The end of the phoney war is now in sight. The Conservative combatants in the general election have indulged their training exercises, which are to close squares round Boris’s deal and find evermore reasons to belittle Corbyn. Labour is engaged in its eternal war between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, with the current outcome in the balance. The ScotNats...
Caught red-handed spying on the private life of Angela Merkel, the Obama administration and its supporters in both parties have chanted the same responses: “Allies always spy on each other,” and “our monitoring activities in Europe have thwarted terrorist attacks.” True enough, but as everyone knows, politicians only tell the truth when it serves...
The Fox Theatre—a grand movie palace of Detroit’s 1920’s, which is now used primarily as a venue for acts that won’t fill an arena—contained a chronologically mixed crowd in mid-March. Paul Young was in concert. Young, a slightly chubby, baby-faced British singer (he appears, to borrow a line from Elvis Costello, “teddy-bear tender and tragically...
Editor Chilton Williamson’s critique of the identitarian position delivers a typical conservative philippic from cloud level. “Identity politics, whether for whites or for others, is a form of narcissism that focuses the mind almost exclusively on the self and its vanities, precluding a true apprehension of society, solid intellectual activity, and a true understanding of...
Jörg Haider, the best known Austrian politician, was killed in a car crash on October 11. His death marks the end of a colorful career untypical for a “far-Right” figure. Armani-clad fitness fanatic, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s pal with a permanent tan, Haider cut a figure vastly different from the bland establishmentarians who have ran Austria for...
“As everyone knows, I made it clear that my first choice for the Supreme Court will make history as the first African American woman justice.” So Joe Biden promised. Since the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, however, Biden has refused to produce a list of Black female judges and scholars whom he would consider...
The term "y'all" is being appropriated for woke means in a manner that would make historic Southerners turn in their graves.
A congressional proponent of the nation’s first federal income tax law, enacted in 1894, was, to say the least, beside himself over the wonders he and his colleagues had wrought. “The passage of this bill,” burbled Congressman David Albaugh DeArmond, “will mark the dawn of a brighter day, with more of sunshine, more of the...
Somebody recently did a “study” purporting to discover that at-home mothers spend hardly any more time daily with their children than mothers who work full-time outside the home. This is a neat trick on the part of the at-home moms surveyed, and I would like to know how they manage it. They must have superb...
The horrendous murder of James Foley by the Islamic State (IS) is more than just another display of jihadist savagery, reminiscent of the death of Daniel Pearl in 2002. Its strategic purpose is to provoke a wave of indignation at home, and to get the United States directly involved in yet another unwinnable Middle Eastern...
Why is the Second Amendment under such constant attack? One important reason is the depressing historical ignorance of most Americans, particularly of classical history. But suppose that modern students were required to read Tacitus, Plutarch, Livy, and other classical historians. The Founders of the American Republic all knew the sad story of the Roman Republic....
When Bill C. Malone’s Country Music, U.S.A. first appeared in 1968, it was obviously the most careful, well-researched, judicious, and accessible book on any kind of American popular music, including jazz, that had been published up to that time. Three revisions later, and a passing of the torch by Malone to a successor charged with...
It now appears that the safest way for scholars to treat Abraham Lincoln is in discrete segments of his life, leaving it to other, perhaps braver, souls to draw the appropriate conclusions. This means that, as in this book which focuses on the presidential years, modern Lincoln scholarship seems to miss the essence of the...
American society is widely recognized as youth-oriented, but it has been a long time since any authoritative source has given us really good news about the young. Recent reports from the American Medical Association, the National Research Council, and the Council of Physical Fitness have been especially discouraging: the young exercise too little, eat too...
“How shameless and how greedy all these people are!” —Fyodor Dostoevsky Once there were three finance firms and then there were none. One was a Ponzi scheme, one a tax fraud, and the last was sold to American Express for $380 million. One CEO is broke and in jail; one is a wealthy fugitive from...
When Sigmund Freud took his children hunting for mushrooms he always insisted that they follow a certain ritual. Part of the ritual consisted of placing fresh flowers every day at the shrine of the Virgin near the wood. Although he publicly attacked religion as an illusion, Freud seems to have had a private preoccupation with...
Having observed and worked for over 30 years in what is euphemistically called American higher education, it seems to me that what is worst about it is not what it teaches but how it misrepresents itself. Contrary to the impression created by neoconservatives and some misguided traditional humanists, educators (at least the ones I have...
