Bolchazy-Carducci is one of those little success stories that can happen “only in America.” Where else could a Latinist, who once studied for the priesthood, start a publishing firm devoted to putting out teaching aids for Latin teachers and end up with a catalogue that includes the most successful computer instruction series on Latin (Artes...
Siena is almost entirely a city of the later Middle Ages. The days of glory—artistic as well as political—were the 13th and 14th centuries, and by the time the city was absorbed by the Medici empire in 1552, it was already a place of memories, whose people were ridiculed by the Florentines (in Dante’s phrase)...
Pat Buchanan’s threnody on The Death of the West has upset Mr. Buchanan’s conservative enemies, who cannot forgive him for violating the GOP’s famous 11th Commandment—not “Thou shalt not speak ill of other Republicans,” but “Thou shalt not bite the hand that feeds us.” No one can actually dispute Buchanan’s main thesis: that European America...
Ernest once told me that, for most of his political life, he had been a neoconservative without knowing it. He did not mean that he necessarily admired or agreed with the godfathers of neoconservatism, but that he was a child of the Enlightenment, an enemy of credulity and superstition, whether those commodities came packaged in...
If drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe, Such boastings as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law— George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” address was a remarkable performance in many ways: It simultaneously marked the zenith of American triumphalism and the nadir, not only...
The basic principle of judo, so I have been told, is to use your enemy’s strength against him. I was forced to apply this principle more than once in college, when my athletic friends, invigorated by the joy of youth and a fifth of Jack Daniels, would suddenly realize how pleasant it would be to...
Hans-Hermann Hoppe may be the most brilliant and original classical liberal alive today. Often lumped together with the libertarians, of whom he is justly critical, Hoppe was a student of Jürgen Habermas before becoming a disciple of Murray Rothbard and, through Rothbard, of Ludwig von Mises. Hoppe is probably the most important philosopher produced by...
Which of our editors wrote this indictment of post-Christian America? More than a few of us begin to see that while wealth accumulates in these United States, man seems to decay. Corruption corrodes our political and industrial doings. In our private lives a pervading relativism, an absence of conviction about what is the good life,...
Even more than Vachel Lindsay, who liked to say that the Mason-Dixon line ran straight through his heart, Booth Tarkington embodied the regional conflict that defined the Midwest. Born in Indianapolis only five years after the end of the war between the regions, Newton Booth Tarkington was descended on his father’s side from Southern Democrats...
After September 11, no foreigner can fully understand what it is like to live in America. Every day, we have to listen to our leaders telling us why the Constitution doesn’t work any more. It is enough to make an honest conservative want to join the ACLU—almost. The ACLU will go all the way to...
Walter Block is a libertarian without guile, a theorist who refuses to confine his classical-liberal analysis to strictly economic questions. Liberty is liberty, he would argue, and value is value, whether we are deciding a question of zoning or a case of censorship. Honest man that he is, he opposes both zoning and censorship as...
Since September 11, our friend Scott McConnell, like most Americans, has been confused. Writing in his Antiwar.com column, Ground Zero, he describes his puzzled disappointment with the talks and conversation at the recent John Randolph Club. He came to Rockford, apparently expecting Chronicles’ editors to deliver a neatly packaged response to the U.S. government’s policy...
“You’ve never been to Nish?!” My friend was incredulous. How can someone who has traveled, it sometimes seems, every inch of Montenegro, Bosnia, and Kosovo not have found the time to go to Nish? The lady is far from being a local chauvinist, but when I first met her and asked (as I had been...
The human universe, we are told by optimists on the editorial pages, is contracting into a gray and insipid doughball, pasted over with brightly colored labels advertising the only ethnic rivalries that persist: the struggles between Nissan and Daimler, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. Unfortunately, there are people around the world who do not read...
George W. Bush comes as close as anyone to representing the current American aristocracy. It is not that the Bushes are old family or even old money. The family fortunes are usually traced back to great-grandfather Samuel Bush, a middleweight railroad magnate in Columbus, Ohio. Samuel’s son Prescott raised the family to national prominence by...
Robinson Crusoe, as the lit boys would say, is an “iconic” character, whose mastery over nature—and over the savage Friday—expresses the West’s sometimes contemptuous sense of superiority over other cultures. In the 500-year-long iconoclastic age that is just now coming to an end, icons are made only to be broken, and in such films as...
