Did the Freedom Caucus just pull the Republican Party back off the ledge, before it jumped to its death? A case can be made for that. Before the American Health Care Act, aka “Ryancare,” was pulled off the House floor Friday, it enjoyed the support—of 17 percent of Americans. Had it passed, it faced an...
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California Dreaming
Pedro Gonzalez reflects on the rapid decline and potential comeback of his home state—California.
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Alvin Bragg—Nothing to Brag About
New Yorkers need a DA who watches out for them, not for himself.
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The Justification for War
During the Cold War, occasional resorts to war or threats of war by the United States were justified by the need to keep communism in check. This justification had the advantage of being based on a real threat—notably in Berlin in 1949, in Korea in 1950, and during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The...
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Screen – Shaking a Money-Maker
Footloose; Directed by Herbert Ross; Written by Dern Pitchford; Paramount. Break dancers–those young people who go writhing, flipping, and spinning about like modern, urban, secular dervishes–probably do not think about sex once they’ve completed their bouts. Rather, they undoubtedly wonder whether there’s a chiropractor in the house. Television’s Dance Fever structurally emphasizes sex through the...
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The Very Definition of Arrogance
A California federal judge just provided the very definition of arrogance, in ruling that Proposition 8, the California law codifying marriage as between a man and a woman, lacked even a “rational basis” and was therefore unconstitutional under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. So much for the beliefs that created Western civilization....
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The Faith of a Critic
The 25 short essays on a variety of “Christian classics” collected in this book originally appeared in the Neiv Oxford Review between November 1979 and October 1982. Collected here, in their total economy, James J. Thompson’s essays remind us of the maturing legitimacy of the interdisciplinarv relations between literature and religion. Christian Classics Revisited shows...
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The New Fusionism
“In the government of Virginia,” said John Randolph in 1830, “we can’t take a step without breaking our shins over some Federal obstacle.” Randolph’s metaphor was a minor exaggeration 160 years ago; today, it would be a gross understatement, because today that federal obstacle has been erected so high, so deep, so strong, that we...
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One Flea Spare & Other New Plays
Actors Theatre of Louisville started its new play festival 20 years ago—that’s a long life in the American theater, and the Humana Festival of New American Plays achieved institution status several seasons back. Unfortunately, the festival is now a little like a fully endowed congregation that no longer has to look to itself to underwrite...
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Japan’s Prelude to Pearl Harbor
Was Japan’s sneak attack on Pearl Harbor out of character for the chrysanthemum nation? Her actions at Port Arthur, nearly 38 years earlier, suggest otherwise. In 1898 Russia began leasing the Liaotung Peninsula, which juts into the Yellow Sea between China and the Korean Peninsula, from the Chinese. On the southern tip of the Liaotung...
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Israel’s Judicial Reform Shows Growing Left-Right Divide Among Jews
The division among Jews worldwide regarding Israeli judicial reforms represents a growing gulf between Jewish liberals and conservatives, or "globalists" and "localists."
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Dabney’s Blind Spot
I read with interest the article by Zachary Garris on Robert Lewis Dabney (“Remembering R. L. Dabney,” December 2019). Having myself graduated from Hampden-Sydney College, where he taught, and being Presbyterian, I have had some interest in his views. The article mentions hierarchal views of biblically sanctioned authority. It does not mention the extension of...
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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 Limits of Economics
Actually, to say that Woods replies is a bit of an overstatement; he cranked out 2,078 words overnight (a feat for which Lew Rockwell praises him), but very few of those words address the arguments that Storck raised. In fact, he includes only one quotation from Storck, which he uses to set up a straw...
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The Faults of Woodward and Trump
There’s a lot of buncombe in Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House. Doubtless Chronicles readers heard some of it when the book was released on September 13, as the mainstream media played and replayed on the hour reports of Chief of Staff John Kelly allegedly grousing in the author’s presence that Trump’s “an...
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Nuclear Baksheesh
For several months Republicans and Democrats have been jawing over the nuclear “deal” with Iran. Unlike so many partisan debates, this one may actually involve issues of national security, but only if both sides are serious. The Iranians have legitimate reasons to be afraid of an American Empire that has destroyed Iraq; plunged Syria, Tunisia,...
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The Decline of Christian America
“This is a Christian nation,” said the Supreme Court in 1892. “America was born a Christian nation,” echoed Woodrow Wilson. Harry Truman affirmed it: “This is a Christian nation.” But in 2009, Barack Hussein Obama begged to differ: “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation.” Comes now a Pew Research Center survey that reveals...
