The Eternal City is home to many eternal things—or, rather, their representatives, among them St. Peter’s, the Castel Sant’Angelo, the Capitoline Hill, and the Forum. Nevertheless, on recent travels to Rome, my wife’s and my first visit has been to none of these things, but, instead, to our good friends Asha and Bellamy, who reside...
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Power, Legitimacy, and the 14th Amendment
The justification for the vast, intrusive, and coercive powers employed by the government of the United States against its citizens—from affirmative action to hate-crimes legislation, from multilingualism to multiculturalism, from Waco to Ruby Ridge—is the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution adopted in 1868, or, more specifically, the authority conferred upon Washington, explicitly or implicitly,...
Multiple Pincers Against Trump
In his latest interview for Serbia Today, the country’s most poplar news and current affairs site, Srdja Trifkovic outlines the likely grand strategy of President Donald Trump’s enemies to remove him from office. [Excerpts, translated from Serbian.] The “deep state,” which is solidly against Trump, includes all key editorial boards of the leading daily newspapers...
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...
Between Gibraltar and a Hard Place
The crisis in British politics deepens. Everything changed Sunday, when the European Union, without further debate, approved the Withdrawal Agreement that is Theresa May’s work. That Agreement is now set in stone, with no further changes possible for the EU/UK. And the dynamics of politics are revolutionized. The Withdrawal Agreement has been greeted with dismay...
A New Right Arises in Poland
The year 2019 was an eventful one in Polish politics. Out of a boring and meaningless dispute between two wings of Polish liberalism, there arose a new political force determined to shake up Poland’s political culture. Eleven MPs from the new Confederation Party appeared in the Polish Parliament, the Sejm, after last October’s parliamentary elections....
The Way We Are Now (with apologies to Anthony Trollope)
Americans are more upset by the killing of a wild beast in Africa than they are by chopping up babies and selling their parts. Americans are more interested in the divorce of Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy than they are in the various wars their government is engaged in. (Killing innocent people and planting...
Turning Away
By the end of last summer, it had become transparently obvious, even to the graying stallions of the “conservative movement,” that organized conservatism in the United States since the 1950’s has been a colossal failure. The failure has been clear enough to most percipient Americans for perhaps a decade or more (an essay I published...
Trump or Ryan: Who Speaks for the GOP?
“No modern precedent exists for the revival of a party so badly defeated, so intensely discredited, and so essentially split as the Republican Party is today.” Taken from The Party That Lost Its Head by Bruce Chapman and George Gilder, this excerpt, about Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964, led Thursday’s column by E.J. Dionne of...
“October Surprise”
The Bush administration could be cooking up an “October surprise”—an attack on Iran—to boost the lagging fortunes of the President and the Republican Party, according to a recent editorial by Patrick J. Buchanan. With midterm elections coming in November, the Bush White House has been cranking up the anti-Iran rhetoric, presenting Tehran’s nuclear program as...
Getting Better By Going Back
The next administration needs to get back to basics. We need to restore law and order, the colorblind meritocracy, and quality education.
Chronicles of Culture
“Culture does not exist autonomously,” wrote Robert Nisbet in The Quest for Community; “it is set always in the context of social relationships.” The implications of Nisbet’s statement should be obvious, but in the age of “social” media, when we speak of “long-distance relationships” with “friends” we have never met, the obvious too often gets...
Under Western Eyes
“When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking, or thinking I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.” —John Adams...
See the USA in Your Chevrolet in 1964
Pop pulled the sky-blue 1963 Chevy Impala out of the driveway in Wayne, Michigan. With Mom and three kids along for what our family would call our 9,000-mile trip, he jogged a block to Michigan Avenue, which, as US 12, always beckoned West to Chicago and, beyond that, to California. The kids: Johnny, nine; Caroline,...
The Radicalization of the Bourgeois Neighbor
Though I have spent my life in a relatively conservative area of Northern California, the specific neighborhood in which I presently reside seems to be greater than fifty percent pro-Biden, judging by the lawn signs. Several of these signs have accompanying rainbow flags, Black Lives Matter merchandise, and other announcements of commitment to the cultural...
Dreams of Gold
If California were to secede from the United States and establish itself, as its first Anglo settlers once intended, as an independent republic, it would instantly emerge as one of the world’s richest nations. As it is, one in every ten Americans now resides in the so-called Golden State. Its economy affects not only those...
