Characteristic of Conservatism Inc. for several decades now has been the practice of having politically correct spokespersons expressing its talking points. Fox News is full of black guests who are encouraged to say what the white hosts are terrified of stating lest they be accused of racism or sexism. Candace Owens, a very attractive black...
Catholics have figured prominently among American conservatives, from Russell Kirk to William F. Buckley, Jr., to Antonin Scalia. Though they differed in many ways, Kirk, Buckley, and Scalia all emphasized the importance of tradition in ordering any decent society and the consistency of America’s constitutional order with Catholic doctrine and tradition. The neoconservative shattering of...
One of the strangest rituals in the United States Senate is the annual reading of President Washington’s Farewell Address. The chore of recitation usually falls to a freshman nonentity eager to curry favor by performing what is regarded as a drudge task. The chamber is empty, save for the classical remnant: New York’s Senator Moynihan...
News anchors refuse to challenge the popular narrative on police racism. Even if they don’t choose the guest or story, they still choose and ask the questions.
The news just in that Dutch prosecutors have changed their mind about prosecuting Geert Wilders for the Orwellian crime of “discriminating against Muslims” and “inciting hatred” is prima facie a victory for free speech and all that. In fact it is not nearly as good as it may seem. The establishment is scared of continuing to hound the...
“Racism” and its derivative, “racist,” are oft-used words, and so we ought to know what they mean. But often we don’t, and we just fling them at each other, hoping they will wound, if not kill, the offensive person. One of my dictionaries (Standard College Dictionary, 1963) defines racism this way: ” 1. An excessive...
Too many of today’s “journalists,” on both the right and the left, have no drive for pursuing the story or finding what is interesting in their subject. This, more than anything, is killing journalism.
Many generations after Christian had made his way successfully to the Celestial City, one of his descendants decided to attempt the same journey. The young man came from the Modern branch of the Christians, a recent but powerful sect that had taken over all the Christian clans. Frank, for that was the young man’s name,...
The classical argument in favor of free immigration runs as follows. Other things being equal, businesses go to low-wage areas, and labor moves to high-wage areas, thus effecting a tendency toward the equalization of wage rates (for the same kind of labor) as well as the optimal localization of capital. An influx of migrants into...
Maurice Isserman is one of the more resilient members of the radical generation that came of age during the 1960’s. Although his apocalyptic ambitions were frustrated, he refused to succumb to gloom, setting out instead in search of a “tradition that could serve as both a source of political reference and an inspiration in what...
You Were Never Really Here Produced by Why Not Productions and the British Film Institute Directed and written by Lynne Ramsay, based on Jonathan Ames’s novel Distributed by Amazon Studios Tully Produced by BRON Studios Directed by Jason Reitman Screenplay by Diablo Cody Distributed by Focus Features This month we have two—you’ll excuse the expression—art-house...
Alarming newspaper headlines greeted me at London’s Heathrow Airport on my arrival from the Balkans yesterday. The Daily Mail led with the EU President’s warning that “Ireland’s debt crisis could kill the European Union stone-dead.” The Independent’s front page (“Ghost estates and broken lives: the human cost of the Irish crash”) was accompanied by a...
“Each social class has its own pathology.” —Proust Going by the tide and subtitle alone, it would appear that this is either a book about the lies rich people tell each other, or a book transforming the jingle of coins into the crash of magical cymbals. Having read it through, I am happy to report...
I was rather taken aback by Fr. Brian W. Harrison’s letter in the September issue of Chronicles (Polemics & Exchanges: “Evil That Good May Come”). He could not have been more mistaken. Fr. Harrison asserts that the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan was unnecessary because the Japanese were effectively defeated and were ready to surrender, given...
“Choose life” does not “foster choice,” or so said Florida Governor Lawton Chiles when he vetoed the manufacturing of license plates with this pro-life message. Was it the smiling faces on the license plate he didn’t like? The bright colors? More likely, he just didn’t want to offend anyone. Apparently, the ol’ he-coon was disappointed...
In the May issue, I asked, “Do We Want a Federal Police Force?” (Views). I pointed out that Congress is passing too many laws that duplicate traditional state criminal laws. The problem with this redundancy is that federal enforcement, like that at Waco and Ruby Ridge, is usually irresponsible. The latest example of this is...
