In the early winter of 1999, much of the world is looking forward with eager anticipation or uneasy apprehension to the dawning of the Third Millennium. It is the third millennium A.D., of course, the beginning of the third thousand of the Years of the Lord, and thus directly relevant only to those of us...
Detroiters have a deeply ironic way of looking at their beloved city. The irony is evident in a once-popular T-shirt that showed a muscular tough gripping a ferocious dog around the neck while holding a loaded gun to the animal’s head. “Say Nice Things About Detroit,” the T-shirt read. The T-shirt is a commentary on...
While the most famous member of the Lindbergh clan is undoubtedly the aviator and World War II-era isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., the qualities for which he won renown—his courage, his Scandinavian severity, his willingness to stand against the tide of popular opinion, his dislike of cities and the elites they spawned, and (most of...
Goethe taught us that true happiness comes from being engaged with others in productive projects, and we have known since Plato and Aristotle that man is a social animal, but we would be hard put to reach these conclusions if our only guide were the current state of American law. Far too often the American...
In May 1995, when our first child was born, my wife and I were living in Northern Virginia. I had just completed the course work for my doctorate, and mv wife was the exhibitions registrar at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. But just two weeks later, the day after our daughter was baptized,...
The anti-American Century began with a bad moon rising. Our new possessions across the sea were awash in colonial gore. Surveying from afar the corpses of Filipino independence fighters and our blood-spattered flag, Mark Twain suggested that we substitute the skull and crossbones for the stars and stripes. The Indiana-bred poet William Vaughn Moody, a...
Embarkation is the business of puzzling large weapons and vehicles, and the Marines that go with them, onto a ship that is run by a man who insists he does not have enough space for all that you need to take in order to do your job once he takes you where you need to...
Americans in the 19th century had a confident pride that they would dominate the coming age, not only because of the immense economic power of the new nation, but as a natural outcome of its moral and religious strength. As Melville had written in White Jacket, “We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of...
At 0825 on 20 November 1943, the first of six waves of Marines left the line of departure and headed for the beach on Betio Island, the principal objective for the United States in the Tarawa Atoll. At 4,000 yards out, shells from Japanese artillery pieces started splashing around the amtracs carrying the Marines. At...
People who know me realize that in the United States I move largely in conservative circles. I write for conservative publishers and periodicals and lecture largely to conservative audiences. I feel at home with them and usually share their views. The vast majority of my friends in America consider themselves to be conservatives, and thus...
The title “Dorothy Day and the American Right” promises a merciful brevity, along the lines of “Commandments We Have Kept” by the Kennedy Brothers. After all, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement and editor of its newspaper lived among the poor, refused to participate in air-raid drills, and preferred Cesar Chavez to Bebe Rebozo....
Austrian sociologist Hans Millendorfer claims to have discovered, at least in his native Austria, a perplexing correspondence: his statistics show a rise in abortions paralleled by a rise in civility. To those of us who consider abortion a violent and evil act, it seems strange that such violence should be accompanied by an increase in...
As the Asian financial and currency crisis spun out of control, the world glimpsed the dark side of the new international economic order. It is highly efficient—linking global markets for goods and money—but dangerously unstable and asymmetrical. For speculators, traders, bankers, and tycoons, there are unlimited opportunities to make money in the global economy. They...
It is time we looked at the world from a new perspective, one of enlightened nationalism. Cliches about a “new” global economy aside, there has always been an international economy—ever since Columbus stumbled onto the Western Hemisphere while seeking new trade routes to the East, in the hire of a nation-state, Spain. The Dutch East...
Despite the President’s and Congress’s promises, the budget is unlikely to be balanced in the year 2002. The bulk of the promised spending cuts come after the year 2000, and future Congresses and Presidents are unlikely to be any more willing than present ones to make tough political decisions. Equally problematic is the fact that...
In an industry that trades on rumors of disaster, the tales flying around New York (which I use here as a synecdoche for major publishing houses anywhere) for the past several years are horrendous. Though some of the horror stories may be exaggerated, at least insofar as the specific publishers involved are concerned, they are...
The renowned American jazzman Charlie Parker, introduced to Jean-Paul Sartre in a Paris club during the 1949 jazz festival, reportedly said, “I’m very glad to have met you, Mr. Sartre. I like your playing very much.” According to writer Boris Vian, who also played trumpet and often served as master of ceremonies at the club,...
