It is hardly an accident that the decomposition of the American nation and its culture is paralleled by the decomposition of the American middle class. In the 19th century, nationality and the middle classes were born together as Siamese twins, and their enemies understood their linkage and tried their best to strangle them in their...
Category: Columns
Science, Wisdom, and Moral Judgment
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Juvenal’s admonition to husbands has often been applied to government, but rarely with the full force of the original: “Go ahead and lock her up,” the Roman satirist warned, “but who will watch the watchmen themselves? She’s put on her guard and starts with them.” Once a large number of frail...
A Threat to Integrity
Like Satan in Dante’s Inferno, the forces threatening the integrity of the American nation and its culture have three faces. The “global economy” and political one-world.ism jeopardize the historic character, independence, and the very sovereignty of the United States. The third threat, the mass immigration that this country has endured for the last fifteen years...
Government of the People
The doctrine of states’ rights has returned to the American political scene. Leftist and liberal governors have been dusting off the arguments of John C. Calhoun and echoing the speeches of Strom Thurmond in preparation for their defiance of the national government. The battle is being fought on several grounds. In Massachusetts, the fight is...
A Major Threat to American Identity
Economic globalism, beloved of many on the contemporary right, may be the major threat to the national and cultural identity of American civilization in the coming decades, but its logical counterpart is the political globalism, long beloved of the left, that marches under the banner of “one world.” As the economic dependence of the United...
Peace on Earth Among Men of Good Will
The dilapidation of the Soviet Empire at the end of 1989 became the minor premise of the argument that man’s dreams of peace and global unity are finally about to be realized at the end of the second millennium. The peaceful crusade of East Germans across the border has convinced otherwise sober men that democracy’s...
Zippity-Doo-Dah Rhetoric
Despite the zippity-doo-dah rhetoric that many conservatives have spouted for the last decade, the United States in the 1990’s will encounter challenges that neither the “right” nor the “left” is prepared to recognize, much less meet. The challenges go far beyond the “relative decline” that Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers...
Banana Republicans
Shortly after the election of 1988 one grand old man of the Republican Party told me he thought Mr. Bush could do a creditable job so long as his administration faced no major crises. The very minor crisis of the abortive coup in Panama was the first serious test of this thesis, and it would...
Nationalism Looking Pretty Good
If conservatives carried revolvers, they’d probably reach for them at the sound of the word “nationalism.” Perhaps it’s just as well they don’t carry revolvers, since nationalism usually makes its appearance armed with considerably bigger guns. In the Europe of Metternich and Castlereagh, nationalism was the vehicle for the revolutionary destruction of dynastic and aristocratic...
Nunc Est Bibendum
Or Now That Poetry Is Dead, I Think I’ll Just Sit Here and Drink A new battle of the books is in progress. This time, the lines are not being drawn between modern and ancient but between the present and the recent past, and the antagonists are not Homer against Milton or Aristotle vs. Bacon,...
The Cow in the Trail
Even in mid-September you cannot go comfortably by day into the deserts of southeastern Utah. Together the late Edward Abbey and I rented horses and rode into the La Sal mountains, following what began as a dirt road and ended as a trail at an elevation of approximately 10,500 feet. From the mountain pass, we...
A Prayer for My Daughters
In recent months both San Francisco and New York have been the scene of triumphs for the homosexual rights movement’s efforts to legitimate single-sex liaisons. . . . Newsweek‘s Eleanor Clift, appearing on The McLaughlin Group, summed up the cases as evidence that in the 1980’s the American people were redefining the family. The American...
Rock and Roll Never Forgets
In the 1950’s any real American boy knew that whatever he wanted to be when he grew up, it was not an underemployed television father like Ward Cleaver or Ozzie Nelson. Our fictional heroes were from another time. They were the cowboys, frontiersmen, and pioneers who had taken risks that seemed inconceivable to a generation...
Second Thoughts
These days everyone is having second thoughts—about Vietnam and the 60’s, about American history, about what it means to be a liberal and what it means to be a conservative. Rather than be left out of the rewrite, I too have been having second thoughts about what I did and did not do some 20...
The Legacy of 1789
One man, one vote. It seems such an obvious, such a simple principle. What can possibly hinder its implementation in South Africa, where blacks are barred from the exercise of citizenship rights, or Israel, where West Bank Palestinian children take to the streets demanding self-government and civil rights, or New York City, where the Board...
Physician as Novelist
or Why the Best Training for a Novelist in These Last Years of the 20th Century is an Internship at Bellevue or Cook County Hospital, and How This Training Best Prepares Him for Diagnosing T.S. Eliot’s ‘Waste Land’ But let us speak of vocations. What one ends up doing with one’s life is surely one...
