The politics of race—mayoral candidate Rudi Giuliani realized after the September 12 primary that to win as a Republican in a Democratic town like New York, he would have to get a large chunk of liberal and centrist Jews to desert David Dinkins’ ticket. As soon as the primary was over, therefore, the Giuliani campaign...
2426 search results for: Politics of Race
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On Politics and Race
Now that Samuel Francis’s two-part installment on his “Rise and Fall” appears complete (April and May 1996), it’s time for the readers of Chronicles to hear the rest of the story. What he did not disclose was the nature of his blatantly white supremacist writings that appeared in a newsletter called American Renaissance. In the...
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Race Politics, Part Two—Clinton for President, Petty for King
Welcome to Darlington. The cradle of Southern stock car racing. The sport was born near here the first time a U.S. Revenue agent figured that he could catch a moonshiner running along a twisty hack road with a car load of booze. No way. . . . Darlington is tradition. First of the big tracks...
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Race Politics: Part One
Yes, I know I promised to write about the Georgia state flag controversy, but that prospect was too depressing. Let me address instead a couple of more entertaining topics, namely the 43rd annual Mountain Dew Southern 500 NASCAR Winston Cup Series Race and the recent presidential election. By the time you read this you’ll know...
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Republicans Celebrate Critical Race Theory This Kwanzaa
The GOP launched a seemingly coordinated campaign to celebrate Kwanzaa this year. “Wishing you a happy and prosperous Kwanza!” tweeted the official account of the College Republicans. It was a theme echoed by numerous other official GOP channels. In wishing his followers a happy Kwanzaa from the balmy state of Florida, Republican Rep. Byron Donalds was simply following...
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The Internet Makes Crazy Politics
These are not easy times for those cherishing political sanity. Barely a day passes without some stupidity drawing the “What can these idiots be thinking?” response. How is one to respond to demands that drag queens be allowed to read to toddlers at public libraries or that boys must be permitted to compete in girls’...
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Sabotaging the Poor, Selling Out for Politics
If there were a Museum of Terrible Ideas, the permanent collection would surely include today’s elected leaders who believe the best way to represent impoverished neighborhoods is to demand the defunding of police departments and supporting policies to undermine public schools. How can anyone argue that poor people benefit from lax law enforcement or ending...
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Critical Race Theory Is Worse Than Marxism
The swear words “Marxist” and “revolutionary” are now thrown around by conservatives, such as those at Heritage, the New York Post, and Fox News, with the same abandon with which the left speaks about “human rights” or “marriage,” particularly in relation to the concept of Critical Race Theory (CRT). But as someone who has studied Marxism extensively,...
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Politics Is Not the Only Game in Town
For many conservatives today’s political news may resemble the early days of World War II: endless defeats and little to suggest future victories. Make no mistake, the defeats are real, but the situation is not as bleak as it may appear. The left triumphs in the political realm and this makes its victories public. By...
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Ending Critical Race Theory for the Children’s Sake
A video of a white teacher from Loudon County, Virginia protesting the required Critical Race Theory (CRT) training for teachers is a highlight of Andrea Widburg’s article, “Maybe the pendulum is starting to swing on cancel culture.” Take one minute to watch this female fireball, and you’ll hear what so many of us are thinking but...
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Danger and Disgrace on Inauguration Day
On Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 2021, 25,000 National Guard soldiers will be assembled in Washington D.C., ostensibly to protect our nation’s capitol from rioters and insurrectionists. Various federal agencies requested the Guard, and governors from across the United States complied with that request. Hundreds more federal and local law officials will also stand watch in...
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Common App Letter Showcases Politics as Educational Endgame
I taught seminars in Latin, history, composition, and literature to homeschool students in Asheville, North Carolina for more than 15 years, including Advanced Placement courses. As a result, students often asked me to write college recommendation letters for them, such as letters for the Common Application, or Common App as it is known. Though I...
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Identity Politics Preserve the Elites’ Power
The avalanche of identity politics has spurred an interest in studying income inequality along cultural lines. Surprisingly, leftists have deviated from their fixation on class warfare to privileging race and gender disparities. It is even more bewildering that few writers recognize the devaluing of class dynamics in popular debates. Invariably, income inequality is mainly about...
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Identity Politics Means Rule by Useful Idiots
Identity politics is now the term du jour and its meaning is clear enough on a superficial level—choosing people according to their physical characteristics and sexual preferences. The left wants more people of color, women, and gays in influential positions, while the right insists that these traits are secondary to competence in a given job....
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Politicians Are Incentivized to Embrace Useless COVID-19 Restrictions
Over the weekend Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, took to Twitter to criticize Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker for not taking more assertive government action to slow the spread of the coronavirus. “Massachusetts has more new COVID cases per capita than Georgia, Florida, or Texas,” observed Jha, who also...
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Politics as Spiritual Warfare
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...
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Prince Andrew in Disgrace
The fall of Prince Andrew, Duke of York, is index to the strength of the monarchy. He has now been ordered by the Queen to step back from public life “for the foreseeable future.” His continued friendship with the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein was the immediate cause, and it was followed by the Duke’s ill-judged...