The arrest of the 19-year-old Bush twins for drinking liquor in an Austin restaurant gave the news-starved (and starved brained) press something to cackle over. The girls, clearly in a state of arrested adolescent rebellion, checked their Secret Service agents at the door and, even after the restaurant rejected Jenna’s fake ID, succeeded in getting...
The Italian election has dealt the international left a severe setback. Although the gap between the vote percentages of the center-right coalition (Casa della Liberia) and the center-left (Ulivo) was fairly small—especially if the hard-core communists (the Rifondazione Communista, who campaigned as the “left wing of the center-left”) are factored in—because of proportional representation, Silvio...
Nineteen ninety-one was the year of revolutions, the greatest, perhaps, since 1848. Many who observed the events from safe seats on this side of the Atlantic must have recalled Churchill’s great Fulton speech, in which he described the “Iron Curtain” that had “descended across the continent,” cutting off “all the capitals of the ancient states...
Some celebrities seem born with a natural star power that radiates from them like an angelic halo. Alcibiades had this kind of “charisma” that made him adored even by people who disliked him. To be a celebrity, as Willy Loman would say, it is not enough to be liked: You must be well liked. Musicians...
“History is philosophy from examples.” —Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Ars Rhetorica The “disruptive decade” referred to in the title of this collection of essays is the 1960’s, when Eugene Davidson served as editor of Modern Age. Although the 60’s ended only 30 years ago, Mr. Davidson’s writing (the prefatory editorials to each...
It has been the usual 56-hour day spent in airports under siege from CNN and microwave-burned pizza, cramped into buses, taxis, and the midget seats of American Airlines steerage with two varieties of undrinkable wine-product to wash down the “looks-like-chicken” alternative to the inevitable “pasta” they serve on flights to Italy, but now we are...
The polemics engendered by the beatification of Pope Pius IX are unlikely to go away. When all the false charges of antisemitism are set aside, the fact remains that this one man may have done more to stem the tide of liberalism than all the great English and American conservatives of the past two centuries...
Perhaps it is a delusion, like snow blindness, caused by the tons of dirty snow shoved into my driveway by the city plows and the sun’s annual disappearing act that drives even non-Scandinavians into melancholy and occasional fits of berserking frenzy, but I am beginning to be persuaded by our Chicago friend Tom Roeser that...
Eugenio Corti is one of the greatest Christian writers of the past half-century. Although he is virtually unknown to the anti-Christian literary establishment in Italy, he is revered not only by conservative Italian Catholics but by straight-thinking Protestants in France, Switzerland (Jean-Marc Berthoud), and the United States (Douglas Kelly). His literary output includes a magnificent...
The scene is Rome, about A.D. 300. The Augustus Maximian has returned to the ancient capital to oversee the construction of the lavish baths that will bear the name of the senior Augustus, Diocletian. Although Maximian is a rough customer from the Balkans and speaks a tough-guy Latin that sounds more like Rumanian than the...
Conservatives are fond of saying that the United States is a republic, not a democracy, and in their appeals to the national conscience, they invoke the sacred language of republican tradition, citing scriptures from Aristotle and Cicero, from Edmund Burke and George Washington: the ride of law, a virtuous citizenry, and ordered liberty. Like most...
“Irish Americans are often disappointed when they come here,” remarked the Scottish chatelaine of our pretty B&B on the Dingle Peninsula, as she served us our breakfast of scrambled eggs and smoked salmon. “They expect to see thatched cottages with leprechauns popping out from shamrocks.” “Played by Barry Fitzgerald or Arthur Shields?” “Yes, and girls...
The presidential election of 2000 is one of the great non-events of modern history. Paradoxically, it may have a powerful effect in waking people up to the reality of what we laughingly call our “democratic institutions.” So far from this election calling into question the “wisdom of the Founding Fathers,” it proves they were right...
What is paleoconservatism? The term seems to connect the American hard right with paleolithic anthropoids who wooed their women with clubs and ate raw meat because they were too stupid to discover fire. Even though Paul Gottfried and I are probably responsible for popularizing the term, I never adopted it, if only because it implies...
In 1912, a group of Oxford fellows began meeting to work out a minimalist common creed that would be acceptable to all Christians. William Temple, future archbishop of Canterbury, was the guiding spirit of the group, which argued its way down to an inoffensive consensus entitled Foundations. The Oxford Seven ended up setting aside miracles,...
“But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue?” —Edmund Burke Murray Rothbard was like the elephant the blind Chinamen in the story tried to describe. Everyone who knew Murray saw only one or two sides of him: There was Murray the happy warrior who campaigned for the soul of the Old Right, the New...
