“Render to all what is due them,” writes Saint Paul, “Tax to whom tax is due, custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor” (Romans 13:7, NASB). When a zealous Christian offered to help Mark Twain understand the difficult things in the Bible, Twain said something like this: “It is not...
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I Hate
A book faces me across the room from a bookcase in my office. It has a blood-red and black cover. The author’s name is printed in black down the upper part of the spine and the title in white below that. The title is Io Uccido—“I Kill” in Italian. I’ve meant for some time to...
Friends All Over the World
In this final book of his splendid career, Christopher Lasch seeks to answer two questions, one that is increasingly heard in political debate, the other still too subversive for consideration in polite society. The first is “What’s wrong with America?”—an issue not too far removed from the “Condition of England” so lengthily debated by Disraeli...
Spain Embraces Change: Canceling the Past
For the last four years, change has been in the air in Spain, following the election of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party. And thanks to his reelection in March of this year, we can look forward to more of the same. There have been abrupt changes to...
Popular Front U.
How well I remember, 40 years ago, prowling in the stacks of a college library and reading the books, observing museum pieces in the halls of that library, and attending concerts in the auditorium next door. Glenn Gould showed up to play the Goldberg Variations, Jerome Hines to sing, and Wolfgang Schneiderhan to play Vivaldi...
Remembering Shinzo Abe
Shinzo Abe was a strong and unifying leader of Japan, restoring a sense of national identity and tradition.
The Dialectic of Suicide
“A nation never falls but by suicide.” —R.W. Emerson The ambush was prepared and actually triggered several months before Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We? appeared in print. When Mr. Huntington, the author of The Clash of Civilizations and a leading political scientist at Harvard, published last winter an excerpt from his new book dealing with...
The Cosmopolitan Temptation
The two books reviewed here provide a contrast both in style and in substance. Whereas Thomas Molnar treats Utopians and historical optimists with exuberant contempt, Michael Ignatieff bewails the fact that nations and nationalism have not yet disappeared. Molnar is proud of his relentless realism, in which politics are related to man’s fallen state; Ignatieff,...
No Piety, No Justice
“Human rights are not isolated, private, and ‘at war’ with each other,” explained Sue Ellen Browder, former journalist for Cosmopolitan and author of Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement. “Human rights are indivisible.” The occasion for Browder’s reflection was the 43rd anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, a date...
Meloni Contra Mundum
The election of Italy’s new right-wing nationalist prime minister, Giorgina Meloni, is a rebuke to the woke liberal democratic system and its political-theological nerve center in Washington, D.C.
Enemies Foreign and Domestic
A cynic once observed that in times of peace nations make war on themselves. Nowhere is this phenomenon more manifest than in the United States military, where the onslaught of political correctness has resulted in the lowest morale in memory. As American Armed Forces recently geared up for another engagement with Iraq, a troubling consensus...
Who Defines America?
A country is a land and a people. A people, in turn, are constituted by interlocking networks of common ways, memories, and understandings, together with symbols that serve as rallying points, all of which enable them to carry on life together and look forward to a common future. So who are the American people? The...
The Call of Blood
We Americans pride ourselves on being a nation of rootless individuals, cut off from the history that chained Old Europe to a cycle of wars and revolutions and bound to one another not by ties of blood and soil but only by the bloodless abstraction of self-evident truths. Rooted in no one place, our corporate...
Establishing Christian America
We Americans like to think of our country as the most religious, the most Christian nation on the face of the earth. In an irritating article I wrote for the Spectator (“America: Not A Christian Country,” August 27, 2005), I demonstrated the hollowness of this claim. Whatever Americans may say they believe, they do not...
To Be Or Not to Be Western Civilization
Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization, by R.V. Young, is an invaluable defense of Shakespeare against modern anti-Western critics.
How Liberalism Is Losing
The refugee crisis in Europe and the response of the various European governments and of the European Commission, surrealistic as they seem, make sense only if one understands that the agony of contemporary Europe (like that of the United States) is the agony of liberalism, whose contradictions have suddenly caught up to it with the...
The “Free World”
The Soviet Union and the Soviet Empire have been gone for 26 years, yet American internationalists, Democrats and Republicans alike, persist in speaking of the “Free World,” quite as if Earth continues to be divided between the liberal-democratic-capitalist and the communist camps. We have been hearing a great deal more of this Free World talk...
Darwin in the Dock
The 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex should be a time of celebration for his many fans. However, my advice to Darwin’s admirers is: Don’t pop the corks yet. The last couple of years of “woke” culture have cast a pall over the legacy of the...
