They liken him to Rasputin and Svengali: He’s the éminence grise of the Trump administration, the hard-line ideologue who represents and multiplies all the darkest impulses of that man in the Oval Office. But who is Steve Bannon, really? The New York Times, in a remarkably dishonest—even for them—piece implied that the President’s chief strategist...
“Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.” —Kierkegaard For those unaware of the growing influence of religious lobbies in the nation’s capital. Representing God in Washington should prove informative. It shows that religious lobbies of left and right are many and powerful, well-funded and well-staffed. They have learned the ropes of...
Robert Stacy McCain’s main point in his review of Ann Coulter’s Godless: The Church of Liberalism (“Is Ann Coulter Among the Prophets?” September) seems to be that those of us who are not blonde and blue-eyed should not envy those who are. (“But we all cannot be blue-eyed blondes, and, in the Age of Media,...
Much as I hate to admit it, AIDS czarina Kristine Gebbie got it right. The message to youngsters these days does indeed give the impression that sex is ugly, dirty, and a more perverse than pleasurable experience. Ms. Gebbie bungled only when she took on the role of anti-Victorian-morality crusader. In the space of a...
“I did it my way,” crooned Sinatra. Donald Trump is echoing Ol’ Blue Eyes with the latest additions to his staff. Should he lose, he prefers to go down to defeat as Donald Trump, and not as some synthetic creation of campaign consultants. “I am who I am,” Trump told a Wisconsin TV station, “It’s...
In February 1941, the world was at war. Nazism and fascism ruled virtually all of Europe and parts of Africa. Imperial Japan was poised to conquer much of East Asia. Joseph Stalin still controlled the world’s largest land mass, although Hitler was soon to shake Stalin’s throne. That year, Pitirim A. Sorokin, born in 1889,...
A relentless critic of FDR, John T. Flynn fought tooth and nail against the New Deal, corporatism, foreign interventionism, and the welfare-warfare state.
“The Anglo-Saxon carries self-government and self-development with him wherever he goes.” —Henry Ward Beecher For almost exactly 30 years, Kevin P. Phillips has been cranking out some of the most interesting and provocative works of political analysis written since World War II. In 1969, The Emerging Republican Majority argued that American politics runs through periodic...
A transcript of the conversation Donald Trump ought to have had with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his visit to Mar-a-Lago.
“Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish . . . ” —Psalm 2:12 Twenty-one centuries will have passed since He promised to come in His glory, 21 centuries since His prophet wrote, “Behold, I come quickly.” For centuries, then, men had beseeched Him with faith and fervor, “O Lord our God hasten...
According to my online dictionary, an oath is “a solemn promise, often invoking a divine witness, regarding one’s future action or behavior.” Oaths play a big role in our society. The Boy Scouts, known today as Scouts BSA since admitting girls to the organization, begin their weekly meetings by raising their right hand in the...
The Rise of Andrew Jackson: Myth, Manipulation, and the Making of Modern Politics, by David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler (New York: Basic Books; 448 pp., $32.00). Andrew Jackson ran for President in 1824 and was defeated by John Quincy Adams, the son of former President John Adams. In 1828 he tried again and...
On June 17, Dylann Roof walked into the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston and murdered 9 of the innocent people he found there. Seizing on the fact that Roof had posed in one picture with a Confederate battle flag, many politicians and media personalities immediately demanded that the Confederate battle flag come down. South Carolina...
A story long popular in London tells of a foreign visitor losing his bearings while walking along Whitehall and politely asking a passerby, “Excuse me, sir, which side is the Foreign Office on?” Hearing the visitor’s accent, the Brit despairingly replies, “Yours, probably.” This story comes to mind when we read the histories of Western...
If is ironic that the thoughts of this essay, extracted from a commencement address I gave at Claremont McKenna College in the spring of 1987, celebrate an old Stanford University tradition of submerging all students in the classical thought of the West as a precondition to graduation, no matter what their major. This spring of...
The following article by Allan C. Brownfeld is reprinted with permission. Free speech used to be highly valued, particularly on the nation’s college and university campuses. Academic freedom demanded a respect for a diversity of views. During the Vietnam War years, this writer taught at the University of Maryland. The campus was alive with debates...
