Once the right allowed the left to frame politics as the avoidance of tragedy, they lost the game. We’d do well to reconsider what Christopher Lasch called the “limits and hope” of politics.
1118 search results for: Forgotten%2525252BHistory
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Unpalatable Values: Culture as Gastronomy
To American readers the name A.A. Gill may mean nothing, but in England the restaurant and television critic of the Sunday Times is a cultural force to be reckoned with. A witty autodidact, with plenty of disdain for the pieties of the moment, to easily deafened ears he is a Jeremiah of the petit-four and...
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Who Is Henry Galt? Ayn Rand and Plagiarism
Can it be that a fraud has been perpetrated on the readers and admirers of novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand—a literary and intellectual swindle that veers perilously close to plagiarism? That such a charge could be leveled at the author of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged is irony bordering on farce. For the spirit that animated the...
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No Capitulation: A Call to Southern Conservatives
The following speech critical of the conservative establishment is one that I did not give at The Charleston Meeting, in Charleston, S.C., whither I was invited by its organizer Gene d’Agostino, as a speaker for the evening of April 14. After espying copies of my book on antifascism for sale on a table in the...
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The Divine Left vs. the New Right
This time around, the divine left is definitely short of ideological change. Once upon a recent time it went to sleep with uncle Stalin; much later, it began to yawn with the revisionist Trotsky, Mao, and Tito; today, it is noisily waking up to the tune of politically correct liberalism. Even a layman must raise...
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Dead Weight
“A conservative government is an organized hypocrisy.” —Benjamin Disraeli It may speak volumes about American conservatives that David Frum’s critique of “big government conservatism” permitted William Buckley—or so Buckley claims on the dust jacket—to enjoy “the most refreshing ideological experience in a generation.” To a conservative movement led by advocates of national uplift allied with...
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Waste of Money
Frustration Joyce Carol Oates: Mysteries of Winterthurn; E. P. Dutton; New York. When it’s literary gee-whiz time, people like Isaac Asimov — the man who produces books, stories, and essays the way that McDonald’s cranks out Big Macs, fries, and Cokes — are trotted out. In the face of Asimov, many literate persons, most of...
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Parietals Then and Now
As a Columbia University undergraduate in 1956, I resided in Hartley Hall, a stately building on the Morningside campus. During my orientation week I was introduced to my floor counselor who said in an unambiguous way that hijinks would not be permitted on his watch. He highlighted one rule which could never be disobeyed: women...
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End American Gerontocracy
Joe Biden's latest fall demonstrates again that he is a massive liability as president. It also shows how America is suffering from gerontocratic rule, with aging Baby Boomers in their 70s and 80s dominating leadership positions.
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A Hatchery at The Nation
If Eleanor Roosevelt was the self-appointed godmother of post-New Deal liberalism, then Freda Kirchwey was its unelected recording (and traveling) secretary. Each woman understood her role and memorized her lines before assuming her part in her long and stormy run on the political stage. In preparation for her grand entrance each woman took a good...
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False Narratives Driving America’s Immigration Policies
Before any serious work can be done to correct America’s border policy failures, we must dispel the false narratives about immigration that too many Americans still accept as fact.
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The Moral and Intellectual Collapse of America’s Political Parties
It is no longer news that 2020 saw a collapse of political discourse and public behavior in the United States. Trends that developed over many years intensified last year. One major political party had as its candidate for president a magnetic figure who can also be nasty and lacking in verbal self-control. The other party...
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A Christmas Parable
It was beginning to feel a lot like Christmas. The stores were staying open until midnight, and the crowded malls were noisy. But all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. We had just settled down for a long winter’s nap, when there was a clatter on the roof and...
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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...
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The Town Meeting
When America was closer to her democratic roots, citizens held town meetings to discuss problems and vote on policies. I was born too late to participate in any of those meetings myself, but the idea of getting together with other concerned citizens to discuss important issues has a nostalgic appeal for me. Consequently, I jumped...
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The Primacy of Privacy
People forget, in an age of promotion, self-promotion, publicity, advertising, the internet, and social media, that personal privacy is essential not only to civility but to civilization. Today, as never before in history, the maintenance of privacy depends on the moral fortitude to resist intrusion by others and the self-restraint and tact not to intrude...
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Political Art and Artful Politics
We speak as readily of the art of politics as we do of the art of cooking or writing, and what we have in mind in each case is what the French call savoir faire. This sense of “art” claims excellence for the activity of which the term is predicated, and since to know what...
