Category: Editorials

Many years ago, Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson was challenged by a mathematician to name a single proposition in all social science that was both true and nontrivial. Samuelson proposed the principle of comparative advantage, first developed by economist David Ricardo

The field of Democrats aspiring to be their party’s presidential nominee resembles what the Republican field of four years ago would have been, had Donald Trump not entered the race.

With more than 20 contenders, Democrats have had to break

During Russell Kirk’s fruitful lifetime
I regularly took his sage advice concerning
books I ought to read. Dr. Kirk
had seemingly perused everything worth
perusing. Thus, on his say-so in 1968, I
read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested
T. S.

As President Donald Trump starts his reelection campaign in earnest, a major segment of his 2020 platform remains ambiguous. In the field of foreign and security policy, the next five or six months present Trump with the last opportunity to

In early June, border agents near San Diego did what they do a lot these days. They collared two previously deported sex criminals who had re-entered the United States illegally. Both men were convicted of sex crimes against children,

The Silicon Valley censors have struck again. This time it’s against James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas for sins related to the practice of journalism, namely publishing documents allegedly exposing anti-Christian bias on the social media platform Pinterest. Veritas earned a temporary

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

Pro-democratic ideological think tanks that evaluate the future of democracy by the extent of its global spread and the fortunes of relatively insignificant countries around the world (the Third one, especially) should be far more concerned with events currently occurring

After two years and tens of millions of dollars, the Mueller investigation ended in a shattering anticlimax for Democrats.  On March 22, Special Counsel Robert Mueller sent Attorney General William Barr his report, and Barr promptly informed Congress that Mueller

Washington never made any particular secret of its jaundiced view of Brexit as suggested succinctly by President Obama when he warned that Great Britain, if she voted to leave the European Union, would need to go to “the back of

Now here’s a headline: “Blackface, sexual assault scandals don’t appear to have tarnished Virginia’s image,” the Washington Post declared on March 3.  The story referred to controversies surrounding each of the commonwealth’s three top statewide officials—all of them Democrats. 

The way foreign-policy mavens in Washington, D.C., talk about Afghanistan, you would think that country had successfully launched a ballistic-missile attack against us on 9/11.  We have occupied Afghanistan for over 17 years now, but still we cannot leave because

The political establishment in California has become self-admittedly secessionist in recent months, rebelling specifically against federal immigration policy and more broadly by raising the possibility of leaving a backward and reactionary country that does not share its culture and its

Many a new genre of journalism has sprung up thanks to President Trump.  The latest is the “victims of tariffs” industry profile.  As the Trump administration slaps tariffs on foreign steel, aluminum, and manufactured goods of various kinds, trading partners—

The Referendum that took Great Britain out of the European Union by a large popular majority occurred two years ago.  President Trump was elected two years ago this coming November in something like a landslide in the Electoral College.  Marine

NeverTrump really means “forever war.”  Proof of this could be seen in the 2016 election, where anti-Trump Republicans fielded a candidate of their own, ex-CIA man Evan McMullin, rather than casting their votes for a third-party ticket with two non-Trump

The “Iran Nuclear Deal” was killed by President Trump on May 8, which came as no surprise to anyone who had heard a Trump campaign speech in 2016 or to those who were aware that Trump had recently hired John

Of the more than 1,000 migrants from Central America who set out in “caravan” to traverse the length of Mexico to seek asylum in the United States, a couple of hundred arrived at Tijuana on the American border.  As of

Rep. Adam Schiff knows something about impeachment.  The California Democrat first won his seat in Congress in 2000, when he defeated a Republican incumbent, James Rogan, who two years earlier had been one of the “managers” acting for the House

Paroxysms of liberal outrage gripped denizens of the Swamp when the Commerce Department announced that it plans to find out the citizenship status of U.S. residents by asking them directly via the 2020 Census and the U.S. Mail.  And as

Writing in this issue of Chronicles, Frank Brownlow, the scholar and literary critic, quotes W.H. Auden as having described logic as “a condition of the world,” like aesthetics and ethics.  Auden was right, which makes advanced liberalism’s rejection of

Democrats are feeling overconfident.  They won a hard-fought special election in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District in early March, then saw over a million people take to the streets in cities across the country to march for gun control some two

On any subject other than Russia, unanimity between the United States and her European “allies” has been impossible to achieve since Donald Trump was sworn in as President.  The unsolved poisoning in the cathedral town of Salisbury, England, of a

Have you noticed?  Newspapers and television channels across the land have discovered a new kind of human-interest story: the business-owning, family-man illegal immigrant who gets deported after living in this country for decades as a productive noncitizen.  CNN’s website headlined

As the new French President, Emmanuel Macron seems determined to hitch opposites together, combine like with dislike, compatibles with incompatibles, and otherwise fudge his policies as he did during the electoral campaign.  As a candidate for the office, he praised

Since the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990, Germans have debated the question of whether their country can ever be a “normal” one again.  A current best-selling book—Finis Germania, by Rolf Peter Sieferle, a former left-wing

Democracy is under attack, we now hear regularly.  While Donald Trump, the GOP, and (if you ask Rachel Maddow) the weather have all been identified of late as “threats” to our democracy, the Great Satan is, of course, Russia, pop.

The party of Hillary Clinton has not stopped losing since last November.  This fact is easily overlooked amid all of President Trump’s bad press, but Democrats have reliably come up short in special elections from Montana to Kansas to suburban

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

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

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

A year ago the op-ed writers who present themselves as tutors to the nation insisted that Donald Trump could not and would not become president.  Progressive pundits were certain of this—after all, they didn’t know anyone who was voting for

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

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

Contrary to what John McCain and others in Washington are saying, North Korea’s nuclear program is not a “Cuban missile crisis in slow motion.”  Nor does tough talk from President Trump mean he’s about to launch preemptive strikes against Kim