The red wave appears to be coming back. It is probable that toss-up races will break Republican. Republicans consistently lead Democrats on the generic congressional ballot.
4611 search results for: The Old Right
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Mayhem and Civility
Joker Directed and written by Todd Phillips • Produced by Creative Wealth Media Finance and DC Entertainment • Distributed by Warner Brothers Downton Abbey Directed by Michael Engler • Screenplay by Julian Fellowes • Produced and distributed by Focus Features The Conversation Directed and written by Francis Ford Coppola • Produced by The Coppola Company...
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Trumpsteria: Dislike!
Chaos dominates the political scene today thanks to the success of the Trump campaign and the Trumpsteria that has accompanied it. This chaos is the subject of myriad essays, commentaries, and—most significantly—power grabs both brand new and repackaged. It was, in many senses, inevitable. Donald Trump is attracting large crowds, and his poll numbers are...
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Presence, Real and Ersatz
The Talented Mr. Ripley Produced by Paramount Pictures and Miramax Films Directed by Anthony Minghella Screenplay by Anthony Minghella, from the novel by Patricia Highsmith Released by Paramount Pictures Anthony Minghella’s screen version of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley has beautiful photography, good acting, and real suspense. What it lacks is the element that...
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October 7, 1571
Today we give special thanks to Our Lady whose intercession led the armada of the Holy League to victory over the Ottoman fleet on October 7, 1571, at the mouth of what the Venetians called the Bay of Lepanto but what we today call the Gulf of Patras. My good ...
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The Communion of Saints
Every one loved St Bridget. Even the sunbeams liked to be near her. One day an April shower came on, and, as she entered her cell, she flung her wet cloak over a sunbeam shining through the window, thinking it was a wooden beam. The bright ray willingly held up her mantle hour after hour,...
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The Penitential History of Vichy France
Accepted scholarship on Vichy France has evolved as Anti-fascist sentiment penetrates historiography like never before. Penitential historiography has arrived.
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Why Does the GOP Elite Hate Its Own Base?
The scorn of the GOP elite for rank-and-file Republicans is simply unsustainable for the party.
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The Mulberry Graveyard
Spain is a country with strong regional identities. The central government recognizes four official languages: Spanish, Galician, Basque, and Catalan. The people in the “periphery” of Spain may refer to Spanish as Castilian, to distinguish it from their own language. In the Basque country, Catalonia, and Galicia, signs in the regional language are omnipresent. At...
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Free Greeks, Servile Americans
Conservatives are fond of saying that the United States is a republic, not a democracy, and in their appeals to the national conscience, they invoke the sacred language of republican tradition, citing scriptures from Aristotle and Cicero, from Edmund Burke and George Washington: the ride of law, a virtuous citizenry, and ordered liberty. Like most...
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Time for an Immigration Pause
The postwar American conservative movement had many factions, but most at least feigned to revere British statesman Edmund Burke. Those who read the movement’s books and magazines were told Burke abhorred radical change, and so should we. In practice, however, most movement conservatives proved powerless to stop the many radical changes America has seen since...
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Leveraged Buyout
“Every nation has the government it deserves.” Joseph de Maistre’s hard saying can give small comfort to Americans. Oh, it is true, we have a paper Constitution that promises a republican form of government, but all three branches of that government have for several generations conspired to evacuate the republican content from the system, leaving...
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Is the GOP Risking a New Cold War?
Before Republican senators vote down the strategic arms reduction treaty negotiated by the Obama administration, they should think long and hard about the consequences. In substance, New START has none of the historic significance of Richard Nixon’s SALT I or ABM treaty, or Jimmy Carter’s SALT II, or Ronald Reagan’s INF treaty removing all...
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Who Are the Taxers?
Never say Republicans can’t learn. After losing the presidency in 1992 on the tax issue, they now use euphemisms for their tax hikes and hide the increases with new and improved fiscal gimmickry. In this Congress, the word “reform” has come to be synonymous with a scheme to extract more money from the private sector,...
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On “Still in Saigon—in My Mind”
Regarding “Still in Saigon—in My Mind” (Chronicles, December 1985) anyone who is standing up to cheer Rambo deserves to be taken for another ride; perhaps to Central America. Stallone is a multimillionaire who avoided the draft and thinks of American Foreign Policy in comic-book terms; similar to the President, who also avoided any real military...
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U.S.A.: The Global Commons
Roper’s February polling of Americans reveals a clear consensus against high levels of immigration. Eighty-three percent favor a lower level of immigration than the current average of over a million a year, and some 70 percent support a level of immigration below 300.000 per year. This view is held by 52 percent of Hispanics, 73...
