Every April since 1981 the American Society of journalists and Authors sponsors an “I Read Banned Books” campaign. They routinely trot out copies of children’s books like Alice in Wonderland or Mary Poppins and modern classics like Ulysses—all of which have been censored by somebody somewhere. One of them inevitably quotes Jefferson on tolerating “error...
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Censorship: When to Say No
Every April since 1981 the American Society of journalists and Authors sponsors an “I Read Banned Books” campaign. They routinely trot out copies of children’s books like Alice in Wonderland or Mary Poppins and modern classics like Ulysses—all of which have been censored by somebody somewhere. One of them inevitably quotes Jefferson on tolerating “error...
Secessionist Fantasies
Throughout the first half of the present year, “secession” became the new watchword for a growing number of people on the American right. Economist Walter Williams has written at least two newspaper columns openly advocating secession. Jeffrey Tucker of the Ludwig von Mises Institute describes secession as “the cutting-edge issue that defines today’s anti-statism,” and...
Post-Boomer Conservatism
Baby Boomer conservatism arose during the salad days of American capitalism, the apex of American military might, and the drama of the Cold War. That's all gone and the young right stands at a crossroads.
Modern Conservatism and the Burden of Joe McCarthy
Many political experts have attempted to explain the rise of the right in recent years. At the close of World War II there was no unified, articulate conservative movement in the United States. Forty years later, Ronald Reagan was serving his second term in the White House, scores of conservative organizations were wealthy and growing,...
Solzhenitsyn: The Russian Liberal
When an influential group of American intellectuals, liberals and neoconservatives alike, unites against one man, a Russian scribbler at refuge in a New England town, there ought to be something big at stake. Their own explanation is that Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn is a reactionary, a social conservative, an anti-democrat, a 19th-century romantic or paternalist, a...
Angels to Govern Us
“If men were angels,” James Madison wrote, “no government would be necessary.” Or, “if angels were to govern men, no controls on government would be necessary.” Madison believed that men are about as good as they can ever be, and since no angels are available to rule, we need checks and balances. Thomas Jefferson added...
Ditching the Cadaver
“Republics exist only on tenure of being agitated.” —Wendell Phillips If anything might have transformed the presidential election of 2004 from a dull ritual of mass democracy into an interesting and perhaps even meaningful act of civic decision, it would have been the presence of Patrick J. Buchanan, whose wit and sharp conservative intelligence enlivened...
Conservatives and the Free Market
When everyone “hastens through by-paths to private profit,” Samuel Johnson remarked confidently in 1756, “no great change can suddenly be made.” So the market can be conservative in its effects. The notion is startling, especially from the pen of an 18th-century Tory, and it hardly matters for the moment whether the market Johnson had in...
Ditching the Cadaver
“Republics exist only on tenure of being agitated.” —Wendell Phillips If anything might have transformed the presidential election of 2004 from a dull ritual of mass democracy into an interesting and perhaps even meaningful act of civic decision, it would have been the presence of Patrick J. Buchanan, whose wit and sharp conservative intelligence enlivened...
Martin Luther King, Jr., as Conservative Hero
In Campus, a newsletter of the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a letter last spring from a student subscriber questioned comments about Martin Luther King found in the preceding issue’s feature essay, “A Rage for Merit.” This article portrayed King as a passionate critic of affirmative action, and this, according to the student, does not square...
Resurrecting the Old Right
For those who may have noticed, I’ve been absent from this venerable magazine for more than 12 years. Upon returning, I feel obliged to give an account of what I’ve learned in the intervening time. Aside from visiting my family and doing research for several monographs, I’ve been pondering the vicissitudes of the American right....
Revolution on the Right: The End of Bourgeois Conservatism?
In the early months of 1985, national headlines recounted lurid tales of an impending right-wing bloodbath in the United States. In New York City Bernhard Goetz admitted to the shooting of four Blacks who he believed were about to assault him on a subway car, and he promptly became a national hero. In the Washington...
Pro-Lifers and the Psalmist’s Curses
On one bright, cold January day in the early 80’s I stood with a group of college students from North Carolina after the annual March for Life in Washington as we were received by Sen. Jesse Helms. He greeted us kindly and then regaled us with a few stories with that combination of gentility and...
A Twinkle in the Brain
Two years after George Bush moved downtown to the White House, the suspicion is beginning to twinkle in the brains of his conservative followers that the President is not one of them after all. What tipped them off to this shattering truth was their leader’s nonchalant decision last summer to support a tax increase. But...
Hanging With Our Friends
A year and a half ago, Umberto Bossi delivered a brilliant speech in t:he Italian parliament. Describing Italy’s political system as organized corruption, the leader of the Lega Nord declared that left and right showed two faces but were joined into one body. A new Italian regime had to be born, but this two-headed monster,...
