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Ninety-two years ago, at the apex of England’s Edwardian ease, Gilbert Keith Chesterton published a curious little novel, written in his inimitable light-but-serious style.  In the context of a literary ambience that had recently produced The Wind in the Willows and Peter Pan, The Flying Inn must have seemed like just another piece of whimsy,...

Thousands of young Muslims, armed with clubs and sticks and shouting, “Allahu akbar!” riot and force the police to retreat.  Windows are smashed; stores are looted; cars are torched.  Europeans unlucky or careless enough to be trapped by the mob are viciously attacked, and some are killed. The scene could be Mogadishu in the aftermath...

One hundred and seventy miles southwest of Tucson, hard by the Mexico line, stands a weathered mountain range called the Cabeza Prieta.  It is a place of weird landforms and scarce but formidable vegetation, a graduate school for desert rats that only the best prepared dares enter.  The geography of the place says, Stay away. ...

In his Introduction to Orthodoxy: The Romance of Faith, G.K. Chesterton casts himself as a man on a yacht seeking the world and finding home.  The seeker, he writes, may have entertained us with his efforts to find “in an anarchist club or a Babylonian temple what I might have found in the nearest parish...

Mass immigration is changing the fundamental character of America—our culture, institutions, standards, and objectives.  Until recently, our society was the envy of the world, so why are these changes even necessary?  In addition to the ruling class’s commitment to globalism and multiculturalism, the chief reason that is given in support of open borders is the...

Only recently, I learned that the community of Columbus, New Mexico, U.S.A., is home to Pancho Villa State Park, which lies immediately south of town.  Since I lived in Las Cruces, 80 miles away by road, for two years in the late 90’s and have paid more than one visit to Columbus and the Mexican...

Historians tend to make the same argument: The South lost the Civil War because its economy was agrarian rather than industrial, with too few munitions factories to supply Confederate troops with weapons and too few textile mills to clothe them.  According to these same historians, the postbellum sharecropper system proved to be an economic disaster,...

I can’t forget the sorrow of my lodge brothers when the doors closed to our beloved home.  We had to pay a bill for a new roof, then the ice machine in the bar went on us.  When the jukebox broke, we couldn’t play “Poland Shall Not Perish While We Live to Love Her.”  Neighbors around...

It is paradoxical that, having led the Western world to triumph over fascism and then communism, the United States is now the vanguard of yet another world socialist order.  This American Empire, based on the benevolent neoconservative principles of borderless free enterprise, trade, and migration and consisting of multicultural social democracies enforced by U.S. military...

The Federal Reserve Act, passed at the close of 1913, created the current U.S. central bank in order to “establish a more effective supervision of banking in the United States.”  However, in response to monetary-policy errors committed by the central bank, Congress has, from time to time, amended the act.  For example, during the 1970’s,...

Public figures talk about globalization as if it were the Rapture.  We are told that, unlike Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus, we live in an era of international trade; so these days, we must worry more about what the world thinks and does.  As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor told the Southern Center for International Studies,...

In the early 1900’s, Reconstruction studies (excluding the work of W.E.B. DuBois) approved quick restoration of states, Andrew Johnson’s strict constitutionalism, and white Southerners’ revolt against military and Republican rule (which consisted of carpetbaggers, scalawags, and freedmen).  These studies—named the “Dunning School” for historian William A. Dunning, whose students applied his interpretation to individual Southern...

Watching a disaster or beholding a disintegration is inherently destructive, but there is also an element of morbid fascination.  Might there be, as well, a redemptive element in tracking the entropic parabola of the great fall of yet another Humpty Dumpty? The national coverage of the recent conventions of the Episcopalian Church, U.S.A., and of...

One day, perhaps, a great history of socialism will be written.  A daunting task, but not impossible, since socialism, the “ism,” is not very old—a relatively new phenomenon, during the last 200 years or even less.  A history of social justice; a history of the working classes; a history of the poor—that would overwhelm any...

Liberalism, in all its guises, is a vision of the final form of political association.  All history is viewed as a slow and painful struggle toward the realization of the liberal state.  Other forms of political association are not denied value, but only because they can be seen as approximations to liberalism.  The universalism of...

If someone is overheard referring to the system of U.S. public finance as “socialist,” most Americans within earshot will write him off as a conservative crank who is being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.  After all, Karl Marx is long gone, and so is his most ardent American disciple, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,...

