“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...
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In Spies Battle, Trump Holds the High Ground
In backing John Brennan’s right to keep his top-secret security clearance, despite his having charged the president with treason, the U.S. intel community has chosen to fight on indefensible terrain. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper seemed to recognize that Sunday when he conceded that ex-CIA Director Brennan had the subtlety of “a freight...
Made for Love
Vanity plates, I once heard—vehicle registration numbers, in other words, that are believed to hold meanings or to pose riddles, in the pedestrian minds of idle onlookers and fellow motorists stuck in traffic—often cost many times more than the cars to which they are attached. This is good news of sorts. For, however pitiful it...
Herman Cain and Obama’s 1000 Days
My latest on the Daily Mail takes up the rise and what I hope will be the fall of Herman Cain. I also have an even newer piece on Obama’s First 1000 Days. Please do not respond here, since what is really needed is a show of interest at the Daily Mail. I would rather be doing these pieces...
A New Deal—April 2009
PERSPECTIVE Dead Romans and Live Americans by Thomas Fleming VIEWS
The Latest Dope From Washington
“Tarry not, I pray you, Madam,” Walter Raleigh is supposed to have cautioned Queen Elizabeth, “for the wings of time are tipped with the feathers of death.” As Harold Macmillan observed a few years ago: “Civil servants don’t write memos like that anymore.” Some have trouble just speaking the language. Nicholas Burns, the State Department...
Syria: Idiocy Meets Mendacity
To be charitable to President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry et al, their case for starting war against Syria now is no worse than Bill Clinton’s and Madeleine Albright’s excuse for attacking Serbia in 1999 or George W. Bush’s and Colin Powell’s justification for attacking Iraq in 2003. It is slightly better than...
Remembering T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot was a traditionalist, but he was also an aesthete, one who defended the independence of art and lauded the highly individualistic work of various modern poets. The caricatures never do him justice.
Who’s Number One?
I was puzzled by Chilton Williamson, Jr.’s “Who Cares Who’s Number One?” (What’s Wrong with the World, May). No reasonable person can disagree with his contempt for our country’s endemic America Number One philosophy, especially when we routinely fall so short. But given the decadent reality of life in most of Europe these days, it’s...
Japan’s Wars of Aggression
“Japan didn’t fight wars of aggression. Only China now says so,” declared Yuko Tojo, the granddaughter of Japan’s wartime prime minister, Gen. Hideki Tojo, in an interview with the Japan Times in late June. Yuko was half right. Although Japan fought several wars of aggression, only China seems to raise the issue today. America dropped...
To Catch a Terrorist
The watershed U.S. Supreme Court decisions Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, we are told, “empowered women” to control their lives. In reality, they empowered the Police State and set the U.S. Imperium on a trajectory where it not only could deny the personhood of the unborn but could legally classify whole groups of...
The Slippery Slope of Safety
Keeping up with technology is tricky. Sometimes, you find information in a press release; other times, you ascertain the full measure of what is going on through obscure legal and scientific papers, last-minute legislative “riders,” and seemingly inconsequential blurbs in the foreign press. Even as my piece on implantable identification tags was going to press...
They All Laughed
Farewell (L’affaire Farewell) Produced by Christophe Rossignon and Pathe Films Directed by Christian Carion Screenplay by Christian Carion and Eric Raynaud Distributed by Neoclassics Films After 20 years, we finally have a film that dramatizes how Ronald Reagan won the Cold War. Needless to say, it’s not an American production. In the land of...
What Civilization Remains
We once had a book about Eastern Europe at home, in between the encyclopedias and Robinson Crusoe. I do not remember its title nor the author’s name, but it contained highly atmospheric black and white photographs of Rumanian scenes. There were baroque chateaux, sturgeons, eagles, wolves, bears, wild boar, bends in the Danube, flowered meads...
Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Go Back in the Water
Our sixth-grade daughter’s class made the “Hiroshima lanterns” late in May when the North Dakota Peace Coalition came to her parochial school. The kids painted the paper sides of the 8″ x 8″ boats with rainbows and flowers and the word “peace,” and made plans to light the candles and set the boats afloat on...
If My Daddy Could See Me Now
September 11, 2001, we are often told, “changed everything.” In Washington, D.C., and Baghdad, Iraq, that may have been true. President George W. Bush and a handful of his advisors, who had been itching for a fight with Iraq since before the inauguration, now saw their opening. It would take another year and a half...
Black Lives Matter’s Billions
The flames that swept through our cities in 2020 may have subsided, but the individuals and the institutions that fanned them haven’t gone away.
The Nationalist Imperative
“Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.” —Albert Einstein When James Bowie took his considerable reputation as a brawler and duelist, along with the famous knife his brother Resin had fashioned for him, to Mexico, married the daughter of the vice-governor of the province of Texas, and became a respected citizen...