The View From Out Here
There is a story about the man who surprised another man in bed with his wife. “What did you do about it?” his friend demanded. “Hell,” replied the fellow in disgust, “the sonofabitch lied his way out of it!” My inclination, on this 15th day of February 1999, is to take the anecdote as a...
Gratuitous Grotesqueness in ‘Poor Things’
Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things is now celebrated in Hollywood but, in truth, it is just another feminist revenge story to which creativity comes to die.
Shepherd in a Strange Land
“I’m a pastor, not a scholar,” Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, head of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia since 2011, said when I interviewed him earlier last year for Catholic World Report about his new book. “A bishop’s job is helping people get to heaven, not to Washington.” In fact, since the death of Francis Cardinal George...
The Call of Blood
We Americans pride ourselves on being a nation of rootless individuals, cut off from the history that chained Old Europe to a cycle of wars and revolutions and bound to one another not by ties of blood and soil but only by the bloodless abstraction of self-evident truths. Rooted in no one place, our corporate...
The Lavender Baboon
“O comrade lustrous with silver face in the night.” —Walt Whitman I first heard about “brain freeze” from an amiable fellow who was vending Italian ices. He pointed out that, if the ices were not consumed carefully, the freeze would penetrate the palate into the brain. In fact, I did experience brain freeze that way. But...
Revolt Against the Rainbow RINOs
The recent clash between the Texas Republican Party and the Republican National Committee exposes the growing divide between grassroots conservatism and the establishment GOP, especially with regard to the LGBT agenda.
The New Bowdler’s
So there is a new Fowler, or rather a Burchfield. It joins the list of beloved reference works corrupted or destroyed to placate our ignorance and our political sensibilities. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable had many of its supposedly dated items excised to make room for television trivia. The Encyclopedia Britannica traded the wit...
Fateful Choices
There are few issues more emotional than abortion. The dogmatism of the respective combatants strikes fear in the hearts of lesser mortals—which means almost every politician. Three decades after Roe v. Wade, the issue of abortion is unlikely ever to be resolved politically. The major parties have largely followed the passions of their most active...
Merkel’s Flawed Legacy
Angela Merkel announced on October 29 that she would make a two-stage exit from the political scene. She is first giving up her chairmanship of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which will select a new leader at its party congress on December 7-8. She is to step down as chancellor next, but not before the...
“A Scientific Faith’s Absurd”
Science, that is, natural and physical science, is supposed to be pure. Those who do science keep their work free from any taint of political belief or social prejudice. The scientific method is itself value-free, beyond good and evil. That, at least, was the theory. In practice, however, scientists are not always so pure. They...
Knowing What We Don’t Know
Before publishing his essay “The Lonely Superpower” (Foreign Affairs, 1999), Samuel Huntington had spoken more candidly in an address to the American Enterprise Institute in May 1998. On that occasion, he had identified himself as an old-fashioned Burkean conservative. Huntington’s central thesis is that “global politics has now moved from a brief unipolar moment at...
Lone Star Rising
The development of a uniquely Texan conservatism has occurred over the last quarter century. A central figure in this transition was the late M.E. Bradford, professor of English at the University of Dallas, literary essayist in the tradition of the Vanderbilt Agrarians, and prominent critic of the political Lincoln. In 1972, Bradford rallied to the...
Rise of the Trumps
Come November, Donald Trump may go down in flames. Or he might continue to surprise and astonish us. But the Trump children, regardless of whether their father is ever again allowed in GOP polite company, are another matter. The display of warm affection for their father during the Republican National Convention was not merely for...
Rome As You Find It
For Englishmen, the Roman Forum was nearly as much a part of their political heritage as the Tower of London or Westminster Abbey. Since Colonial America was a part of British culture, educated American colonists shared in the British reverence for antiquity. Eighteenth-century Englishmen (and those Americans who could manage it) traveled to Italy—Rome in...
The Incredible Shrinking Woman
Movies, according to conventional wisdom, reflect society. And so they do. Politically, movies often reflect the perspective of Hollywood artistes who think they possess a gift for reflecting society. Commercially, movies reflect not only audience taste but what some director or studio executive assumes is audience taste; they reflect not only what we’re willing to...
Marx, Albright, Blair & Gates
When the jacket blurb tells you that the book before you “basically combines a kojevian notion of global market as post-history (in this sense akin to Fukuyama’s eschatology) with a Foucauldian and Deleuzian notion of bio-politics (in this sense crossing the road of a Sloterdijk who also poses the question of a coming techniques of...
