One problem with labeling ideological movements “old” or “new” is that inevitably, with the passage of time, the “new” becomes an “old” and the markers get confusing. In the modern, post-World War II right wing, there have been a number of “news” and hence “olds” over the past half-century. But what I call the “Old...
4577 search results for: The Old Right
Beautiful Losers
When T.S. Eliot said that there are no lost causes because there are no won causes, he probably was not thinking of American conservatism. Nearly sixty years after the New Deal, the American right is no closer to challenging its fundamental premises and machinery than when Old Rubberlegs first started priming the pump and scheming...
Property Rights and the Founding
Americans entertain the peculiar idea that history—or, at least, “our history”—is the reign of continuity. In spite of all the talk about revolution, there appears to be a remarkable degree of stability in every substantial political rupture. The American Revolution was, in fact (we are told by historians), a “conservative one,” restoring the political order...
The Old Right Failure
No sooner had at least a dozen or so counterattacks on David Frum’s silly rant against paleoconservatives in the April 7 issue of National Review appeared in print or on the internet than the sole defense of the Frum article of which I am aware popped up under the name of William Rusher. Some paleos...
Witnessing at The Hague
All history is to some extent contemporary, but none more so than that analyzed, interpreted, and sometimes constructed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague. ...
Attack of the Jacobins
Trent Lott—to the guillotine! The cry has gone up, the mob is implacable, and the once-powerful and seemingly unassailable Senate majority leader has gotten the message loud and clear: Confess your sins, bare your neck, and prepare to lose your head! And for what? What sin did this former muckamuck of the GOP commit that...
From Household to Nation
If there was any major difference between the presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan in 1995 and his first run at the Republican nomination in 1992, it was the relative calm with which his enemies greeted the announcement of his second candidacy and his rapid move last year to the forefront of the Republican field. Rabbi...
Our Global Parents
Americans who hoped that the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child would be stuffed in a drawer with its predecessor, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, got a jolt in February when Mrs. Clinton announced (at the funeral of UNICEF director James Grant) that the Convention...
Politics Without a Right
It took only a few days after the rout of the Republicans in their battle to drive Bill Clinton from office for the leaders of the Beltway Right to decide that the war was over and the only thing left to do was announce surrender. Four days after the Senate “acquitted” the President of the...
Civil Rights or Property Rights?
The interplay of race and economics in America has produced a new variant of political economy that we might call “multicultural capitalism,” a system in which property is, for the most part, privately owned, but its ownership is conditional on the race, sex, and—in some cases—the sexual orientation of the owner. In the pursuit of...
Puppets and Their Masters
A naked boy runs down a crowded Italian street, chased by an angry old man. Grabbing the boy by the back of the neck, the old man shouts: “Just wait till I get you back home.” The crowd quickly takes sides against the old man, and when the carabinieri arrive, they take him off to...
Religious Wrong
Despite the ocean of ink that has been spilled in the last several months on the “religious right,” perhaps the most sensible comment about it, or at least about its journalistic coverage and political analysis, was penned by John F. Persinos in an article published in the magazine Campaigns and Elections last September. “When examined...
Our European Cousins
“All great peoples are conservative . . . “ —Thomas Carlyle What does it mean to be “rightwing”? Since the term and its companion “left-wing” first appeared in the wake of the French Revolution to describe, respectively, those who opposed and those who supported the revolutionary agenda and legacy, one plausible meaning of “right-wing” is...
Nobody but the People
In the “Prologue” to his massive biography of Sen. Joe McCarthy, historian Thomas Reeves describes a scene that took place in Milwaukee, in the senator’s home state, in November, 1954, only a month before his colleagues voted to condemn him and thereby effectively to terminate his career. The scene was a mass celebration of McCarthy’s...
Our Constitutional Covenant With Death
“The compact which exists between the North and the South,” proclaimed William Lloyd Garrison in an abolitionist declaration of 1843, “is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” When the Southern states concluded that they were no longer bound by what their enemies regarded as a compact with the devil. Garrison and his...
A New European Identity
In Europe today there is a youthful yearning for a new genesis and a desire to overcome the legacy of World War II. While a facile model of one generation rejecting the last is a tempting one to offer as explanation, in fact, the emerging “New Right” seeks both a connection and a rejection to...
Queen of the Damned
“What I like best about the Order of the Garter,” Lord Melbourne is reported to have remarked, “is that there is no damned merit about it.” Had the Philadelphia Society existed in Melbourne’s day, he would have found damned little merit in it either, though the society is not on quite the same level of...