The New Class Controversy
The recent successes of the American right depend, in part, on its ability to deflect lower-middle-class resentment from the rich to a parasitic “new class” of professional problem-solvers and moral relativists. In 1975, William Rusher of the National Review referred to the emergence of a “verbalist” elite, “neither businessmen nor manufacturers, blue-collar workers or farmers,”...
The New Class Controversy
[This article first appeared in the June 1990 issue of Chronicles.] The recent successes of the American right depend, in part, on its ability to deflect lower-middle-class resentment from the rich to a parasitic “new class” of professional problem-solvers and moral relativists. In 1975, William Rusher of the National Review referred to the emergence of a “verbalist” elite,...
The Republic We Betrayed
A republican government is an exercise in human optimism, and patriotic republicans must engage in an unremitting struggle against that human entropy we used to know as Original Sin. Any American citizen today can quote, or at least dimly recall, Washington’s declarative challenge in his Farewell Address: Of all the dispositions and habits which lead...
Exporting Political Correctness
During the early days of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the White House frequently trotted out Laura Bush to laud our soldiers’ heroic efforts to “liberate” women. These were not wars of aggression or conquest. They were wars for “education,” the former schoolteacher averred: “The United States government is wholeheartedly committed to the full...
Defending the Family Castle, Part III
The English/American household was more than a fortified building with locks and bars to keep out unwanted intruders: It was also an autonomous community, whose existence antedated the state. This was the teaching of both philosophers and jurists, who cited approvingly Cicero’s famous statement that the family was the seed-bed of the commonwealth. This was...
Dead Weight
“A conservative government is an organized hypocrisy.” —Benjamin Disraeli It may speak volumes about American conservatives that David Frum’s critique of “big government conservatism” permitted William Buckley—or so Buckley claims on the dust jacket—to enjoy “the most refreshing ideological experience in a generation.” To a conservative movement led by advocates of national uplift allied with...
Revolution in the Air
Is it idle, or at least premature, to talk about “revolution from the right”? Whether it is or is not, that is exactly what leaders of the right have been talking about for some years, from Pat Buchanan’s “Middle American Revolution” and his imagery of the “Buchanan Brigades” and peasants with pitchforks rebelling against “King...
Middle American Gothic
The bad weather of 1993 eliminated my usual fishing trips to northern Wisconsin, but the other day in Madison, where I go to use the library and relive the 60’s, I saw a sign for an instant oil change and lube: “Faster than an Illinois tourist.” Most people in Wisconsin are happy for the dollars...
Beyond Conservatism
“Paleoconservatism” is an awkward word, but then what it purports to describe is an awkward thing. The word in the English language that it most resembles is “paleontology”—the scientific study of fossils—and a fossil is precisely what most of the enemies of paleoconservatism accuse it of being. Coined in 1986 or ’87, the word was...
Courage in Profile
Like Richard A. Epstein’s earlier book Takings, dealing with the defense of property in the Fifth Amendment, his latest one combines legal study and economic analysis with megadoses of political and social theory. Though Epstein explores, for the most part, civil rights legislation aimed at the removal of job discrimination, he devotes the opening section...
Avoiding Democracy
Does America exist anymore, or is the nation only a fantasy concocted out of old Frank Capra movies, civics classes, and pamphlets from the Department of Education? The weight of the evidence suggests the latter. Twenty years ago—ancient history by the standards of the press—a considerable number of young men who refused to fight in...
The Flawed Attempt to Make a Religion for the Right
In these troubled times of pandemics, racial conflict, and economic instability, disagreements over American conservatism may not sound particularly important. Yet, when “cancel culture” tactics are being applied to the right, the meaning of conservatism is no longer just an academic talking point. This hostile climate has rekindled robust debate on what exactly conservatism means....
Beyond Left and Right
November 9, 1989, marked the end of the old politics and the old alignments; on that day, as the Berlin Wall fell, so did the political categories and alliances of half a century. The end of the Cold War meant a lot more than the end of communism as a viable ideology. It meant more...
Sam Francis’s Mad Tea Party
Reading up for a book on the fate of democracy since Tocqueville published Democracy in America in 1835, I recently came across an excellent study, Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville, by Alan S. Kahan. Professor Kahan includes these men in a group of...
Revolting Parasites
Movements are always based on lies, and the lies begin with the titles and slogans that are chosen to advance “the cause.” Here in the United States, so-called liberals are really nonrevolutionary Marxists, while the people who call themselves conservatives are, at one extreme, libertarian capitalists who reject any principle or experience that cannot be...