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Conrad Aiken
I was to meet Cap Pearce at his office at 12:30, for discussion of a book contract and for one of our lunches at a small Italian restaurant in the East Thirties where the veal scallopini was well pounded and the wine muscular. But Cap called and said, “Come early. Conrad Aiken will be here...
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The Electric Conductor
Back in the day, was there anyone more famous than Arturo Toscanini? Everyone knew who he was, what he did, and what he looked like. He was more famous than Walt Disney and got coverage like a movie star. And even the sight-challenged were aware of his performances and recordings. The first recording I ever...
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Shiny, Happy People
Like death, suffering is inescapable. It represents the burden of being. But too often today, Americans are trying to escape it with therapeutics and chemicals, neatly packaged as happiness in a bottle.
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Chronicling the Fall
“Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than malice can be in the intent.” —Halifax The correspondence of Edmund Burke, whose letters help to illuminate his published works, was not available in a complete edition until 1978. Today, however, it seems that every aspiring journalist begins saving his correspondence even...
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Unending Journeys
Few subjects arouse such atavistic emotions as migration—whether the arrivals come as conquerors or as kin, fleeing ordeals or seeking opportunities. For incomers, migration can represent a dream, a rational choice, an urgent necessity, or a last hope. For recipient countries, it can be an infusion of energy, a reunion, a social challenge, or an...
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Teaching Children To Be Unbiased Is Impossible
A comic from NPR caught my eye the other day. Promising to tell parents “how to raise informed, active citizens,” the scrawled images and text stressed the importance of civics and made several recommendations on how parents can work instruction of this topic into everyday life. The suggestions range from using fun and games, to...
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Southern Men, American Persons
“Sweet home Alabama / Where the skies are so blue.” It has been many years since anyone made money from patriotic songs dedicated to Illinois or New Jersey. Chicago and New York have their anthems of course, to say nothing of San Francisco, but no one is going to get into a fight over “the...
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The Journalist and the Fixer: Who Makes the Story Possible?
We were already roaring down the road when the young man called to me over his shoulder. There was a woman seated between us on the motorbike and with the distance, his accent, the rushing air, and the engine noise, it took a moment for me to decipher what he had just said: We might...
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Trade Without Frontiers
“Trade without frontiers”—when the European Economic Community talks about barrier-free trade, the wall begins at Spain and the US is left on the wrong side of it, as the Bush administration, which has supported the coming federation of Europe, is beginning to discover. In October the EEC voted 10 to 2 to adopt a set...
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Perot, the Proto-Trump
One evening in the fall of 2015, with the unlikely Donald J. Trump already dominating the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, I ran into Ross Perot, Jr., at an exclusive charity event in Dallas. Perot is a billionaire real estate developer and the only son of H. Ross Perot, who campaigned for president...
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Sesquicentennial Sidelights
Despite all that has passed since, the war of 1861-65 arguably remains the central event of American history. In proportion to population no other event equals it in mobilization, death, destruction, and revolutionary change. We are into the Sesquicentennial, and one would like to think that Americans will take the opportunity to contemplate where we...
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Law, Morality, and Religion
A paleoconservative thinks about the law the way Edmund Burke did. The basis of all law is the will of God or, to use the term employed by Blackstone (another hero of paleoconservatives), “natural law.” According to natural law as understood by Blackstone, Burke, and our late 18th-century American Founding Fathers (as paleoconservatives can still...
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Tale of a “Seditionist”
Lawrence Dennis was an outsider in a movement of outsiders, a unique and largely solitary figure whose career as a writer—and notorious “seditionist”—embodies the tragedy and bravery of the Old Right, the pre-World War II “America first” generation of conservative intellectuals and activists. In many important ways, Dennis is the prototype of modern “paleo conservatives.”...
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The Titanic 90’s
Titanic Produced by James Cameron and Jon Landau Directed by James Cameron Screenplay by James Cameron Released by Paramount and 20th Century Fox The umpteenth movie about the sinking of the great ship finally meets modern standards. James Cameron’s Academy Award-winning Titanic may be the “movie of the year,” but it is just as dishonest,...
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Deconstructing the 1619 Project
Several years ago, I purchased a used copy of Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974), one of the five most important books on American slavery that have appeared in the last 50 years. The previous owner had inserted a series of newspaper clippings of book...
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Homo Sovieticus Lives On
To the old popular proverb, “The only good communist is a dead communist,” we should perhaps now add: “Once a communist, forever a communist.” Although as a muscled ideology communism is dead, as a way of life it is still very much alive. Similar to any other past and present mass belief or theology, communism...