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Mormons and Modernism
“So pale grows Reason at Religion’s sight, So dies, and so dissolves in supernatural light.” —John Dryden Leonard Arrington: Brigham Young: American Moses; Alfred A. Knopf; New York. Richard L. Bushman: Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism; University of Illinois Press; Urbana, IL. Jan Shipps: Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition; University of Illinois Press; Urbana, IL. Ernest...
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What Makes a Nation?
When Fernand Braudel died in 1985, The Times of London called him “the greatest of Europe’s historians.” In spite of Braudel’s great merits, many would question this accolade. Indeed, he may be assigned a place among those contemporary historians who justify, by their oeuvre, the sociological school, and who therefore have “betrayed” the historian’s true...
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Ora Pro Nobis
Last summer, on the 10th anniversary of Elvis’ death, a reporter called to ask the usual question: What does it all mean? Ah, that took me back. To be precise, it took me back to August of 1977. We were living in England when Elvis died, and I noticed at the time that the BBC...
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The Courage to Live
“Often the test of courage is not to die but to live.” —Vittorio Alfieri, Oreste (1785) This volume is the first complete English translation of Zbigniew Herbert’s poetry—a cause for rejoicing. And, although Alissa Valles’s translations are a bit gray, as if sprinkled with fine dust, they are invariably precise and never overstated. While there...
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The New Utopians
Picture the scene: I am shoveling shavings into the team wagon, stooping over in my patched overalls and faded flannel shirt to scrape the barn floor clean, now and then climbing into the wagon to tread down the mounting heap. The young man who owns the new barn, the new tractor, the new hydraulic log...
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Tiger, Tigre: The Perils of Translation
In November 1875, in a gas-lit flat over a rain-soaked street in Tours, a law student sat together with a young Portuguese widow. They were rifling through her letters. She had been a minor actress in Bordeaux and had played at the Haymarket Theatre and elsewhere. She had had an English lover who once gave...
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A Pastime Made Politically Correct
Joe Posnanski gets out his sackcloth and ashes and mournfully chants the litany of baseball’s historic racist sins.
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Ho, Ho, Ho, and a Bottle of Fun
For the fifth time, Señor Pérez-Reverte, the Spanish novelist and international journalist, has presented “a novel of suspense” that adheres to his formula, and this may be his best yet, or at least his longest. The length of this ironic romance is significant; since the author works within a narrow scope and with a small...
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Baseball and Marital Permanence
The game of baseball is centered on home: pitchers throw the ball over home plate, batters hit home runs, and fans root for the home team. Apparently, baseball’s preoccupation with home is no accident. According to a recent study by Denver psychologist Howard Markham, the average divorce rate in cities that have major league baseball...
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Literature and Freedom
Nothing has pushed forward cultural life as much as the invention of printing, nor has anything contributed more to its democratization. From Gutenberg’s time until today, the book has been the best propeller and depository of knowledge, as well as an irreplaceable source of pleasure. However, to many, its future is uncertain. I recall a...
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Existential Threat
At present, two themes dominate British political news. One is Brexit, which never ends. The other is antisemitism in the Labour Party, which sucks up enormous amounts of media oxygen. It is not clear how much the public cares that much about either. Journalists talk of little else. Over the summer, many an otherwise dull...
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Crime Story
Probably not since Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind has a popular novel influenced Americans as deeply as Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. Appearing in 1969, the book remains, according to the inflated come-on of its publisher’s blurb, “the all-time best-selling novel in publishing history.” If true, that claim in itself is no mean accomplishment, considering...
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The Late Hit on Judge Kavanaugh
Upon the memory and truthfulness of Christine Blasey Ford hangs the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, his reputation, and possibly his career on the nation’s second highest court. And much more. If Kavanaugh is voted down or forced to withdraw, the Republican Party and conservative movement could lose their last best hope for...
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Arguing With Apes
It was all the way back in 1860, when Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, participated in an open debate with T.H. Huxley, Darwin’s leading supporter, that at least for England the evolutionary debate was effectively decided once and for all. The bishop was judged to have lost the argument by virtue of his memorably snide...
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Books in Brief
Somme: Into the Breach, by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard, 607 pp., $35.00). This book is a superlative history of the Battle of the Somme between July 1 and November 18, 1916, by the author of Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man. Sebag-Montefiore’s masterly account of the engagement that claimed more than a million men dead...
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The Bowe Bergdahl Gaffe
Back in 1988 Michael Kinsley (in the Times of London) famously defined the gaffe as the occasion when “a politician tells the truth.” Kinsley himself immediately watered down his elegant definition by adding “some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say,” as if the code of the politician did not require him to be uniformly...
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Love And The Ruins
What with baby boomers running our instruments of communication, what were we going to talk about this month but, yes, the 40th anniversary of Woodstock? Lay it on me, man! Peace! Love! All that ’60s stuff! Or some of it. The marginality of Woodstock as a Great American Event will grow more obvious as—I hate...
