It is a healthy and encouraging sign when politicians don’t know where they’re going because they have no idea what’s coming next, which pretty much describes the state of politics in the West today. Among the various political groupings, only liberals know where they wish to go—and that is simply where they’ve been going for...
Author: Chilton Williamson (Chilton Williamson)
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Books in Brief
The Retreat of Western Liberalism, by Edward Luce (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press; 240 pp., $24.00). Almost by the author’s admission, the title of this book is a falsehood. Liberalism is not retreating. It is being pushed back by “populists,” which is what liberals call people who are against liberalism because they are, for the...
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What the Editors Are Reading
As the author of a travel book as well as many novels, I’ve often suspected that writing a superior work in the first category is a greater challenge than writing one in the second. The comparative difficulties become clear when you develop the same material, as nonfiction first and then again as a novel, with...
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Managerial Suicide
In The Spectator (June 24, 2016) Charles Moore, the Grand Old Man of British journalism despite his relatively young age, writes, “How much longer can it go on? Deaths caused by terrorism are always followed now by candlelit vigils, a minute’s silence, victims’ families/government ministers/emergency services/clergy/imams all clustered together, walls of messages, flags at half-mast. ...
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Books in Brief
This is an excellent and very readable book about the life and work of a man with whose name every educated person is familiar, but about whom (and which) few people in America today know very much, though his 100th birthday in 1869, only a decade after his death, was spectacularly celebrated across the United...
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Snuffed Candle
Proclaimed political “dynasties” in American history have never persisted beyond two generations. The Adams family produced two presidents in two generations, followed by an author of significant accomplishments who disdained democracy and never ran for political office. The Roosevelts, Theodore and Franklin D., came from two branches of the family and later produced several public...
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Managerial Suicide
In The Spectator (June 24, 2016) Charles Moore, the Grand Old Man of British journalism despite his relatively young age, writes, “How much longer can it go on? Deaths caused by terrorism are always followed now by candlelit vigils, a minute’s silence, victims’ families/government ministers/emergency services/clergy/imams all clustered together, walls of messages, flags at half-mast. Instinctively I...
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The Meaning of Donald Trump
Nearly half a year into the new administration in Washington, it remains too early to tell how many of President Trump’s unquestioned pratfalls and errors in judgment, most of them resulting from emotional indiscipline, stubbornness, and political inexperience as well as the necessary thicker skin experience would have given him, are attributable to the President...
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What the Editors Are Reading
A casual mention by a friend of The Magnificent Ambersons, the novel by the Midwestern American novelist and playwright Booth Tarking ton (1869-1946) translated to the silver screen by Orson Welles, sent me to my library to renew my acquaintance with a book I read many years ago. Instead of Ambersons, however, the book I...
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The Russia Question—About Hillary Clinton
I invite readers of this blog to review this article by Peter Schweizer, author of Clinton Cash (Harper Collins, 2015), in light of the stories about Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with the Russian lawyer, Miss Veselnitskaya, in Trump Tower a year ago last June: At stake in this meeting is the word “dirt” that Trump...
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Tyranny in Our Time
From the December 2013 issue of Chronicles. There is a saying among jurists that hard cases make bad law. Similarly, every book critic knows that the best books make for hard reviewing. Faced with a truly fine work, the reviewer is tempted simply to reproduce the author’s thesis in abbreviation, while scattering as many of...
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Second Appomattox
A visitor to the United States from abroad, ignorant of recent American history, might find himself perplexed by the fact that the further the War Between the States recedes into the past, the larger it looms as the angry obsession of “progressive” Americans—the same people who insist at every turn that the country needs to...
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Chesterfield and Chesterton
Much of life may come down to a choice between the respective views of Lord Chesterfield, who urged his son always to excel at whatever he did, and G.K. Chesterton, who once wrote that, “If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.” The issue, of course, is what the “thing” in question is. ...
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What the Editors Are Reading
Confined to a three-man tent on a rainy day in the canyons of southeastern Utah, I continued by lantern light my rereading of Cormac McCarthy’s novel All the Pretty Horses, first published a quarter-century ago as the first volume in The Border Trilogy, and got a good start on its immediate sequel, The Crossing. McCarthy’s...
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Books in Brief
Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty, by John B. Boles (New York: Basic Books; 626 pp., $35.00). This excellent, very well-written, and highly readable book is the “full-scale biography” the author set out to write. It succeeds further as an affirmation of the historian’s (and his readers’) need to accept the past on its own terms...
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Who’s Appropriating Whom?
All immigrants to America demand a good deal of us, some more than others. Mexican immigrants (and after them the Muslim ones) demand the most. St. Patrick’s Day parades date from the late, prerevolutionary 18th century and have been an American institution ever since as a celebration of Irish history, culture, and cuisine. Cinco de...