The Ritz Club, the casino arm of the venerable and resplendent hotel in Piccadilly, is, for the discriminating player with an 18th-century sense of what gambling is all about, “the other place.” Apart from the late John Aspinall’s hallowed sepulchre in Curzon Street, this subterranean alhambra is the only privately owned gambling club in London. ...
NAFTA will fail a thousand times before its advocates beg forgiveness. Not that an apology should be accepted, but justice requires, at least, that they admit their complicity in the century’s biggest intergovernmental financial seam. NAFTA led (thanks to the Republican leadership) to a $50 billion American bailout of Mexico, the loss of the dollar’s...
It is well to remember that ruling powers never exercise censorship to suppress falsehoods. They often themselves perpetrate falsehoods they find useful and are indifferent to others. The purpose of censorship is always to suppress inconvenient truths. One of the best reasons to question the prevailing dogma of evolution as the source of life is...
Professional Democrats, like the proverbial dog who returns to his vomit, cannot quit the idea that their grotesque caricatures of those who hold traditional views of marriage and family, men and women, borders and citizenship, and meaningful employment will appeal to enough of the electorate to return control of the government to them. Donald Trump...
Asked if he would agree to be interviewed by Robert Mueller’s team, President Donald Trump told the White House press corps, “I would love to do it . . . as soon as possible. . . . under oath, absolutely.” On hearing this, the special counsel’s office must have looked like the Eagles’ locker room...
Two of the Clinton campaign’s central promises aimed at reducing the federal budget deficit and “reinventing” government. Unfortunately, President Clinton’s recently unveiled campaign finance reform plan will do neither. The most dramatic step the President could take toward accomplishing his goals would be to resist congressmen’s desires on the topic closest to their hearts: election...
Most Americans agree that the greatest problem America faces right now is a faltering economy. One would never know that by looking at NRO’s Corner from 4:54 pm to 6:21 pm on Thursday, February 26. A visitor to the Corner at that time would conclude that the greatest threat to the Republic is the appointment...
Since the time of the Founding Fathers, Protestantism appeared to be the default religion in the United States. At the end of World War II, when the United States began to enjoy superpower status, Mainline Protestantism (comprising the older denominations that sprang from the Reformation) began to drift away from its moorings. Then, in the...
“Total German triumph as EU minnows subjugated,” The Daily Telegraph headlines a report by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s latest diktat. Whoever wants credit must fulfill our conditions, she declared. Her conditions amount to capitulation by three vulnerable states on core policies, and further erosion of sovereignty for the rest of the eurozone. For Greece, Evans-Pritchard explains, the terms...
Vladimir Gusinsky, the Russian media magnate, has escaped the long arm of the law. The Russian General Prosecutor’s Office dropped charges of illegal privatization of state enterprises against the Kremlin’s chief nemesis, rescinding the freeze on his property and lifting a ban on foreign travel. Gusinsky promptly headed for his home in Spain. His NTV...
In the third week of August someone pushes the button and brings summer to an end in the Mountain West, though beautiful weather and Indian summer lie ahead. Typically the change comes with the discharge of a powerful thunder cell, seemingly no different from any other electrical storm but collapsing into a gray leaden overcast...
From the June 1997 issue of Chronicles. The global industrial revolution being engineered by multinational firms and the dismantling of international trade barriers have produced wrenching social changes and will unleash more. Rolling Stone National Editor William Greider, author of Secrets of the Temple (on the Federal Reserve) and Who Will Tell the People (on...
The Girl on the Bridge (La Fille sur le pont) Produced by Films Christian Fechner and France 2 Cinéma Directed by Patrice Leconte Screenplay by Serge Frydman Released by Paramount Pictures Saving Grace Produced by Homerun Productions and Portman Entertainment Group Distributed by Fine Line Features Directed by Nigel Cole Screenplay by Mark Crowdy and...
EU leaders have vowed to “build a bastion” against the surging popularity of Europe’s right-wing parties, as smearing their opposition as “Nazis” no longer works.
[This review first appeared in the November 1994 issue of Chronicles.] “Wisdom is neither inheritance nor legacy.” —Thomas Fuller In his keynote speech to a meeting of the John Randolph Club, Murray N. Rothbard exhorted his colleagues to take up the task he sees as central to the success of their movement: nothing less than...
In light of the vital importance of the Middle East to American interests, it is curious that our media have chosen not to report Arab reactions, which have been uniformly negative, to Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s vice-presidential candidacy. From America’s friends in the Persian Gulf and Egypt to its foes in the Levant and North Africa,...
