It’s popular in academe today to describe the Mexican War as an example of an aggressive and expansive colossus beating up on a weak neighbor, but that was not the case in 1846. The war was really a second phase of the Texas Revolution. Most people don’t understand that Mexico never recognized Texas independence. It...
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Plato’s Apology
After returning from my Balkan adventures, I can now return to the serious business of using Plato to teach reasoning. Let us turn to the Apology. You probably all know that the Greek apologia means something like justification or defense argument rather than apology. It is Plato’s reconstruction (or imaginative recreation) of the speech Socrates made in...
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Why Trump Must Not Apologize
“Never retreat. Never explain. Get it done and let them howl.” Donald Trump has internalized the maxim Benjamin Jowett gave to his students at Balliol who would soon be running the empire. And in rejecting demands that he apologize for his remarks about the La Raza judge presiding over the class-action suit against Trump University,...
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The Radical Virus
Tom Schachtman: Decade of Shocks: Dallas to Watergate, 1963-1974; Poseidon Press; New York. Allen J. Matusow: The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960’s; Harper & Row; New York. Pity the lot of the American radical of recent vintage. Never does the opportunity arise for him to spill his blood...
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Greek Statues, Molon Labe!
I write this under an Attic sun, its light reflected from the marbles of the Acropolis and into my living room. This was once the center of Western civilization, its stem just hundreds of feet from where I’m standing. Individual liberty and democracy first flourished right here, while 300 Spartans gladly went to their inevitable death...
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Does Our Diversity Portend Disintegration?
After nine people were shot to death by a public transit worker, who then killed himself in San Jose, the latest mass murder in America, California Governor Gavin Newsom spoke for many on the eve of this Memorial Day weekend. “What the hell is going on in the United States of America? What the hell...
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Honorable Exit From Empire
As any military historian will testify, among the most difficult of maneuvers is the strategic retreat. Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, Lee’s retreat to Appomattox and MacArthur’s retreat from the Yalu come to mind. The British Empire abandoned India in 1947—and a Muslim-Hindu bloodbath ensued. France’s departure from Indochina was ignominious, and her abandonment of hundreds...
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A Philanthropic Journalist
If representative government requires a free press, as the founders of this Republic believed, then it is small wonder that the citizens of the United States no longer enjoy the benefit of free elections. For elections to be free, there must be a choice from among well-defined positions and characters: John Quincy Adams or Andrew...
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“Socialism of Fools”
Anti-Semitism, said August Bebel, was the “socialism of fools.” Murray Rothbard has responded similarly to the reckless imputation of anti-Semitic motives by neoconservatives and their clients, saying that “Anti-anti-Semitism has become the conservatism of fools.” The non-responsiveness of journalists and intellectuals to the gentile-bashing of Alan Dershowitz suggests that the problem underlined by Professor Rothbard...
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Teaching History Without Identity Politics
“Our children need to learn more history and civics!” is a regular rallying cry for those who want to see America returned to its moral and common sense roots. That a greater emphasis on history and civics is needed is evident from The Nation’s Report Card, which finds only 24 percent of American high school seniors...
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What Is History? Part 24
A Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever. —John Adams Honest history is one of the many casualties of the ethnic spoils competition that now dominates American society. —Clyde Wilson Blood will tell. —proverbial wisdom There is a great deal of ruin in a nation. ...
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The American Exception
From the October 1993 issue of Chronicles. A favorite exhortation of those seeking to further restrict or remove the private possession of firearms in the United States is to “look at other countries,” where lower murder rates are supposed to be a result of gun control laws. The underlying presumption beneath these laws is that...
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Bumpy BRICS Road
Until a year ago it had seemed that BRICS, the association of five emerging economies—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—was morphing from a loose economic alliance into a geopolitical force willing and able to challenge the global order. Its members’ potential to do so appeared impressive: They account for three billion people (two fifths...
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Remembering Walter E. Williams
Addressing a Boston anti-slavery audience in 1865, abolitionist Frederick Douglass asked, “What shall we do with the Negro?” The answer he provided was a favorite of the conservative economist Walter E. Williams, though if Douglass were to utter it today he would probably be condemned by Black Lives Matter and deplatformed from social media: ...
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Liquidating the Empire
A decade ago, Oldsmobile went. Last year, Pontiac. Saturn, Saab and Hummer were discontinued. A thousand GM dealerships shut down. To those who grew up in a
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A Legendary Failure of Liberalism
When Brown v. Board of Education, the 9-0 Warren Court ruling came down 60 years ago, desegregating America’s public schools, this writer was a sophomore at Gonzaga in Washington, D.C. In the shadow of the Capitol, Gonzaga was deep inside the city. And hitchhiking to school every day, one could see the “for sale” signs...