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What the Editors Are Reading
Having written the book on Bill Bryson (literally—for Marshall Cavendish’s Today’s Writers & Their Works series, 2010), I have been looking forward to the film version of A Walk in the Woods (1998) since I first read Bryson’s semifictionalized account of hiking the Appalachian Trail. Robert Redford, who produced the movie and stars as a...
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Post-Trump Verdict, Will the American Right Finally Wake Up?
It has never been more incumbent upon the right to finally wake up and realize what is going on right now in this once-great nation.
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The Way We Are Now Goes On
“Forward, gentlemen, and show them the bayonet.” —Stonewall Jackson, born January 21, 1824 It may be that automobile workers are not very good workers, as some assert. But they are a whole lot better at being workers than the automobile industry executives are at being executives. Parts of the Posse Comitatus Act have been repealed,...
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Long Before Trump, We Were a Divided People
In a way, Donald Trump might be called The Great Uniter. Bear with me. No Republican president in the lifetime of this writer, not even Ronald Reagan, united the party as did Trump in the week of his acquittal in the Senate and State of the Union address. According to the Gallup Poll, 94% of...
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Back in the News
School uniforms are back in the news. The school board of the nation’s largest school system, that of New York City, voted unanimously this March to recommend uniforms for elementary school students. President Clinton endorsed the notion, though Norman Siegel, executive director of the New York City Civil Liberties Union, predictably threatened to sue if...
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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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Euro Woes
My stopover in Brussels on the way to the Balkans last week proved less than illuminating on the issue of the eurozone crisis and Greek debt. The real decisions are made further east, in Frankfurt and Berlin, but the EU apparat appears confident that there will be no Greek default in the short term and that Athens...
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Anglo-Americana
In 1858, as British and French forces pushed their way to Peking in the Opium Wars, Josiah Tatnall, commander of the neutral American naval squadron, intervened to save the British ships from Chinese guns and tow them safely out of range. When asked why he had abandoned his government’s official neutrality, Tatnall replied: “Blood is...
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End of an Era
Slobodan Milosevic’s delivery to a NATO airbase in Tuzla marks the end of an era—but which one? It appears to conclude the period in which the Serbian people tried to find leaders who would not accept that their national interests should be defined either by a socialist Yugoslavia or by the great powers. Their willingness...
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Shirking Responsibility
The nasty fight between Richard Clarke and manifold Bush officials quickly took on a “he said/she said” quality as greater violence enveloped Iraq. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice gave a strong performance before the September 11 Commission, but the celebrated August 2001 briefing memo warning of an Al Qaeda attack weakened her case. Neither side...
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A Classic Reconsidered
Do not look for last year’s best novel piled high in a fancy stack at the Books-A-Million or B. Dalton, with the belles lettres of Tom Clancy or John Grisham, because the best novel of 2002 was written 48 years ago. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, by Sloan Wilson (recently deceased), hit the...
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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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Trump Said What?
The nation held its breath in mid-December when GOP candidate Donald Trump dared to suggest that, in the wake of an ISIS/ISIL/IS/Caliphate/Daesh-related terrorist attack on U.S. soil, all Muslim immigration should be halted, until “Congress can figure out what the hell is going on.” When the press finally exhaled, it started screaming and hollering, pausing...
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Letter from Brussels: The Belly of the Eurobeast
Visiting Brussels is like visiting an acquaintance who is well informed but whose company you don’t enjoy. It is not fun but it can be useful. The European Union is in a state of latent crisis which has the potential to turn acute at any moment, but the massive bureaucratic machine in its capital pretends...
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Setting the Stage
The Bolshevik Revolution’s 73rd anniversary set the stage for an angry dissident’s attempt to assassinate Mikhail Gorbachev at an outdoor rally. It would have been the first shot of the coming Russian revolution, which may be peaceful, but more likely not. Time is running out for peaceful change. Gorbachev’s new Treaty of the Union is...
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Praying Alone
When Americans look back on 2020, the year of the virus, they will see multiple transformations. I fear that some of the most sweeping changes will come in the realm of religion, marking a grim turning point in the story of American faith. Historically, pandemics have played a major role in shaping religion, by undermining...
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India, Jihad’s Permanent Battleground
Teams of heavily armed terrorists carried out seven coordinated attacks in India’s financial capital
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Tea Party Tory
Before the Tea Party philosophy is ever even tested in America, it will have succeeded, or it will have failed, in Great Britain. For in David Cameron the Brits have a prime minister who can fairly be described as a Tea Party Tory. Casting aside the guidance of Lord Keynes—government-induced deficits are the right...
