The Great War and its inevitable successor have been called Europe’s civil war, and there is some truth in this characterization. Divided by language, religion, and culture, the nations of Europe were nonetheless united in a common civilization that developed out of the ruins of the Christianized Roman Empire. Despite the strains brought on by...
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Hell Is Other People
Robin N—wasn’t sure what was wrong. The suburban Milwaukee mother of three had experienced a pang upon turning 35, but these “pangs” seemed to be intensifying as the months passed. Sometimes, they took the form of paralyzing depression; other times, of anxiety verging on panic. She found herself fearful of going out in public or...
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Too Much is Never Enough
Researchers report significantly increased rates of suicide among U.S. military personnel, college students, and baby boomers. Until now, suicide was most prevalent among teenagers and elderly persons. Journalists have suggested a number of explanations for the phenomenon, among the more plausible of them the structural collapse of the American family in which troubled, lonely, and...
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Mommy’s Little Monster
Monsters are an ancient phenomenon in human history: There have always been individuals whose characters are marked by brutal, sadistic cruelty, who lack any redeeming instincts of compassion or mercy. Call them what we will—fiends or psychopaths, ghouls or serial killers—this type is by no means new to the later 20th century, however much the...
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For God, Country, and Kate Smith
To that select few who have frequented its precincts, it is simply “The Major’s.” In reality it’s the “Globe and Laurel,” along Virginia’s Route One near the main gate to the U.S. Marine Corps Base, Quantico, Virginia. Its proprietor is a sandy haired, crewcut, toothbrush-mustached, immaculately turned out, retired Major of the U.S. Marine Corps:...
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The Quintessential Democratic Politician
What follows is an attempt to portray not the typical statesman, as he repeatedly appeared in the course of Western history up to yesterday, but the average professional politician of our times, the man (or woman) whose chosen trade is to govern his (or her) fellow citizens. Any ruler must somehow be subordinate to the...
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Groomers by Any Other Name
In the wake of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signing the Parental Rights in Education bill into law, the internet has been ablaze with debate as to whether those who advocate for LGBT curricula and policies in public schools should be described as “groomers.” The left is predictably up in arms over this controversy. And although...
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Carrier, Congress, and Cronies
“Crony capitalism” is the new buzzphrase, now that Donald Trump is cutting deals to keep jobs in the United States. When previous presidents cut deals to allow companies to build new factories in Mexico and overseas while shutting down factories here, no one called it crony capitalism, even though it was; we called those deals...
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Capture the Flag, Part II
We have it on good authority that the peacemakers are blessed, and that’s only fair, because we sure catch hell in this world. Not long ago I suggested that most Southerners who display the Confederate flag are not bigots and got some hate mail to the effect that only a bigot could believe that. Last...
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Playing With Wickedness
Henry and June Screenplay by Philip Kaufman and Rose Kaufman Directed and produced by Philip Kaufman Released by Miramax Tune in Tomorrow Screenplay by William Boyd Directed by Jon Amiel Produced by John Feidler and Mark Tarlov Released by Cinecom Entertainment Reversal of Fortune Screenplay by Nicholas Kazan Directed by Barbet Schroeder Produced by Edward...
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Slouching Toward Mar-a-Lago
The Post-Cold-War Consensus Collapses Like it or not, the president of the United States embodies America itself. The individual inhabiting the White House has become the preeminent symbol of who we are and what we represent as a nation and a people. In a fundamental sense, he is us. It was not always so. Millard...
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Everything Is Jake
My old man did not think much of writers; he had known too many of them. He did not like what little he had seen of Hemingway, and regarded his obsession with virility as unmanly. Hemingway, at least as a younger man, must have had few illusions about himself and his generation, and his first...
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The Promise of Life
“Give them hope, so they may fear.” —The Apocrypha There is no more Atlantis. “Where,” I was asked in prison, by a Yugoslav State Security agent, “is this Atlantis you would like to live in, Selic?” I didn’t tell him that I wanted to live in America, it being alive and well, and still above...
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The Crusade to Nowhere
My last conversation with Edward Thompson, the Marxist historian, was at the gates of Durham Castle. That, on reflection, was how it should have been. There was always something slightly grand about him, as if a castle, or at least a country mansion, might be a natural place for him. Durham Castle is now a...
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Having It All
You could say liberalism is about squaring the circle, if it weren’t for the fact that even liberals don’t really expect to accomplish this feat: They aim at creating the impression they can effect the impossible, and lying afterward about their success in having done it. In between comes an impressive array or sequence of...