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Blizzard
Storms and other phenomena of nature have their own distinct sounds. Those who have survived a tornado often say that it sounded “like a train.” A volley of cannon fire accompanies every thunderstorm. The gale-force winds of a hurricane howl at nearly 200 miles per hour, as the rain strikes objects with the velocity of...
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Democracy’s Dictionary (With Apologies to Ambrose Bierce)
Democracy: A sacred form of government invented by Abraham Lincoln in the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address. John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. also helped greatly in the invention of democracy. Democratic Elections: When the rulers permit the voters to keep on voting until they get it right. Elder...
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Sport Without Hooligans
Last year I had the agreeable and unusual experience of spending two hours in a packed sports stadium where there was no hooliganism, no violence, and no bad feeling. The good-humored crowd of thousands of men, women, and children, mainly local but with a fair sprinkling of foreigners assembled, enjoyed themselves and dispersed in a...
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Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Honkies
The New York Times has delivered the unshocking news: “White births are no longer a majority in the United States.” Using words like “milestone” and “tipping point” and “tectonic,” the Times wonders aloud whether greedy white folks will be willing to pony up the cash necessary to educate the burgeoning majority-minority generation. After all, the Maj-Mins (copyright ADW) will...
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Intelligent Design
Intelligent design had its day in court in Dover, Pennsylvania, and the result was sadly predictable. So was the reaction to it. The evolutionist and atheist left ballyhooed the decision as another victory for science over superstition, and for the separation of Church and state. The intelligent-design crowd vowed to continue fighting, and talk radio...
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What the Editors Are Reading
Perhaps the greatest American autobiography in both the quality of its writing and the import of its content is Whittaker Chambers’ Witness (1952). Sadly, it’s also one of the most neglected by the country’s leftist-dominated intelligentsia. Witness describes Chambers’ winding path through the Communist underground in the 1920s and ’30s, from his Pennsylvania Quaker upbringing,...
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The Leopard at Large
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was the last prince of his long and languid line, but soon after his death he became one of the first names in 20th-century Italian letters. The Leopard, his 1958 novel about the last days of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the first days of a (theoretically) united Kingdom...
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Common App Letter Showcases Politics as Educational Endgame
I taught seminars in Latin, history, composition, and literature to homeschool students in Asheville, North Carolina for more than 15 years, including Advanced Placement courses. As a result, students often asked me to write college recommendation letters for them, such as letters for the Common Application, or Common App as it is known. Though I...
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Managing the Quagmire
Twenty years ago Leon Hadar published Quagmire: America in the Middle East, an eloquent plea for U.S. disengagement from the region. He warned that American leaders had neither the knowledge nor the power to manage long-standing disputes involving faraway people of whom we know little. Attempts at meddling, he wrote, invariably made the various actors...
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Worse Than Useless
Many a wise ancient employed allegory to elucidate meanings obscured by platitude, and so I thought, why not use the trick in this book review? The fact is, only the history of World War II is more densely populated with hacks than the history of the Russian “Revolution”—initial capital being part of that old scam—and...
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The Decline and Fall of Rock
The twists of fate have resulted in rock becoming the conservative music of the age, but specifically conservative, not right-wing, which would have been truly counter-cultural and "dangerous."
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Clichés Revived
Hell or High Water Produced by Film 44 Directed by David Mackenzie Screenplay by Taylor Sheridan Distributed by CBS Pete’s Dragon Produced and distributed by Walt Disney Productions Directed and written by David Lowery Hell or High Water has won extravagant praise from mainline film reviewers. This, I suspect, has to do more with its...
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A Tale of Two Elections
Despite a surge of popular support for right-wing parties in Britain and France, this summer's elections ended with an effective containment of the right that will last for years to come.
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“Banding” Together
Race-norming’s likeliest successor is something called “banding.” If you see references to a “diversity-based sliding band,” do not expect to encounter something as agreeable as a Dixieland ensemble. No, the term is only a euphemism for the latest subterfuge to scuttle rank-order selection of top scorers on tests for hiring and promotion. It’s better, you...
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Answering Islam
Americans find it difficult to understand the Islamic threat. It is not just that they have made the mistake of listening to presidential speeches on the “religion of peace” or dulled their wits reading the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The fault does not lie exclusively or even primarily with American schools,...
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Syria: The Islamist War Against Christians Continues
Recent weeks saw an increase of media attention to events in Syria, shifting away from Ukraine after the Crimean referendum. The main reason for the flurry of Syrian-related activity on the Internet was the ubiquitous #SaveKessab campaign on social media websites Twitter and Facebook. Kessab is a small town in the Latakia region of northwest...
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Resourcemammal Eroticism
Readers who have been attentive to the slashing edge of the Postmodernist Project will be aware of Lagado University’s vanguard role at the Modern Language Association’s 1995 meeting. On that occasion a session conducted entirely by the LU English Department’s faculty, “Intersections of Sex and Animal Husbandry: The Love that Dare not Low its Name,”...