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Biden Goes All In on the Race Issue
Those who believed America’s racial divide would begin to close with the civil rights acts of the 1960s and the election of a black president in this century appear to have been overly optimistic. The race divide seems deeper and wider than at any time in our lifetimes. Most of the aspiring leaders of the...
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The End of Politics
Politics are over in America. Political maneuvering will go on, of course, but the old civics-class view of American political life was based on a set of assumptions that are no longer operative. America was once far more homogenous than she is today. But the passing of the 1965 Immigration Act and the political and...
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Race and the Classless Society
A few months ago I was on a long plane ride when something rather startling happened: Someone sitting near me was actually polite. He was in the seat immediately in front of mine, and before reclining he turned to look over his shoulder and asked—asked!—if I would mind if he leaned a little bit into...
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The Politics of Morbid Fascination
Rafael Palmeiro has ED. How do I know? He told me. He told you, too. Heck, he told the whole country about 15 years ago. He went on national television (while intermittently swinging a big bat—Freudian subtlety is lost on the Madison Avenue types) to say that he was having a bit of trouble with...
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Machine Politics
From the December 1993 issue of Chronicles. “Modern liberty begins in revolt.” —H.M. Kallen In 1943, in the midst of the dark years of World War II when collectivism seemed to be sweeping all before it at home and abroad, three fiercely independent and feisty women, all of them friends and libertarians devoted to what...
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UNDERSTANDING BALKAN GEOPOLITICS
In his latest interview for Serbia’s National Public Service Radio, Srdja Trifkovic discusses the geopolitical significance of the Balkan Peninsula, through the centuries, in the context of today’s complex strategic equation in Southeastern Europe. Audio (Interview starts at 2 minutes 50 seconds. Unedited translation from Serbian) Q: The Balkan Peninsula is an area where empires,...
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Race, Genocide, and Memory
In 2012, U.S. historian William H. Frederick sparked a fierce controversy about a horrible if largely forgotten episode in Asian history, the so-called Bersiap movement of the 1940’s. The affair demands our attention for what it suggests about the politics of memory, and how we value human lives. It also reminds us of the quite...
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Trump Embraces the Culture War
To attend the Indianapolis Colts game where the number of the legendary Peyton Manning was to be retired, Vice President Mike Pence, a former governor of Indiana, flew back from Las Vegas. With him in the stadium was wife Karen. In honor of Manning, she wore a No. 18 jersey as “The Star Spangled Banner”...
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Race and Civil Rights
One would expect race-baiting liberals and leftists to try to glorify the “civil-rights movement” and the laws of the early 1960’s, insisting that we view all of it as earth shaking history, more important than the fall of the Roman Empire, the Norman Invasion, the battles of Tours and Lepanto, the Reformation, the American, French,...
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Agonistic Politics
Thirty years ago Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) was hardly visible on the American intellectual horizon, and the rare mention of his name in scholarly publications was usually dismissive. After all, Schmitt was a Nazi, a Catholic extremist, and an inveterate enemy of the liberal order. Today, Schmitt’s major works are available in English translation, and a...
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Take the Money and Run: Entitlement Politics
As New York City’s mayoral campaign kicked into overdrive earlier this spring, the New York Times saw fit to question the viability of Republican candidate Joe Lhota, former chairman of the Metropolitan Transit Authority. With all the populist fervor it could muster, the Times asked readers, “Can New Yorkers learn to love someone who increased...
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Politics Against Nature
As I write, the lame-duck Congress is revving up for one last chance to do really lasting damage to the country, in the form of the cloyingly titled DREAM Act, which would grant an open-ended amnesty to illegal aliens who were brought here as children by their parents. As Roy Beck of NumbersUSA warns, this...
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On Race and Fairness
In “Race and Racism” (Views, November) Tom Landess states that a seismic shift occurred in race relations with Strom Thurmond leading the Dixiecrats out of the Democratic National Convention in 1948. Now, in 1948, blacks were paying taxes (federal, state, and local). They saw that money used by politicians to foster second-rate education, housing, and...
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Race and Racism: A Brief History
Today, many Americans presume that the debate over slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries turned on the question of race. Though race was an ingredient in the Great Debate, it was no more than a pinch of salt. Both proponents and opponents of slavery tended to hold the same view of blacks. The superiority...
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Race and Racism: A Brief History
Today, many Americans presume that the debate over slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries turned on the question of race. Though race was an ingredient in the Great Debate, it was no more than a pinch of salt. Both proponents and opponents of slavery tended to hold the same view of blacks. The superiority...
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Politics and Economics in America
All things at Rome are for sale. —Juvenal Thomas Jefferson has left us an account of a supper-table conversation in the very earliest days of the U.S. government. Vice President John Adams (who was intended by nature for a preacher) declaimed at length about the virtues of the British government, which, he ...
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The Politics of Dante
I propose, in the two weeks I have before going to Florence, that we look at two works of Dante: the Convivio and the De Monarchia . Although the whole of the Convivio is worth our attention, I am only going to talk about Book IV, in which Dante talks about the empire, Rome, the...