Gary, Martin, and John
I started this letter back when David Garrow’s biography of Martin Luther King appeared, with its revelations about Dr. King’s sexual habits, just in time for Christmas 1986. I put it aside because I wasn’t happy with it. In the summer of 1987, the Hart and Bakker scandals made me dust it off and try...
No Capitulation: A Call to Southern Conservatives
The following speech critical of the conservative establishment is one that I did not give at The Charleston Meeting, in Charleston, S.C., whither I was invited by its organizer Gene d’Agostino, as a speaker for the evening of April 14. After espying copies of my book on antifascism for sale on a table in the...
Sir Roger Scruton: Britain’s Culture Warrior
I first heard Roger Scruton speak at the 1993 regional Philadelphia Society meeting in Dearborn, Michigan, organized to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. Scruton spoke on the topic of “The Conservative Mind Abroad” in a soft but authoritative voice that gently drew and kept the listener’s attention. However, his professorial...
Unlovable Losers: The Left in Perspective
Not long after last fall’s presidential election, an entire wall in New York City’s Union Square subway station was plastered with hundreds of protestors’ Post-it notes, hailed by Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration as “subway therapy” for the losing side, but more akin to a billboard for the demented, all berserk with rage, contrived hysteria,...
Citizen Sunflower and America’s Future
Cancer imposes innumerable indignities on its victims. In addition to possible death, the disease, its complications, and its treatment also force patients through the most inhumane gauntlet of our health-care system. When you’re not giving a blood sample, you’re likely hooked up to an IV full of toxins or being zapped with near-lethal doses of...
Revolt of the Fatherless
The crash of Western civilization can be traced to the state’s surgical removal of the father’s authority and to the feminized blind rebellion that has followed.
We’re All Racists Now
“For Democrats, it’s the gift that keeps giving: If all else fails, just call Republicans racists . . . ” —Neil Cavuto, FOX News Well, everything else is indeed failing, but the racism racket is working so well that it won’t be going away any time soon. Al Sharpton sees “white supremacism” everywhere among Obama’s...
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...
Solid Strategy, Limited Vision
Metternich: Strategist and Visionary by Wolfram Siemann; Translated by Daniel Steuer; Belknap Press, Harvard University; 928 pp., $39.95 All states need a strategy, however rudimentary, in order to survive. Great powers need much more: a viable grand strategy for war and peace is called for to endure in the never-ending struggle for power, land, and resources. As A.J.P. Taylor...
Acting Up
Faithful Roman Catholics are routinely criticized (this book is no exception) for their unwillingness to condone the use of contraception. Although it is commonly believed that opposition to contraception is unique to Catholic doctrine, it was only recently that Protestants gave up the same fight. As recently as the 40’s and 50’s, the Anglican C.S....
Looking Forward as the West Declines
Germany’s defeat in World War II was accelerated by Hitler’s unwillingness to accept reports at odds with his increasingly fantastical view of reality. His self-deceptions were believed with such firmness that, by mid-1944, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel concluded that the Führer was living in a Wolkenkuckucksheim (“cloud cuckoo land”). The same diagnosis applies to the establishment Right, both in...
Children of the Revolution
We are all children of the Revolution. Wherever we look, in the office or at church, whatever professions we examine or traditions we cherish, we are hard pressed to discover a single significant aspect of human experience that has not been transformed by a perpetual revolution that has inverted all the ancient truths and turned...
Hungary’s Stand Against the European Union
Western elites recently heaped scorn on the Hungarian government for passing child-protection legislation. The Land of the Magyars outlawed the portrayal of homosexuality and “sex reassignment” surgeries in school education material and television programs aimed at minors. Hungarians view the law as protecting children from radical ideologies about sex and gender, while European Commission President...
The Modern Left Is Not Marxist, It’s Worse
Is the current left Marxist? In a provocative commentary, Bill Lind explores this genealogical question, and, unless I’m mistaken, the left and much of its media opposition would second his conclusions. Since Antifa describes itself as Marxist, when it’s not calling itself anarchist, and since leading figures of the Democratic Party, like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria...
Myths, Visions, Passions
Martin Seymour-Smith: Robert Graves: His Life and Work; Holt, Rinehart & Winston; New York. Douglas Archibald: Yeats; Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY. Although the era of “High Modernism” is well in the past, the pantheon of modern literature still seems to many a palace of confusions. The paradoxes and contradictions, the conflicting impulses that informed...
Leave the Kids Alone
The recent Supreme Court decision striking down a Silent Prayer Law in Alabama came as a shock to many people. What harm could be done by a moment of silence that the students were free to dedicate—or not dedicate—to a Supreme Being? Religion, it now seems, is to be treated like the daughter who disgraces...