From the June 1991 issue of Chronicles. Lewis Namier liked to tell the story of an English schoolboy who was asked to define “imperialism” on an examination paper. “Imperialism,” the budding proconsul wrote, “is learning how to get along with one’s social inferiors.” In the Edwardian twilight of the British Empire, that answer might have...
Batman Returns Produced by Denise di Novi and Tim Burton Directed by Tim Burton Screenplay by Daniel Waters Released by Warner Brothers Monster in a Box Produced by Jon Blair and Renee Shafransky Directed by Nick Broomfield Written and Performed by Spalding Gray Released by Fine Line Features Not only had I not planned to...
Laurie A. Recht, a legal secretary in New York, received encomiums from the press and various and sundry others for endorsing the court-ordered plan for integrated housing in Yonkers last year. In fact, when Ms. Recht was the only speaker in favor of the integration proposal at an open hearing, arguing that the City Council...
On September 13, 2004, a piece by David Frum called “Correcting Pat Buchanan” appeared at National Review Online. In it, Frum charged that Buchanan had opposed America’s war against the Taliban and had “repeatedly predicted doom and disaster.” Frum spoke of Buchanan’s “past opposition to military action against Osama bin Laden” and said “I cannot...
When 20-year-old Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School and murdered 26 people, most of them children, after killing his own mother at home, the nation went into one of its periodic orgies of recrimination—mostly directed at the National Rifle Association, which had to shut down its Facebook and Twitter accounts thanks to the...
Concealed guns were the topic of a recent marathon hearing in the Texas State Legislature. In the middle of the hearing, one Suzanna Gratia suddenly marched over to Senator Royce West, pointed her index finger at him, and cocked her thumb. “Tell me. Senator,” said the good-looking chiropractor about a fellow nearby, “would you like...
Many thanks for Roger McGrath’s, Joe Guzzardi’s, and Myles Kantor’s pieces in your September issue. Rather than heaping lofty, obscurantist scorn on various currents, they actually wrestle with glaring, concrete issues, which suggests proper strategies for waging the culture war instead of merely talking about it. For instance, it does no good merely to criticize...
U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul, Obama’s man in Moscow, who just took up his post, has received a rude reception. And understandably so. In 1992, McFaul was the representative in Russia of the National Democratic Institute, a U.S. government-funded agency whose mission is to promote democracy abroad. The NDI has been tied to color-coded...
Such is the Wickedness of some men, and the stupid Servility of others, that one would almost be inclined to conclude that Communities cannot be free. —Sam Adams Much American public discourse—the larger part—is made up of false impressions and invalid assumptions, what sensible people used to call cant, that are designed to disguise and...
You might say it has not been much of a month for the human race. I might myself contend that signs of life float on the flooded streets of Houston, Texas. People are acting the way people used to act, back before we were all required, seemingly, to stake out a political position and hate...
That Trump is a would-be dictator has been a recurring narrative on the left for nearly a decade now—and so has the wish that he would be done away with, by one means or another—even violence, if necessary.
Here is a somewhat conversational masterpiece by the great Ben. It’s a bit long but very vivid, funny, and, while self-serving, not hypocritical. What a man he must have been! Small wonder younger poets loved him, and not simply because he helped them. His poem on Shakespeare, so often misunderstood as carping or envious,...
The road to hell, I was taught as a child, is paved with good intentions. Surely no one could fault the intentions of the Reverend Ralph David Abernathy—Martin Luther King’s right arm and successor in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—as revealed in this fascinating and moving autobiography. Inspired by faith in Divine mercy, by a...
Though it gets harder to remember with every passing day, one of the long-established premises of the recently ended Cold War was the notion that both the Soviet Union and the U.S.A. were engaged in an ideological battle for the minds and souls of the world’s population. In line with this the West used powerful...
The Schwinn Bicycle Company, which was run by the same family for 97 years, has gone bankrupt. No more Schwinn bikes? I remember mine, and brother Jack’s, and those I bought my children in the 50’s—visions of delight with their balloon tires, chrome springs, and coaster brakes. The last of my four children actually got...
On a morning in April 1990, practitioners of the journalistic craft received in their mail a communication from one Jack Lichtenstein, at that time the director of public affairs for the National Endowment for the Arts, an agency then embroiled in a desperate onslaught by an army of Philistines, voters, and taxpayers who imagined that...