Shelby Steele’s The Content of Our Character, a collection of essays, is mainly an attack on affirmative action, black separatism, and other such programs, policies, and trends that flourish in American universities and that Steele opposes, first of all, because he regards them as racist. By virtue solely of race, these programs reward blacks and...
Nothing churns the entrails of the professional democracy priesthood more than the rancid taste of a little real democracy. Since one of the main dishes on the 1992 political menu has been a generous serving of authentic popular rebellion, the sages have spent a good part of the last year lurching for their lavatories. The...
COMMENDABLES Nightfall for Liberalism? by Richard John Neuhaus George Parkin Grant: English Speaking Justice; Notre Dame; $4.95 paper. “Liberalism in its generic form is surely something that all decent men accept as good-‘conservatives’ included. Insofar as the word ‘liberalism’ is used to describe the belief that political liberty is a central human...
President Obama’s announcement of a de facto amnesty for illegal immigrants by administrative fiat offered a chance for Mitt Romney to appeal to the majority of Americans who consistently tell pollsters that they want to see immigration reduced. Instead, Romney told a gathering of Hispanic politicians that he will increase immigration, by raising the caps for...
With this latest novel, Ivan Doig completes his McCaskill trilogy, begun in 1984 with English Creek and followed in 1987 with Dancing at the Rascal Fair. Ride With Me, Mariah Montana is good Doig, and that means readers can expect crisp dialogue, rapid pace, vital language, and many satisfied- hours with this handsome volume from...
What the Europeans call America—that is, Canada and the United States—was fostered by what we usually refer to as Europe. If men and women had not left the Old World, there would not be any New World as we know it. Hence, any investigation into the relationship between Europe and America must begin with an...
September’s unemployment figures were not only disappointing—they were grim. For the 21st straight month, Americans lost jobs. Fifteen million are out of work—5 million for more than six months. But as the Washington Times asserts, “America’s jobless crisis is much worse than the 9.8 percent unemployment rate.” The U.S. economy actually lost 785,000 jobs in...
Following the terrorist attacks last September, matters have been moving much too fast for a monthly periodical to have any hope of keeping up with events. It may be that, by the time these words appear in print, world affairs will have been restored to happy equilibrium, justice will have triumphed, and the severed heads...
I enjoyed reading George McCartney’s review of Monsters From the Id in the November 2000 issue of Chronicles (“Frankenstein’s Children,” Opinions). However, it contains some misrepresentations of what I had to say on the relationship between sex and horror. To begin with, the Ford Foundation never funded Alfred Kinsey’s sex surveys; it is the Rockefeller...
I am going to ask what Churchill would have called some naughty questions, and offer some impertinent answers. I apologize in advance for the extreme political incorrectness of what follows. In the hope of persuading the reader that I raise these issues with no pleasure at all, I shall preface them with some personal notes....
In an interview with FOX News aired on Sunday, April 10, President Barack Obama said that failing to prepare for the aftermath of the ousting of Libyan leader Col. Muammar Qaddafi was the worst mistake of his presidency. He added that intervening in Libya nevertheless had been “the right thing to do.” The second part...
For about 30 years Wendell Berry has been writing fiction, poetry, and essays motivated by what he identifies as “a desire to make myself responsibly at home in this world and in my native and chosen place.” I think the “world” he has in mind is that of mortality in general and of our chaotic...
Half a century ago, American children were schooled in Aesop’s fables. Among the more famous of these were “The Fox and the Grapes” and “The Tortoise and the Hare.” Particularly appropriate this Christmas season, and every Christmas lately, is Aesop’s fable of “The Dog in the Manger.” The tale is about a dog who...
As recently as 1882, Neasden in north London was an obscure hamlet of several large houses, a few cottages, and a smithy. Then the Metropolitan Railway and, later, the North Circular Road went through and thousands of often jerrybuilt houses sprang up along their lengths, as London bit ravenously into Middlesex. Although Neasden rapidly became...
The thing about Lyndon Johnson—and you may be sure I kept a close adolescent eye on him while he was one of my two U.S. senators—was that he knew what he was doing. There was more to it even than that. He knew how to get things done. The faint breezes from the ’50s...
John Richardson, the brilliant biographer of Picasso, resembles (by his own account) those charming and attractive young men of limited means and boundless ambition—right out of the novels of Stendhal and Balzac—who use any means to make their way in the world. The son of an English soldier, educated at Stowe school and the Slade...
