As the American left brings all aspects of human life under the ideological command of an all-powerful state, the right needs to pursue a strategy of decentralization.
Year: 2023
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What We Are Reading: October 2023
Short reviews of Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary, by Robert Nisbet, and The Power of the Powerless, by Václav Havel.
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Books in Brief: October 2023
Short reviews of The Constitution of Non-State Government, by T. L. Hulsey, and The Past Is a Future Country, by J.O.A. Rayner-Hilles.
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The Missed GOP Debate Opportunity
The Republican Party keeps looking back at Reagan without considering what has changed since Reagan. This results in missed opportunities for the GOP.
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‘Hood Justice’ in Ohio
Three black men involved in the brutal death of a white teen in Ohio walked away with slaps on the wrist, calling into question whether equal justice under the law still exists for whites in America.
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Biden’s a Loser–but Democrats Can’t Ditch Him
Joe Biden is going to lose to Donald Trump in '24. Democrats can see this but there is little they can do to stop it.
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John Fetterman’s Slovenliness and the Demise of Objective Social Standards
The Senate is defining its standards down to meet the demands of a single mentally defective boor who lived off his parents until he was nearly 50 and still cannot bring himself to dress and act like an adult.
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Do Sex Scandals Matter?
Trump, Boebert, Gibson—or any candidate—might have moral character flaws, but candidates who are personally objectionable are often politically indispensable.
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Inherited Traditions Are More Credible Than Natural Rights
Chronicles Editor Paul Gottfried explains why the moral and legal foundations of America are found in religion and custom, not Enlightenment natural rights, which can be interpreted ever-leftward and lead to intolerance and aggression.
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Defending Natural Right
Government on the basis of tradition and biblical morality is no longer possible in modern times, Michael Anton argues; our choices are either a rational morality independent of man's will, or nihilism.
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Hunter’s Gun Indictment Is Moment of Truth for Biden Regime
The Biden Regime's handling of the Hunter indictment will tell us whether we actually have a two-tier justice system as conservatives claim.
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Cornel West Spells Doom for Biden
Cornel West is setting the stage for a replay of 2000 when Ralph Nader peeled off enough votes to cost the Democrats the White House. West's appeal, like Nader's, is a sign of a larger problem facing the Democratic party.
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What We Are Reading: September 11, An Oral History
The agony of this story is close to unbearable, but we recall atrocities in order to respect those souls who were ripped out of this world and sent into the next.
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‘Bidenomics’ Gaslighting Reveals POTUS’s Impotence Lead-Up to 2024
Joe Biden and his cackler henchwoman, Kamala Harris, will run on "Bidenomics." And they will ask you not to believe your own lying eyes, but to believe that the turd sandwich they are offering up is actually a tasty filet mignon.
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A Turbulent Traditionalist Priest
Faithful Catholics should not comply with the totalitarian demands of the globalists. We should not fear those who can kill the body but not the soul.
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Subverting Protestantism
The Missouri Synod is siding with Antifa over its own historic teachings, and its own members. Congregants within other supposed conservative churches should take note—be prepared for false promises and betrayal.
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The Rise and Fall of the Evangelical Elite
The current evangelical elite came of age at a time when secular influences tried to stay neutral toward Christianity; The faith competed as an equal in the marketplace of ideas. But those days are over. In our age of secularist hostility, evangelicals need new tactics.
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The State of Catholicism
The post-conciliar Church's efforts to bring Christ into the modern world have brought the modern world into the Church. The Church is not moving the world; the world is moving the Church.
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What We Are Reading: September 2023
Short reviews of Middlemarch, by George Eliot, and Shane, by Jack Schaefer.
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Toward a Secular America
America is finally joining the secularism of the other nations of the West. In this transition to secularism one key lesson emerges: faith is inextricably bound up with family.
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Rehabilitating Felix Frankfurter
American law school faculty is often given to unwise and thoughtless hero worship, to which even Felix Frankfurter occasionally succumbed.
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A Flawed Primer on ‘Conservative Revolutionaries’
The book Partisans is a product of contemporary political discourse—made up of cut-and-paste, second- and third-hand source-filled rants—that fails to pass for serious scholarship.
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Invasion of the World Savers
There is still time left to rescue the past, present, and future from William MacAskill’s ideological future savers.
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Books in Brief: September 2023
Short reviews of Tearing Us Apart, by Ryan T. Anderson and Alexandra DeSanctis, and Dollars for Life, by Mary Ziegler.