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Steadfast Sessions
President and five-star Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower said that a man must “believe in his luck” in order to lead. Jeff Sessions is such a man. He has not only survived multiple setbacks, considered career ending by many, but has consistently come out ahead. Most recently, his early and conspicuously vocal endorsement of Donald Trump...
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Seven Simple Proposals to Fix Our Broken Elections
Joe Biden may have declared victory, but whether he or Donald Trump officially wins the presidency may remain undetermined for weeks, even months, and even then we may see the election brought before the Supreme Court. Who knows? What we do know is that this election has delivered a mess not seen since 2000, when...
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In Focus – Say A Little Prayer
George Goldberg; Reconstructing America; Wm. B. Eedernabs; Grand Rapids, MI. Many years ago Leo Strauss remarked that the Supreme Court is more likely to defer to the contentions of social science than to the Ten Commandments as the words of the living God. Strauss was, of course, basing his observation on the use of social...
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Live Free! (Kill Your Lawn)
Americans love their lawns. They spend $40 billion per year—more than the gross national product of most countries—to create the perfect lawn. Taken together, all these lawns would cover the entire state of Kentucky. Lawns are everywhere, from trailer parks and executive mansions to businesses, churches, and recreational areas. American agronomists have created so many...
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Allies on the Transatlantic Right
Conservative nationalists in Europe face the same uphill struggle against the dominant left as do their American counterparts.
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Madman in the Dock
When John Hinckley was acquitted in 1982 for his attempted assassination of the President, the verdict galvanized opposition to the insanity defense. Some lawmakers wanted to restrict the use of the defense or even abolish it altogether. In Crime and Madness Thomas Maeder places the insanity defense and the recent challenges to it in historical...
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Which Ones are the Enemy?
For Southerners, the hatred of so many of their “fellow Americans” comes so steadily and predictably that it is usually best simply to ignore it and let the heathen rage. We are an easy-going, non-ideological, and Christian people, so most of us don’t even notice. However, the Washington Times has usefully exposed a particularly egregious example, an...
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Iraq: The Least Bad Scenario
The Democrats’ victory on November 7 and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s departure a day later marked the beginning of the end game in Iraq. The moment is reminiscent of December 1970, when President Nixon decided to pull U.S. forces out of Vietnam by the end of the following year. The major difference is that...
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Between Tyranny and Chaos
Why does serious 20th-century music attract so few listeners? This unpopularity is not due to a lack of interest in serious music itself, since classical music is a formidable industry that regularly draws vast numbers of listeners worldwide. These people flock to listen to the works of an earlier era, however—music of the 17th, 18th,...
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To Teach or To Sneer
Authentic conservatives and their libertarian allies have long been a small minority in a larger movement that, for the most part, rejected their radical critique of the managerial state. The “paleos” were singled out for attack by the neoconservatives, that exotic sect of ex-leftists prophetically described by Russell Kirk as “this little Sacred Band—which had...
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Nostalgia Ain’t What It Used To Be
I cannot remember the occasion, but I will not forget the voice—female, authoritative, and poised—that intoned a dismissal of the so-called yuppies as follows: “They oversee the distribution of toilet paper!” I was a bit thrilled by the superior attitude, being even then no young upwardly mobile professional myself. I thought about the matter and concluded...
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None Dare Call it Treason
None dare call it treason when a former US President intrigues with the head of an unfriendly foreign government. But when Jimmy Carter met with Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega on February 2, Vice President Quayle had the courage to say: “Obviously, when you have a former President meeting with heads of state we don’t meet...
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Boxing at the Garden
Imagine this scenario: at the end of a boxing match between two fighters— one white, the other, a visiting African black—the black boxer, clearly winning the fight, is disqualified on dubious technical grounds. Instead of protesting he walks peacefully over to a neutral corner, where he is suddenly set upon by the white corner crew,...
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Quebec Secession
Quebec Secession was the subject of an historic judgment handed down by the supreme court of Canada on August 20, 1998. This question reached the court by a “reference” or “renvoi” initiated by the governor general, in effect a request by the Prime Minister and his cabinet for an advisory opinion. The judgment is not...
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April Bombing
The April bombing in Oklahoma City told us a lot about ourselves and how we respond to adversity. When a bomb destroyed the federal building in that city, politicians and journalists were swift to place the atrocity in some kind of wider context, offering interpretations which ranged from the accurate to the vulgar. In the...