In the first book, AT confronts the mystery of the French Revolution, which no one seemed to understand at the time and which baffled the succeeding generation. In chapter two, he makes a twofold argument, that the FR aimed neither at destroying religious authority nor at weakening the central authority ...
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Books in Brief: The Decline of Nations
The Decline of Nations: Lessons for Strengthening America at Home and in the World, by Joseph F. Johnston, Jr. (Republic; 385 pp., $30.00). How would you know your country is in mortal decline? Joseph Johnston first explains how the Roman Republic and the British Empire rose to greatness and then declined. In light of these...
A Troublesome Trio
Reviews of films "Sharper," "The Whale," and a revisit of 1969's "The Reckoning." Despite some deficiencies, each has something to recommend itself.
National Lawyers Association
Three years ago, the American Bar Association voted to abandon its neutral position on legalized abortion and to endorse Roe v. Wade. In response to this action, some 14,000 members of the ABA resigned in protest. Many attorneys felt it was impossible for them to remain a member of, let alone contribute money to, an...
Commercial Speech and the First Amendment
For sheer incoherence, incomprehensibility, and outrageousness, nothing beats the United States Supreme Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence. The First Amendment is a fairly simple piece of constitutional law: It forbids the federal legislature from restricting freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, or from establishing a national religious sect. Unfortunately, in the 20th...
May’s Reprieve—And Brexit’s Future
The execution of Theresa May has been postponed sine die. It fell to Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the Tory rebels (the European Research Group, ERG), to announce the stay of execution. Last week it seemed that she was heading for the firing squad. The 48 letters necessary to trigger a vote of No Confidence...
On Traditionalists
I had already read Robin Anderson’s biography of Pope Pius VII, but if a book review or anything else has Thomas Fleming’s name on it, I read it. Alas, no more than nine lines into his review (“The Church Militant,” Reviews, August), I was startled by the first of several attacks on Catholic traditionalists that...
Dr. Bob’s Unusual University
Bob Jones University. Isn’t that the segregationist place down in South Carolina someplace? Well, yes and no; or, rather, no and yes. BJU is in Greenville, South Carolina. And it did lose its tax exemption not long ago because its administration—which means the Reverend Dr. Bob Jones Jr., son of the founder—forbids interracial dating on...
Tom Roeser, R.I.P.
Tom Roeser was perhaps Thomas to his parents and teachers and those who never met him. But for those of us fortunate enough to have glided within his ambit—even for a few moments—he was “Tom.” There was no pretense about him. There was no standing at one or two removes from him. He was warm...
Erdogan Unleashed
A successful national leader (“good” or “bad”) is able to redefine the terms of what is politically possible in accordance with his values, and to produce durable desired outcomes. Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan come to mind at home, and Churchill, De Gaulle, and Deng Xiaoping abroad. Very few are able to effect a profound, long-lasting...
A Stand-Up Comic Stands Up for God: Evan Sayet Obliterates the Atheist Origin Myth
The humorless left long ago met its match in Evan Sayet. Now the comic is offering the same treatment to militant atheists, packing an intellectual punch with his wit.
A Fig From Smyrna
Jan Chryzostom Cardinal Korec, S.J., was an eyewitness to the 20th century’s most important event: the defeat of Marxism-Leninism in Eastern Europe by the Church established by Jesus Christ. At age 27, Korec was secretly consecra-ted as a bishop in Slovakia, a largely Catholic nation of five million. He led the underground Church after the...
CRAP Happens
My summer vacation along Lake Superior’s western shore into Canada took place just before the anniversary of a milestone, although it was marked by no celebrations or remembrances, and nobody I saw on mv quick stay in Thunder Bay showed any sign of acknowledging it. The anniversary was not the subject of conversation in the...
An Arresting Moment
Five years ago, I wrote of the horror that Aaron Wolf and I experienced as we spent a morning photographing the old Turner School here in Rockford. Built in 1898, the massive brick-and-stone structure was closed 80 years later by a school board attempting in vain to avoid a lawsuit ...
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...