John O’Hara and American Conservatism
In 1941, Edmund Wilson published a small book of pieces about several contemporary writers, tied together under the tide, The Boys in the Back Room. It was a typical Wilsonian production—insightful, wrongheaded, and regal—synthesizing as “Hollywood writers” James M. Cain, William Saroyan, John Steinbeck, and others now forgotten, along with John O’Hara. That this linkage...
The Engineered Empathy Gene
“If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith.” —Flannery O’Connor Patricia Snow cites the sentence above, taken from O’Connor’s introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann, in a brilliant essay that appeared recently in First Things (“Empathy...
Preparing for Battle
Your Excellency: May is once again upon us, bringing that mad dash in which you sprint from parish to parish, rubbing oily crosses on the smooth foreheads of gawky teens, confirmandi mentally and spiritually armed to do battle with the dragons facing God’s holy Church. My youngest son, who is even now preparing to receive...
The Case Against Divorce
In the opening pages of The Future of Christian Marriage, Mark Regnerus notes a troubling truth well known to anyone who has set foot in an institution of higher education in the last several decades. “To talk seriously about marriage today in the scholarly sphere is to speak a foreign language: you tempt annoyance, confusion,...
Pork Politics
“There is no distinctly native American criminal class, except Congress.” —Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar Mark Twain, responsible for the foregoing, was being funny. His remark, however, is steadily becoming a little more true and a little less funny. The U.S. Congress, through indirection and guile rather than by overt vote, has managed to give itself a...
Trading Liberty for Security
Attacks on constitutional liberties, including the erosion of due-process protections for the rights to life, liberty, and property, tend to soar in wartime. The most egregious assaults have occurred during the Civil War, the two world wars, and, most recently, in the so-called War on Terror. Courageous individuals spoke out against the abuses during and...
Tocqueville’s Ancien Régime Book III
In the third book of his Ancien Régime, Alexis de Tocqueville takes up the intellectual origins of the French Revolution. AT notes the at first sight strange phenomenon, that in absolutist France intellectuals were free to challenge the most fundamental political, social, and religious institutions and beliefs. While each
The “Punishment” of Women
Questions concerning the relationship between morality and law were reignited when, during the Republican primary campaign, Donald Trump commented on the matter of abortion and (implicitly) women’s rights. When pressed by a journalist, Trump stated that, yes, women should be “punished” if their behavior is illegal or contrary to prevailing community standards. Though abortion is...
A Tale of Two Revolutions
A hundred years ago, in the early hours of November 7, 1917, the Bolsheviks grabbed power in Petrograd. Within weeks they took advantage of Russia’s collapsing political and social structure to impose control over the country’s heartland. The result of the coup was a tragedy of world-historical proportions. A vibrant, flourishing culture (see “Remembering the...
Blazing Brooks
Fifty years ago, a cry went out for a man with laughs. Mel Brooks answered the call.
The Most Dangerous Amendment
One evening a few years back, I was channel-surfing when I ran across a panel discussion of efforts to restrict children’s access to smut and violence on TV. One of the panelists was former New York mayor Ed Koch; another was the president of one of the major TV networks. The latter was quite agitated...
Dia de los Muertos
Fall had always been Héctor Villa’s least-favorite season. This year, as the days shortened and his cousin’s stayover in his home lengthened inexorably, he felt his substance as a householder drain away in exact proportion to the diminishing quantity of the pale indirect light. Four days after the shortest day of the year comes Christmas;...
Faith and Empathy
“Well, I do believe some things, of course . . . and therefore, of course, I don’t believe other things.” —G.K. Chesterton, The Incredulity of Father Brown The progressive turning away from belief in God that characterized Western intellectuals during the 19th century continues, alas, in the 20th. This intellectual shift has often been attributed...
The World Turned Upside Down
A truly startling, topsy-turvy race is being run for governor of Illinois. U.S. Representative Glenn Poshard, the Democrat, is embracing more conservative positions on culture and social policy; Illinois Secretary of State George Ryan, the Republican, is running away with much of the Democratic base, including gay-rights supporters. On trade, Poshard has supported a Buchananite...
Our Next Mideast War—Syria
Jeb Bush has spent the week debating with himself over whether he would have started the war his brother launched on Iraq. When he figures it out, hopefully, our would-be president will focus in on the campaign to drag us into yet another Mideast war— this time to bring down Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria....
The Greatest Error of the Homeschool
There is little question or doubt in the public mind about the value of the homeschool. Homeschooled kids better behaved than children from public schools. homeschooled youngsters seldom become involved in gangs, seldom use drugs to excess, and there are absolutely no reports of a homeschooled teenager committing suicide (contrasted with the several thousand public schooled...
Advice to a Postulant-Professor
If I could tell every first-year graduate student in America one thing, it is this: The campus is not a calling, it is just another career. If university teaching serves your purposes, come and join us. If not, follow your star in a different firmament. In graduate school, learn in order to sell your knowledge...
