“A perfect democracy is the most shameless thing in the world.” —Edmund Burke For some time now it has been the opinion of European political theorists that right and left have become antiquated points of reference. Allegedly, these terms, archaic by the time of the Cold War, were kept in use...
President Bush suffered fierce attacks from conservative quarters as the 1992 election year came to a close, and many on the right even celebrated his loss. Fine enough, but after the election the message on the conference circuit and on the nation’s op-ed pages was that conservatives’ great hope for 1996 is Jack F. Kemp....
Conservatives in the 21st century lead subterranean lives, taking refuge in their obscurity and finding comfort only in the virtual memories of better times, memories all too often implanted from misleading books and films. Like aristocratic pagans in the afterglow of the Roman Empire, they are a despised minority who fight symbolic battles. In 382,...
The Great Gatsby Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures Directed by Baz Luhrmann Screenplay by Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce Why do studios keep trying to turn F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby into a film? Fitzgerald’s extraordinarily vivid prose and his unmatched descriptive powers would seem to make it a natural choice,...
Great Granddaddy Honeycutt and Teddy Roosevelt Children, I haven’t ever been on what you might call speakin’ terms with any presidents. But I have seen four or five of them from pretty near, and I want to tell you that they ain’t nothing special. They have to get out of bed in the mornin’ and...
No sooner were my spirits raised by reading your quotation from the Oxford English Dictionary on the meaning of to parse than they were dashed by this sentence in the New York Times: “‘It’s not just, “Can you parse this sentence in the subjunctive?'” said Mrs. Cipolone, who had 36 Latin students when she began...
It’s amazing how many crises you can live through unscathed if you just don’t follow the news. We all develop silly pointless habits from time to time. Some chew gum. Some collect string. Some vote and write their Congressman. I don’t think voting is actually sinful. It is more a state of cluelessness, like chewing...
“Why do ye also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition?” (Matthew 15:3). Jesus had many negative things to say about the dangers of placing excessive emphasis on tradition; in the passage quoted above, he goes on to cite the prophet Isaiah, “In vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of...
A few hours before Richard Holbrooke’s death on December 13, Hillary Clinton told a group of top U.S. diplomats at a State Department Christmas party that he was “practically synonymous with American foreign policy.” Her assessment is correct: Holbrooke’s career embodies some of its least attractive and most deeply flawed traits. Holbrooke started as a...
The following is written by a white male Catholic convert, 48 years old, who has no specialist theological training whatever, is of strictly average intelligence, and represents no interest group or political movement. It derives solely from a recent visit to London, in which nothing spectacularly horrible occurred, and which was spent mostly among people...
In February, when 52-year-old Georgian billionaire and political exile Badri Patarkatsishvili died at his Surrey mansion, British media wondered if this might be a Georgian version of the Litvinenko affair. Patarkatsishvili had been a supporter of President Mikheil Saakashvili’s 2003 “Rose Revolution” but had lately been in opposition to the Georgian president, running against him...
No political phenomenon can be so creative and so destructive as nationalism. Nationalism can be a metaphor for the supreme truth but also an allegory for the nostalgia of death. No exotic country, no gold, no woman can trigger such an outpouring of passion as the sacred homeland, and contrary to all Freudians more people...
“Progress needs the brakeman, but the brakeman should not spend all his time putting on the brakes.” —Elbert Hubbard The case for pessimism has been easy to make since Lincoln, and mandatory since Franklin Roosevelt. Today, not much is left of the Old Republic. As early as the 1930’s, Frank Chodorov could describe Washington, D.C.,...
Correspondence on "More Hand-Wringing About the Radical Right," by Paul Gottfried and "A Fork in Europe's Road," by Srdja Trifkovic.
“Courage,” said the Philosopher, “is the prime philosophical virtue” (by which he meant the moral kind) “lacking which all the others become irrelevancies one has no nerve to bring oneself to put into practice.” It is a notion from another time, in accord with which it came to pass that the philosophical cream of my...
The Thomas Crown Affair Produced by Irish Dream Time and United Artists Directed by John McTiernan Screenplay by Leslie Dixon and Kurt Wimmer, original story by Alan Trustman Released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer The Blair Witch Project Produced by Haxan Films Directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez Screenplay by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez Released by...
