Short reviews of The Myth of Left and Right by Hyrum Lewis and Verlan Lewis, and Myth America by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer.
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Reinventing the Wheel
Two Jesuits have recently written books on social ethics, the humane economy, and on liberating the poor. I know what you’re thinking: two more liberation theologians using Marxist criteria for their analysis, and ruthlessly criticizing the free market. Think again. Prevalent opinion traditionally associates the Society of Jesus with all forms of cabals, while a...
Steeped in Islamic Orthodoxy, Hamas Is Israel’s Permanent Enemy
It is necessary to be aware of the ambitions of political Islam and to harbor no illusions about its goals.
On Reparations: John F. Kennedy vs. Robert F. Kennedy
When did the civil rights movement go off the rails? The answer is when proponents went from justly demanding equal rights to unjustly demanding equal results. As to exactly when this occurred, that’s more difficult to answer. But consider statements, made five years apart, from the Kennedy brothers, John F. and Robert F. Neither brother was...
The Right Stuff Drugs and Democracy
Morphine is said to be good for people subject to severe depressions, or even pessimism. Although the drug first surfaced in a laboratory at the end of the last century, its basis, opium, had been used earlier by many aristocratic and reactionary thinkers. A young and secretive German romantic, Novalis, enjoyed eating and smoking opium...
The New Environmentalism
More change has occurred in the environmental movement during the past ten years than in its entire previous history. Its thrust has become less ideological and more pragmatic, less New Age and more scientific. It is increasingly grounded in the databases of atmospheric science and the genetic models of conservation biology. The practice of conservation...
Getting Solzhenitsyn Right
Years after his arrest by the Soviet authorities, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, while recuperating in a prison hospital after a cancerous tumor had been cut from his body, cast out the last remnant of a spiritual tumor from his soul. A prison doctor, soon to die by the hand of another zek, “fervently” recounted to Solzhenitsyn his...
Good Manners, Good Literature
For this very welcome and unexpected award, I thank The Ingersoll Foundation and all concerned. When I was in high school, there were certain books that I carried around in order to impress people with my literariness. One was the Collected Poems of Hart Crane, whom I didn’t altogether understand, but whose words made me...
Of Opposite Minds: Maistre and Mill
Joseph de Maistre, a brilliant wordsmith, was an elegant defender of the old order, while John Stuart Mill, in his plodding prose, helped to usher in welfare democracy and the modern administrative state.
Christmas Fruitcakes
Angela Merkel isn’t as nutty as she sounds, or so she would have you to believe. She simply wants to have her Obst kuchen (“fruitcake”) and eat it too. The Obst kuchen, in this case, is liberalism, whereby people from every tribe under heaven—including the Islamic ones—live happily together in the Motherland, and all ethnic,...
Books in Brief
The Long Night of the Watchman: Essays by Václav Benda, 1977-1989 (St. Augustine’s Press; 352 pp., $35.00). On July 4, 1983, in Prague, there occurred one of those moments that may rightly be considered a single loose pebble that caused an avalanche. Film director MiloŠ Forman had been permitted to return to his native Czechoslovakia...
Eastern Europe Versus the Open Society
Excerpts from a speech to the H.L. Mencken Club, Baltimore, October 23, 2010 Two weeks ago the first “gay pride parade” was staged in Belgrade. Serbia’s “pro-European” government had been promoting the event as yet another proof that Serbia is fit to join the European Union, that is has overcome the legacy of its...
The Crime of History
He who writes a nation’s history also controls its future—so wrote George Orwell. During the Soviet reign over Eastern Europe, every citizen knew who was in charge of writing history, especially that dealing with the victims of World War II. Anyone professing to be a Slovak, a Croat, a Ukrainian, or a Russian nationalist was...
Polemics & Exchanges: February 2023
Letters from readers about "Christian Nationalism--A Protestant View," by Stephen Wolfe, and "A Conspiracy Against the People," by Pedro Gonzalez.
The West on the Precipice: A Warning and a Hope
Traditional Christians should unite against the satanic vision of liberal-democratic nirvana, which continually threatens the West.
Looking Backwards
“Whose picture is this, Daddy?” The little blond girl is 11 years old, and, as she flips through the iScraps, her smooth round face shows the first twinge of the questioning mind that will disturb the complacency on which all future happiness depends. “That’s my grandfather.” “Your grandfather? He doesn’t look a bit like us,”...
Sympathy for the Devil
His writing these last 40 years amounts to little more than a succession of malicious ad hominem attacks on people he disagrees with. His appeal is to those with a dirty mind, who want society to be as dirty as he is, and who are glad to erode barriers of decency. There is a coy...