Ron Paul’s Hour of Power
The decades-long campaign of Ron Paul to have the Government Accountability Office do a full audit of the Federal Reserve now has 313 sponsors in the House. Sometimes perseverance does pay off. If not derailed by the establishment, the audit may happen. Yet, many columnists and commentators are aghast. An auditors' probe, they ...
Border Math: A Study in Priorities
A rare crack in the fortified wall of the Bush administration’s diplomatic obstinacy seemed to appear as U.S. diplomats sat down in March with their Iranian and Syrian counterparts to discuss stability in Iraq. Foreign-policy realists of both parties hailed the move as a potential breakthrough: Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE) offered a characteristically self-righteous lecture, while...
Iranian Crisis Escalates
Speaking to reporters during a visit to Turkey on January 19, Iran’s foreign minister Ali Akbar Salehi warned his country’s Arab neighbors against aligning themselves too closely with the United States in the ongoing crisis over Tehran’s nuclear program. Saudi Arabia was particularly vocal in its condemnation of Iran’s warning last month that it might close...
No Place for Humanity: Our Free-Chosen Dystopia
By the time of Donald Trump’s inauguration, George Orwell was at the top of Amazon.com’s best-seller list. Readers had developed a sudden passion for antitotalitarian literature, it seemed—not only for Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four but for Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism as well. And with the surge of interest in Orwell came a sales revival for...
On Franklin Pierce
My esteemed friend Chilton Williamson, as is his wont, makes the most concisely brilliant characterization of the Clintons that has been set down on paper (“Four More Years,” February 1997). However, even though I know the reference was ironic, I must take issue with his mentioning the honorable President Franklin Pierce even in the same...
Writing in the Tolstoy Tradition
“I always wanted to be a writer I can remember the first book I ever wrote when I was very little. I wrote the title and the index, but I didn’t actually get ’round to the contents.” Nikolai Tolstoy laughs and leans back, trying to fit his extremely long legs under my dining room table....
Free Trade and the Sacrificialists
Mainstream economics “experts” constantly attempt to lull the fears of anybody worried at seeing our manufacturing sector relocated abroad and our factories turned into ghost towns. They invoke Adam Smith’s arguments against mercantilism, arguing that it is a matter of free trade, that free trade always is the best policy, and insist that “protectionism” is...
A Hothouse of Goofiness: The American Book Industry
The renowned American jazzman Charlie Parker, introduced to Jean-Paul Sartre in a Paris club during the 1949 jazz festival, reportedly said, “I’m very glad to have met you, Mr. Sartre. I like your playing very much.” According to writer Boris Vian, who also played trumpet and often served as master of ceremonies at the club,...
Rock Music Lives On
Camille Paglia, current official Court Enemy of America’s East Coast intellectual mafia, recently went on record in the New York Times encouraging federal support of the allegedly endangered American art form of rock music. She is correct in praising rock as one of American folk art’s grand contributions to world culture. Rock is definitively American,...
The Realms of Gold
In Vienna, during the decade before the Great War, an astounding concentration of creative genius coincided with the final stages of political collapse. The work of Hofmannsthal, Musil, Broch, Schnitzler, Kraus, Werfel, and Zweig in literature; Mahler, Wolf, and Schönberg in music; Krafft-Ebing and Freud in psychology; Wittgenstein and Buber in philosophy; Schiele and Kokoschka...
The Triumph of the Atomic Bomb
Overwhelming force is war’s only mercy Alan J. Levine must be praised for his courage in discussing the United States’ atomic bombings of Japan without the tears, whining, and pleas for international forgiveness that are now requisite. The “confusion” discussed by the author was, of course, present in 1945, but it is now a largely artificial,...
Who Pays the “Tort Tax”?
The United States, of all Western legal systems, is probably the harshest on manufacturers, at least insofar as they can be held liable for millions or even billions of dollars in damages for unanticipated defects in their products. Until about the middle of the 20th century, liability standards in this country were not significantly different...
Aristotelian Worms in the Leviathan
Is there such a thing as the proper size of a political order? Westerners have inherited three visions of political size and scale: the Aristotelian polis; the Christian commonwealth; and the Hobbesian modern state. For Aristotle, the point of political order is the cultivation of human excellence. Since virtue cannot be learned except through apprenticeship...
Diversity Bites Back
After September 11, the word blowback was frequently heard. It is a CIA term describing operations that come back to haunt the agency (e.g., Afghanistan). Unlimited immigration has its own form of blowback: people like Chai Vang, who, on the afternoon of November 21, 2004, shot eight deer hunters in the northwoods of the Indianhead...
Never See His Kind Again
My father, Sefton Sandford, died last November 11, which somehow appropriately was Veterans Day. He was 87. Any child’s judgment is apt to be subjective on these occasions, but I remain stubbornly of the opinion that he was a great man, and certainly one who answered Wordsworth’s question, “Who is the happy warrior? Who is...