Even the weariest presidential campaign winds somewhere to the sea, and this month, as the ever dwindling number of American voters meanders into the voting booths, the sea is exactly where the political vessels in which the nation sails have wound up. Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. It is symptomatic of...
956 search results for: Politics of Race
Civil Rights or Property Rights?
The interplay of race and economics in America has produced a new variant of political economy that we might call “multicultural capitalism,” a system in which property is, for the most part, privately owned, but its ownership is conditional on the race, sex, and—in some cases—the sexual orientation of the owner. In the pursuit of...
Reassessing the Legacy of George Wallace
There was a very odd occurrence in the “Cradle of the Confederacy” in July 1987: Presidential aspirant and civil rights activist Jesse Jackson paid a visit to the Montgomery, Alabama, home of George Corley Wallace. It had been 126 years since Jefferson Davis stood on the steps of the Alabama capitol and been sworn in...
The Hispanic Strategy
The question that has smoldered in the Republican mind for the last couple of years is not who will be the presidential nominee of the party in 2000, but rather, will George W. Bush win the Hispanic vote? Since some time in 1998, it has been an unquestioned assumption of many, if not most. Republicans—at...
Rout of the Republicans
The first thing to be said about the presidential election of 2000 is that George W. Bush and the Stupid Party lost miserably. This is true despite their actual victory in the great post-election Florida chicken-scratch because, without Ralph Nader on the ballot, Al Gore would have won the election easily. Nader’s votes in Florida...
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....
White Like Me
I have never seen Ireland, but, anchored decades ago aboard R.M.S. Saxonia in a foggy night redolent with the odor of burning peat off Cobh while the tender came and went between the ship and the dockside several miles portside, I have scented her. Queen Mary 2 does not call at Cobh, and so on...
Schizophrenia & Politics
The Confidence Gap: Business, Labor, and Government in the Public Mind by Seymour Martin Lipset and William Schneider; The Free Press; New York. ” American public opinion,” Theodore Roosevelt once said, “is a vast ocean. It cannot be stirred with a teaspoon!” Since then, assorted experts have tried, with increasingly sophisticated tools, to measure the...
Stop Playing the Left’s Game
When Chronicles asked me to provide a refutation of Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission report (“Rejecting the ‘Proposition Nation,’” April/May 2021), I knew it would be controversial. I was right. Michael Anton wrote a lengthy rebuttal at American Greatness (“Americans Unite,” May 1, 2021). I don’t mind Anton circling the wagons to defend his friends. That is admirable. That said, his...
The Facts and Fiction of Election Reforms
Two of the Clinton campaign’s central promises aimed at reducing the federal budget deficit and “reinventing” government. Unfortunately, President Clinton’s recently unveiled campaign finance reform plan will do neither. The most dramatic step the President could take toward accomplishing his goals would be to resist congressmen’s desires on the topic closest to their hearts: election...
End of the Liberal Dream
Hell hath no fury like a peaceable liberal whose peaceable cause seems to be losing—especially when that cause is represented by the liberal himself, as Hillary Clinton’s tirade in the guise of a concession speech in Manchester, New Hampshire, demonstrated. Liberals and liberalism are currently under siege in Western countries. So liberals are in a...
Culture War, Whether We Like It or Not
We need to rethink how we fight the ascendant cultural left, which does not consider truth an arbiter.
The Future of the Christian Right
Like a cold front, you could feel the defeat coming; and you did not need Dan Rather or George Gallup to prepare you. You knew it in your bones as you listened to the sound bites on the evening news: Clinton saying nothing and saying it well; Dole saying nothing and saying it poorly. It...
Sleepwalking in America
For the third time in our generation, independent voters could be the balance of power in this year’s presidential election. In 1968, Alabama Gov. George G. Wallace, standardbearer of the American Independent Party, received 13 percent of the popular vote, a sum greater than the difference between Hubert H. Humphrey and the victor, Richard M....
The Sexual Left, the Welfare State, and the Divorce Revolution
“All politics is on one level sexual politics.” —George Gilder Extremists break out of the margins and take power when they fool opponents into advancing their agenda. By politicizing the family and sexuality, the left duped conservatives, and all of us, into becoming their accomplices. Since last fall’s electoral coup, the United States has been...
Christian Nationalism—A Catholic Integralist View
Natural law, not liberalism, directs Man to his proper end.
The End of Politics
Politics are over in America. Political maneuvering will go on, of course, but the old civics-class view of American political life was based on a set of assumptions that are no longer operative. America was once far more homogenous than she is today. But the passing of the 1965 Immigration Act and the political and...