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American Psychiatry Has a Lot to Apologize for (but not Racism)
It seems like every other major American institution is apologizing for racism these days, so why not the American Psychiatric Association (APA)? Back in January, the APA issued an apology for its “ingrained” racism towards black and indigenous people of color (BIPOCs). The APA pledged to develop “anti-racist policies that promote equity in mental health for...
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Facts Are Stubborn Things
It took only 22 years after he left the White House for conservatives to turn Ronald Reagan into a totem. The celebrations surrounding his 100th birthday on February 6 made George Washington look like a back-bench legislator. Conservatives hailed Reagan as the apotheosis of political wisdom and prudent action. Liberals conceded that he had done...
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Medical Control, Medical Corruption
The vested interests are sick over it: Americans are beginning, just slightly, to take charge of their own health care. Such best-sellers as the Doctor’s Book of Home Remedies, the Physician’s Desk Reference, and the Merck Manual can keep you out of the doctor’s appropriately named waiting room, or at least help you understand what...
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It’s Trump’s Party, Now
Before the largest audience of his political career, save perhaps his inaugural, Donald Trump delivered the speech of his life. And though Tuesday’s address may be called moderate, even inclusive, Trump’s total mastery of his party was on full display. Congressional Republicans who once professed “free-trade” as dogmatic truth rose again and again to cheer...
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Celebrating Diversity
The very first day I spent at a prestigious prep school—I was ten—I was punished for breaking the rule that no new boy was allowed to walk on the grass. “Rhinies,” as we were called at Lawrenceville, had to stick to the paths, and the only time we could walk on the grass was during...
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On Being America’s Red-Headed Stepchild
Are you puzzled and irritated by the viciousness and falsity of most of what is being published these days about the South and Southern history? The beginning of all wisdom on this subject is to know that in American public discourse and so-called scholarship there is usually no effort to understand the South, like any...
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A Master Accompanist
Few jazz pianists are “accompanists” as gifted in knowledge, technique, and taste as Norman Simmons, able to back vocalists with consummate skill in chording, passing notes, and background lines, but also wise in the use of space. “A pianist is a piano player—that’s different from accompanying,” Simmons said recently, as he approached his 85th birthday. ...
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Something of Art
In Something of Myself, his 1935 autobiography, Kipling remembers that when he was a young man, working for the English newspaper in the Punjab, “I no more dreamed of dressing myself than I did of shutting an inner door or—I was going to say turning a key in a lock. But we had no locks.”...
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The Foundations of Faith
Nicholas Orme has had the original idea of treating England's great cathedrals as a single class of cultural architecture, encapsulating the English religious imagination at its most expansive.
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Out With the Old
[Aaron D. Wolf on the revolution in the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, grandfathers, the Devil, and the fate of Issues, Etc.] My grandfather has congestive heart failure. I hate to say it, but I probably won’t see him this time next year. “Gramp,” as I’ve called him since I can remember, taught me how to shoot...
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Rome as We Found It
In horse-and-carriage days, foreign visitors to Rome, after an arduous Alpine crossing, commonly entered the city from the north, by the Milvian Bridge which has existed since the second century B.C. Here, on October 28, 312, Constantine had a vision of Christ on the eve of his victory over his rival, Maxentius. Since that time,...
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New American Plays
Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival of New American Plays, now in its 14th year, has had its up and downs. But some local grumblings notwithstanding, this year’s festival was much better than last, with two excellent plays and only one real miss. Promised works from Slaves of New York author Tama Janowitz and novelist...
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The West’s Fear That Dare Not Speak Its Name
With the drowning deaths of 27 migrants crossing the Channel from France to England, illegal migration from the Third World is front and center anew in European politics. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has proposed that France take back to its shores all migrants who cross the Channel illegally and come ashore in Britain. In the...
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Obama’s Atomic Wedgie
April may be the cruelest month, but this year May took the cake. It was then that we were reminded that human life is a political football, and that players on both sides of the line of scrimmage are suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy. When word came that President Obama was scheduled to appear at...
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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...
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The Reentry of Nature Ecological Restoration
Not long ago I participated in a delightful and in some ways unusual nature outing at a place called Poplar Creek, one of the forest preserves that make up an extensive system of green spaces in Chicago and its suburbs. For three or four hours some fifty of us cut and piled brush, planted seeds,...
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Russia’s Strawman Svengali Feels the West’s Wrath
The assassination of Aleksandr Dugin's daughter, Darya, is a tragic consequence of the Western-media myth that he is Putin's political mastermind. In reality, the eccentric philosopher wields no influence in Russia.