Abizaid of Arabia What does President Trump’s recent nomination of retired Army General John Abizaid to become the next U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia signify? Next to nothing—and arguably quite a lot. Abizaid’s proposed appointment is both a non-event and an opportunity not to be wasted. It means next to nothing in this sense: while...
Gerald N. Rosenberg, an assistant professor of political science and an instructor in law at the University of Chicago, has some simple advice for activists who think a United States Supreme Court ruling is an end-all: not only are you wrong, but your money is better spent out of court than in court. In The...
Neither George W. Bush, the Republican Party nominee in 2000 and 2004, nor Jeb, the dethroned Prince of Wales, will be in Cleveland. Nor will John McCain or Mitt Romney, the last two nominees. These former leaders would like it thought that high principle keeps them away from a GOP convention that would nominate Donald...
If Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture is best known for its political, social, and historical reflections, that by no means implies any neglect of literature, nor does it imply that the distinction of Chronicles has not been felt in its treatment of literature, or indeed in its presentation of literature itself. I think that...
The central theme of Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency has been his call for “change”—albeit often with few details about the nature of that change. There is certainly a pressing need for change in U.S. foreign policy. During the Cold War, Washington’s strategy led to security free-riding by allies and clients, caused the...
The road to hell, I was taught as a child, is paved with good intentions. Surely no one could fault the intentions of the Reverend Ralph David Abernathy—Martin Luther King’s right arm and successor in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—as revealed in this fascinating and moving autobiography. Inspired by faith in Divine mercy, by a...
Edmund Burke’s statement of government as a compromise and a sharing of power is no longer relevant today. The world has been remade since Burke's warnings, unfortunately.
Back in the days when Southern merchants had to take the Ku Klux Klan seriously, the knights of the Invisible Empire liked to play a neat little trick on a store owner who had strayed too far from the path of racial rectitude the secret society demanded of him. Several Klansmen in plain clothes would...
The “Prince of Darkness”—aka Robert Novak—who died this week of a brain tumor, was the Hunter Thompson of the right, albeit with predictable differences. Thompson, like Rimbaud, espoused a total disordering of all the senses—with materials as varied as ayahuasca, LSD, cocaine and tequila whereas Novak stuck to booze. Thompson blew his brains out, whereas...
In last month’s American Proscenium, I focused on the news that Washington is reaching out to various Islamist activists opposed to the secularist regime of Bashir Assad, and notably to the supposedly “moderate” elements of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria. The editorial, entitled “Aid and Comfort to the Enemy,” concluded that such policies reflect either...
Jean-Marie Le Pen is in trouble again. Imagine if Pat Buchanan had just scored a major political success, which had put him within reach of real political power—and then, just as he was reaching out to taste the fruits of years of hard work, political opponents threw a minor legal charge at him. Conviction on...
“It is better that some should be unhappy, than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.” —Samuel Johnson The best way to corrupt a value is to maximize it. That is one of the fundamental lessons of liberalism in the postwar period. Take rights. Push one...
Evolutionists used to be hard-boiled theorists who maintained that nature, including man, was based only on the impersonal plus time plus chance. They coolly asserted that the fittest survive, that some species die off and others thrive because of natural selection. All enduring creatures, great and small, have mutated and adapted to their environments. The...
High-ranking officials in the Biden administration worked with a transgender NGO to promote mutilating sex-change procedures for minors, according to a recent court-ordered document release.
In La Guerre D'Espagne, historian Stanley Payne delivers an even-handed collection of scholarly essays on the Spanish Civil War.
As the Air Croatia plane began its descent into Zagreb, it came to me that I had no idea where I was going. The Chesterton Society conference was to be held downtown at Europski Dom, but the participants were being put up at a Jesuit seminary. In a city of nearly a million, the Jesuits...
Patrisse Cullors is a co-founder of Blacks Lives Matter. About her background, she said in 2015: “The first thing, I think, is that we actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia (Garza, BLM co-founder) in particular are trained organizers.” Cullors also said: “We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological...
This part two of a series. If you have any doubts about the premise accepted here, that Obamacare represents an implementation of socialist principles, please read Part I. I should not that I have borrowed passages from the first chapter of a book in progress, tentatively titled Cities of Man. In Part III, I’ll...