There are several conflicting narratives on who is doing what to whom in Syria, and why. That a false-flag operation was followed by an act of aggression by the U.S. and its European satellites is clear. Everything else is murky. Three initial impressions deserve particular attention. 1. False flags work if they are supported by...
In late 2000, the Netherlands became the first country to legalize euthanasia. Under the law, passed by the lower house of the Dutch Parliament 104-40, a child as young as 12 can request to be put to death, provided he has at least one parent’s consent. In 1999 alone, according to the Associated Press (July...
Thousands of U.S. troops safeguard the border of South Korea. U.S. warships patrol the South China Sea to stand witness to the territorial claims of Asian allies against China. U.S. troops move in and out of the Baltic States to signal our willingness to defend the frontiers of these tiny NATO allies. Yet nothing that...
“A poet in our times is a semi- barbarian in a civilized community.” —Thomas Love Peacock Something happened. The juice went out of it, the largest joy. There may arise figures analogous to Emily Dickinson, or even to John Clare, but no experienced lover of poetry expects a new Keats or a new Shelley or...
“Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind.” Emerson’s couplet comes to mind as the New Year opens with Pakistan, the second largest Muslim country on Earth, in social and political chaos, trending toward a failed state with nuclear weapons. Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, whom the White House pressed to return home from exile...
Laser beam surgery has now made it possible to correct many common eye defects caused by irregularities in the shape of the lens of the eve relative to the size of the eyeball. For those with severely impaired eyesight, this means a welcome escape from a serious handicap. However, for children who are only mildly...
Scandalously, Thomas Jefferson once wrote to James Madison, “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and is as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” In the same year, 1787, in regard to what is known as Shays’ Rebellion, he wrote ...
The few reviews I’d read of Cormac McCarthy’s new novel, including the lead in the New York Times Book Review, though laudatory, had little more to say than that No Country for Old Men would (will) make a terrific screenplay. So much for the art of book reviewing these days. Another way to say it...
Politicians are trying to use the Uvalde school shooting to introduce new gun control measures, but the horrible event actually shows how useless government is at protecting the vulnerable.
The Berlin Tagesspiegel recently went after a young Protestant theologian whom naïve readers might have mistaken for a polite, unassuming scholar. This figure was outed by an academic colleague who discovered that he wrote for “new Right” publications, a term that in the German context should be understood quite broadly. One of the venues of this putative extremist...
I’ve just learned I may be a terrorist. On Aug. 13, the Secretary of Homeland Security issued a statement warning about an increase in domestic and foreign terrorism. At the end of the document’s summary were these words: “Such threats are also exacerbated by impacts of the ongoing global pandemic, including grievances...
Here is a somewhat conversational masterpiece by the great Ben. It’s a bit long but very vivid, funny, and, while self-serving, not hypocritical. What a man he must have been! Small wonder younger poets loved him, and not simply because he helped them. His poem on Shakespeare, so often misunderstood as carping or envious,...
“My religion defines who I am. And I’ve been a practicing Catholic my whole life,” said Vice President Joe Biden in 2012. “I accept my church’s position on abortion as . . . doctrine. Life begins at conception. . . . I just refuse to impose that on others.” For four decades, Biden backed the...
The inability to speak well was once upon a time a great hurdle to overcome. But in today’s schools, pupils are taught that speaking properly is elitist, snobby, and not with the times.
The 75th anniversary of the publication of I’ll Take My Stand ought to cause traditionalist Southerners and other Americans to look closely not only at the current state of our society but at their own personal spheres of community, family, and church. The authors warned that the South was in danger of being snatched from...
If anyone ever doubted that DaimlerChrysler is now a German-controlled corporation, the recent demise of the Plymouth brand provides incontrovertible proof Plymouth, sold only in the United States, was the inexpensive core brand of Detroit’s Chrysler Corporation, America’s third-largest automaker in the post-World War II era. Introduced on the eve of the Great Depression in...
Until a week ago it appeared that the government in Belgrade would give up the last vestiges of its claim to Kosovo for the sake of some indeterminate date in the future when Serbia may join the European Union. A series of unreciprocated concessions over the past few months have encouraged the KLA regime’s...
Dick McIlhenny awoke with a cold foot in the blackness that could be an hour after he fell asleep or ten minutes before the alarm clock went off. He attended to the foot inside the sleeping bag and checked the luminous dial on the clock beside his pillow. The clock said 30 minutes past one....