“Among the many priests of Jove . . . all passed muster that could hide Their sloth, avarice, and pride.” —Bernard Mandeville Bruno Rizzi’s La Bureaucratisation du Monde, first published in Paris in 1939 and Part I of which is here translated by Adam Westoby into English for the first time, is the obscure work...
The modern age has known many false prophets who have challenged the moral and spiritual beliefs of the Christian faith. Although churchmen have not always been vigilant in defense of traditional religion, one institution able to resist the secularizing trends of the 19th and 20th century has been the Catholic Church. But it has not...
Richard Posner has a complaint against many of his fellow judges. Owing to their lack of up-to-date information and their conservative backgrounds, his colleagues often decide cases that touch on sex in an ignorant and benighted manner. Judge Posner aims to remedy matters with this comprehensive treatise, which offers both a theory of how sexual...
Want to learn how the economy really works? Don’t go into academia. Get a job. I spent six years of school filling my head with fancy theories and complicated mathematics, practiced under assumptions that often don’t work in the real world. I earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in economics, but where I...
It has been argued that, of all human deeds, only the act of conception is selfless, since, for the briefest of instants that consummate it, neither the man nor the woman ever thinks of himself or herself, but always of the other. And it can further be said that this is precisely where our lifelong...
The human universe, we are told by optimists on the editorial pages, is contracting into a gray and insipid doughball, pasted over with brightly colored labels advertising the only ethnic rivalries that persist: the struggles between Nissan and Daimler, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. Unfortunately, there are people around the world who do not read...
Basically, the Yugoslav problem is simple: it is a war of vanities, of various ethnic and religious groups vying for supremacy. If this sounds familiar to American and other Western readers, the parallel is intentional: after all, it was Tito, the arch-communist, who first implemented the New World Order of former President George Bush, of...
Writing her column the other day in a London newspaper, a feminist confessed that the women’s movement that started some 25 years ago had “spluttered to a halt.” Many a middle-aged feminist nowadays will tell you the same thing. The young, they will say with an air of regret, meaning their daughters and the friends...
According to a recent front-page story in the New York Times, the latest innovation of a particularly ambitious segment of the upwardly mobile American middle class is the replacement of the old-fashioned summer camp with getting-into-college camp. In proportion as the Times is ignorant of One Big Thing, its editors are highly knowledgeable about many...
How do I get a grant? You first must get an application. Forget about those grants for which you cannot apply, such as MacArthur Fellowships, which are essentially designed for people already known, which is to say celebrities, or incipient celebrities. Once you get the application, read its guidelines carefully to make sure you qualify...
“Our Union rests upon public opinion, and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war. If it cannot live in the affections of the people, it must one day perish.” —President James Buchanan, 1860 A poll of American historians, not long ago, chose James Buchanan as “the worst”...
I got a call from a Washington-based journalist the other day who wanted to know if Pat Buchanan had any influence on the platform of our current President. What a question! The guy sounded fairly young—at least, younger than me—so he doesn’t remember. Yes, but aren’t there books, articles, easily accessible on the internet? Has...
Yolanda and Raul Salazar of Miami, Florida, naturalized citizens who escaped Castro’s Cuba, are finding out the hard way that Uncle Sam’s classrooms are not about proficiency at anything, or literacy, or basics. America’s schools aren’t extensions of the home, where families are held sacred and parents are valued. Instead, American education is about “mental...
“The market may have its martyrdoms as well as the pulpit; and trade its heroisms, as well as war.” —John Ruskin We were two old parties, my visiting brother and I, sitting under the grape arbor at the end of a mild summer day. When I say “two old parties,” however, in the manner of...
The phrase “America’s Christian Heritage” might irritate any hearers who do not want to be classed as members of the tribe that first received its name in Antioch (Acts 11:26). But wait: we recognize that one does not have to be a member of the family to be remembered in a will, nor be of...
Publishers Weekly (Publishers Weakly in my book), though it is one of the most depressing magazines in America, obviously considers itself a sprightly, thoughtful, and somewhat “irreverent” publication, gifted with the insight to see that the emperor has no clothes on and blessed with the courage to stand forward and say so. In the bold...
Down and Out in Beverly Hills has a lot going for it. The film was directed and co-written by Paul Mazursky (Moscow on the Hudson). It has Richard Dreyfuss, Nick Nolte, and Bette Midler in the lead roles, as well as Tracy Nelson and “Little Richard” Penniman in supporting roles. The film was photographed in...