He knew that he was destined for greatness. The son of uneducated manual laborers, immigrants to Illinois, he was never much of a student, but he would become a successful lawyer. From a young age, though, his sights were set on political power. Through his political connections, he got himself elected to the Illinois House...
Camps Regarding Jerry Salyer’s “Leftists, Creationists, and Useful Idiots” (Correspondence, October), I will paraphrase the excellent letter from Richard Mastio (“Trump and the GOP,” Polemics & Exchanges) that opened the issue: Are conservatives so blind, so self-serving, so cavalier, so very arrogant as to believe that by ridiculing Answers in Genesis and elevating Francis Collins...
If Joe Biden loses on Nov. 3, public interest in whether his son Hunter exploited the family name to rake in millions of dollars from foreign donors will likely fade away. It will not matter, and no one will care. But if Joe Biden wins the presidency, a prediction: By the Ides of March 2021,...
From the June 2002 issue of Chronicles. There are probably more judicial biographies of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall than of all the rest of the Supreme Court justices combined, so why another one? R. Kent Newmyer, historian and law professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, undertook to write a work...
The current Presidential race has witnessed an unprecedented drive, especially by the GOP, to court the Catholic vote. Democrats, who for decades snookered Catholics into believing that theirs was the party of the laborer and the immigrant, are finding their social-justice platform of little use among Catholics who find Democrat enthusiasm for infanticide and “gay...
“Then shall I dare these real ills to hide In tinsel trappings of poetic pride?” —George Crabbe English must be kept up. It rarely is. But what a splendid collection of offenses against it is in D.J. Enright’s book of euphemism. Those who delight in the instructions for Japanese small appliances will here encounter the...
The United States has been at war in Afghanistan for more than eight years. That is longer than our involvement in both world wars combined. Yet the end of the conflict appears to be further away than ever. It is not even clear what would constitute victory. Afghanistan began as the “good war,” receiving near-unanimous...
“French aircraft were due to begin their first reconnaissance flights over Iraq,” France’s Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius announced on September 15. Britain is already flying reconnaissance missions over Iraq. Several other countries – Arab ones included – say they are willing to support the air campaign. None seem interested in pledging any ground troops, however....
To focus some thoughts on current trends in American theatrical style—as distinct from play writing—it may help to use a telescoping lens to zero in on a classic play, not itself American. The play I have in mind is one that was recently produced not in the bazaars of New York but in one of...
Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day, I asserted a few months ago in Chronicles (“Taking Stock,” Views, November 2000), would “seek to persuade Middle Canadian voters that the [governing] Liberals are their enemies, not their friends.” I also argued that he didn’t “play by his enemies’ rules,” and that his party was “a viable alternative to...
Critics have long considered H. L. Mencken to be impossible, meaning stubborn, difficult, exasperating. But today the appellation takes on a different meaning: His career and ideas simply would be impossible today.
Death is terribly tactful. It comes to a man when he finally realizes that he understands nothing, thus saving his face. Watched back to front, like the videocassette that you know is on fast rewind when you see the hooker paying the client, life is a gradual shedding of obsolescent platitudes, a quiet letting go...
Barack Obama has a problem, and if it were not for this one problem, he would easily be elected president. As it is, because of this problem, the impossible John McCain actually has a chance. The problem is white people. Yes, it is true that the majority of Obama supporters are white people, but most...
This is a book about life in a society from which higher goods have been expelled, leaving no place for love, wonder, or beauty. The “compulsion” of the title is that which guides people in such a setting. In default of anything better, people fall under the dominion of itches, obsessions, and impositions, and mistake...
“On the whole, the home remains the supreme cultural achievement of women.” -Georg Simmel Elisabeth Griffith: In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton; Oxford University Press; New York. Kathleen Brady: Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker; Seaview/Putnam; New York. Near the turn of the century Charles Peguy, alarmed by the advance of secularism in the modern...
When I called Mike Rafferty to arrange a meeting to discuss a possible symposium on the demise of the local community, I had to choose a different date from the one I?wanted because Mike was busy that night. He was boxing at the Spectrum. Like Rocky Balboa, Mike Rafferty lives ten minutes from the Spectrum. ...