The received wisdom today seems to be that, with the downfall of Soviet communism, socialism has lost its pungency.  Not only has Marxism proper reputedly crumbled, together with the Berlin Wall, but the somewhat watered-down type of socialism that survives Marxism has been forced to come to terms with its archrival, economic liberalism, which is...

The direction taken by progress to the America of the future, as I saw it, was toward abstraction.  If one looked to the natural world to supply the measure of what was concrete, then this world was long in the past, perhaps not actually with the dinosaurs, but certainly with the Model T and the...

In 1976, the Episcopal Church, U.S.A., met in General Convention to consider, among other things, two questions: the adoption of a new Book of Common Prayer and the ordination of women.  Whether they knew it or not, the delegates were actually resolving a deeper, more disturbing dilemma: whether to remain orthodox or to remain respectable....

“Transcend yourself and join in the universal struggle to bring about the self-transcendence of all men!” —Karl Marx Culture, as the term is used in America in our times, covers a vast territory with ill-defined frontiers.  There is primitive culture (flint spearheads, animal and human sacrifice).  There is high culture (Shakespeare, Michelangelo).  There is, or...

“A fact is not a truth until you love it.” —Shelby Foote A while back, I wrote a piece for a Festschrift in honor of Walter Sullivan—Place in American Fiction: Excursions and Explorations.  My piece, “Places We Have Come From, Places We Have Been,” argued that my own fiction and poetry, like that of so many...

The present condition of literature (as that term is ordinarily understood), at least in America, is obviously unhealthy.  Its illness is the result not only of internal undermining, “the invisible worm” of Blake’s “The Sick Rose,” but of external conditions, the “howling storm” on which the worm (however implausibly) rode.  External and internal decline, all...

I do not live in a painting by Magritte or by De Chirico or even by Carmen Cicero—no, really, I don’t, honest, scout’s honor, no kidding—but sometimes I get the creepy sensation that I do.  That sinking feeling is an identifiable vertigo not caused by imposing stimuli, such as intimidating heights, but by lesser, humdrum disconnects,...

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...

“ . . . a republican government, which many great writers assert to be incapable of subsisting long, except by the preservation of virtuous principles.” —John Taylor of Caroline On a summer morning in 1842, near the end of its session, the U.S. Senate was busy receiving committee reports.  The Committee on the Judiciary reported...

For just about the last half-century, since Earl Warren became chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the American legal academy has pondered something usually referred to as the “legitimacy problem.”  Law-school professors have believed that there is a difficulty inherent in the fact that an unelected, isolated body of nine jurists working in a...

If George Barna, by far the most prominent head counter among American Christians, is correct, 35 percent of “born-again Christians” have experienced (to borrow from Tammy Wynette) “pure h–e-double-l.”  A decade-long study on the Barna Group’s website, published first in 2004, reveals that, “among married born again Christians, 35% have experienced a divorce.  That figure...

“And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.” —Genesis 3:20 The first time I ever visited Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, it was in the company of a pretty Irish-American girl from Massachusetts named Evelyn.  Her father was some kind of Democratic politician back home.  She and...

When I first heard of the topic “Small Is Beautiful,” I thought of the wonderful motto of Chilton Williamson’s friend Edward Abbey: “Growth Is the Enemy of Progress.” Abbey went right to the heart of the matter. The false but pervasive premise of American life is that progress and growth are the same thing and...

Twenty-five years ago, the village of Machesney Park, Illinois, did not exist.  Today, it is one of the fastest-growing municipalities in the state: This spring, the village will pay $143,000 for a special census to determine how far the population has risen above its 2000 Census level of 20,759.  Village officials estimate that 1,400 people...

Thirteen of the British colonies in North America declared their independence in 1776 as the only means of preserving the life, liberty, and property of what was then declared to be the American people.  It was generally understood, in light of John Locke’s 1690 Second Treatise on Civil Government (widely recognized in the late-18th century...

“He hath made us kings . . . ” —Revelation 1:6 Roman beggars, like Roman gypsies and Roman cats, not to mention Roman prostitutes warming themselves by their little winter chestnut fires, are the bearers of an ancient tradition, peculiar to the City of the Seven Hills, the caput mundi, which even her membership in...