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The Country Writer
I am as grateful for this award as I am surprised by it, and I certainly did not see it coming. Obviously, it cannot be easy to feel worthy of an award bearing the name of T.S. Eliot, and so probably I ought to say that I am grateful, but unconvinced. The etiquette attendant upon...
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How Aussies Lost Their Pride of Erin
“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” “The dog did nothing in the night-time.” “That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes. —Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “Silver Blaze” Some recent Australian cultural trends—massive Islamic immigration, for instance—are so...
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Shafik and Other College Presidents Have Mission Confusion
American colleges and universities have long been considered tops in the world, but this preeminence won’t last if they operate as mere indoctrination factories, turning out social activists instead of knowledgeable, independent thinkers.
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The Cost of Immigration—June 2009
PERSPECTIVE Immigration, Neighbors, and Enemiesby Thomas Fleming VIEWS The Economic Impact of Immigration by Peter BrimelowPaying for the Privilege. You Should Have Been Here Yesteryearby Roger D. McGrathWhen the Golden State was paradise. California Crashby John C. Seiler, Jr.The Golden State today. Mandating Failure by Edwin S. RubensteinFederal insistence on multilingualism. NEWS Bailing Out the Bucket...
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Avoiding the Iranian Debacle
It takes neither unique intellectual brilliance nor supernaturally honed intuitive skills to predict the consequences of hazardous foreign-policy moves. On numerous occasions over the past decade and a half, I have advised against U.S. military interventions not because of my visceral isolationist zeal, but because I deemed the consequences of those actions to be contrary...
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Plato and the Spirit of Modernity
In C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle the world of Narnia begins to dissolve and disappear. The Pevensie children are confused and frightened, but Professor Kirke, now Lord Digory, reassures them that the Narnia and the England they had known were only shadows compared to the reality they were about to experience. Then he mumbles to...
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Just War or Just Another War?
Political experts are certain that war with Iraq is on the horizon, though there is some disagreement about how distant that horizon might be. The way the Bush administration and media pundits invoke the words “justice” and “just war” without actually calling attention to the historical criteria for a just war has been disconcerting. The...
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What Trump Has Wrought
Should Donald Trump fall short of the delegates needed to win on the first ballot (1,237), there is growing certitude that he will be stopped. First by Ted Cruz; then, perhaps, by someone acceptable to the establishment, which always likes to have two of its own in the race. But Washington, the city of self-delusion,...
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Pluralism in Miniature
Science was a sacred cow in the United States in the 1950’s. The words “Science says . . . ” came with all the force of an imperial command. Pluralism has taken on the same status in the late 1980’s. As soon as the words “Our pluralistic society will not permit . . . ”...
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To Be Or Not to Be Western Civilization
Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization, by R.V. Young, is an invaluable defense of Shakespeare against modern anti-Western critics.
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Religion is out, fashion is in
So, at least, we might conclude from a poll conducted recently by Starch Advertisement Readership Service, which has been doing door-to-door opinion surveys since the l 930’s. The results of a poll taken in 1953 indicated that the top five areas of interest for American women at that time were: (1) religion, (2) food, (3)...
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In Praise of Cultural Appropriation
Recently I read of a 67-year-old woman who wanted to run in a marathon. She had never run for exercise in her life, but her desire and passion led her to put on a pair of sneakers, leave the house, and walk a mile. Every day she walked through her neighborhood, extending the distance a...
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White Guys and 9/11
Whiteness and maleness lately have been under constant attack. It’s worth remembering that 23 years ago our culture celebrated four white male heroes who stopped a terrorist attack in the skies above Pennsylvania.
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A Divisive Statement
The Dixie Chicks have caused quite a stir in Lee Greenwood’s America. To recap, for those who have taken E. Michael Jones’ advice and drop-kicked their television set out the front door: On March 10, during a concert in London, singer Natalie Maines said, “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the President of the United...
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Science Fiction, R.I.P.
To register the obituary long after the fact: science fiction is dead. Aficionados of the genre who acquired their taste for it in the 1950’s and 60’s probably already know this. What they might not know is that the death of science fiction has significance for the state of American culture in 1997. With the...
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Whose Side Is God On?
Does God take sides in conflicts between men? If He does, how can we tell? Is the side favored by God always victorious, or can a lost cause also have been blessed? Bob Dylan mocked the very notion of God taking sides in human warfare: Accept it with pride, For you don’t count the dead...
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Thomas More’s Supplication of Souls
“E’ la morte di una civilizazione.” (“It’s the death of a civilization.”) These were the words of the Vatican official who told me the following sad story at the beginning of September. It seems that, after the heat wave of August, hundreds of the cadavers of the lonely urban old folks of France were being...
