During the 19th century, the United States fought five wars, of which it won three, the Indian, the Mexican, and the Spanish-American ones; the War of 1812 was a draw; and then there was the Civil War, the bloodiest war of mankind until that time and the one that proved the grand failure of the...
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The Republic We Betrayed
A republican government is an exercise in human optimism, and patriotic republicans must engage in an unremitting struggle against that human entropy we used to know as Original Sin. Any American citizen today can quote, or at least dimly recall, Washington’s declarative challenge in his Farewell Address: Of all the dispositions and habits which lead...
The Leaning Tower of Babel
“Culture, with us, ends in headache.” —R.W. Emerson While the state of American—in fact of Western—society today is probably unique in human history, it is in some ways the inverse of the situation that prevailed at the end of the Roman Empire, when the barbarians had Roman citizenship extended to them without their ever becoming...
Private Faith & Public Schools
A Martian attending Inauguration Day ceremonies might be curious about the book upon which the President lays his hand as he takes the oath of office. “That,” we would tell him, “is the Bible, a book of Scripture sacred to most American citizens.” “I see,” our alien friend responds, “and therefore your President is obligated to...
The Long March Through the Constitution
In the opinion of Marshall DeRosa, one of the contributors to this book, The transition from states’ rights to unitary nationalism, i.e., domestic imperialism, was the most significant development in American politics. This marks one of the worst fears of the framers coming to fruition, tyranny. That is a self-evidently correct judgment. It is also...
In the Time of the Breaking of Nations
“We will bury you,” warned Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950’s, but in the end, it is America’s NATO imperium that is burying Serbs under the rubble of Novi Sad and Belgrade and Americans under the red tape of the New World Order. The march of globalization has proceeded without effective resistance but not without criticism,...
The Empire’s New Clothes
Not the least of the several noticeable ironies that attend the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st is that, when the logically appropriate moment for the declaration of a formal American Empire arrived during the half-century of conflict with the Soviet Union, the empire failed to emerge. Today, well after...
The Angry Summer
Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight . . . —Psalm 144:1 According to the Washington Post, McAllen, Texas is an “all-American city,” albeit one “that speaks Spanish.” So it’s small wonder that “immigration isn’t a problem for this Texas town—it’s a way of life.” ...
Catholics in America: An Uneasy Alliance
At first, it may seem Catholicism contributed little to the American founding. The Founding Fathers were Protestants or deists and had themselves mostly arrived from the formerly Catholic kingdoms of England and Scotland, many as dissenters from the initial dissent of King Henry VIII. They had little obvious sympathy for Catholic doctrine or political thought. Among...
As We Go Marching
” . . . Your tragic quality Required the huge delusion of some major purpose to produce it. What, that the God of the stars needed your help?” —Robinson Jeffers, “Woodrow Wilson” “When a term has become so universally sanctified as ‘democracy’ now is,” wrote T.S. Eliot in 1939, “I begin to wonder whether it...
The Real American Dilemma
This remarkable editorial by Chronicles’ longest-serving editor offered one of the first and best analyses of America’s immigration problem.
As English Goes, So Goes the U.S.
By undermining the Western canon in the 1990s, leftist academics paved the way for today’s ‘woke’ hurricane.
That New Time Religion
Americans in the 19th century had a confident pride that they would dominate the coming age, not only because of the immense economic power of the new nation, but as a natural outcome of its moral and religious strength. As Melville had written in White Jacket, “We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of...
Rise of the Alt-Left: After This, the Deluge
Images of those traumatized by the election of Donald Trump are indelible. I mean specifically the sight of empaneled experts, red-eyed, choking, and stuttering as they said things like “CNN is now prepared to call the state of Wisconsin for Donald Trump.” Or of rainbow mobs of sign-wavers in urban centers declaring (absurdly and solipsistically)...
The Real American Dilemma
This remarkable editorial by Chronicles’ longest-serving editor offered one of the first and best analyses of America’s immigration problem.
Our Country, ’Tis of We . . .
What’s So Great About America by Dinesh D’Souza Washington: Regnery; 227 pp., $27.95 Dinesh D’Souza is a classic example of the immigrant imperialist. Others are Fouad Ajami (professor of Middle Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins University), Fareed Zakaria (managing editor of Foreign Affairs and a contributing editor to Newsweek), and Ramesh Ponnuru (a senior editor...
Birth of a Nation
Most of us in the United States are hyphenated Americans: Hispanic-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Irish-Americans. Even WASPs have taken refuge in the term “Anglo-American,” as if the British stock did not define the American identity. At this point in our history, we have trouble even imagining a people that takes its nationality neat without the addition of...
Can American Legal Education Be Fixed?
Something has gone radically awry with legal education and maybe even legal practice. For about a decade now, the loudest wailing over the state of affairs has come from Chief Judge Harry Edwards of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, who wrote a landmark article in the Michigan Law Review...