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Campaign Finance Reform
Jack Tawil proposed a daring solution to balance campaign finance reform against the constitutional right to free speech: disconnect campaign contributions from sordid influence.
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30 Years Fighting the Culture War—July 2006
PERSPECTIVE Violent Revolution by Thomas Fleming Women in bondage. VIEWS Hollywood Blues by George Garrett A culture of grand illusions. Culture War by Clyde Wilson Fighting on. Dressing for Progress by Andrei Navrozov A culture of lovelessness. An American Dilemma by Tom Landess The Episcopal Church (1976-2006). RUOK? AWHFY? by James O. Tate Communication in the vast wasteland. O Literature, Thou Art Sick by Catharine Savage Brosman The consequences of theory. INTERVIEW Rendering ...
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Don’t Give Up the Ship
From two until almost four o’clock on a sunny afternoon in June 1967, in the Eastern Mediterranean, Israeli jets and motor torpedo boats mercilessly pounded the virtually defenseless U.S.S. Liberty, killing 34 sailors, seriously wounding 171 (two thirds of the crew), and leaving the ship with a nine-degree list and a huge torpedo hole in...
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Have a Good Day
After the initial horror of the Oklahoma City bombing, official reactions were certain to be heavy-handed, and a great many reasonable people were likely to be swept along with the draconian countermeasures proposed. We should not be surprised about the sweeping nature of the so-called “counterterrorist” laws suggested this spring, which included the inevitable package...
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The Walk Up Cemetery Ridge
The private-school league’s middle-school basketball playoffs were home games for Prep. Prep is the town’s most expensive private school, and their gym is beautiful: spacious, air conditioned, the wall by the entrance made of plastic so the new, impressive weight room is visible on the other side of a hall. We met them in the...
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The Fall and Rise of the House of Hardy
A noted Southern literary historian once took me to task for wasting time on polemics. The scholar’s task, he said, is to search out the facts and make coherent sense of them. In the long run, the truth of history would inevitably correct the fictions of ideology. At the time I was skeptical, and in...
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Crying Bloody Murder
The more a man of the world looks at the world, the more he is persuaded that not only are its political and social truths rarely what they seem, they are often the diametrical opposite of what they seem. So, in one memorable episode, did many an Englishman, a copy of the Times in one...
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Octavio Paz, R.I.P.
Octavio Paz, who died m April, was one of the greatest poets of the second half of the 20th century. On the left for most of his life, Paz held convictions that were often more compatible with conservative thought. Paz was not a “progressive.” In fact, he complained that the ethos of progress had no...
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Accidents & Ignorance
A. J. P. Taylor: A Personal History; Atheneum; New York. With the exception of Edward Gibbon, there have been few great historians who have written their autobiographies. The reason for this should be fairly clear. While some historians, such as Macaulay or Mommsen, led interesting lives, and some, such as Lewis Namier, are interesting...
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Theresa May’s Miscalculation
Last Thursday the Conservative Party suffered a major blow in the general election in the United Kingdom, the third such race in as many years. It had not been due until May 2020, but Prime Minister Theresa May decided to call a snap election on April 19 and obtain a “stronger mandate.” At that time the governing party...
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Cui Bono?
Cui bono? That is the question to ask now that the fur and feathers have settled from the celebrated January match between gamecock Vice President Bush and wildcat Dan Rather. Clearly the answer is George Bush. Before the encounter Bush had two serious liabilities: a general impression of wimpishness and a lingering taint (at least...
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Zebra Killings
Whenever whites commit crimes against blacks, the dastardly deeds make headlines and are featured on nightly news programs. The president wrings his hands and makes speeches about racism. The Promise Keepers hug one another, cry, and confess to a newly minted transgression, the “sin of racism.” Western Europeans look down their long noses at us. ...
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How Killing Libyans Became a Moral Imperative
“Who would be free themselves must strike the blow.” So wrote the poet Byron, who would himself die just days after landing in Greece to join the war for independence from the Turks. But in that time, Americans followed the dictum of Washington, Adams and Jefferson: Stay out of foreign wars. America “goes not abroad...
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The Body’s Vest
Casting the body’s vest aside, My soul into the boughs does glide. —Andrew Marvell (1621-78), “The Garden” Browsing through the poetry section at Borders, I came upon a sole copy of a new book of poems by Fred Chappell, Shadow Box. I have been an admirer of Chappell’s fiction for years, especially his novel I...
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The Republican War—Over War Policy
Rand Paul had his best debate moment Tuesday when he challenged Marco Rubio on his plans to increase defense spending by $1 trillion. “You cannot be a conservative if you’re going to keep promoting new programs you’re not going to pay for,” said Paul. Marco’s retort triggered the loudest cheers of the night: “There are...