Farewell to a Good Pope
Christian believers will remember Benedict XVI as a great teacher of the faith who was never willing to subject Christianity to the destructive standards of post-Christian Western culture.
The Death of Moral Community
“The opponents (of same-sex marriage) have no case other than ignorance and misconception and prejudice.” So writes Richard Cohen in his celebratory column about Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s role in legalizing gay marriage in New York state. Now, given that no nation in 20 centuries of Christendom legalized homosexual marriage, and, in this century, majorities in...
Murder in the Wasteland
The mystery novel, to borrow a line from Original Sin, has all the virtues of its defects. “The mystery,” Baroness James explained in a recent Washington Post interview, “deals with the planned murder” and is thus confined to a certain formulaic structure in which a detective protagonist confronts an often unsavory lot of suspects, all...
The Chief and His Men
On June 1, 1945, Pope Pius XII met for three hours in private audience with his co-conspirator, the German lawyer Josef Müller. “I had hardly crossed the threshold into his study when the Holy Father approached me, and embraced me,” Müller later wrote. “The Pope said,” writes the author of this remarkable tale of spiritual...
Lehayyim—”To Life,” Not Abortion
Since many Jewish institutions and individuals speaking “as Jews” (or so they say) favor unrestricted abortion, pro-life people often assume that Judaism does, too. But when we distinguish the personal opinions of individuals from the doctrines of a faith set forth in authoritative holy books, matters prove more complex. And when we realize that, from...
The Whiskey Boys and Their Fight
My grandfather spent most of his days underground, as a cutter in his cousin’s coal mine in Imperial, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh. At night, he would arrive home looking like he had been through an explosion. Outside the kitchen door, my grandmother kept a large metal tub full of water to soak the coal dust off...
Scandalizing Uncle Ez
The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secret of St. Elizabeths by W. Fuller Torrey, McGraw-Hill; New York. Without doubt, Ezra Pound was a remarkable poet. His best verse is beautifully cadenced, delicately chiseled. Herbert Read described him as “an alchemist who transmuted the debased counters of our language into pure poetic metal.” Deferentially, T. S. Eliot called him...
The Habit of Making
“Nature I loved, and next to nature, art.” —W.S. Landor In October 1986, I heard Robert Penn Warren read a selection of his poems at an LSU conference marking the 50th anniversary of the Southern Review. He was 81 years old, exceeding frail, and suffering from cancer. About halfway through the...
Bucking the Tide of Progress
Sen. Jesse Helms’ announcement in August of his retirement at the end of his current term was an opportunity for vituperation on the part of the left-wing media that has so detested the North Carolina conservative throughout his entire 30-year political career. “It is alway’s tempting,” moaned the New York Times lead editorial the day...
Our Grim Postliberal Future
We inhabit a world vastly different from the one in which liberalism flourished. Liberalism, properly understood, is gone and not coming back.
Just Asking
Does it really make much difference whether Barack Hussein Obama (or anybody else) was actually born in the United States or not? Is the conquest and permanent occupation of Iraq justified under international law and the U.S. Constitution? Is the conquest and permanent occupation of Iraq an appropriate response ...
Old Adam, New Eve
Feminist writers sometimes give us the impression that the nonworking mother is a rare bird like the Bach man’s Warbler—sighted (not very reliably) once a decade or so in a corner of I’on Swamp in the South Carolina low country. The ladies magazines do occasionally report on rumors that some professional women like Janet Fallows...
A Son of Saint Dominic
The appellation “monstre sacré” for Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. (1877-1964), was coined by François Mauriac, an influential Catholic litterateur and contemporary of Garrigou, suggesting the ill feelings harbored by those who found their theological or philosophical positions contradicted by Garrigou. In this book, Fr. Richard Peddicord, O.P., associate professor of systematic theology at the Aquinas Institute,...
Vipers in Ivory
“Teaching,” said the former nun in blue jeans, as if she were instructing a room full of halfwits about something very important, “is a political act.” It was early December 1991 at Providence College, the school where I taught for 27 years, the school that I grew to love deeply, though that love, it seems, was...
Wall of Sound: Noise as the Basis of Culture
“And when Joshua heard the noise of the people as they shouted, he said unto Moses, There is a noise of war in the camp.” —Exodus 32:17 Poor Phil Spector. He may be a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the producer of a string of hits from “Be My Baby” (The...
Dostoevsky, Putin, and the Russian Soul
The writings of Fyodor Dostoevsky provide a window into the soul of Russia and the soul of Vladimir Putin. His writings are Russia's national consciousness put to paper.