Our Fathers’ Fields
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,...
To Bail or Bail Out, That is the Question
“What do you think about the bailout?” The old philosopher sighed. Xanthippe had been getting market gossip again from the slave girl she sent to the agora. How many times did he have to tell her to pay no attention to these rumors? News, he snorted to himself. Those people were right in Thurii who...
Property Rights Redefined
Years ago, a Christian evangelist friend of mine complained about doing the Lord’s work in the South. Everyone is a Christian there, he lamented, whether or not they really are one. His point was well taken. It is hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, which is a problem not just for Christian evangelists...
Sam Francis’s Mad Tea Party
Reading up for a book on the fate of democracy since Tocqueville published Democracy in America in 1835, I recently came across an excellent study, Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville, by Alan S. Kahan. Professor Kahan includes these men in a group of...
A Week of Mondays
“There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson What helps set this study apart is its still largely verboten subject. Joseph Scotchie devotes his attention to that part of the American right that Lee Edwards, Jonathan M. Schoenwald, and William Rusher...
America in Europe, Europe in America
What the Europeans call America—that is, Canada and the United States—was fostered by what we usually refer to as Europe. If men and women had not left the Old World, there would not be any New World as we know it. Hence, any investigation into the relationship between Europe and America must begin with an...
Nationalism, Old and New
In the course of American history, nationalism and republicanism have usually been enemies, not allies. From the days of Alexander Hamilton, nationalism has meant unification of the country under a centralized government, the supremacy of the executive over the legislative branch, the reduction of states’ rights and local and sectional parochialism, governmental regulation of the...
What the Right Needs Now
Amid an eloquent diatribe against the “woke” left and its friends in the Deep State, Fox News host Tucker Carlson attributed to American Deplorables a sentiment that may more accurately reflect his own feelings: “All they want to do is go back to how things were in 2005.” I heard myself responding out loud...
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...
Don’t Give Us India
“Don’t give us India,” Samuel Johnson once told Boswell, when the talk was about how widely mankind differed in its view of chastity and polygamy. Montesquieu, he said, the great pioneer of anthropology, was in many wavs a fellow of genius. But whenever he wants to support a strange opinion, he quotes you the practice...
So-Called Fascism, Canadian-Style
The Canadian left and right are equally guilty of slinging the word “fascist” at their opponents. The partisan reinvention of this term is problematic for the left, as Pierre Trudeau once subscribed to an ethnic and organic nationalism.
Left and Right in Eastern Europe
Not much can be understood about the new role of the political left and right in Eastern Europe without taking into account two fundamental factors, generally ignored by both critical and enthusiastic observers of the post-1990 years. One is the historic trauma of the five-century-old division of Europe into two halves, effected by the Turkish...
Is There Hope for the Federal Courts?
In a radio address last year, President Clinton railed against congressional Republicans who were stalling on his nominees to the federal bench and had even threatened some sitting judges with impeachment. Their actions, he claimed, had endangered our tradition of judicial independence, and were an attack on the rule of law itself. The truth, of...
Homesick in America
“Darlin,’” she said, “I’ll get that. Go ahead and take it.” She was a weathered-looking woman with mousy light brown hair drawn back in a bun and the plain, honest look of one of those faces you see in Depression-era photos from the Dust Bowl, faces that don’t smile—they are just themselves, making the best...
The War Against the West
“Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.” —Tennyson In our day the mere mention of imperialism is enough to provoke paroxysms of moral outrage. Except in derision, no one any longer dares to speak of the white man’s burden, and few possess the courage to say that it was Europeans who created...
Self-Evident Lies
Jon Stewart: “You write that marriage is the bedrock of our society. Why would you not want more couples to buy into the stability of marriage?” Mike Huckabee: “Marriage still means one man one woman life relationship. I think people have a right to live any way they want to, but even anatomically ....
The People’s Right Not to Know
When Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spoke at Harvard University two decades ago, one of the most unfathomable lines in his widely panned commencement address was his lament about “the forfeited right of people not to know.” This line was buried within his section charging the press with hastiness and superficiality—and the reporters in attendance rushed out to...
Sisyphus and States’ Rights
Can a ten-year-old girl successfully sue a local school board for failing to prevent the sexual harassment of the young lady by an elementary-school classmate? Should an Alabama state court judge be able to display his hand-carved copy of the Ten Commandments in his courtroom? Can the people of a state decide that no state...
Back to the Stone Age IIB
The Pernicious Myth of the Individual Part and parcel of the counter-factual theory of natural liberty is the myth of the individual. If man were in fact naturally free, it would be because he is his own person, because, as some libertarians say, he owns himself. Pure and utter hogwash that only a self-blinded...