Jean-Marie Le Pen is in trouble again. Imagine if Pat Buchanan had just scored a major political success, which had put him within reach of real political power—and then, just as he was reaching out to taste the fruits of years of hard work, political opponents threw a minor legal charge at him. Conviction on...
Harding was a consummate conservative governed by humility, kindness, and charity for all: principles that guided him in both his personal life and his political career.
“Mankind is tired of liberty.” —Benito Mussolini An acquaintance of mine, who is not particularly conservative, once heard a television newsman quack about how bad the 1950’s were. Disgusted, he burst out, “What was wrong with the 1950’s? People were norma/then!” People certainly seem a lot less “normal” nowadays. Charles J. Sykes has written a...
Until a week ago it appeared that the government in Belgrade would give up the last vestiges of its claim to Kosovo for the sake of some indeterminate date in the future when Serbia may join the European Union. A series of unreciprocated concessions over the past few months have encouraged the KLA regime’s...
From the October 1986 issue of Chronicles. “The obscurest epoch is today.” —Robert Louis Stevenson Taken together, these three books serve nicely as a kind of group portrait of Clio and her several faces. In reverse order we have the historian as diarist and memoirist, as documentarian, and as reflective sage. As one of the...
High-ranking officials in the Biden administration worked with a transgender NGO to promote mutilating sex-change procedures for minors, according to a recent court-ordered document release.
It did not take the Israel lobby long to make mincemeat out of the Obama administration’s “no new settlements” position. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is bragging about Israel’s latest victory over the U.S. government as Israel continues to build illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land. In May, President Obama read the Israelis the riot act,...
As 2005 drew to a close, the scandal over the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame potentially threatened to overwhelm leading figures in the Bush White House. Meanwhile, editors and journalists have been struggling to keep a straight face while affecting shock at the central revelation of the case—namely, that major news stories commonly derive...
At the G-7 summit in Canada, President Donald Trump described America as “the piggy bank that everybody is robbing.” After he left Quebec, his director of Trade and Industrial Policy, Peter Navarro, added a few parting words for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau: “There’s a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in...
Knowing what is going on in the Hobbesian world of international politics is an essential function of the state apparatus. Detecting, assessing, and countering external threats, real and potential, helped the Byzantine empire survive a thousand years longer than its Western counterpart—well beyond its strictly geopolitical potential for endurance. Essential to its longevity was its...
The disgraced former president of Harvard University is representative of the DEI regime and the massive undertaking it will be to dismantle it.
On June 25, 2015, in a 6-3 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court saved ObamaCare once again. Appropriately, Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the first opinion saving ObamaCare (see “Earl Warren Rides Again“), authored the latest one as well. The case involved the federal subsidies received by those who purchase health insurance through ObamaCare. The...
A coordinated left-wing media smear campaign against conservative Supreme Court justices has one goal and one goal only: to delegitimize the U.S. Supreme Court, and to pave the way for ruinous policies that would irreparably damage, and ultimately destroy, that venerable institution.
Heidi Waleson’s Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America (2018) is a challenging and enlightening work—one which dares much and succeeds remarkably well. We must concede that we do not often find a work of expository prose to be as appealing as...
For almost 2,000 years, Christians have been confessing Jesus Christ as God and Savior in the assurance that they knew enough about Him to justify making this confession. From the earliest days of Christianity, its adversaries have repeatedly challenged the facts and doctrines recorded about Christ in the four canonical Gospels and in the great...
Where capitalism is “relatively benign of itself,” as Chilton Williamson, Jr., wrote when commenting on Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’ (“Church and State,” Editorials) in the September issue, it is inaccurately named. The word capitalism means that what matters most to capitalists is capital. Capital is wealth used to gain more. That suggests that what...
Critics have long considered H. L. Mencken to be impossible, meaning stubborn, difficult, exasperating. But today the appellation takes on a different meaning: His career and ideas simply would be impossible today.
It seems that on many fronts, the American establishment right has been incapable of halting the advance of the left. There is one bright spot, however: more Americans are resisting encroachments against their right to self-defense by exercising their Second Amendment rights. Gun stores have had 10.3 million firearms sales so far this year, according to...