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The Great Transparency Racket
“Democracy Dies in Darkness” is the motto of the Washington Post. The editors of the Post belong to the honorable group of which Norman Podhoretz once confessed himself a member—Idolaters of Democracy. They idolize Big Government also, that implacable enemy of democracy, or so democrats believed before the 1930’s. No doubt the editors could demonstrate...
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What the Editors Are Reading
An unfortunate effect of more than two decades of war between the West and the Middle East, and the resulting terrorist campaigns launched from there, is the replacement of the charm, even the magic, the historical Persia held for Europeans—and for me—by their opposite: contempt, disgust, even fear. In the late 80’s and the 90’s...
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Books in Brief
The Habsburg Empire: A New History, by Pieter M. Judson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard; 592 pp., $35.00). This book continues the arguments historians have made over the past three decades that challenge the long-received and -accepted view of the Habsburg Empire as an anachronism among European states in the 19th century. As Judson says, historians had...
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The Face of Liberalism
It was said (by Bernard DeVoto?) of America before World War II that it was as if the United States had been tipped to the left and downward, so that, across the rest of the country, whatever was unattached or unsecured slid southwest into California. Today we might say that the Democratic Party is sliding...
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The Seven-Year Itch
It has been seven years since the Democratic members of Congress, ridden herd by their majority leader, Nancy Pelosi, passed the Affordable Care Act, inaccurately nicknamed ObamaCare. During those years, four things happened: President Obama and his party insisted that the law was proving itself a success, Obama Care developed an increasing number of serious...
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The End of Something
It is remarkable how little notice the advent in America of the self-driving car has drawn. Who would have imagined that mobile, road-obsessed, and by-auto-possessed Americans whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents made their prized automobiles the center of their recreational lives and prided themselves on their prowess behind the wheel and their supercharged engines would...
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The “Free World”
The Soviet Union and the Soviet Empire have been gone for 26 years, yet American internationalists, Democrats and Republicans alike, persist in speaking of the “Free World,” quite as if Earth continues to be divided between the liberal-democratic-capitalist and the communist camps. We have been hearing a great deal more of this Free World talk...
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What the Editors Are Reading
In spring, my thoughts turn first to the Southwest, that most beautiful and haunting part of it especially, the canyon country of southeastern Utah. There was a time when I pulled my horses down there every year toward the end of March and spent a week or ten days riding and camping south of Moab...
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Books in Brief
John Adams’s Republic: The One, the Few, and the Many, by Richard Alan Ryerson (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press; 555 pp., $60.00). This very excellent and elegantly written book by the editor of the Adams Papers between 1983 and 2001 draws on the second American President’s entire corpus of political writing, from his books...
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What Do Liberals Want?
The agenda of the Democratic Party, of liberal politicians generally, including socialist-liberals like Bernie Sanders and Keith Ellison, and of liberal academics and “intellectuals” is pretty clear from the record of Barack Obama’s two administrations and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which ran on that record. Not nearly so clear is what the demonstrators who have been...
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The New Class War
“When a culture of freedom becomes a cult of freedom, injustice, suffering, and social dysfunction get explained away as ‘choices.’” —R.R. Reno The burden of this important book by the editor of First Things is the need to restore genuine freedom to American society—and, by implication, Western society as a whole....
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Books in Brief
Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics, by Nicole Hemmer (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press; 320 pp., $34.95). This very readable and otherwise excellent book is a history of the first generation of what the author calls “media activists,” conservatives who refused to work for mainstream periodicals and broadcasters...
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The New Liberal Establishment
For many decades people—conservatives, especially—have understood the phrase the liberal establishment to mean the social, educational, and economic elite that sits atop the broader community of people who think, act, and vote liberal: the “limousine liberals,” in other words. “The liberal establishment” meant the liberals at the top of the social hierarchy who dominated their...
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Who’s a Populist?
The mood in Washington during the weeks leading up to the inauguration of Donald J. Trump combined the bloodthirsty rage of the Reign of Terror with the wild comedy of A Night at the Opera, as the New Jesus and his holy family prepared for their ascension from the Capitol Building on January 20 immediately...
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Books in Brief
Stalin’s Englishman: Guy Burgess, the Cold War, and the Cambridge Spy Ring, by Andrew Lownie (New York: St. Martin’s Press; 433 pp., $29.99). This book, the first full biography of the most important of the Cambridge spies, is also a first-rate work of social and intellectual history and a highly successful character study of a...
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What the Editors Are Reading
Courtesy of our Westminster correspondent, Freddy Gray, who kindly sent me the book from London as an unexpected present, I’m nearly through Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family, by Alexander Waugh, the son of the late journalist Auberon Waugh, grandson of Evelyn, and himself a classical-music critic (ironic, as Evelyn Waugh loathed music...
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Trump and the GOP
Donald Trump exploded upon the political scene as a strongly charged individual, not as the head of a faction of the Republican Party or of a movement of his own. The great question, from the moment he announced his candidacy for the presidency, has been what effect he might have on the party whose candidate...