With Friends Like These
British author Douglas Murray recently wrote what he calls a “bit of self-criticism” about the American right in the online magazine UnHerd. Murray builds his argument around what he considers a very serious problem: “Bill Maher, Bari Weiss and a slew of other liberals who have fallen out with their own tribe have chosen not to...
Down Here Among the Lilliputians
Kong: Skull Island Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts Screenplay by Dan Gilroy and Max Borenstein Moonlight Produced and distributed by A24 Directed by Barry Jenkins Screenplay by Barry Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McCraney Lion Produced and distributed by The Weinstein Company Directed by Garth Davis Screenplay by Saroo Brierly from his...
Playing the Trump Card
In August, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) published a report documenting a startling increase in immigration over the past year. The study indicated that America’s immigrant population had grown by 1.7 million and that 44 percent of the new immigrants were from Mexico, with illegal immigration increasing during a “protracted period of legal immigration...
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...
Everything Old Is New Again
Maureen Dowd, premier columnist for the New York Times, is possessed of a rare professional gift: She can be mean (often really mean) and funny (often very funny) at the same time. What’s more, her potent powers of observation and sheer talent as a writer usually combine to mitigate her predictable Washington cynicism. But with...
Is COVID-19 Relief Encouraging People Not to Work? Dems Say, ‘No Evidence.’
“Experts” predicted 1 million jobs would be created in April. The actual number fell far short, at 266,000. Republicans warned that overly generous COVID-19 relief benefits create a disincentive to work. The day before this disappointing jobs report, Bloomberg wrote: In earnings calls and business surveys, executives often blame stimulus checks and generous unemployment benefits for hampering...
What the Editors Are Reading
I’m rereading large portions of Ed Abbey’s books (of course) as Chronicles goes to press: Desert Solitaire, Black Sun and The Fool’s Progress (both novels), Abbey’s Road, One Life at a Time, Please, Down the River, Beyond the Wall, The Journey Home . . . the record of a full, busy, and productive lifetime in...
If Duterte Wants Us Out, Let’s Go
Philippines President Duterte Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has just given us notice he will be terminating the Visiting Forces Agreement that governs U.S. military personnel in the islands. His notification starts the clock running on a six-month deadline. If no new agreement is negotiated, the VFA is dissolved. What triggered the decision? Duterte was offended...
In an Impotent World Even the Bankrupt Can Prevail
When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Japan did not spend years preparing her public case and demonstrating her deployment of forces for the attack. Japan did not make a world issue out of her view that the United States was denying Japan her role in the Pacific by hindering Japan’s access to raw materials and energy....
The British War for Independence
The anti-Brexit hysteria never went away. “How Brexit damaged Britain’s democracy” was the headline of the regular political columnist “Bagehot” in The Economist (March 30). One can hold different views on the value of Brexit—but a referendum is a “threat to democracy”? All subsequent events have pointed to ever-growing economic success. George Osborne’s doom-laden forecasts...
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...
First Things First
Once, in a Paris bookstore, biographer Leon Edel heard Ernest Hemingway’s take on T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. “Camels!” bellowed Papa. “Camels!” In his new book, Thomas McGuane has given us Horses! Horses! There is a theory that the artist who invests too much intellectual capital in the pursuit of sport or hobbies cheapens,...
Shifting Ground
Kenneth Miller, a professor of biology at Boston University, has produced a beautifully written work. His book is intended to refute every objection to the more or less universally accepted doctrine of evolution, to discredit its opponents, and to assert the compatibility of strict evolutionary doctrine with religion. Ever since Darwin—and especially since the rise...
The Knack of the Non-Deal
An Arab-Israeli peace agreement is like a moderate Syrian rebel or rational leftist: It is possible to visualize, but producing one is daunting. Every attempt has failed. President Donald Trump’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan will be no exception. Hardly the “deal of the century,” it proposes the establishment of a disconnected, truncated Palestinian state with...
Race and Civil Rights
One would expect race-baiting liberals and leftists to try to glorify the “civil-rights movement” and the laws of the early 1960’s, insisting that we view all of it as earth shaking history, more important than the fall of the Roman Empire, the Norman Invasion, the battles of Tours and Lepanto, the Reformation, the American, French,...