The Living Constitution and the Death of Sovereignty
As this is written, the United States and its NATO allies are bombing the Serbian forces of Slobodan Milosevic. This is the first offensive action for NATO, and the first time that jellied armed forces have been unleashed against a sovereign nation with which the United States is not formally at war without an express...
The New Meaning of Conservatism
One of the most amazing and alarming features of the managerial system in the United States is its capacity to alter the meaning of things without changing their external appearance. This property is essentially what the Old Right political analyst Garet Garrett observed in his insight about “revolution within the form,” a concept he drew...
The New Right of the Old World
Intellectual conservatism in Europe began its odyssey with Donoso Cortes in the 19th century, only to end its shipwrecked voyage a century later with Oswald Spengler. European conservatism has always been a panic-stricken response to the egalitarian torrents that have been sweeping over Europe since the American and French Revolutions. After 1945, the anus mundi...
Tales From the Dark Side
“All great peoples are conservative; slow to believe in novelties; patient of much error in actualities; deeply and forever certain of the greatness that is in law, in custom once solemnly established, and now long recognized as just and final.” —Thomas Carlyle Both Justin Raimondo’s Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative...
Obama and the Bishops
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has had a rough time of it lately, and I won’t say they don’t deserve it. Barack Obama is their President, after all, when it comes to most political issues; for example, immigration and immigrants’ rights, tax policy, economic inequality, “social justice,” peaceful internationalism, and national healthcare. The exception,...
A Child’s Joke: A Story
The sea, warm and quiet, lay in front of me. Dusk was falling, and there was a strong smell of brine and kelp in the air. I was sitting on a piece of a ruined ancient column on the shore of the Black Sea and couldn’t quite believe that just a few hours earlier I...
Inside History’s Dustbin
Ever since I committed the blunder, nearly 30 years ago, of signing up with the “conservative movement” during my first year in graduate school, a certain pattern of behavior has enforced itself on my decreasingly callow mind. The pattern, as a colleague of mine once remarked to me, is that there seems to be no...
The Divine Left vs. the New Right
This time around, the divine left is definitely short of ideological change. Once upon a recent time it went to sleep with uncle Stalin; much later, it began to yawn with the revisionist Trotsky, Mao, and Tito; today, it is noisily waking up to the tune of politically correct liberalism. Even a layman must raise...
The Lion of Idaho
The latest fad among leftist historians, according to the New York Times, is the study of the conservative movement. “By marrying social and political history,” the Times announced, “this new wave of scholarship is revising the history of Americans on the right”—a prospect that is at once depressing and potentially rather promising. The depressing...
The Lion of Idaho
From the November 1998 issue of Chronicles. The latest fad among leftist historians, according to the New York Times, is the study of the conservative movement. “By marrying social and political history,” the Times announced, “this new wave of scholarship is revising the history of Americans on the right”—a prospect that is at once depressing...
Mr. Lincoln’s War: An Irrepressible Conflict?
“[T]he contest is really for empire on the side of the North, and for independence on that of the South, and in this respect we recognize an exact analogy between the North and the Government of George III, and the South and the Thirteen Revolted Provinces. These opinions…are ...
Old Route 66
Now, I’m a poor Oakie and I’m heading out west. I’m pulling a long trailer and my car’s doing its best. We hit a long mountain and she began to boil. She blew a head gasket and it started dripping oil. The wheels is out of balance, she shimmies and she shakes. But it keeps...
The Meaning of Macron—and the “Right” in the West
“He is on the right.” “That party represents the right.” These are standard expressions that are familiar today in the West, including France. But as usual, few understand or even care about the precise meaning of the word. Most people either hurl it as an insult, or claim it as a virtue. For example, after...
Classical Liberalism Must Endure
The right must defend and restore the early modern-era values of classical liberalism, rather than abandoning them just because they have been perverted by the postmodern left.
The Abortion Gambit
Trying to be the chief intellectual in the Republican Party is probably a little like trying to be an admiral in the Swiss navy, but in the last year or so, that is more or less what Bill Kristol has become. The son of neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol, young Bill made his bones by billing...
The Real Cabal
After nearly two decades of paleoconservative criticism, complaints, and general grousing about the ideological hegemony of the neoconservatives, the establishment press finally began to notice the existence of the latter. Between the time of President Bush’s factually flawed “Axis of Evil” State of the Union Address in 2002 and the “end” of the war with...