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The Return of the Savage
The Democrats and the rest of the left are taking the results of last November’s election no better than they predicted the Republicans and the right would do if their man lost. The street riots, lawsuits, recounts, constitutional challenges, furious denial, and refusal to accept the electoral decision in a spirit of peace, resignation, and...
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Books in Brief
August 1914: France, the Great War, and a Month That Changed the World Forever, by Bruno Cabanes; translated by Stephanie O’Hara (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; 230 pp., $27.50). This superb and marvelously readable work of social and political history, drawn from a wide variety of personal and official documents and records, recounts the...
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What the Editors Are Reading
Taking up one of Graham Greene’s many novels has for me always been a hit-or-miss affair. Over the Christmas holidays I read The Honorary Consul, a copy of which I’ve owned for years. The Third World setting, this time Argentina, will be familiar to Greene’s admirers, and so will the author’s abiding preoccupation with religious...
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Trump, Putin, and America
The only way the American political class will ever accommodate itself to the reality of post-Soviet Russia would be if that country succumbed to the second leftist revolution it has been trying for years to incite. Whether the revolutionaries called themselves communists or “liberal democrats” would make little or no difference so long as the...
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Back in the Cowboy State
On November 8 last year, Donald Trump prevented a resurrection of the Clinton administration 16 years after it left office. That same day, in an election paid scant attention by the national media, the spirit of George W. Bush’s administration was given new life in Wyoming, where Liz Cheney, a daughter of former Vice President...
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Around the World With Donald Trump
My title is a bit of a stretch, as I did not travel all the way round the world, nor close to it, and the trip took 19 days, not 80. Still, it was my world, extending roughly from the American Mountain West across Western Europe, and I traveled by ship and train and motor...
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Girls of the Golden West
Prospective readers should not be put off by the words “women writers” in the title of this book. Catharine Savage Brosman’s emphasis is not on the ideological but rather on the intellectual and artistic identity of her subjects, which complement the masculine sensibilities of their male counterparts—Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Tom Lea, John S. Van...
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Books in Brief
Against Democracy, by Jason Brennan (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press; 288 pp., $29.95). I found this a disappointing book, as the subject is a critical one in the 21st century. Brennan begins with Schumpeter’s well-known assertion that The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters...
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After Castro
November was a bad month for the left. First, Hillary Clinton was defeated in the presidential election by Donald Trump. Then, Fidel Castro died at 90 after a long illness that had forced him some years before to surrender the presidency of Cuba to his brother Raúl. So far as Cuban politics goes, Fidel might...
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Election Overload
The country is near unanimous in feeling that the elections of 2016 were unique in American history. Some say for the unlikability of the two principal candidates; others, for the rhetorical violence and vitriol on all sides. Still others cite the general volatility of the political year from its beginnings, in its wide swings left...
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It Just Did Happen Here
Whichever candidate wins the presidency on November 8 (this issue went to press on November 2), the American political establishment—the Democratic and Republican parties combined as America Consolidated—will have decisively lost the presidential elections. That is the meaning of the director of the FBI’s public decision to reconsider the agency’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email...
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The Easiness of Being Liberal
Liberals are keen to sniff out and condemn “privilege,” by which they mean the superior education, the affluence, the influence, and the comfort enjoyed by well-connected, well-born people, usually imagined by them to be political conservatives. None of this has anything to do with privilege in the historical sense of the word, of course, but...
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Books in Brief
Polarized: Making Sense of a Divided America, by James E. Campbell (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 313 pp., $29.95). This book is probably too academic to suit the taste of the general reader. It is, however, eminently sensible and notably well written for an academic text. Campbell argues that the polarization of American politics began...
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What the Editors Are Reading
I read Goethe’s Faust in college and had not looked into it again until the other day when, prompted by curiosity roused by Willi Jasper’s new book Lusitania: The Cultural History of a Catastrophe, I pulled a copy of the play off my shelf and began rereading with the idea of forming a better sense...
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Race and the Elections
In a year of blatant political lies (and what presidential election year isn’t?) the calumny against Donald Trump that he is a fomenter of racial divisiveness may be the most unconscionable. The Republican candidate has never said that all Mexicans are rapists and criminals of various sorts, only that some illegal immigrants from Mexico are—a...
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Wages of Arrogance
A quarter-century of American diplomatic arrogance toward Russia, and the exploitation and temporary ruination of the Russian economy by the combined forces of Washington, Wall Street, and the Harvard Economics Department, are currently reaping their just deserts. (See “Wreckers and Builders,” by Anne Williamson.) Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the possibility...
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Culture and Kultur
The historical controversy over who was “responsible” for the outbreak of war in 1914 will doubtless never be settled, so clearly did so many of the participants contribute to igniting the catastrophe. German rearmament and the kaiser’s determination to build a navy equal to Great Britain’s, as well as the country’s territorial ambitions on the...