My father, Harry S. Cathey, was a World War II veteran. He left behind letters to my mother written from France and Germany in 1944 and 1945. Some of the words and designations are obviously in a code they had between them—he could not identify locations in the combat zone. What comes through above all...
On March 24, President Donald Trump said he wanted the country and the economy “opened up and just raring to go by Easter.” Easter came and went. And Trump was mocked for being aspirational and unrealistic. Yet, with Ascension Thursday at hand, 40 days after Easter, the president seems to have been ahead of his time....
Four weeks ago I posted an article examining some likely geopolitical implications of the COVID-19 epidemic. The first among those concerned attempts by major oil producers to halt the collapse of prices by agreeing to the largest production cut in history. I noted that it was uncertain whether the agreement would be enough to push...
“We have met the moment and we have prevailed,” said President Donald Trump Monday, as he supported the opening of the U.S. economy before the shutdown plunges us into a deep and lasting depression. Tuesday, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases, made clear to a Senate committee his contradictory views....
Lately, my progressive acquaintances and the mainstream media seem unable to complete a thought without mentioning the importance of “public health.” These days, if Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia decides to take away people’s guns, he’s only doing so to improve the public health. If he then wishes to extend abortion rights to women who...
Free speech, open inquiry, and serious academic discussion are now being construed as the fruits of racism, white supremacy, sexism, or homophobia in my state of North Carolina. Differing points of view, once the hallmark of our college education system, are now routinely suppressed, and increasingly by professors and pusillanimous administrators at our universities. A...
Under fire for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump, his campaign and his party are moving to lay blame for the 80,000 U.S. dead at the feet of the Communist Party of China and, by extension, its longtime General Secretary, President Xi Jinping. “There is a significant amount of evidence” that the...
Over the weekend, Never Trumper Erick Erickson put up a profanity-laced series of tweets in which he berated pro-Trump conservatives for criticizing the lockdown that has shuttered many businesses, closed down most churches, stopped most medical procedures and examinations, and isolated most Americans from friends and family for two months or so. According to Erickson,...
The most destructive war in history ended in Europe shortly after 9 p.m. on May 8, 1945, when Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signed the final German Instrument of Surrender. Over the past seven and a half decades millions of words have been written about World War II, but some of its aspects remain contentious to...
After Pearl Harbor, FDR declared that his role of “Dr. New Deal” had been superseded, replaced by his new role, “Dr. Win the War.” Tuesday, President Donald Trump signaled that, in the war on the coronavirus pandemic, he, too, is executing a strategic pivot. Where the medical crisis had been the central front, pulling the...
As of April 30, the coronavirus pandemic has killed 61,500 Americans in two months and induced the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. And if history is our guide, the economic crisis, which has produced 30 million unemployed Americans in six weeks, may prove more enduring, ruinous, and historic than the still-rising and tragic death...
The fate of Karen Whitsett, a black Democratic representative to the Michigan House of Representatives, who was censured by her fellow black Democrats from Detroit, for developing good relations with President Trump, speaks volumes. It tells us, if any further proof were required, how deeply American blacks hate the Republican Party and any black person...
Is America, in lockdown, with 26 million unemployed and entering a new depression, up for a confrontation and Cold War with China? For that appears to be where the GOP wishes to lead us. According to Politico, a 57-page memo from Mitch McConnell’s senatorial committee instructs GOP candidates to blame the coronavirus pandemic on China,...
“War is the health of the state,” wrote the progressive Randolph Bourne during the First World War, after which he succumbed to the Spanish flu. America’s war on the coronavirus pandemic promises to be no exception to the axiom. However long this war requires, the gargantuan state will almost surely emerge triumphant. Currently, the major expenditures...
After the Great Pandemic has passed and we emerge from Great Depression II, what will be America’s mission in the world? What will be America’s cause? We have been at such a turning point before. After World War II, Americans wanted to come home. But we put aside our nation-building to face the challenge of...
Founding Virtue To the list of those labeled as “social justice conservatives” by Brion McClanahan (“Reinventing Reconstruction,” February 2020) you can add the names of the Founding Fathers. Referring to them, Alexander Stephens (Vice-President of the Confederacy and author of the infamous “Cornerstone Speech”) wrote, “The prevailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and most of the...
Political magazines have long relied on donors to ensure their continued existence. This is true of Chronicles, but it’s also been true of mainstream organs of conservatism such as the National Review. William F. Buckley, Jr., would often pen letters to donors which asserted that the magazine was “dead broke.” In one such letter from...