Open Roads to Nowhere
SLOW TRAFFIC RIGHT LANE. It is a simple concept if you are literate and socially conscious. Consideration for others, however—the idea that you are not alone in the world and that it does not belong exclusively to you—is not an inborn value, but one taught by family and society. The realization that, while we may...
Happy Warriors
For decades, conservative commentators and writers have told anyone who would listen that America is going to hell in a handbag. (An aside: Why do people always go to hell in a handbag? If I must go to hell, I’d prefer a limousine with a fully stocked bar; some beloved books; a picnic basket overflowing...
Under the Ruble or An Idiot Abroad
It was eight o’clock Moscow time when the overcrowded British Airways Jet landed at Sheremetevo Airport. Liberated from our Iron Maiden seats—BA seems to have squeezed in an additional seat per row—we made our way into the arrival hall, happily anticipating if not a good Russian dinner, then at least something to eat. The barely...
Diagnosing the Right as Pathological
While President Joe Biden was supposed to turn down the temperature and restore normalcy to our political life, rhetoric from those in power increasingly echoes with dark references to “homegrown terrorists” and “extremists” emerging from a process of radicalization. For months after the inauguration, the ruling class maintained Washington, D.C. as a fortress city, complete...
Mr. Wilson’s Wars
“National aspirations must be respected; peoples may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent. ‘Self-determination’ is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of action, which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril.” Woodrow Wilson’s words, recorded in the New York Times on February 12,1918, defined the 20th century and...
Easy to Vote, Easy to Cheat
Peruse left-wing media reports and Twitter trends and one will discover that claims that “Trump won” are labeled as misinformation. Polling numbers, however, show that many Americans hold exactly the opposite view, and think that Biden’s claim to the presidency is questionable. Underlying such contention is the thorny question of who is and who...
Twenty Years and Counting
I have lived now in the West 20 years, two years past the age of liability for military service (if there were a Western States of America, and if they had a draft) and one year short of my political majority and the suffrage. Although you can have spent half a century living in a...
Lincoln’s Other War of Aggression
Lincoln’s war against Southern independence is just one component of the American Civil War. Like a Matryoshka doll, the Civil War opens up to reveal a set of nested wars, one inside another. There is Lincoln’s war against international law; his war against the Congress; his war against the judiciary; his war against the Bill...
A Great Tradition Renewed
Literary feuds, like ideas, have consequences. After Sir Walter Scott read a disparaging review of his Marmion in the Edinburgh Review, the bard of the Borders decided that what British life needed above all was a journal that would give his works more respectful treatment and would provide a powerful antidote to the Whiggish and...
Christians Against Terrorism
Tony Blair is mad—really mad. Nasty people keep blowing up things in his London, and he is going to do something about it. At a press conference in late July, he told the world that he wants to make it illegal for British subjects to leave Britain for advanced terrorist training in Pakistan. The hidden...
The Financial Black Swan is Already Here
The Biden administration brags that it has figured out a way to get the benefits of declining inflation while continuing to grow the economy, but in reality they are merely kicking the can down the road.
Erdogan’s Enabling Act
Last Saturday, during lunch with Scott Richert and Aaron Wolf at Rockford’s Prairie Street Brewhouse, I expressed suspicion that the coup in Turkey—just over 24 hours old at that time, and in the final stages of collapse—was Erdogan’s Reichstag fire: a stage-managed event, carried out by clueless stooges, meant to enhance the power of the...
Books In Brief
The Case for Trump, by Victor Davis Hanson (New York: Basic Books; 400 pp., $23.99). It is expected of an author that he say something new and big about someone or something new and big, even should it have been so for two years already. President Trump remains something new and big, though his detractors...
Why Can’t Biden Stop This Invasion?
Article IV of the Constitution addresses the obligations of the federal government to the state governments that were being asked to surrender aspects of their sovereignty to form our new Union. “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government,” reads Article IV, “and shall protect each of...
Transhumanism and the Cure for Suffering
Are there evolutionary purposes to human suffering? And, if so, what might these tell us about how to alleviate it through artificial intelligence and whether we should?
Death Wish of the West—May 2011
beyond the revolution The Unentitled by Thomas Fleming views Suicide by (Legal) Immigration by Roger D. McGrath The Death Wish of the West by Claude Polin news DOMA’s Fifth Column by William J. Watkins, Jr. reviews A Southern Foison by Ray Olson Chronicles of the South edited by Clyde N. Wilson Vol. 1: Garden of the Beaux Arts Vol. 2: In Justice to so Fine a ...