1959: I was eight years old. Had someone told me I would one day own and operate a bed-and-breakfast, homeschool my kids, and possess a laptop that allowed me to write instant letters to far-away friends or read newspapers from England, such predictions would have boggled my mind. “Homeschool,” “laptop,” and so on were words...
Our Founding Fathers understood that they had inaugurated a republican federal union unique in its balance and distribution of powers. Unlike their descendants, who self-indulgently congratulate themselves on their democracy, the Fathers also understood that the preservation of such a regime was a daunting and demanding task, requiring virtue (in the masculine Roman sense) on...
Less than a month after President Bush unbosomed his latest reflections on political philosophy before the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, one of the latest victims of his administration’s crusade to foster the “global democratic revolution” in Iraq was grousing that what the administration planned for his country simply wasn’t democratic enough. The Grand...
“I don’t know where democracy will end, but it can’t end in a quiet old age.” —Klemens von Metternich Rowland Evans and Robert Novak were among the first political commentators to designate the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan a watershed date in American political history. From their perspective in 1981, “What was so quickly started...
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every hook has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless...
Certain moments in a good story possess a quality that is logically very strange indeed, and that renders them often haunting and unforgettable. Consider Dorothea’s choice of Ladislaw as her lover in Middlemarch: the logic of fiction would dictate that Dorothea should pair up with Lydgate, who is a heavyweight like her, and if after...
The recent massacres and expulsions of Iraqi Christians are only the latest chapter in the genocide of the ancient and exclusively Christian Assyrians, a continuation of the bloody campaign that took place in the Ottoman Empire, Persia, and Iraq throughout the 20th Century. The Chaldean Catholics who are bearing the brunt of IS attacks in...
The March issue of Chronicles coincides with the 30th anniversary of the passing of novelist, essayist, poet, and conservationist Edward Abbey. This column appears as a chapter in The Hundredth Meridian: Seasons and Travels in the New Old West (Chronicles Press). It may or may not make sense for the living to think in arbitrary...
Cam Newton’s petulance after the Carolina Panthers lost to the Denver Broncos largely eclipsed the splendid season Newton had had before the Super Bowl. Since Donald Trump essentially clinched the GOP nomination after winning over 50% of the vote in seven consecutive primaries, a number of conservative pundits and Republican politicians have begun emulating Newton’s...
Having failed to establish much of a numerical presence in American society, the Episcopal Church, USA, succeeds in attracting attention by the continuing antics of a long parade of outrageous ecclesiastics. In 2003, attention focused on the ordination of openly homosexual Vicky Imogene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire. While I am reluctant to add...
I read Dr. Srdja Trifkovic’s highly coloured article on ChroniclesMagazine.org about the recently deceased Archduke Otto of Austria with a mixture of surprise and concern. Not a single one of his sources supported the entirely negative picture that he drew. Let’s see why. “Habsburg was an enthusiastic supporter of the Jihadist side in the Bosnian civil war,...
A remark one often hears from the current crop of film critics is that John Wayne might indeed merit the iconographic status conferred on him by tens of millions of ordinary cinemagoers around the world, were it not for the troubling matter of his alleged evasion of military service during World War II—an issue, it...
America, in case you haven’t noticed, is lost in the throes of celebrating the writing of its Constitution, which is now two centuries old. The somewhat labored efforts to fix public attention on the historic document are largely the work of former Chief Justice Warren Burger and his own private bureaucracy in the Commission on...
The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat; Avid Reader Press; 272 pp., $27.00 The ancient latin aphorism per aspera ad astra (“through rough things, to the stars”) might well be a fitting epigraph for New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s latest book. Its cover features a 19th century French illustration of Rabelais’ Gargantua et Pantagruel being fed...
The reopening of the great cathedral, Notre-Dame de Paris, is a great reminder of the achievements of Western civilization and our potential to live up to them.
“You want to go see Bo Gritz burn the U.N. flag?” My libertarian neighbor Bill, during the final days of the last presidential campaign, was making me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I have always been half-frustrated by mv failure to take advantage of all those radical activities in my college days during the 60’s....
The protagonist of a novel I’m now writing speaks in the voice of George Orwell, except that he uses the manly, tobacco-and-gin accents of reason, detachment, and persuasion to discuss love, rather than politics. The novel is called Earthly Love, and it will be the ninth book I’ve written, which is a painful thing to...