trunks and there was no Rick to run the show....
Yes, God, Yes Directed and written by Karen Maine ◆ Produced by Maiden Voyage and RT Features ◆ Distributed by Vertical Entertainment Waiting for the Barbarians Directed by Ciro Guerra ◆ Screenplay and novel by J. M. Coetzee ◆ Produced by Iervolino Entertainment and Ithaca Pictures ◆ Distributed by Samuel Goldwyn Films Zulu (1964) Directed...
Historians of the American right agree that Russell Kirk (1918-1994) was one of the key figures in the birth of the postwar conservative movement. Indeed, Kirk more than anyone was responsible for reintroducing the term “conservative” into American political conversation after its long domination by various strands of liberalism. The centenary of his birth in 2018...
I was born in 1964, in a country that most people, inside America and out, regarded as the greatest on the planet. Indeed, many felt that America in the early 1960s was the greatest country there had ever been. There was little reason at the time to question this consensus. Americans enjoyed a standard of living...
The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Managerial Elite; by Michael Lind; Portfolio; 224 pp., $25.00 A mostly white, cosmopolitan “overclass” rules America with a technocratic fist through the union of public and private spheres after pulling off a “revolution from above,” Michael Lind argues in his latest book. As Lind sees it, the country’s political institutions...
American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup; by F. H. Buckley; Encounter Books; 184 pp., $23.99 When asked whether a state can constitutionally secede from the United States, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia brushed the question aside, saying the matter was settled by the Civil War. He was wrong. A Zogby poll in 2018 found that...
It is significant but not surprising that Ross Douthat in his book The Decadent Society and reviewer John M. DeJak (“A Decadent Diagnosis,” August 2020 Chronicles) both overlooked the pivotal impact of Vatican II and Catholic social doctrine. These two liberal landmarks changed the religious and cultural focus from duty to freedom; from truth to inclusiveness; from repentance to...
Mobs loot, burn, and vandalize while politicians advocate defunding the police. A commune was established in Seattle and turned into Lord of the Flies while government did nothing. Blacks demand equal treatment from police despite a violent crime rate many times greater than that of whites, and mainstream media will not report honestly the differences in crime rates....
Having forced myself to listen to most of the Republican National Convention (RNC) orations in late August, I was struck by what my daughter, who had done such work professionally, characterized as the program’s “underlying marketing strategy.” The GOP’s advisers seem to have pitched their message at the demographics among whom Trump has had the least...
The mythical nation dedicated to a proposition is dying, and rioters, looters, and social justice warriors are playing Dr. Kevorkian. Because the United States has not reached their construct of the purest Platonic form of equality, it must be euthanized to make room for a new empire to rise in its place. It’s fitting that activists,...
Calling a dictator and military officer of a Communist regime, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, “conservative” will come as a surprise to many a Western reader. After all, can such an icon of loyalty to his Soviet overlords be truly considered conservative in any sense other than a nefarious dedication to conserving a highly destructive political order? History...
The New York Times recently spoke ex cathedra on the American founding through its “1619 Project.” You probably learned in grade school a cartoonish story about white guys in powdered wigs declaring America’s independence in 1776. The Sulzberger family’s College of Cardinals have declared the nation’s birth year was actually 1619, when the first hapless African slaves landed on...
People are policy and Joe Biden has 2,000 of them. That is, according to reporting in Foreign Policy magazine that his team of foreign policy and national security advisors has swelled to more than that number. A contingent of that size could be expected to produce a torrent of interesting ideas and fresh proposals, from the fundamentals of...
Chronicles Foreign Affairs Editor Srdja Trifkovic was interviewed by Serbian morning news program, Dobro jutro (Good Morning) on the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. We bring you an abbreviated and edited transcript of his remarks in English. ST: The conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh does not have the same potential to trigger...
By nominating Federal Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, Donald Trump kept his word, and more than that. Should she be confirmed, he will have made history. Even his enemies would have to concede that Trump triumphed where his Republican predecessors—even Ronald Reagan, who filled three court vacancies—fell short. Trump’s achievement—victory in the...
Recently C. Bradley Thompson responded obliquely to my critical comments in Chronicles about his book and subsequent observations on the American Founding. Contrary to Thompson’s asides on Facebook and Twitter dismissing my criticism, I did read some of his tome, The Revolutionary Mind, and even commented on it—but I found its discussion of our state-builders so...
“As everyone knows, I made it clear that my first choice for the Supreme Court will make history as the first African American woman justice.” So Joe Biden promised. Since the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, however, Biden has refused to produce a list of Black female judges and scholars whom he would consider...
It’s mid-September, and the sun already seems to be setting lower in a sky of lengthening shadows. The temperatures have noticeably dropped off. Autumn, such as it is in this part of the country, appears to already have begun settling in, like an early and unexpected guest. I was walking along a sidewalk in my...
President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are on the cusp of making history. With Trump having named two justices to the U.S. Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, they have an opening to elevate a third justice to fill the seat of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, thereby securing the constitutionalism of the...
Given the spread of violence across America, and the unfortunate politicization of these events, I’ve written a statement that virtually any Protestant or Catholic pastor could release, or deliver from the pulpit, in the wake of the next outrageous attack on innocent life using guns. As a public service to Christians in America, I’ve written...
Having presided over the recognition of Israel by the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, President Donald Trump has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize amid talk of peace breaking out across the region. Assuredly, this is a major diplomatic breakthrough, and Nancy’s Pelosi’s sour-grapes dismissal of the deal as a “distraction” testifies to that...
It seems that on many fronts, the American establishment right has been incapable of halting the advance of the left. There is one bright spot, however: more Americans are resisting encroachments against their right to self-defense by exercising their Second Amendment rights. Gun stores have had 10.3 million firearms sales so far this year, according to...
“There is no… sound reason for the United States to continue sacrificing precious lives and treasure in a conflict not directly connected to our safety or other vital national interests.” So said William Ruger about Afghanistan, our longest war. What makes this statement significant is that President Donald Trump has ordered a drawdown by mid-October...