The Heart’s Geography
I took out the atlas the other day to figure out the routes of the voyagers retraced by Jean Raspail on his first trip to the United States. In the event, it proved impossible to plot a French expedition on a modern map of the United States. Maps are political abstractions. They encourage us to...
A New Christian America
Have you made any special place for Quincentennial Day? It promises to be a huge even, conceivably even more spectacular than the overblown Y2K phenomenon a couple of years back. I am referring, of course, to December 12, 2031. This is the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mexico’s patron saint, in the year...
Selling the Golden Cord
Free trade, according to the usual pundits, is an issue that divides the right. The usual pundits are, as usual, wrong. Free trade, which has never been more than an undocumented alien on the right, is an ideal that does unite much of the left. It is a point on which socialism converges with both...
A Man for Distinctions
“The Jews are a race apart. They have made laws according to their own fashion, and keep them.” —Celsus Jacob Neusner’s bibliography is as long as the laundry list of a professional football team. Only in his mid-50’s, Neusner has published more than two hundred books—including detailed studies of the various rabbinic commentaries on the...
The Promise and Peril of Identity Politics: Hope in a Dismal Season
George W. Bush is a stunningly and deservedly unpopular president. His approval ratings rival Nixon’s after Watergate, and the Republicans largely avoided any mention of him at their convention in St. Paul, a convention from which Bush was conspicuously absent. Under his leadership, we have become embroiled in a war that has cost thousands of...
Whose Museum? What Nation?
Nations define themselves by what they choose to remember. The growing complexity of the United States is suggested by the ever-expanding volume of her historical memories, the range of groups and events that are commemorated, often in the name of multiculturalism. Just look at the changing landscape of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., with...
A Little Rebellion
Scandalously, Thomas Jefferson once wrote to James Madison, “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and is as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” In the same year, 1787, in regard to what is known as Shays’ Rebellion, he wrote another friend, “God forbid...
Turning Rights into Wrongs
How Democracies Perish was the subject, as well as the title, of an important book by Jean-Francois Revel. M. Revel is a hardheaded journalist who takes little interest in political theory, but he is a keen observer of the corruption into which the states of the West have fallen. When I had drinks with him...
Islam, Immigration, and the Alienists Among Us
In his Introduction to Orthodoxy: The Romance of Faith, G.K. Chesterton casts himself as a man on a yacht seeking the world and finding home. The seeker, he writes, may have entertained us with his efforts to find “in an anarchist club or a Babylonian temple what I might have found in the nearest parish...
The Brothers Tsarnaev: Assimilating Terrorists
Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s widow is no longer calling herself “Karima Tsarnaeva.” She is Katherine Russell again. Karima/Katherine is reportedly drifting away from the way of life she accepted when she converted to Islam and married the Boston Bomber, the terrorist killed by police last April following the bombings that left three dead and wounded as many...
The Emerging American Empire
Let us begin by assuming that we agree that Islam is inherently militant. The words Muslim and Islam are derived from the Arabic word for “submission.” Submission to the absolute authority of Allah is essential. The heart of Islam is submission to the central credo that there is only one god, Allah, and Muhammad is...
As a City Upon a Hill
“A steady Patriot of the World alone, The friend of every country — but his own.” -George Canning John Crewdson: The Tarnished Door: The New Immigrants and the Transformation of America; Times Books; New York. Victor Ripp: Moscow to Main Street: Among the Russian Emigres; Little, Brown; Boston. Lewis A. Coser:...
National Religion
Americans are a people of deeply held religious conviction. If any has doubts, let him look on the most serious of our sacred holidays and believe. Naturally, it is a federal holiday, but that fact alone does not convey the magnitude of this special ...
Remembering Eric Voegelin: Anti-Gnostic Warrior
That political ideology and activism have become a new religion is something the average individual sees signs of nearly every day. A black man is killed in an altercation with police and his face instantly becomes an icon to be carried in protests, his name a phrase to be repeated with adoration. A slogan such...
“Anti-American Feeling”
After September 11, voices from many quarters have urged Americans to reflect on the reasons for the widespread hatred that the United States endures abroad. This is doubtless good advice: Such historical reflection is always worthwhile, and the pressing need for it is amplified in times of trouble. But whether these voices genuinely seek historical...
Lighting Out for the Territory
Restless Nation is an enjoyable exploration of the American national character. The book presents a plausible hypothesis, supported by the author’s broad knowledge of the nation’s history and social trends and illustrated throughout by aptly chosen literary references that reflect admirably wide reading. The problem is that, despite all these positives, I just don’t buy...