The Madison Forum was founded in 1993 by Missouri State Senator Walt Mueller and me for three reasons. First, we wanted to respond to the Supreme Court’s claim in Missouri v. Jenkins (1990) that the federal judiciary’ has the authority to levy or increase taxes. We believe this constitutionally baseless assertion by the Court poses...
Governments today seek to monopolize violence and to control the ability of people to defend themselves, their families, and their communities. In doing so, governments present themselves not only as representatives and protectors of their people, but also as the necessary end of the historical process. These views can be contested, not only by appealing...
She is a middle-aged grocery clerk, and I have seen her working at Food Lion on Sundays and holidays and late into the evening during the week. Standing at her register, she warmly greets her customers, but she could as easily be receiving tourists at an antebellum mansion on the James River or teaching Arthurian...
The trial, conviction, and death sentence of Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing of April 19, 1995, passed quietly this year, far more quietly than most reporters and some political leaders wanted. The main reason for the calmness of the McVeigh proceedings was probably the utterly uninteresting mind, character, and personality of the defendant....
“[T]he contest is really for empire on the side of the North, and for independence on that of the South, and in this respect we recognize an exact analogy between the North and the Government of George III, and the South and the Thirteen Revolted Provinces. These opinions … are the...
How well I remember, 40 years ago, prowling in the stacks of a college library and reading the books, observing museum pieces in the halls of that library, and attending concerts in the auditorium next door. Glenn Gould showed up to play the Goldberg Variations, Jerome Hines to sing, and Wolfgang Schneiderhan to play Vivaldi...
Just outside Tucson, Arizona, lies a foreign country. It is not Mexico, although that is close by, but Tohono O’odham Nation, an Indian reservation the size of Connecticut that is home to some 30,000 people. Larger than many countries, the Tohono O’odham Nation is a place of astonishing and austere beauty. Seldom visited, it harbors...
They call it Cascadia—a land of plunging waterfalls and snowcapped mountains, a mythical kingdom of towering trees and raging rivers. Here in Seattle, capital of this Arcadia, the sleekly modernistic Space Needle rises up against the backdrop of Mount Rainier, which dominates the horizon—a distinctly Cascadian juxtaposition of mountain and cityscape, forest and skyscraper, greenery...
Among the terms of endearment applied to Americans who worry about present immigration policy is “xenophobe.” This high-toned word normally precedes lower-toned ones—”racist,” “bigot,” “neo-Nazi,” etc.—which take over as the exasperation level rises. A “xenophobe” is someone who fears foreigners. Fears them why? No dictionary is competent to say. Every xenophobe doubtless has his own...
I know it will strike many people as odd to call the current foreign policy of the United States a form of “empire building” or “imperialism,” and of course none of our leaders would ever call it that. They would prefer some such term as “peacekeeping” or “spreading democracy” or “nation-building” or “exporting capitalism,” or...
Sometime during the last decade, the Philip K. Dick cult came out from underground. Those of us who spent the 1980’s trying to explain our affection for this pulp writer no one else had heard of, this author of surreal science fictions and bleak realistic novels, have watched both pop culture and the academy discover...
In June 1996, the funding of British politics came to front page prominence with a controversy over the funding of political opposition to greater integration within the European Union. This opposition, organized by Bill Cash, a backbench (i.e., non-office-holding) Tory MP, was offered funds by Sir James Goldsmith, a very wealthy Anglo-French entrepreneur mostly resident...
Interpreting elections is a national spectator sport, offering as many “meanings” as there arc board-certified spin doctors. Nevertheless, all of these disparate revelations, insights, and brilliant interpretations share a common, unthinking vision: elections, despite their divisive, contentious character, exist to facilitate citizen power over government. Whether ineptly or adeptly, honestly or dishonestly, government is supposed...
Gay issues are likely to remain central to social and political debate in this country for many years to come, whether in the form of gay rights referenda, gay service in the military, school curricula, or the adoption of children by homosexual couples. It should not be too long before one specific issue, the recognition...
During most of human history, religious explanations and rituals imparted meaning to people’s lives and justified controlling their conduct. Today, medical explanations and rituals often perform those functions. For example, masturbation and homosexuality were first forbidden on religious grounds, then on medical grounds. Being a male infant is, of course, not behavior. Accordingly, routine neonatal...
Morphine is said to be good for people subject to severe depressions, or even pessimism. Although the drug first surfaced in a laboratory at the end of the last century, its basis, opium, had been used earlier by many aristocratic and reactionary thinkers. A young and secretive German romantic, Novalis, enjoyed eating and smoking opium...