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Crime’s Black Adhesive
Sterling Hayden was as an actor and soldier, he had the resolution to make his participation in his films and his career more than well-earned.
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Do Natural Rights Exist?
Michael Anton and Paul Gottfried debate the existence of natural rights in the September 2023 issue.
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A Spark to Start a Wildfire
Sound of Freedom is a beautifully crafted and passionately humane film about the darkest underbelly of contemporary life: the trafficking and sexual abuse of helpless children.
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Getting Unexpectedly Noticed
National Review writer Michael Brendan Dougherty's recent comments explain the attempts of conservative establishment publications to ignore paleoconservatives.
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Diversities True and False
Within the literature and the arts, it is the left that is the least diverse, and the most inward-looking and intolerant of different perspectives.
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California’s Own Reparations
California is at the forefront of the plan to grant reparations to blacks for slavery and discrimination. The state's published plan to pay up to $800 billion makes no sense, especially since California entered the Union as a free state.
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The New Lingua Franca
The inability to speak well was once upon a time a great hurdle to overcome. But in today’s schools, pupils are taught that speaking properly is elitist, snobby, and not with the times.
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Kissinger in China
Henry Kissinger’s fears and misgivings about the future of U.S.-Chinese relations may prove just as prophetic as George Kennan's warnings about Russia and NATO expansion.
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Vivek Ramaswamy and Conservative Victimhood
Vivek Ramaswamy once condemned conservative victimhood, especially Trump's Jan. 6 narrative. Now he's indulging it, in order to cultivate Trump supporters.
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Ramaswamy: A Trump Versus Trump?
Trump wasn't on stage in Milwaukee, but Trumpism was, thanks to Vivek Ramaswamy. Will Ramaswamy take votes from establishment candidates, or from Trump himself?
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The Paths Forward for the GOP Presidential Field
There is truly only one person around whom a GOP consolidation might be feasible, and he happens to be the de facto winner of Wednesday's debate.
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The GOP Primary Obviously Isn’t Over, but the First Debate Is Crucial
If one is to believe the prevailing narrative from Donald Trump’s current campaign to retake the White House, the 2024 Republican presidential primary might as well be over. The former president has been consistently dominating the top-line horse race polling for months now, the argument goes, despite (or perhaps because of?) the fact he has...
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How America Kills Its Own
America is a worse place for the 50,000 men and women we lost to suicide last year.
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War in Ukraine: U.S. Analysts Sink to New Depths
The topic of Ukraine brings once-reputable journals and senior analysts down to the level of propagandistic hacks. A particularly egregious example was recently published in an online edition of Foreign Policy.
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They Don’t Just Hate Trump. They Hate You!
The left—and the establishment GOP—want all Trump’s supporters to live in fear that they’ll share the fates of the January 6 defendants, of Jake Gardner, of Ashli Babbitt, of Kyle Rittenhouse, and all the other uppity proles who dared to disobey their supposed betters.
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Armenians in Peril, Again
The ongoing war between Azerbaijan and Armenia threatens the existence of Christian communities in the Near East. The Biden White House is unlikely to intervene in any way for fear of losing support from Turkey.
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Bye-Bye, “Y’all”
The term "y'all" is being appropriated for woke means in a manner that would make historic Southerners turn in their graves.
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Freedom’s Penalties
In Obedience Is Freedom, Jacob Phillips illustrates how too much freedom can often mean unhappiness. Men are not made to endlessly self-create.
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The Therapeutic Roots of Wokeism
A new order undergirded by therapism has taken form in the United States.
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Black Lives Matter’s Billions
The flames that swept through our cities in 2020 may have subsided, but the individuals and the institutions that fanned them haven’t gone away.
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Do Not Spare the Rod, or the Iron Bars
The Myth of Overpunishment is a muscular response to the activists and politicians who cry over the supposedly too-high incarceration rate of the American justice system.
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A Bridge to Nowhere
Modernist education is a bridge to nowhere. This is so almost by definition because modernism holds no transcendent aim for man nor even any reliable bedrock of human truth upon which to build.
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Why the Politics of Grievance Is a Winning Strategy for the Democrats
The Democratic Party decided to abandon the working class and become the party of grievance groups generations ago. This is what it is today; there's no going back.
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The Russian Conundrum
It is in the American interest to avoid the risk of direct intervention in Ukraine regardless of the course of the war because neither the security nor the prosperity of the United States depends upon its outcome.