Assuming, no doubt, our anxious world could use a good laugh, Stephen Hawking undertakes to provide one. He says the universe created itself. The theory itself isn’t the joke. The joke is the dogged persistence of atheists trying in the face of common sense to persuade the world as to the wisdom they see...
Russian relations, in mid-November, were potentially on the verge of a sea-change, at the conclusion of two days of smiles, handshakes, bear hugs, and the usual feel-goodisms we have come to expect of “summit meetings,” especially from American presidents. (President George W. Bush, for instance, insisted that “the more I get to see” Russian President...
“The whole place would be abandoned if it weren’t an Indism reservation,” Bernard Fontana was saying, “like so much of rural America these days. There are a lot of people on the reservation who wake up in the morning knowing that what they’re going to do today isn’t worth sh-t. That may be true of...
The Life of William Faulkner. Volume 1: The Past Is Never Dead, 1897–1934 512 pp., $34.95 The Life of William Faulkner. Volume 2: This Alarming Paradox, 1935–1962 656 pp., $34.95 by Carl Rollyson University of Virginia Press Readers might be excused for exclaiming, “What! Another Faulkner biography?” Yet one can make a case for a...
What was meant to grow separately cannot last long as an artificial whole. This prehistoric wisdom seems to be forgotten by advocates of multiculturalism—which is just a misleading euphemism for polyethnism and multiracialism. The unpredictable side of multiracial conviviality seems to be deliberately overlooked by political elites in multiethnic and multiracial Belgium, a miniscule country...
Fleet Financial Group. New England’s largest bank-holding company, made big news when it fired 3,000 people and reduced its operating expenditures by $300 million. In addition, employees no longer get certain small perks, and even its best customers will pay fees that used to be waived for them. Analysts chalked it up to “corporate downsizing,”...
An interesting debate on the right concerning the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution neglects to consider that the founder’s Constitution may no longer be our framework of government.
“Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.” —Oscar Wilde In 1978 I published “Acceptable in Heaven’s Sight: Robert Frost at Bread Loaf, 1939-1941,” an account of three of eight summers of conversations with the poet in which—probably for the first time in print—he summarized the many...
Clayton R. Gaylord, chairman of The Ingersoll Foundation and the first chairman of The Rockford Institute, died on January 3. He had a remarkable career as industrialist, civic leader, and philanthropist. In 1958, he became president of The Ingersoll Milling Machine Company, the firm that has been owned and led by his family since his...
President Donald Trump’s meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia and their joint press conference in Helsinki on July 16 have ignited an ongoing paroxysm of rage and hysteria in the U.S. media. Morbid Russophobia and Putin-hate are déjà-vu, but the outpouring of vitriol against Trump has been raised to an entirely new level. The...
With disarming and hardly disingenuous modesty, Polish humanist Leszek Kolakowski describes his new anthology, Modernity on Endless Trial, as a loose collection of “semi-philosophical sermons” written over the course of a decade or so, purporting to offer no original philosophy. He adds, as an apparent afterthought, that he views them as conscious, deliberate appeals for...
What Vladimir Putin is up to in Syria makes far more sense than what Barack Obama and John Kerry appear to be up to in Syria. The Russians are flying transports bringing tanks and troops to an air base near the coastal city of Latakia to create a supply chain to provide a steady flow...
Instead of taking the responsible approach of admitting sanctuary policies are a failure and reversing course, mayors have taken absurd steps to appear to be leading while maintaining their good standing among those adhering to the anti-borders orthodoxy.
“Less is more” has proved to be (more often than less) a dreadful aesthetic credo, inspiring and justifying boldly insipid architecture better suited to robots than to humans, monotonous music in which the intervals of silence are the most welcome parts, minimalist visual art that is an insult to the visible universe, and poems little...
Our Pushover President by Patrick J. Buchanan • November 24, 2009 • Printer-friendly “This state visit is . . . a terrible mistake,” said Rep. Eliot Engel, chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. “He is illegitimate with his own people, and Brazil is now going to give him the air of legitimacy...
On March 3, 1994, ABC-TV’s Nightline devoted its half hour to the question of deteriorating relations between blacks and Jews. As background, the program showed clips of newsreels from the civil rights era, the “halcyon days”—and years—of unity between Jews and blacks in the 1950’s and early 60’s. The narration then jumped to the 1980’s...