Towers of Babel
“Nations have lost their old omnipotence; the patriotic tie does not hold. Nations are getting obsolete, we go and live where we will. Steam has enabled men to choose what law they will live under. Money makes place for them.” —R.W. Emerson While Pierre Manent’s Democracy Without Nations? concerns itself principally with the erosion of...
The Fixer
This new biography of one of the great “fixers” in American political life, James F. Byrnes, creates the impression of an American Ozymandias, proclaiming by example the ephemerality of human greatness. Byrnes and his political colleagues did mold the world in which we live long after the last of them died; yet the scene of...
Wheeler’s Progress
On October 15, 1905, Burton K. Wheeler stepped off a train at the Northern Pacific depot in Butte, Montana, thinking that he had seen more of the West than Lewis and Clark but wondering if his luck had run out. After looking up every lawyer in town (Wheeler had graduated from the University of Michigan...
Attack of the Jacobins
Trent Lott—to the guillotine! The cry has gone up, the mob is implacable, and the once-powerful and seemingly unassailable Senate majority leader has gotten the message loud and clear: Confess your sins, bare your neck, and prepare to lose your head! And for what? What sin did this former muckamuck of the GOP commit that...
Non-Partisanship
“Here in North Dakota, people vote Republican for president or for local offices because they’re seen as the white party,” North Dakota State University political science professor David Danbom told me. “But they’ll vote for the Democrats for Congress and some local offices to look after their economic interests in Washington or here at home.”...
A Flawed Primer on ‘Conservative Revolutionaries’
The book Partisans is a product of contemporary political discourse—made up of cut-and-paste, second- and third-hand source-filled rants—that fails to pass for serious scholarship.
Human Rights and Self-Government
In the United States, the federal system of government is undergoing profound changes that compel students of American politics to rethink traditional ideas about national identity. Questions such as: “What does it mean to be a citizen of the United States?” and “What are the duties and privileges of U.S. citizenship?” and “In what manner...
A Political Rumble in Wyoming Reveals Divisions Within Trump’s Team
It’s hard to find anyone these days outside National Review’s deluded pages sorry to see Rep. Liz Cheney dragged across the political concrete. Besides rubbing raw the hide of a realigning right with her grating adoration for George W. Bush, Cheney embodies a conservative establishment that has conserved little more than its sinecures and pretensions. The prospect of Donald Trump...
Gabriel’s Horn
Surely, no American city has endured such a history of disaster as Charleston, set beguilingly beside the Atlantic upon her fragile spit of earth between the Ashley and Cooper rivers. Fires, floods, epidemics, blockades, sieges, bombardments, hurricanes, and earthquakes have repeatedly scarred her, but arguably the great Charleston earthquake of 1886 was the most destructive...
South Africa—Yesterday and Today
“The trouble with people is not their ignorance. It is the number of things they know that ain’t so.” —Mark Twain During 1986, the fury of the left’s outrage with human rights in Chile abated globally and was redirected against South Africa. The reasons given were the vestiges of the apartheid system and an alleged...
Race Matters
This book is either irrefutable evidence against a multicultural society or the last-ditch plea of someone who is very concerned with the problems posed by multiculturalism but: who wants to make a go of it nevertheless. It may well be both. Lani Guinier’s essays ask how far democracy must go to accommodate itself to groups...
Giulio Andreotti: A Career (Full Article
Almost two months have passed since the death of Giulio Andreotti, arguably the most powerful politician in Italy’s post-World War II history. In recent weeks I have struggled with a draft obituary of this complex man who deserves to be better known abroad, but the task proved daunting. There are too many loose ends, strange...
The Consolations of Philosophy
“An idea is a putting truth in checkmate.” —Ortega y Gasset Philosophy in the 20th century has shared the fate of other high arts whose audiences are increasingly limited to an inner circle of adepts. This is partly the fault of a culture that aims at mass production and mass communication, but a good part...
Sadly for Adlai
“Madly for Adlai,” proclaimed the campaign buttons in 1952. But Adlai Ewing Stevenson II wasn’t the kind of politician who aroused mad affections, or, for that matter, hostilities. He was a Stevenson. Passion isn’t the Stevenson thing; service is—service conducted with objectivity and a certain fidelity to the public weal. Jean Baker, professor of history...
Partial Prognoses
Paul Fussell has written an interesting entertainment that examines the American class structure. It is basically descriptive and impressionistic and espouses no cause. It is filled with keen insights and amusing anecdotes and is consequently a relaxing, nontaxing book. In essence, it meshes with a vast Western literature—both scholarly and pedestrian—that enthrones class as the...
Against the Pessimists
America in Black and White is an ambitious project, at once a massively detailed review of race relations this century and a provocative manifesto for the future. As such, it demands comparison with Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944), which did so much to place racial injustice at the center of American politics for decades...