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Politics in the Anti-Christian Age
So what is the real significance of Barack Obama’s victory? Pundits’ fingers and tongues have been flying, of course, scoring the triumph in a variety of ways: the terrible legacy of slavery and racism has been dealt a conclusive blow; the Democratic Party has displaced the Republicans as the party of Middle America; the nation...
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Spain Embraces Change: Canceling the Past
For the last four years, change has been in the air in Spain, following the election of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party. And thanks to his reelection in March of this year, we can look forward to more of the same. There have been abrupt changes to...
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The Promise and Peril of Identity Politics: Hope in a Dismal Season
George W. Bush is a stunningly and deservedly unpopular president. His approval ratings rival Nixon’s after Watergate, and the Republicans largely avoided any mention of him at their convention in St. Paul, a convention from which Bush was conspicuously absent. Under his leadership, we have become embroiled in a war that has cost thousands of...
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Tribal Politics
Was race a factor in the decision of Colin Powell to repudiate his party’s nominee and friend of 25 years, Sen. John McCain, two weeks before Election Day, and to endorse Barack Obama? Gen. Powell does not deny it, contending only that race was not the only or decisive factor. “If I had only that...
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The Politics of Human Interests
After wearing out the patience of television viewers over an entire year of premature campaigning, the two political parties will soon be informing us of their choices. Will the presidential election of 2008 really come down to a contest between two leftist anti-Christian senators representing New York? Or will Al Gore, even more bloated with...
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Pop Culture and Politics: Passing By the Train Wreck
If Macbeth were alive today, he would probably make an appearance in the public confessional with Oprah Winfrey and, in all likelihood, would emerge as a prime candidate for Big Brother or one of the other “reality” shows that crowd our airwaves. Macbeth would be helped to come to terms with his domestic issues and...
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The Politics of Life—and Politics
“If a woman of her own accord drops that which is in her, they shall crucify her and not bury her.” —The Assyrian Code, c. 2000 B.C. Ancient history is worth keeping in mind when confronting the claims of the pro- and anti-abortion and euthanasia camps, since both tend to couch their arguments in terms...
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Talking About Conservatism: The Politics of Guilt
It is not easy nowadays even to mention the word conservative in Greece. Historical factors, as well as the cultural dominance of the left since the restoration of democracy in 1974, have put immense pressure on everyone who is trying to represent the right in the modern Hellenic Republic. Even when speaking of the ruling...
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Beyond Politics
Most Americans think of the terms modern and modernity as denoting something positive. A modern society is advanced in science, reason, hygiene, and human goodness. To condemn modernity is to be against progress and all of its material benefits. Even American conservatives are essentially modern in outlook, identifying modernity with material improvement. European conservatives are...
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New Politics in Old Virginia
It took 114 years, but by 2000, Virginia had become a Republican state. What brought about such a great change in the Old Dominion? Let’s take a look back. Reconstruction was the low point of Virginia history. In 1865, a defeated and gutted state lost not only its cities, towns, farms, and one third of...
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A Race Apart
“A people still, whose common ties are gone; Who, mixed with every race, are lost in none.”—George Crabbe Kevin MacDonald’s study of the Jewish people in sociobiological perspective will not likely help his career, for reasons having nothing to do with the author’s scholarship or his accumulation of pertinent evidence. While...
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The Politics of Illegitimacy Rates
Since the early 1960’s, compiling statistics on illegitimacy rates in the United States has been the official responsibility of the National Center for Health Statistics. However, the methodology employed by that federal agency to determine illegitimacy rates according to race has been inaccurate, classifying virtually all illegitimate Hispanic births as illegitimate “white” births. The result...
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The Politics of Hispanic Identity
The federal government officially recognizes “Hispanic”—an artificial and arbitrary concept devoid of ethnic, racial, cultural, or linguistic meanings—as a legitimate collective identity for two reasons. Domestically, it is to create a “Hispanic nation” within the United States, to inflate the numerical size of that “nation,” and to have all members of that “nation” eligible for...
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Pizza Politics
Pittsburgh’s Human Relations Commission did the right thing in January in the pizza “redlining” case against Pizza Hut brought by Carl and Shelia Truss. The Trusses, a middle-class black couple who reside in a mixed-race area of well-kept homes in the upper Hill District area of Pittsburgh, also known as Sugar Top, phoned Pizza Hut...
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The Politics of Hate Crime Statistics
The FBI’s “Hate Crime Statistics”—preliminary figures for 1995 were released in November—are highly suspect because of the agency’s flawed methodology. The problem is that, in recording and identifying the perpetrators of hate crimes, there are no strictly defined categories for thugs of “European-American,” “Hispanic,” or “Middle Eastern” descent. The term “Hispanic” has already been officially...
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The Hague Tribunal: Bad Justice, Worse Politics
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once referred to the Cheka as “the only punitive organ in human history that combined in one set of hands investigation, arrest, interrogation, prosecution, trial, and execution of the verdict.” He was probably mistaken about “human history,” but his anger was just. What he chronicled was indefinite imprisonment without trial; investigations and indictments...