A Sicilian Visit
In Dürrenmatt’s The Visit, an aging billionairess returns to the provincial town where she was born and announces to the townsfolk that she will leave them all her money, on one condition. They must kill the man, himself now aging, who deceived her years ago. The townsfolk noisily reject the lady’s proposition as immoral, but...
Empty Gestures
Sin City Produced by Dimension Films Directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller Written by Frank Miller Distributed by Dimension Films and Miramax Films So you have been wondering what happened to Frodo, a.k.a. Elijah Wood, after he drifted off into that glorious sunset at the end of The Return of the King? It seems...
Beyond Moral Equivalency
“The triumph of demagogies is short-lived. But the ruins are eternal.” —Charles Peguy Jeane Kirkpatrick has given us two useful ways to think about that segment of the American intelligentsia that continuously finds fault with virtually everything this country does: they are the “blame America first” crowd and the believers in “moral equivalency.” After reading...
Books and Those Who Read Them Are the Real Endangered Species
In the February 2021 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, Professor Mark Brennan declares, “My students look at me in amazement when I tell them I read 8 to 10 hours per day. I look at them in amazement when they tell me they play video games 16 hours straight.” Brennan then went on...
Has History Passed Obama By?
Barack Obama’s dream of being a transformational president who alters the course of his country died 48 hours ago. The message America sent Obama and the men and women America sent to Congress to replace his allies impel one to ask: Why would he want a second term? Why would the most liberal president...
Books in Brief
Against Democracy, by Jason Brennan (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press; 288 pp., $29.95). I found this a disappointing book, as the subject is a critical one in the 21st century. Brennan begins with Schumpeter’s well-known assertion that The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters...
Back at the Front
When Senator Jesse Helms was in his prime, one newspaperman described his crusades on the Senate floor as “stompin’ trompin’ ultra-right action.” Ultra-rightists of the Helmsian kidney were not offended, and most were despondent when the most reliable man on the right went into ideological hibernation during the Reagan-Bush years. Helms went after a few...
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...
Mass Illegal Migration Makes Us Sicker, Not Stronger
The Biden administration’s chaotic, illegal approach to immigration prioritizes importation of people with questionable health records over the well-being of U.S. citizens.
American Proscenium (Part 3)
Richard Brautigan was a familiar American type that has been with us since the days of the Yankee peddler: the self-appointed Job who wants to take on the powers that be from his chair behind the cracker barrel, the freshman who writes a history of the world without a bibliography, the guttersnipe journalist who runs...
Not Communism But Feminism
News of strange doings up north has begun to travel south of the border. Last year, a University of Toronto mathematics professor was convicted of “sexual harassment” for allegedly staring at a part-time female student in the university pool. In Weak Link, Brian Mitchell reports that the Canadian military is now 9.2 percent female, barely...
Expanding Minds
Thomas Fleming’s “To Save One Child” (Beyond the Revolution, March) reminds me why everyone who still values a reasoned and ethical perspective on family values, and many other aspects of contemporary living in America, should read Chronicles. After pointing out how easily a well-intentioned individual, professing a spiritual nature, confuses values with virtues, Fleming then...
Temporizing on the Thames
It is one of the chief distinguishing features of the philistine that he thinks himself, above all things, “openminded.” While the converse of this proposition is untrue, modern culture having witnessed an explosion in the doctrinaire varieties of philistinism, it is nevertheless a fact that the trueblue, classic philistine, of the kind described by the...
Master of Your Domain
With the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision in Kelo v. New London, the truth of this column’s conceit—that Rockford, Illinois, is a microcosm of America—has never been more clear. One of the running themes of this column since shortly after it began in 2001 as a “Letter From Rockford” has been the abuse of the...
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,...
Reviving Self-Rule Ward
As a general rule, democracy does not grow with time. It usually comes into being as the result of some general uprising, and it is supported by the broader and more general popular will. But, with time, and because the larger population docs not usually continually watch for the encroachment of smaller groups, the course...
Erdoğan Victorious
Erdoğan narrowly won a third term as Turkey’s president in the most momentous electoral contest of the year. Critics of his record on Western-style human rights fail to grasp that his blend of nationalism, Islamism, and neo-Ottoman visions of imperial grandeur has been enormously successful.