In 1967, The American Challenge by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber predicted that by the 1980’s American multinationals would have virtually bought up European industry. A decade later, there was another big scare—the Arabs were going to buy up all the US farmland (some farmers now wish this had been true, since the price of farmland subsequently collapsed)....
If his Republican opponents will not take down Donald Trump, Fox News will not only show them how it is done. Fox News will do the job for them. That is the message that came out loud and clear from last Thursday’s debate in Cleveland, which was viewed by the largest cable audience ever to...
National Education Day was signed into law by President Bush and Congress last March 20. At first sight this new holiday looks like the President’s bid to be taken seriously as the “education President.” In fact, educators nationwide celebrated it as a tribute to their profession. But a closer look at the bill indicates that...
The History and Impact of Marxist-Leninist Organizational Theory: “Useful Idiots,” “Innocents’ Clubs,” and “Transmission Belts” by John P. Roche; Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, Cambridge, MA. The joke is as old as Marxism in power: Lenin (or Stalin or Khrushchev or Chernenko) shows his beautiful Crimean villa, his fleet of limousines, his army of servants,...
A.D. Sertillanges’ advice to anyone who wishes to accomplish intellectual work includes the following admonition: As to newspapers, defend yourself against them with the energy that the continuity and the indiscretion of their assault make indispensable. You must know what the papers contain, but they contain so little; and it would be easy to learn...
Overly committed as he was to supposedly universal political ideals and to the spread of American liberal democracy throughout the world, William F. Buckley, Jr., was not my kind of conservative. He could be tactless and cruel, as when he wrote in an obituary for Murray Rothbard that “Rothbard had defective judgment” and “couldn’t handle...
Some insomniacs do endless sequences of sums in their heads, while more traditional conservatives rely on counting sheep—or sheep in elephants’ clothing. An instinctive Machiavellian even as a child, and dimly conscious of the reality of power, I preferred to count rulers. In elementary school I learned the American presidents, and in high school I...
Fred Chappell’s A Way of Happening is a gathering of some 17 critical pieces, together with an important personal essay about teaching writing (“First Night Come Round Again”) and an essay-length introduction (“Thanks But No Thanks”), published between 1985 and 1997, all but three written expressly for and published by the Georgia Review. Chappell, author...
Where are today’s Platos and Aristotles? On this question, for once, Strauss announces that he “won’t beat around the bush in any respect”—and, actually, he doesn’t. As he states flatly: “Since a very, very early time, the main theme of my reflections has been what is called the Jewish question.” His interest does not stem...
Dispatches From the Muckdog Gazette by Bill Kauffman New York: Henry Holt and Company; 207 pp., $22.00 A decade ago, a friend of mine was working for a prestigious law firm in Washington, D.C., which had decided to institute a “paperless” office. The process would take a couple of years; in the interim, to smooth the...
It is sad to contemplate what the American Melted Pot and Deweyite education have done to the language of Shakespeare—which was also the language of the founders of America—the most beautiful and utilizable of all the tongues of man. In our country in ...
A small people with a distinctive religion, the Jews throughout history have tried to avoid imitating the Gentiles (that is, everybody else), lest assimilation destroy the faith and the group that embodies it. In fact, Scripture’s passionate denunciation of idolatry led the ancient rabbis, “our sages of blessed memory,” to condemn certain practices under the...
Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles tirelessly advocates for illegal aliens. A native of Mexico, he has an ardent love of his homeland and his people. He testifies frequently on Capitol Hill in favor of various amnesty-related issues, always in the name of the Catholic Church. He promotes the same theme before various groups of...
Britain’s defense policy prohibiting homosexuals from serving in the armed forces was recently struck down by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Formed in 1959 to enforce the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the ECHR is a creature of the 41-nation Council of Europe. The court’s authority comes from the European Convention...
In these days of political correctness and multiculturalism, the surprising thing is that there was so little controversy when the board of School District 205 awarded a $40,000 contract to revisionist historian Michael Hoffman, author of They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of ...
Jihadophilia (/d??’h??do’f?lj?/) is a mental disorder affecting members of the Western (West European, North American and Anglo-Antipodean) elite class, mostly politicians, journalists, academics and civil servants. J. is characterized by a breakdown of the ability to name Muslims as perpetrators of the acts of Islamic terrorism, by the tendency to systematically ignore Islam as a factor in terrorist attacks...
Patricia Highsmith is a peculiar taste, nasty and unpalatable to many. Readers who like her, however, tend to like her enormously. She was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, the unwanted daughter of a graphic artist who attempted to abort her by drinking turpentine. Her father left home before she was born, and she...