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once referred to the Cheka as “the only punitive organ in human history that combined in one set of hands investigation, arrest, interrogation, prosecution, trial, and execution of the verdict.” He was probably mistaken about “human history,” but his anger was just. What he chronicled was indefinite imprisonment without trial; investigations and indictments...
Senator Eugene McCarthy is America’s senior statesman without a party. An Irish-German Minnesota Catholic who left the seminary for academe, McCarthy was elected to the House of Representatives in 1948 and the Senate in 1958. He was the link between the Old Progressives of the Upper Midwest and the postwar liberals; as time goes by,...
Conservatives and environmentalists generally have as much in common as the Hatfields and McCoys. Environmentalists like to point to the career of conservative James Watt and the comment of Ronald Reagan that once you’ve seen one redwood you’ve seen them all. Most conservatives, on the other hand, view environmentalists as sentimental anti-modernists who want to...
In this 1996 essay, the late Congressman James Traficant illustrates the Washington establishment’s habitual subordination of America to foreign interests.
In accepting the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1908, this century’s greatest populist warned: “How can the people hope to rule if they are not able to learn, until after the election, what the predatory interests are doing?” The man was, of course, William Jennings Bryan, and he offered a “complete and effective” solution...
Douglas Young was a tall man, six feet six inches; with his beard he looked like a Calvinist Jehovah. At St. Andrews, he acquired the nickname “God” by eavesdropping on a political discussion about the Balkans. (In the 1930’s, the Balkans were full of angry ethnic factions, fighting and killing one another.) The group was...
Sovereignty is a people’s ability to govern its internal affairs and protect its independence against outside interference. Military power has always been the most obvious pillar of sovereignty. Clausewitz’ dictum that the object of war is “to compel your opponent to do your will” means that the victor substitutes his sovereignty for that of the...
While visiting out-of-state friends in Jackson last summer, I was involved in a conversation with a just-married couple who had moved to Wyoming two months before from Los Angeles for the now-familiar purpose of escaping drive-by shootings, berserk retired football stars, and the multifarious Sons and Daughters of Emma Lazarus. In the course of our...
I am deeply honored to receive the Richard Weaver Award, to stand in the ranks of the distinguished men who have received it, and to have an award in the name of a man who has always been one of my heroes. As a lifelong libertarian, I have been moved by the occasion to reflect...
The true nature of the New Deal was revealed in one of those brilliant ironies that flash lightning-like in a midnight storm. It happened September 13, 1933, the Nativity of a new secular holiday: NRA Day. An interminable parade up New York’s Fifth Avenue celebrated the National Recovery Administration, which was to set prices, fix...
A few months after the outbreak of war, in January 1940, Nazi leaders held a merry meeting. They had plenty to be cheerful about. Poland had been crushed in a few weeks, and the new Soviet alliance had been “sealed in blood,” as Stalin put it. By a secret agreement in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of...
While violent criminals are given a pass to victimize and reoffend, the everyday American finds himself under the heel of an increasingly invasive and oppressive state.
Near the beginning of Federico Fellini’s Intervista (1988), a very large camera crane is about to rise, wreathed in smoke and artificial moonlight, high above the soundstages of Cinecitta. One of the camera operators calls down to his director (Fellini being played by Fellini), “Aren’t you coming up?” “No,” Fellini immediately replies, “I can imagine...
One of the most significant but little noted transitions from English to American society was in the Common Law of homicide and self-defense. As far back as the 13th century, English Common Law dealt harshly with the act of homicide. The “right to kill in self-defense was slowly established, and is a doctrine of modern...
Vanessa was the first American woman in my life. “You forced a superpower to her knees,” congratulated my friend Peter, when I told him what had happened the previous night. Things went considerably quicker in Paris in 1958; I had no reason to beat around the bush posing questions about bisexual lovers, blood transfusions, or...
The questions I ask myself from time to time are: What is the Ingersoll Milling Machine Company doing with its own philanthropic organization? What does Ingersoll have to do with philanthropy at all? We are engaged in a highly technical international machinery business, which is extremely demanding because of surging technology, because there are competitors...
One of the best things in life for a writer who sets out to be an artist is to be appreciated by people whose opinions are generally respected and valued. That is the happy condition in which I find myself this evening, and I thank the directors of the Ingersoll Foundation and the Rockford Institute....