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A Week of Mondays
“There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson What helps set this study apart is its still largely verboten subject. Joseph Scotchie devotes his attention to that part of the American right that Lee Edwards, Jonathan M. Schoenwald, and William Rusher...
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Renaissance in Education
When I accepted President Reagan’s appointment to be chairman of the National Council on Educational Research, I did so because I welcomed the opportunity to learn firsthand how professional bureaucrats approached America’s many and increasingly serious educational problems. After some time spent at my appointed task, I realized that bureaucrats were not capable of solving...
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A Tale of Two Cities
Visits in the space of ten days to Toronto, Ontario, and then Tifton, Georgia, demand reflective analysis for stronger reasons than the compelling force of alliteration. The city and the town are so different that the visitor to both is driven to look for the faintest similarities. Once that effort is made, however, sweeping conclusions...
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What a Swell Party This Is
The final presidential election of the millennium is still more than a year away, but by last summer rumblings of discontent with the plastic dashboard figurines who are the leading candidates of the two major plastic dashboard political parties were already audible. The rumblings first attracted national notice when Pat Buchanan, in the course of...
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Ethnicity as a Way of Life
Years ago, an Hungarian friend of mine, eager to finish a novel, decided to go to Corsica to find the peace and quiet he craved. Some six months later, after he returned to Paris, I asked him if, during his stay, he had picked up any Corsican. Not much, he admitted, except for a phrase...
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Biden at Tulsa Is a Study in Historical Confusion
In a rambling performance taking three-quarters of an hour, President Joe Biden spoke at Tulsa on the anniversary of the murderous events of 1921. He subjected his audience to his usual mangled sentences, omitting key words or parts of speech, sometimes to the point of total incomprehensibility. In fairness it should be noted that he is hardly...
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The Origins of the Jerk
(Inspired by Clyde Wilson) Every human society has had its share of offensive or annoying people: busybodies and bores, poseurs and bullies, cheapskates and check-grabbers, hypocrites and egomaniacs. You might even be able to define some societies by the offensive characters they tend to produce or by the qualities they find most offensive. Southerners used to regard...
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Marbury v. Madison
The impact of judicial review has been profound and often detrimental to the rule of law in America. Judicial review is the power of the courts to void federal, state, and local laws and ordinances that they have determined to be incompatible with the U.S. Constitution. Certainly, national and state legislatures have passed laws that...
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Voices: An Excerpt From ‘Entered From the Sun’
“Are you acquainted with Christopher Marlowe?” “The poet?” “The same.” “I am surprised you do not speak of him in the past tense. He has been dead for some while.” “Since May of ’93, as it happens.” “Well, then,” Hunnyman tells the young man. “At that same time our company was performing in the North.”...
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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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A Different Past
Sometimes historical scholarship tells us more about the present than about the past. In June 2005, an exhibit of Omar ibn Said’s The Life, the only known autobiography written by an American black while in bondage, was on display in the lobby of the U.N. headquarters. What made it even more significant was that The...
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Those Oldies But Goodies
An Italian-American restaurant I count on features sound reasons for my presence there, and that of others. I like the tone in that environment. There is an aspect of 1950’s atmosphere—the place is quiet, the lighting subdued, and the manners polite. The menu is gratifying when the garlic is held in control, and the service...
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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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Eternal Memory
As we round the curve, the driver pulls up short—at least, as short as you can when you’re only going five miles per hour in the first place. As the minibus shudders to a halt, we all shift in our seats to get a better view out of the windshield. There, up ahead on the...
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Academic Sins
Frank: “They threw me out for plagiarizing.” Ernest: “You were stealing songs?” Frank: “No, I was taking notes.” —from a Frank and Ernest cartoon (Frank has been expelled from music school) A graduate student asked if he could take a reading course; sitting at my feet, I thought, talking with the rabbi. He was...
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The Chechen War Far From Over
The Chechen War, as the Russian leadership discovered in early March, is far from over. On the night of March 2, a convoy of nine trucks, carrying about 100 Internal Ministry special forces troops from Grozny to the strategically important crossroads village of Pervomayskava, was ambushed by an estimated 40 Chechen boyevikiy (“fighters” or “warriors”)....
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Wreckers and Builders
Twenty-five years is a long time to get back to where you started, but two-and-a-half decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is the United States, not the Russian Federation, that has succeeded in restoring the threat of nuclear annihilation to the global conversation. And, by means of economic sanctions, energy-infrastructure intrusions, and...