As everyone who has not been in total coronavirus quarantine knows, Harvey Weinstein was recently condemned to death for sexually assaulting six Hollywood wannabes. Actually, he was given 23 years in prison, but in view of his 67 years of age, it would have been far more dramatic and fitting for the former Hollywood film...
On April 20, Adolf Hitler turns 131. Ten days later comes the 75th anniversary of his earthly demise in the ruins of Berlin, but he is still our contemporary par excellence. He continues to haunt and fascinate. Hitler’s countenance, his very name, seem to get indelibly etched in the collective consciousness of each new generation....
“Nothing will ever be the same again!” The cliché is invoked whenever people think they are facing an event of metahistorical significance. Sometimes its use is justified: Sarajevo 1914, the Bolshevik Revolution, Hiroshima, and the fall of the Berlin Wall fit the phrase. More often it is not. Versailles 1919, JFK’s assassination, Neil Armstrong’s “giant...
As the hysterical coronavirus overreaction crashes our economy, I can’t help but think of the Spanish flu, which took some 675,000 American lives in 1918 and 1919. Adjusting for the difference in the size of the American population then and now, that number would be equivalent to two million deaths today. I’ll be surprised—I’m writing...
One would be hard pressed to find a more pleasant London neighborhood than the leafy suburb of Twickenham, where this author resides. Situated on the Thames River and immersed in history, Twickenham was for years a bastion of conservatism. In the last two decades, however, Twickenham has become something of a solid outpost for the...
The late Joe Sobran used to refer to liberal high society as “the hive.” What Joe was highlighting were certain qualities that he associated with the fashionable left, e.g., extreme clannishness, the exclusion of those who deviated from authorized political doctrines, and a sense of moral superiority. Without having to deny that such a “hive”...
While researching a book on antifascism, it became clear to me that the contemporary left has strange ideas about what earlier leftists believed. This is especially true in the ascription of a certain timelessness to intersectional politics, which today’s antifascists are all about. In How Fascism Works by Yale Philosophy Professor Jason Stanley, and in...
Among the works that first brought Henry Kissinger to academic acclaim was A World Restored, his 1950s book about how the greatest diplomats of Europe met at the Congress of Vienna to restore order to a continent shattered by the Napoleonic Wars. The balance-of-power peace these men achieved lasted—with the significant exception of the...
The same day the number of U.S. dead from the coronavirus disease hit the 15,000 mark, we also crossed the 15 million mark on the number of Americans we threw out of work to slow its spread and “bend the curve.” For each American lost to the pandemic, 1,000 Americans have lost their jobs because...
Easter may not bring America the victory in the war against the coronavirus pandemic that President Donald Trump anticipated. But in this Holy Week, we may be reaching our Saratoga moment, our turning point. While New York state reported a record number of deaths from the virus on Tuesday, over 1,800, new hospitalizations were down....
Is Antonin Scalia’s originalism—indeed, constitutional self-government itself—passé? The eternal temptation to read one’s own values into the Constitution beguiles even religious conservatives espousing natural law. The U.S. Constitution is the “supreme law of the land,” whose ultimate interpretation is entrusted, by longstanding custom if not by explicit textual direction, to the U.S. Supreme Court. Accordingly,...
I first heard the Loveline radio show in the late ’90s. It came on late at night, broadcast from Los Angeles back to me in Atlanta. The format was like an old-fashioned advice column, but with a coarse edge. People phoned in with questions about sex and relationships, tales of abuse and heartbreak, disease and...
No one so much as pauses when the mob shouts down reasonable voices during a panic. Just witness the media’s daily performance during the COVID-19 crisis. CNBC hit the ejector button on author James Grant during a live broadcast when he wondered aloud if the government’s civil society shutdown might lead to more harm than...
The Long Night of the Watchman: Essays by Václav Benda, 1977-1989 (St. Augustine’s Press; 352 pp., $35.00). On July 4, 1983, in Prague, there occurred one of those moments that may rightly be considered a single loose pebble that caused an avalanche. Film director MiloŠ Forman had been permitted to return to his native Czechoslovakia...
Two years after the death of the man whom one of his biographers, John Judis, dubbed the patron saint of modern conservatism, Encounter Books brought out a splendidly packaged omnibus volume of his columns and essays, entitled Athwart History: Half a Century of Polemics, Animadversions, and Illuminations (2010). On the cover, William Francis Buckley stands...