Ancien Régime III, 1-3
Ancien Regime III b In his first and vitally important chapter, Tocqueville says that true aristocracies impose their system of values on a nation, but in France the nobles permitted the philosophes to impose their ideology not only on the education of the young but also even onto the edicts of ...
Turkey Goes Islamic
On November 3, Islam triumphed politically in Turkey, rendering the entire U.S. strategy in the Middle East tenuous and causing dismay in Europe. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, barred from public office for Islamic agitation, led his Justice and Development Party (AKP) to a landslide victory over his secularist opponents in NATO’s only Muslim nation. Muslims will...
In the Mail
Science Fiction in America, 1870’s-1930’s: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary Sources by Thomas D. Clareson; Greenwood Press; Westport, CT. Although the first entry is Flatland and the final is Zamitan’s We, the second and the penultimate are more telling: number two, The Man With the Broken Ear, includes a character who believes that “humans are...
The Happy Few
Stendhal had the delightful habit of ending his books with the closing dedication, in English, “TO THE HAPPY FEW.” The phrase is thought to be a borrowing from Henry V (“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers . . . ”) or perhaps from Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield, where the vicar anticipates his...
The Last Gentlemen
“Friendship is like two clocks keeping time.” —Anonymous Walker Percy was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 7, 1916, the eldest son of a prosperous lawyer and a Georgia socialite. In addition to patrician lineage, Percy enjoyed a birthright of wealth and privilege. With these amenities, however, came a familial predisposition...
Obama: The Audacity of a Dope
Author John Lott of “More Guns, Less Crime” fame had this to say about a personal encounter with the future POTUS during his time at the University of Chicago law school in his latest book (hat tip to Mark Brennan and David Gordon): “I first met him in 1996, shortly after my research on concealed...
Small Is Bountiful: The Secession Solution
Aristotle declared that there is a limit to the size of states: “a limit, as there is to other things, plants, animals, implements; for none of these retain their natural power when they are too large or too small, but they either wholly lose their nature, or are spoiled.” But really, what did he know? ...
Polemics & Exchanges
Letters to the editor on the subject of post-war Germany, "effeminate cruelty," George Santayana, and the competing influences on human behavior of genes and culture.
There’s More Than One Way to Burn a Book
“There is more than one way to burn a book,” Ray Bradbury once said. “And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.” Bradbury wrote the novel Fahrenheit 451 about a world that systematically burned books. In late December, I resolved to try and read more books than those I review for Western North...
The New Wealth of Nations
I have just returned from a trip around the world; a trip where among other things I explored why certain nations succeed brilliantly and other nations stumble along in poverty with marginal economies. In previous travels to South America, I accepted the standard south-of-the-border excuse that its poverty and problems were caused by “Yankee Imperialism.”...
On the Human Condition
My grandparents both emigrated from Germany shortly after World War I. Grandma hailed from a small town on the plains of Lower Saxony, and Grandpa grew up in a smaller town in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. Both came from large families and left behind numerous brothers and sisters and their offspring. Among my...
Letters From Tocqueville
“I am rich in letters. . . . “ —Horace Walpole Alexis de Tocqueville was an immensely prolific writer. His friend Gustave de Beaumont wrote that “for one volume he published he wrote ten; and the notes he cast aside as intended only for himself would have served many writers as text for the printer.”...
The Lost Secret of Kells
When I tell you that I was recently shocked by the treatment of history in a children’s cartoon, you may wonder what kind of pompous buffoon I might be. (“I cannot begin to list the fundamental errors in marine biology that The Little Mermaid parades before our vulnerable children . . . ”) Yet watching...
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...
Laughing at Harry
Things have never been grimmer. Wall Street wolves have become billionaires while rigging the system, rats like William Kristol are showboating on television and spreading lies about The Donald, and the most dishonest couple since Bonnie and Clyde are getting themselves ready to reinhabit the White House. In times like these, there is only one...
Tradition and Justice
“We have forgotten the origin of morality in fact and circumstance.” —Wendell Berry Alasdair MacIntyre is our most relentless tracker of the crisis of the liberal regime. In After Virtue, he recounted the history of the triumph of “emotivism” in ethics. In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? he has begun the process of pointing the way...
Papagueria: II
Past Robles Junction where the road coming north from Sasabe meets Highway 86 we crossed onto the Papago reservation heading west toward the Indian capital of Sells, no lights ahead save the constellation of the Kitt Peak Observatory lifted high against the night sky by the bulk of the Baboquivari Mountains, and almost no traffic....