Agrarianism From Hesiod to Bradford
What does it mean to be an “agrarian”? In reading Southern literary journals, I get the impression that the “agrarians” were an isolated group of writers who, nostalgic for the preindustrial South, celebrated in prose and verse the bygone beauties of rustic life. In this sense, they were like the early Romantics, and their movement,...
Liberalism in the Headlights
The murder of five white police officers in Dallas, immediately following the fatal shootings of a black man in Louisiana and another in Minnesota, gave President Obama the opportunity to engage in still another of the flights of soaring clichés and wafting banalities for which his admirers celebrate him; Hillary Clinton the chance to demonstrate...
The Anti-Prometheans
Barack Obama’s words “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” have come to stand as the motto of his presidency. (Their author was actually the black Caribbean bisexual poetess June Jordan.) Similarly, “This is the one we’ve been waiting for” is a succinct representation of the issue of climatic change the international left has...
Dictatorship of the Deranged
A long time ago, I happened upon a cartoon in some publication or other. A single frame—in the vein of Gary Larson—depicted thousands of sheep rushing headlong off a cliff. In the middle of this great multitude, one particular sheep moved in the opposite direction. “Excuse me…excuse me…excuse me,” it bleated. That scene came to...
Four More Years
“Where law ends, tyranny begins.” —William Pitt On the eve of the inauguration of the second Clinton administration, reading biographies of the First Couple is like reading Airport while waiting to board a transcontinental flight. A morbid interest in gruesome facts and events is further titillated by the anticipation of horrors...
Christian Nationalism Is a Political Fantasy
Without unity among Christians, there can be no Christian state.
Election Day: A Means of State Control
Interpreting elections is a national spectator sport, offering as many “meanings” as there arc board-certified spin doctors. Nevertheless, all of these disparate revelations, insights, and brilliant interpretations share a common, unthinking vision: elections, despite their divisive, contentious character, exist to facilitate citizen power over government. Whether ineptly or adeptly, honestly or dishonestly, government is supposed...
George W. Bush: Wilsonian Liberal
If constitutional liberties are as old as the republic itself (older if you include the tradition of English common law), violations of those liberties are just as old. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson threw their political opponents in jail, Andrew Jackson pursued a policy of genocide against this continent’s original inhabitants, and Abraham Lincoln unleashed...
The Tea Party: A Mixed Bag
In January, when Republican Scott Brown was elected to fill the remainder of the late senator Edward M. Kennedy’s term, the activists who helped make it possible traced their political lineage back to the Boston Tea Party. Jubilant supporters dubbed it the “Scott heard round the world.” This Tea Party wanted to dump into the...
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,...
Genes vs. Culture
In the current American definition of democracy, all adult citizens should have the right to vote and otherwise participate in politics. Earlier exclusions of women or nonwhites have been disallowed. Similar rules are supposed to apply to preferred positions in civil society. In a meritocracy, it has been believed until recently, individual capability should count...
How the Market Stamps Out Evil
In the year before the 1994 election, Ralph Reed announced that the Christian Coalition would broaden its focus. It would go beyond traditional social issues like abortion and school prayer and include economics. He made the case that the security of the American family, a central concern of any Christian political organization, is affected by...
Of Candidates and Clowns
The Ides of March Produced by Smoke House Directed by George Clooney Written by Grant Heslov, George Clooney, and Beau Willimon from Willimon’s play, Farragut North Distributed by Columbia Pictures George Clooney’s film The Ides of March is a behind-the-scenes look at a presidential primary race in contemporary Ohio. The behavior of the candidates...
Can’t Keep A Great Man Down
John Ganz focuses on American cultural and political wars during the 1990s, when two maverick candidates, Patrick J. Buchanan and H. Ross Perot, rocked the world of staid mainstream conservatism.
A Valediction for Enoch Powell
Enoch Powell is dead, and it is as if a hill has suddenly vanished from the horizon. British life, conservative life, political philosophy, economic philosophy, classicism, Biblical studies, and learning generally are all the poorer for the death of this English original. Powell was a man of many contradictions—classicist and romantic, patriot and imperialist, politician...
The Reign of Grantham
“The results of political changes are hardly ever those which their friends hope or their foes fear.” —T.H. Huxley Media commentators covering David Cameron’s incumbency as Tory leader have remarked—often gleefully—on how unpopular Cameron’s Labour-like policies are with the “traditional right.” By this, they mean the Thatcherite rump of the party (probably still the numerical...
Democracy and the Art of Handloading
Swish . . . creak—chunk. Swish . . . creak—chunk. At the top of the press stroke the lubricated brass shell rises into the top of the press frame where it is engaged by the sizing die, screwed down and secured by the locking nut. On the downstroke it catches momentarily in the die before...