Perhaps you heard something of the furor evoked down here a couple of years ago when it was reported that a speech pathologist in Chattanooga, one Beverly Inman-Ebel, was conducting a class for those who wished to shed their Southern accents. (That’s how the news stories put it. One could as well say, of course,...
John Milton Cooper, Jr.: The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt; Harvard University Press; Boston. Lloyd Gardner: A Convenant with Power: America and World Order from Wilson to Reagan; Oxford University Press; New York. There have been many interpretations of Woodrow Wilson done from widely divergent perspectives. Fortunately for Wilson’s reputation, his...
Knocked Up Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures Directed and written by Judd Apatow Juno Produced and distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures Directed by Jason Reitman Screenplay by Diablo Cody 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days Produced by Mobra Films Directed and written by Cristian Mungiu Distributed by IFC Films Thirty-five years ago,...
Japan feared the Soviets, not the bomb For a generation after the Japanese Instrument of Surrender was signed on Sept. 2, 1945, the standard narrative remained fairly straightforward. By deciding to use nuclear weapons—against Hiroshima on Aug. 6 and on Nagasaki three days later—President Harry Truman enabled the realists in Tokyo, also called the peace faction,...
Before the largest audience of his political career, save perhaps his inaugural, Donald Trump delivered the speech of his life. And though Tuesday’s address may be called moderate, even inclusive, Trump’s total mastery of his party was on full display. Congressional Republicans who once professed “free-trade” as dogmatic truth rose again and again to cheer...
The Life of Kingsley Amis by Zachary Leader New York: Pantheon Books; 996 pp., $39.95 No, I’m not sorry. I’m not. Really. And I’m not sorry about a lot of things that we won’t go into, such as believing in the 1950’s that “we” were against communism, and such as ever believing that higher education...
For the whole weekend I had the (mis)fortune of attending a Continuing Legal Education course at my old law school in order to remain in good standing with the venerable New York state bar. Now, most of the speakers were older attorneys in the personal injury field. One of them, whom I’ll call “Seymour...
“PEN international is working for your release,” my lawyer told me. In the bare, mean interview room of the Belgrade District Prison he smiled at me, and I smiled back, because the mikes could not pick that up. There were no TV cameras there, yet, to monitor our winks and nods—the language of slaves, as...
A recent article in USA Today (“Mexico’s Violence Not Widespread,” August 4) could serve as a case study in why Mexican journalists consider their North American counterparts “hopeless” when it comes to accurate reporting on their country. The article pretends to correct the public misperception that Mexico on a whole is a dangerous and violent...
“Nobility is the symbol of mind.” —Walter Bagehot In times of texting and sexting, Twittering and wittering, there is something positively antediluvian about epistolary collections—a whiff of fountain pens and headed notepaper, morocco-topped escritoires in long-windowed drawing rooms looking out over lawns studded with cedars and peacocks. Such fleeting evocations are lent depth and body...
The typical animal rights activist is a female agnostic or atheist, unmarried with no children and six “companion animals,” “educated,” and living a resolutely urban life in the company of other activists on behalf of all sorts of causes, most of them left-wing. This bizarre specimen of contemporary humanity aspires to echo one day over...
The recent war in the Persian Gulf has at least had the merit of dissipating one or two myths, even if it has also helped to generate new mirages. One of the most pernicious of these myths was the belief, shared by France’s former defense minister, Jean-Pierre Chevenement, and other members of the Franco-Iraqi Friendship...
President Obama, in his State of the Union Address last January, called upon American students, teachers, scientists, and business executives to “out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.” We are living, the President announced, in a “Sputnik moment.” As polls show the majority of the country considers the United States to be rather...
A large portion of American history is only now being invented. For most periods of that history, we know the broad outlines: For instance, any account of the 1850’s has to include certain themes, certain events and landmarks. However much we differ on our interpretation, every respectable account has to devote some space to Uncle Tom’s...
Things are pretty dismal all over the country, but some places are worse than others. Usually, published rankings of American states are compiled by liberals who value such things as high-school and college graduation rates, personal income, internet speed, and the availability of abortion clinics. That’s why Massachusetts and Minnesota commonly come out on top. ...
It’s been almost seven months since Britons voted to leave the European Union. By now it seems likely that a genuine, hard Brexit—as opposed to some “associate-EU-membership” fudge—will actually happen. PM Theresa May has a strategy, it seems. It is not to the liking of the British liberal elite, but it is in line with...