Parasite may be both the most amusing and the most horrifying movie of the year. That is, if you can get past its inept attempt at making a political statement. Written and directed by Bong Joon-ho, Parasite recently became the first foreign language film to win the Academy Award for best picture. Bong’s investigation of...
As I write, political factions left and right are sparring over the right approach to the coronavirus. I don’t envy President Donald Trump or the members of his coronavirus response team, for they appear to be in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situation. If they continue a general societal shutdown for too long, the economy will teeter...
If you had told me at Christmas that by March the whole office would be working remotely due to a state emergency order to combat a global pandemic, I wouldn’t have believed you. But here we are. Without a doubt, this is a situation 99.9 percent of Americans have never experienced. Many cities appear abandoned,...
Many intemperate critics have attacked President Trump and his intellectual influences. Benjamin Teitelbaum is not one of them. Cleverer and more fair-minded than most critiques, War for Eternity strives to show that many modern national conservative and populist movements are paradoxically informed by the arcane intellectual current known as traditionalism. At the book’s heart are...
Among the 20th-century conservative movement’s legendary leaders, Willmoore Kendall (1909-1967) stands out as the one who most effectively offered a grounding in a specifically American philosophy. There is also a timeliness in this remarkable political scientist’s thought. Our society has become divided to an extent that Kendall might well have found horrifying—although not surprising. His...
Enthusiastic defenders of the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution are fundamentalist cultists—and women and minorities are their victims. At least, that is the thesis of University of Miami law professor Mary Anne Franks’ new book, The Cult of the Constitution, an unforgiving disparagement of the Constitution’s white male origins and the allegedly unwoke...
When he was president, Theodore Roosevelt, a patron of arts and letters, commissioned the redesign of American coins, especially the small denominations in common circulation, from the penny to the dollar. He was right to complain about the existing designs; at least about the nickel, the dime, the quarter, and the half. However, the Indian...
For declaring in March that the U.S. economy might be reopened by Easter, President Donald Trump was roundly mocked. Yet, it appears his political instincts were correct. He was more in tune with his country than were his critics. By early Easter week, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the governors of six states in the New...
In the third week of April, the nation remained absorbed by the epidemic and its immediate effects, to the exclusion of most other concerns at home or abroad. This does not mean that the struggle for power and resources in the great, wide Hobbesian world has been suspended. It continues, just as the Hundred Years’...
Pope Francis recently said he believes the coronavirus epidemic is “nature’s response” to humanity’s failure to address human-induced climate change. Asked by British journalist and papal biographer Austen Ivereigh if the current crisis provided an opportunity for an “ecological conversion,” the pontiff repeated his previously stated belief that humanity had provoked nature by not responding adequately...
“Fortress Europe is an illusion.” So declares the Financial Times in the closing line of its Saturday editorial: “Europe Cannot Ignore Syrian Migrant Crisis.” The FT undertakes to instruct the Old Continent on what its duty is and what its future holds: “The EU will face flows of migrants and asylum seekers across the Mediterranean...
A week ago, the candidacy of Joe Biden was at death’s door. On a taping of “The McLaughlin Group,” this writer suggested it might be time to “call the rectory” and have the monsignor come render last rites. Today, Biden’s candidacy is not only alive. He is first in votes, victories, and delegates, and is...
For more than 60 years, I’ve been interested in both the historical past and in how historical interpretations are created. I’ve also written a great deal on both subjects, but particularly on how public and scholarly opinions about past events and personalities change, and why they change. I believe there are two routes through which...
President Donald Trump’s first official visit to India produced all the right optics for him and his host, Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Tens of thousands of flag-waving Indians lined the streets, and well over 100,000 came to the cricket stadium in Ahmedabad to hear Trump speak. Clips from the Namaste Trump extravaganza—shots of a charismatic...
As we ponder the impact of school closures, economic dislocation, panicky shoppers clearing the shelves of toilet paper, and the general disruption of our lives as a result of the coronavirus scare, there are a couple deeper points to consider about how this situation came about. First, the warning signs of what globalism meant for...
A long time ago, I happened upon a cartoon in some publication or other. A single frame—in the vein of Gary Larson—depicted thousands of sheep rushing headlong off a cliff. In the middle of this great multitude, one particular sheep moved in the opposite direction. “Excuse me…excuse me…excuse me,” it bleated. That scene came to...
For decades, American political discourse has largely operated within the spectrum of opinions voiced by the editorial pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. Opinions not embraced by one of these newspapers were unlikely to advance very far, and those voicing such unapproved opinions were, sooner or later,...