The Dream of the South
“Poetry is a northern man’s dream of the South.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Last of the Belles” In the summer of 1933, Southern Agrarian poet Allen Tate and his friend Marxist literary critic Malcolm Cowley visited various Civil War landmarks in northern Tennessee and southern Kentucky. After being photographed shaking hands in front of the...
Sarajevo Today, Chicago Tomorrow
The War Crimes Tribunal going on at The Hague is the first test of one of the great principles of postwar politics—the Nuremberg Doctrine, which makes individuals liable to international prosecution for actions committed during a war. In the old days, military personnel and police officers were expected to do as they were told. In...
Antiquities of the Republic
“The United States shall guarantee to every state in this Union a republican form of government.” —Constitution of the United States, Article IV Until the triumph of the civil-rights movement at the end of the 1960’s, probably the most disruptive and recurrent conflict in American politics came from the struggle between...
Treason Against the New Order
I was doing my best to mind my own business on a very busy Saturday. My wife was in England, and after nearly two weeks of playing mother, I was catching up on the laundry, shopping for the dinner I would have to prepare, and, in between trips to the store, I had to take...
Halting the Leftward Lurch
The centrist right has capitulated to the triumphant march of the left, but true conservative opposition, such as Sam Francis offers, is attacked as far-right extremism.
Soli Deo Gloria
This book is a collection of largely reprinted material (with revisions in some cases) and a couple of original essays. Its nine chapters cover (according to section titles) “the Catholic human rights revolution,” “peace and economy, again,” and “the life of the mind.” The expected repetitions are sometimes distracting if one reads the book straight...
Suicide of the Right
After spending several weeks in deep hugger-mugger at the Republican Party platform committee this summer, the leaders of the right wing of the GOP emerged triumphant. Their deeply beloved and totally useless Human Life Amendment was reaffirmed. The obnoxious statement of “tolerance” for the opinions of those who disagree with the amendment was excised. Language...
How Giorgia Meloni Became Standard-Bearer of the European Right
Once a marginal figure, Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni's success on the European stage stems partly from the rising popularity of the European right, but, above all, from what she has accomplished.
Democracy: The Enlightened Way
Before American readers embark on this inquiry into the particular democracy that was born in France with the French Revolution, I should warn them that they had better be prepared to enter a world of ideas so removed from reality as to make it almost impossible to believe there were people who actually took those...
Every Which Way But Up
“The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes.” —Aristotle Readers of Chronicles may vaguely recall Michael Lind as the contributor of a few articles to this magazine in the late 1980’s and early 90’s, but they should have no problem recognizing...
The Constitution, R.I.P.
On July 22 of this year, the Washington Times published, as the weekly installment of its “Civil War” section, a long article by a gentleman named Mackubin Thomas Owens, described as “professor of strategy and force planning” at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, under the headline, “Secession’s apologists gut Constitution, history.” The...
Will Fox News Outlive the Boomers?
Fox News continues occupying the right-center in American politics, but the rising generation of American rightists are miles further off to starboard.
Remaking Conservatism
Charles Kesler, in an otherwise unremarkable essay in the Claremont Review of Books (Summer 2009), argues that an effective response to the challenges of modern liberalism requires a revolution within conservatism. He says a reformation on the right must involve a “return to the principles of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution” as interpreted by...
Dorothy Day and the American Right
The title “Dorothy Day and the American Right” promises a merciful brevity, along the lines of “Commandments We Have Kept” by the Kennedy Brothers. After all, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement and editor of its newspaper lived among the poor, refused to participate in air-raid drills, and preferred Cesar Chavez to Bebe Rebozo....
Censorship: When to Say No
Every April since 1981 the American Society of journalists and Authors sponsors an “I Read Banned Books” campaign. They routinely trot out copies of children’s books like Alice in Wonderland or Mary Poppins and modern classics like Ulysses—all of which have been censored by somebody somewhere. One of them inevitably quotes Jefferson on tolerating “error...
Censorship: When to Say No
Every April since 1981 the American Society of journalists and Authors sponsors an “I Read Banned Books” campaign. They routinely trot out copies of children’s books like Alice in Wonderland or Mary Poppins and modern classics like Ulysses—all of which have been censored by somebody somewhere. One of them inevitably quotes Jefferson on tolerating “error...
Jefferson or Mussolini?
The right side of the World Wide Web has been aquiver with reports on Executive Order 13083, otherwise known as Bill Clinton’s attempted coup d’etat. How seriously should we take the Clinton plot to abolish the last vestiges of states’ rights? Setting aside the equivocations and dissimulations that mark all of Mr. Clinton’s official utterances,...