When Edmund Burke called perfect democracy “the most shameful thing in the world,” he was not referring to the mixed forms of popular government that had existed in ancient Greece and Rome, much less to the newly liberated English colonies that had been struggling to form “a more perfect union” on the Eastern seaboard of...
“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...
[Jefferson Davis: Unconquerable Heart, by Felicity Allen (Columbia: University of Missouri Press) 808 pp., $34.95] “As the tug bore him away from the ship, he stood with bared head between the files of undersized German and other foreign soldiers on either side of him, and as we looked, as we thought, our last upon his...
Abortion is not something to discuss in polite company. Unlike a good, clean murder committed from natural motives such as revenge, envy, and greed, abortion is something slimy, more like a sex crime. Many parents must be tempted, from time to time, to commit mayhem upon their offspring. Such feelings are natural; but women who...
Why do we send our children to school, much less to a college or a university? I have put this question to any number of parents, teachers, and headmasters and only rarely received a better answer than “So they can get a good job.” Never having had what most people would call a good job,...
In troubled times, we look for something to hold on to as the dangerous currents are sweeping us downstream to destruction. Some will have the clear sight (or unthinking prejudice) to grab on to some rooted feature of the landscape—the limb of an oak tree, the steeple of a church, the arm of a brother;...
“Beyond Left and Right” was the tide of the Antiwar.com conference which brought together Pat Buchanan and Alexander Cockburn, Justin Raimondo and Lenora Fulani (to say nothing of two Chronicles editors) in the same room (if not all at the same time) for a broad critique of the aggressive New World Order launched by the...
“You can fool some of the people all of the time,” said W.C. Fields quoting Lincoln, “and those odds are good enough for me.” Fields also said that, in a presidential election, he never voted for anyone, only against, and this time around contrarians could have, well, a Field day, since George W. Bush and...
“A monarchy that’s tempered with republican equality.” Who would have thought, 100 years ago, that by the end of the American Century the great burning public issue would be the Confederate flag? Back in 1900, Americans were eager to put their quarrels behind them. Rebs and Yanks had fought side by side in Cuba, and...
Al Gore and George W. Bush have a lot in common: They’re both spoiled rich boys and sons of famous politicians; both are party animals. I thought it could not get any worse, but I was wrong. The first rule of American politics is that it can always get worse and usually does. Both Gore...
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”—Samuel Johnson G.K. Chesterton was an avid reader of popular fiction, particularly the so-called “penny dreadfuls,” whose everyday morality and concentration on plot and character made them more wholesome reading than the pretentious productions of modernist literature. Chesterton’s prejudice is shared today...
Elian Gonzalez, the six-year-old Cuban boy whose mother died in an illegal attempt to enter the United States, has become the smiley-face of the New World Order. Not that Elian or his father or Fidel Castro (or, to go still lower, the Clinton administration) is to blame—far from it. This mischief is being made by...
You have seen them on the evening news, the long weary lines of Christian refugees: Serbs streaming from the Krajina, Bosnia, Kosovo; Russians from Chechnya, Dagestan, and Kazakhstan. These are not the victims of some short and bitter war that strews exiles across the map of Europe for several years until they can make their...
My old man did not think much of writers; he had known too many of them. He did not like what little he had seen of Hemingway, and regarded his obsession with virility as unmanly. Hemingway, at least as a younger man, must have had few illusions about himself and his generation, and his first...
Cultural genocide is a legal term sometimes used to describe the planned destruction of an ethnic or religious identity. The English, in solidifying control over their islands, did their best to obliterate the historical memory of Scottish Highlanders and Irish Catholics, and the national socialists of Bill Clinton’s party are doing the same thing here...
“We will bury you,” warned Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950’s, but in the end, it is America’s NATO imperium that is burying Serbs under the rubble of Novi Sad and Belgrade and Americans under the red tape of the New World Order. The march of globalization has proceeded without effective resistance but not without criticism,...
James Bohan, a Pennsylvania attorney, believes he has elevated the abortion debate above the pedestrian levels of both medicine and religion. However, Mr. Bohan rises above faith and science only to fall back on the well-worn cliches of human rights doctrines found in the sacred texts of the Declaration of Independence, the writings of Albert...
The Nobel Peace Prize is by now a running gag—or rather a running sore. Like the Prize for Literature, given nearly every year to an untalented anti-writer as obscure in his own country as he is in the rest of the world, the Peace Prize is generally awarded to failures, like the 1998 winners from...