Tulsi Gabbard's farewell to the Democratic Party sounds more like a declaration of war. Most of her remarks would pass muster at a Trump rally.
Rebekah wants to be an algebra teacher. She announced this a few months ago, about the time she turned 15. “You do know,” I said, “to be an algebra teacher, you can’t just study algebra. You’ll have to be proficient in math at all levels, through calculus, including geometry.” Only six months before, she had...
The “Great Men” of history were mostly mad or bad, and often both. To be driven by pride, vanity, and ruthless ambition is common and unremarkable. That drive is not sufficient to leave a lasting mark on the affairs of mankind, of course, but it is necessary. It is therefore redundant to dig diligently into...
Liberals accuse Trump of being cozy with dictators, but the dictators of Iran's cruel and corrupt regime find comfort only with Trump's Democratic opponents.
We live in interesting times. In June of this year, the U.S. national soccer team played an “away” game against Mexico—in Los Angeles. Many of the 93,000 fans in the Rose Bowl booed the U.S. squad, chanted obscenities directed at the U.S. goalkeeper, and blew air horns during the U.S. national anthem. After Mexico won...
On April 10 of last year, the European Patent Office quietly awarded a patent to Michigan State University (MSU) for “euthanasia solutions which use the anesthetic gammahydroxy-butramide (embutramide) as a basis for formulating the composition.” On the surface, the event was not out of the ordinary. In the abstract of the public document, the new...
David Vital describes his work as a political history, whose subject is the exercise of legitimate violence. He recounts how the Jews of Europe addressed the political crisis that overtook them between the end of the ancien regime in 1789 and the collapse of their rebuilt social order in Europe in 1939: His subject is...
The Democrats and the rest of the left are taking the results of last November’s election no better than they predicted the Republicans and the right would do if their man lost. The street riots, lawsuits, recounts, constitutional challenges, furious denial, and refusal to accept the electoral decision in a spirit of peace, resignation, and...
Though he never came here, Walt Whitman knew India was more than a country: a subcontinent, madhouse of religions, seedbed of civilizations, primordial and immemorial. “Passage to more than India.” How to cope with this vital mess, this messy multiplicity? These hundreds of millions of people in hundreds of thousands of villages? I have learned...
Tolstoy once referred to Mormonism as “the American religion.” I only know that because one of my former assistants, a Mormon himself, used to quote the statement as corroboration of the Mormons’ belief that they are quintessentially American. Despite all of his proselytizing efforts and the gift of a Book of Mormon, I took no...
“In the name of God, whom we all revere, in the name of liberty we hold so dear, in the name of decency, which we all cherish—what is happening in America?” —Gov. Orval Faubus, broadcast to the people fifty years ago as the city of Little Rock was occupied by bayonet-wielding paratroopers and swarms of...
The Smithsonian has had on display, for the past decade and a half, an exhibit entitled A More Perfect Union. The many millions who have viewed it have been erroneously taught that, during World War II, America grossly mistreated her Japanese minorities, in spite of the “fact” that the all-Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team racked...
The Greek and Roman classics had a great influence on George Gissing, not least because the literature and history of antiquity provided him with a kind of refuge from the grim realities of the modern industrial and commercial world. Gissing was a highly cultivated man who was at home in several foreign languages—French, Italian, Spanish,...
Perhaps you heard the howls (actually, more like hollers) a while back when some hapless Texas bureaucrat proposed that the Lone Star State be known henceforth on its license plates as “The Friendship State.” You’ve got a friend in Pennsylvania, according to that state’s plates, but it sounds as if Texans want to check you...
With more and better fast-food choices available than ever before, why do Americans continue to reward the mediocrity that is McDonald’s?
In reaffirming the rule of law and giving local support to national sovereignty, Arizona has taken a bold, perhaps dangerous step. How it will end, I do not know. Much depends on the will of the electorate and the political class that is supposed to represent the people. The predictable backlash from the Latino community...
Developed nations should assist poorer states by doing no harm. Washington should end government-to-government assistance, which has so often buttressed regimes dedicated to little more than maintaining power and has eased the economic pressure for needed reforms. The United States should stop meddling in foreign affairs which matter little to America; the result is usually...
It is totally misleading to present history as if its course was inevitable. The past cannot be understood if the elements of chance and contingency are ignored. To assume that what happened was bound to happen—the teleological interpretation of history—takes away the options facing individuals, groups, and governments in the past. It is analytically suspect,...