Defeating Domestic Jihad: A Program of Action
With mathematically predictable precision, President Barack Hussein Obama declared that last Wednesday’s slaughter of 17 American attendees of a Christmas party by two Muslims in a community center in California, and the wounding of two-dozen others, was a mystery (“We don’t know the motives)—and that the U.S. needed stricter gun laws. It was a jihadist...
Thornton Wilder’s Depression
Thornton Wilder met Sigmund Freud in the fall of 1935. Freud had read Wilder’s new novel, Heaven’s My Destination. “‘No seeker after God,’” writes Wilder’s biographer (quoting Freud of himself), “he threw it across the room.” At a later meeting Freud apologized. He objected to Wilder’s “making religion a theme for amusement.” “Why should you...
Gimme That Ol’Time Education
” . . . Form and Limit belong to the Good.” —C.S. Lewis Liberals in the United States have lately gathered around the standard of pluralism in the hope of stalling the movement toward private Christian education. Yet Americans, historically indifferent to such objections, have been the last to censure a church—especially a reformed or...
Thornton Wilder’s Depression
From the November 2011 issue of Chronicles. Thornton Wilder met Sigmund Freud in the fall of 1935. Freud had read Wilder’s new novel, Heaven’s My Destination. “‘No seeker after God,’” writes Wilder’s biographer (quoting Freud of himself), “he threw it across the room.” At a later meeting Freud apologized. He objected to Wilder’s “making religion...
Netanyahu for President
Benjamin Netanyahu is back in the United States, rallying his troops and hectoring the administration. I stand in such awe of this man that I propose we suspend our now pointless requirement of being American born and run Mr. Netanyahu as the candidate of both parties. Why not? It’s not as if the US government,...
The Unknown Civil War
The use of NATO military strikes against the Bosnian Serbs, at the urgings of the Clinton administration, camouflages for the moment a rift that has occurred in the Western alliance. Sooner or later recriminations over “who lost Yugoslavia?” are certain to come. And though it may be a while before historians render a verdict, there...
Lost in the 50’s
It was about 1965, in Jimmy Dengate’s “club” in Charleston, when I got my first clue to what the 50’s had been all about. I met an unusual sportswriter. Let us call him Jack, if only because it was his real name. Jack was unusual, because he could write decent prose, knew something about sports,...
Revolution and Tradition in the Humanities Curriculum
A few years ago I found myself in the belly of the beast. To be more accurate, I was actually in the appendix of the beast, the Department of Education, giving a paper on curriculum reform. Secretary Bennett, who preceded me, spoke with his accustomed exuberance of the then current crisis in the humanities and...
The Saudi Presence in the United States
For all the investment the United States has made in prosecuting the “War on Terror” in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Saudi presence in the United States has gone largely unnoticed—although it may be the most lethal terror front of all. U.S. politicians have been intoxicated by Saudi petrodollars for decades. Saudi greenbacks led Spiro Agnew...
Sarajevo Today, Chicago Tomorrow
The War Crimes Tribunal going on at The Hague is the first test of one of the great principles of postwar politics—the Nuremberg Doctrine, which makes individuals liable to international prosecution for actions committed during a war. In the old days, military personnel and police officers were expected to do as they were told. In...
Restoring Families by Restricting Government
When we view the monumental seats of government, the palaces and temples of ancient and medieval civilizations, we are awed by their architectural grandeur, the art and culture to which they testify, and the sheer effort they represent. While they are indeed a part of our cultural heritage, these edifices are better understood as monuments...
Every Neighbor a Litigant
Goethe taught us that true happiness comes from being engaged with others in productive projects, and we have known since Plato and Aristotle that man is a social animal, but we would be hard put to reach these conclusions if our only guide were the current state of American law. Far too often the American...
The Betrayal of the Spirit of Flight 93
We told ourselves we would never forget. We put bumper stickers bearing that slogan on our cars, we hung flags in front of our homes, and we repeated the names, deeds, and last words of the day’s heroes. We read books and watched movies about what happened. We gave the impression of a people grimly...
Culture and Kultur
The historical controversy over who was “responsible” for the outbreak of war in 1914 will doubtless never be settled, so clearly did so many of the participants contribute to igniting the catastrophe. German rearmament and the kaiser’s determination to build a navy equal to Great Britain’s, as well as the country’s territorial ambitions on the...
The Hague Tribunal: Bad Justice, Worse Politics
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once referred to the Cheka as “the only punitive organ in human history that combined in one set of hands investigation, arrest, interrogation, prosecution, trial, and execution of the verdict.” He was probably mistaken about “human history,” but his anger was just. What he chronicled was indefinite imprisonment without trial; investigations and indictments...
The Gulf Grisis in Europe
Whatever may be the outcome of the crisis in the Gulf, one thing is already certain: European intellectuals will no longer be polarized along ideological lines, but divided along geopolitical fault lines. For the first time the European right is marching hand-in-hand with the European left, in common protest against the U.S. involvement in the...