Life and Death in a House Divided
The Supreme Court’s recent decision to review a Missouri abortion case has raised the spirits of the pro-life movement. In his appeal, Missouri’s attorney general asked the Court to reconsider Roe v. Wade, the landmark civil rights decision that made pregnant women and their physicians sole arbiters over who is born and who is not...
The Real American Dilemma
This remarkable editorial by Chronicles’ longest-serving editor offered one of the first and best analyses of America’s immigration problem.
Epitaph for Tombstone
Edward Lawrence Schieffelin’s story seems like something made up by a Hollywood writer long on cliche and short on imagination, for his silver strike epitomized the hopes and dreams of every sourdough prospector who ever wandered the lonely mountains, valleys, and streams of the American West. For years he searched in vain, living on the...
Kazin and Caligula?
“Our literature is infested with a swarm of just such little people as this—creatures who succeed in creating for themselves an absolutely positive reputation, by mere dint of the continuity and perpetuality of their appeals to the public.” —E.A. Poe In our age the business of literature has become as stale and well-organized as the...
The Dangerous Myth of Human Rights
Even if I had done all the things the prosecution says I did, I would still not be guilty of any crime, because I am fighting against colonialism. We have heard such arguments in recent years from a variety of sources: IRA bombers, African National Congress supporters (bishops and necklacers), and Marxist rebels all over...
Traveler’s Tales
Coelum, non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt was Horace’s observation on the narrowing effects of travel: “Those who go across the sea change their weather but not their mind.” It is the rare tourist who gets more out of his expeditions than a confirmation of his prejudices. One of the most intelligent visitors to...
Diplomats, Dupes, and Traitors
Election ’88 has been so far a political flea circus in which the issues are as microscopic as the candidates. The one interesting candidate has been the Rev. Jesse Jackson. If you have seen his very effective commercials, you will remember the pictures of Jackson meeting with President Assad of Syria, and the voice-over reminding...
Rights of Clergy
I saw my old friend Browne recently. The subject eventually turned to the politics of religion and the religion of politics. I asked him what he thought about the current Anglican debate over homosexuality, and I wondered aloud if it had anything to do with the obvious unmanliness of the clergy—the final phase of what...
Citizens of the Welfare State
Like most Americans of my generation, my experience of poverty has been self-inflicted. “Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift.” Dylan’s little fantasy of “Maggie’s Farm’ takes on grim reality when the scholar-gypsy turns to waiting tables or substitute teaching, being in general what my parents were unkind enough to...
Still Crazy After All These Years
After the 1987 convention of the National Organization for Women, USA Today published the results of an “informal survey” of 703 NOW members. Forty-seven percent of the respondents said that “women are doing worse in 1987 than in 1980.” Twenty-four percent said “women are doing better.” Half the members questioned believed that “NOW should focus...
Freedom of Opinion and Democracy
“I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. In America, the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion: within these barriers, an author may write what he pleases; but woe to him if he goes beyond them. Not that...
Avoiding Democracy
Does America exist anymore, or is the nation only a fantasy concocted out of old Frank Capra movies, civics classes, and pamphlets from the Department of Education? The weight of the evidence suggests the latter. Twenty years ago—ancient history by the standards of the press—a considerable number of young men who refused to fight in...
Homage To T.S. Eliot
Nineteen eighty-eight is the centennial year of T.S. Eliot’s birth, and there is sure to be a flood of tributes to a writer that has changed the course of poetry and criticism and whose reactionary pronouncements on politics and religion have been an inspiration to conservatives of every description. Instead of offering to Mr. Eliot...
The Statecraft of Stooges
The speaker of the House of Representatives negotiates cordially with a Marxist dictator at the very time when the American government is sending aid to an armed resistance movement fighting to overthrow his regime; a political preacher flies to the Middle East and discusses the most sensitive foreign policy issues with unfriendly heads of state;...
A Time to Reap
I do not know what the city-bred recollect of childhood, but one of my earliest memories is of a sunny Easter morning, when I was no more than three or four years old, standing in an unpaved lane that led down to a tiny farm: the bright new grass was pushing through last year’s burnt-over...
Place of Asylum
The theater is dead, the novel dying, poetry extinct; biography is the province of graveyard ghouls, and history a battleground on which disheveled armies of academic theorists contend with hucksters and prostitutes for the fate of an entire civilization. These conclusions of a temperate man in a good humor pretty much sum up the business...
Tyranny In a Good Cause
Democracy or Republic? might well be the title of the D debate between liberals and conservatives on the nature of the American political system. (In the view of some liberals, the easiest way to spot a conservative is the habit of referring to America as a republic.) Democracy, in the strict procedural sense of one...