It is a measure of the stature and the significance of Justice Antonin Scalia that, upon the news of his death at a hunting lodge in Texas, Washington was instantly caught up in an unseemly quarrel over who would succeed him. But no one can replace Justice Scalia. He was a giant among jurists. For...
The present condition of literature (as that term is ordinarily understood), at least in America, is obviously unhealthy. Its illness is the result not only of internal undermining, “the invisible worm” of Blake’s “The Sick Rose,” but of external conditions, the “howling storm” on which the worm (however implausibly) rode. External and internal decline, all...
“Fox populi.” —Anonymous No public figure in American history is more inscrutable than Abraham Lincoln. While this is in some measure due to his extraordinary deftness as a politician, it is primarily the result of his astounding success in refounding the Republic in his own image. So thoroughly did Lincoln reform our collective historical and...
Born in a Cadillac in Beverley Hills Raised on gin and vitamin pills, Robbed him a bank, when he was only three Now he’s locked up in the penitentiary, Willie, Willie Sutton.. Someone taught me this parody of “Davy Crockett,” when I was ten years old, I am not sure I remember the concluding words...
When I called Mike Rafferty to arrange a meeting to discuss a possible symposium on the demise of the local community, I had to choose a different date from the one I?wanted because Mike was busy that night. He was boxing at the Spectrum. Like Rocky Balboa, Mike Rafferty lives ten minutes from the Spectrum. ...
Heather Mac Donald is a very good journalist, and conservatives are in her debt for her work dealing with immigration, crime, and the realities of urban life. But Mac Donald, an atheist, is puzzled by religion. Last Sunday, this puzzlement took the form of a short piece at the Secular Right website, where Mac Donald...
In Decade of Nightmares, Philip Jenkins considers how the progressive and “forward-looking” decade of free love, drugs, and cultural revolution led to the reactionary “counterrevolution” of the 1980’s, personified by Ronald Reagan. The author gives fair play to both sides of the various debates, which makes for interesting reading. It is often difficult to tell,...
“A politician . . . one that would circumvent God.” —William Shakespeare The title gives the game away: David Owen, a failed British politician who was for three crucial years (1992-95) Europe’s chief negotiator on the issue of the former Yugoslavia, seeks to cast himself as a Homerian hero. After 400 pages of tedious and...
Russian relations, in mid-November, were potentially on the verge of a sea-change, at the conclusion of two days of smiles, handshakes, bear hugs, and the usual feel-goodisms we have come to expect of “summit meetings,” especially from American presidents. (President George W. Bush, for instance, insisted that “the more I get to see” Russian President...
Maybe we need the pressure of loss close at hand in order to catch glimpses of things as they really are.
Donald Trump reveals something to us about ourselves, if we are honest enough to face it: We care far too deeply about presidential politics and not enough about our actual problems. Please, put down the pitchfork and listen for just a minute. Believe me, I understand. Trump has raised the very important immigration issue, and...
An interesting debate on the right concerning the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution neglects to consider that the founder’s Constitution may no longer be our framework of government.
The sensitive conservative. An oxymoron to most liberals. An eye-averting embarrassment to many conservatives. And, it would seem in 1994, an irrelevancy. Who needs sensitive conservatives when Democrats in power can assure tolerance and sensitivity? All in all, it’s a dubious time to be a touchy-feely man of the right. Just my luck. Actually, I...
Philippe de Villiers, a French entrepreneur, politician, and author, belongs to what one might call the New French Resistance, a group of contemporary French patriots for whom Paris, not Vichy, symbolizes treason against both the French Republic and the historic French nation. Descended from an aristocratic family in the Vendée, Villiers is the founder and...
It was my penultimate summer in California when two friends from Germany crossed the pond to visit. They rented a room in San Diego not far from the beach, nestled in a palm-tree lined suburb. At some point between setting their bags on the curb and checking in to their summer digs, a man was...
Big government—is it back? Well, I wouldn’t put it quite that way. But September 11 has demonstrably changed, and may continue to change, some attitudes regarding the exercise of government power. Bombing the hell out of Afghanistan may be one of those enterprises for which Americans value the services of the national government. (There may...