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Three Classic Critics of the Revolution: A Bastille-Day Meditation (Part II)
Edmund Burke was not the only great early critic of the French Revolution. De Maistre and Taine also developed strong, distinct criticisms of the revolutionaries in the period immediately following the Terror.
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Another White House Globalist
Whenever it is polically expedient, Barack Obama criticizes free trade. He did it in 2008, when he told Ohio primary voters that he would renegotiate NAFTA. He did it in 2012, when his campaign saturated the industrial Midwest with ads criticizing Mitt Romney for outsourcing jobs to China at Bain Capital. But these noises are...
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Risking Nothing
Americans like to think this is a land of diversity unparalleled anywhere in the world, but in religious matters at least, such a view is far from the truth. America remains today substantially what it has always been, namely, a Christian country. While the United States is indeed home to a remarkable number of religious...
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Learning Goodness
From the July 1988 issue of Chronicles. 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...
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Remembering
Tazwell is a town in Claiborne County, Tennessee, about 45 minutes northeast of Knoxville on Highway 33, just south of the Kentucky border. On the muggy Saturday morning of June 3, 2000—the 192nd anniversary of the birth of Jefferson Davis and Confederate Memorial Day in Tennessee — some 200 people gathered in Tazwell’s Irish Cemetery...
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Trick or Treat?
During my first semester as a graduate teaching assistant, I was fired from my job at a coffee shop for mv inability to act phony. Anyway, this is what I suspected my particularly phony employer meant by a “bad attitude.” I quickly found that, despite the incredibly high taxes in Illinois, my state-university stipend was...
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Autopilot Wars: Sixteen Years, But Who’s Counting?
Consider, if you will, these two indisputable facts. First, the United States is today more or less permanently engaged in hostilities in not one faraway place, but at least seven. Second, the vast majority of the American people could not care less. Nor can it be said that we don’t care because we don’t know....
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Vote Claudius: He’ll Leave Your Sons Alone
When Edmund Burke called perfect democracy “the most shameful thing in the world,” he was not referring to the mixed forms of popular government that had existed in ancient Greece and Rome, much less to the newly liberated English colonies that had been struggling to form “a more perfect union” on the Eastern seaboard of...
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Betrayed by Britain
“And hung my head and wept at Britain’s name.” —Samuel Taylor Coleridge If there be monsters, they yawn from within. It is hard not to see justice in the story of an empire, brought low by its unwillingness to defend itself. “This book is in part a penance for unquestioningly accepting the Titoist bias shared...
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The Centaur
I used to make fun of them, those barelegged, ball-capped figures grunting under the weight of 90-pound loads giving them the appearance of Neil Armstrong on the moon or a man bearing his own coffin on his back: tall, headless silhouettes lurching from around a bend in the trail to dispel the illusion of primordial...
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The Vanishing Craftsman
The house is barely six months old, but it has already begun to settle. Loose steps creak, doors hang, and cracks appear along the baseboards. If I were a carpenter, as my father was for 40 years, or knew enough of such things, I would have built my own house, as he did. But I...
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From There to Here—And Back Again
“All great peoples are conservative; slow to believe in novelties; patient of much error in actualities; deeply and forever certain of the greatness that is in law, in custom once solemnly established, and now no longer recognized as just and final.” —Thomas Carlyle As the Clintons’ socialist steamroller grinds out new programs, new entitlements, higher...
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Never Mind Your Manners
Having been invited to address the topic of manners, I can only do so with a certain embarrassment, for I have been known to have behaved deplorably. Indeed, I was once even called “reprehensible” by a woman of repellent aspect, remotely connected with education, but, all things considered, I felt more honored than not. I...
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The Making of a Banana Republic
Now that the Rubicon has been crossed and we have entered a world in which politicians attempt to not merely defeat their opposition at the ballot box but also prosecute and incarcerate them, there is no going back.
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Iranian Crisis Escalates
Speaking to reporters during a visit to Turkey on January 19, Iran’s foreign minister Ali Akbar Salehi warned his country’s Arab neighbors against aligning themselves too closely with the United States in the ongoing crisis over Tehran’s nuclear program. Saudi Arabia was particularly vocal in its condemnation of Iran’s warning last month that it might close...
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Considering Bannon
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...
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Speaking for God or Men?
“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...
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A Message for Boys
The steamy morning reminded the congregation that Baltimore is on the shore and was once considered part of the South. The heat and the elderly substitute for the vacationing rector made the service informal and cozy, but if I had known the small church didn’t have air conditioning, I might have chosen some other Sunday...