On Might
“I chant the new empire . . . “ —Walt Whitman Walt Whitman sang what he saw—in 1860, he gave a name to Madison’s and Jefferson’s vision of the new commonwealth. “[Our success],” Jefferson had said in 1801, “furnishes a new proof of the falsehood of Montesquieu’s doctrine, that a republic can be preserved only...
The Pterodactyls of Lima
“Whitman can sing confidently and in blithe innocence about democracy militant because American Utopia is confused with and indistinguishable from American reality.” —Octavio Paz, Walt Whitman As we left for Ayacucho, Lucho Monasi Cockburn took out his machete from under his car seat and put it between the two of us. “It’s a bad road,”...
Cultural Conservation
A few years back, when the air was fresh and the world was new, some of us thought that the election of Ronald Reagan was only the beginning of the beginning of “morning in America.” It is a common mistake. Some decades have an identity for those who set their mark upon them. In periods...
Arms and The Man
I must have been 11 or 12 years old before my father put a gun into my hands and told me to shoot. By then, I had been out hunting with him several times a year but I had not ceased marveling at the efficiency and grace with which he handled a shotgun or a...
Thrice-Told Tales
Politics and tale-telling are virtually inseparable activities. Great political events—wars, rebellions, social crusades—do not exert their full measure of influence until they are whittled into legends. More than one British statesman has derived his understanding of the Wars of the Roses from Shakespeare’s Histories, and in the United States the stories of Washington at Valley...
Literacy Before the Revolution
Publishers Weekly must be the most depressing magazine published in the United States. Oh, there are others like Esquire that make us despair for the affluent numskulls who swap life-styles as if they were wives, or The New Yorker that makes us remember how really boring New York can be. But for the sick feeling...
No Latin, Much Less Greek
In pondering where the modern age went wrong, writers have pointed to as many answers as there are systems of thought. For conservative editorialists, the problem is Marxism or its lifeless reflection, liberalism. Irving Babbitt blamed the Romantics, while Richard Weaver nailed his thesis on the door of nominalism; and there are still literary scholars...
Paradise Enow: A Midwestern Perspective
This is not an invitation. Frankly, if you don’t live here already, most of us would rather you stay where you are, although we can’t blame you for wanting to come. Oh, some of our businessmen and bankers and ministers and mayors and tourism promoters might, in the prejudicial atmosphere of their workplaces, look down...
The Business of Business
Jefferson was of the opinion that the tree of liberty was not a hardy perennial that could be safely neglected. Once planted by a revolution, it needed to be periodically “refreshed by the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Jefferson’s radical vision of revolutionary violence was muted, in later years, by his conservative skepticism, but the...
Speak the Word Only
Modern man often seems ill at ease. It is as if the world has been broken and the human community shattered into millions of charged particles, attracting or repelling each other in their chance meetings. Some such notion has threatened many of the best (and second best) minds of the past two centuries. For Hegelians,...
Plain People
The Century of the Common Man. That was the phrase Henry Wallace used to describe the world emerging out of the Second World War. Wars do have a way of leveling society into the great democracy of the dead and dying, and it is certainly the case that, in the two great wars of the...
The Uses of Diversity: Recovering the Recent Past
One of the more interesting recent books of popular history, Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, stakes out the period between the outbreak of World War I to almost the present. In Johnson’s intellectual framework, the boundaries of modernity are marked by two great revolutionaries: Albert Einstein, who threw the thinking world into a turmoil of doubt...
Short Views
Some people love to go to Washington. The sight of so much power and wealth is exhilarating, especially for young conservative writers who discover that their names are recognized on the Hill. For many, however, the reaction is just the reverse. Within a few hours they are mulling over certain scriptural passages in Eliot—”Oh my...
Journalists and Other Anthropoids
It is over 60 years since the Scopes Trial attracted journalists like Henry Mencken and Joseph Wood Krutch to Dayton, Tennessee, and yet the teaching of evolution is once again as controversial as—it was in 1925. Most of the debate is carried out between militant fundamentalists and equally militant materialists. While most of the fundamentalists...
Fruitless Grain
The great American story for at least 100 years has been a tale like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman Major Molineux”: the rube who comes to the city and loses his innocence. Like Jack in the fairy tale, we are eager to trade in the family cow for a chance to...
Old Adam, New Eve
Feminist writers sometimes give us the impression that the nonworking mother is a rare bird like the Bach man’s Warbler—sighted (not very reliably) once a decade or so in a corner of I’on Swamp in the South Carolina low country. The ladies magazines do occasionally report on rumors that some professional women like Janet Fallows...
Rock ‘N’ Roll Never Forgets: Healing the Wounds of the 60’s
In 1985 the senior members of the baby boom generation turned 40. Many of them are surprised to be still around. The films and songs of the 50’s and 60’s were so full of “disorder and early sorrow” that it was, perhaps, no surprise how many real-life actors and singers, who took the place of...