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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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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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...
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It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over
“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...
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Racial Integrity
“You only have I known among all the families of the earth.” —Amos 3:2 The early chapters of the Bible present two major stories of judgment: the Deluge and the Tower of Babel. The first, the story of the dramatic “liquidation” of the vast majority of the human race, has no parallel in recorded history,...
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James Burnham, R.I.P.
He was a controversialist. As a literary critic he argued with T.S. Eliot, and as a Trotskyist he quarreled with Trotsky himself. Almost alone among the ex-Communists, he made the full journey to a conservative world view, and before his death he returned to the Catholic faith. He wrote many books, some of which will...
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The Left-Hand Path
Last May, the New Republic carried an informative article about how contemporary exponents of Cabala, a school of Jewish mysticism dating from the Middle Ages (if not earlier), have shaped the minds (such as they are) of such celebrities as Mick Jagger, Britney Spears, Demi Moore, and Madonna. The Material Girl herself was quoted from...
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Many Children Left Behind During COVID
Though some students have found learning at home relieves them of school’s social stresses, many others miss their teachers, classmates, and the routine of the school day. Some of the little ones have become more defiant and have reverted to bed-wetting, while many older students suffer from depression. In “The Children of Quarantine: What does...
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Gigantic in Everything
When you visit a foreign capital for the first time, sooner or later you are likely to be asked the question: “What do you think of our country?” or “What is your impression of this city?” In St. Petersburg, which I had visited in May, I had a ready answer: Everything there (the worst as...
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The Sea Gave Up the Dead
“Lord, he looks so peaceful,” Miss Alice said tearfully. I braced myself for a long two hours at my post—and that was before the funeral started. Interrupting my thoughts, she looked up at me and spoke in a whisper that was loud enough for Pastor Brown, who was standing on the other side of the...
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Thomas Fleming and Mother Teresa: Undoubted Motives in the Morality of Everyday Life
“Name one.” —Anonymous Too bad that, since 1966, they are no longer adding titles to the Index of Prohibited Books. My more than ten years as diocesan censor librorum—was it this past distinction that gained me the happy task of writing this review?—would lead me to grant Thomas Fleming’s The Morality of Everyday Life: Rediscovering...
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Russia’s Way Back
Liberalism’s Glorious Age of parliamentary democracy, nation building and national consolidation, free trade, and empire, of which Great Britain was the chief power and paramount symbol, reached a catastrophic close in 1914. After 1945, liberalism in renovated form attempted to launch a modern Glorious Age dominated by the Pax Americana and the United Nations and...
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Missed Manners and Creeping Laws
All societies regulate personal behavior: That is part of what makes them societies, instead of mere aggregations of isolated individuals. Societies differ enormously, though, in just how they perform this regulation, how much they rely on law and the state, rather than informal or private means. If I walk into a crowded room wearing a...
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The “Melting” Experience: Grow or Die
I have a friend, a Boston thoracic surgeon, who has a great sensitivity for issues concerning the meaning of life and the nature of man. It’s easy to understand how a man who spends the best part of his busy days at the pressure-packed juncture of life and death could become absorbed in philosophical thought....
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Occupying Iraq
Beirut’s occupation in 1983 by U.S. Marines may provide a small-scale sample of what a prolonged U.S. occupation of Iraq could be like, should the Pollyannaish postwar scenarios of some members of the War Party fail to materialize. Of course, the two situations are, in some ways, very different. Beirut, for instance, is just a...
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A Family Affair
One of the little-remarked phenomena of modern popular music is the fact that the familial tradition evident 1930’s, 40’s, and 50’s (e.g. the Mills Brothers, the Andrews Sisters, Steve and Edie) continues on. Merciful impulses insist that the Partridge Family and Sonny and Cher are expunged from consideration. The Davies brothers, Ray and Dave, of...
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The Evil That Men Don’t Do: Joe McCarthy and the American Right
His is probably the most hated name in American history. Other villains—Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr, Alger Hiss, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—today evoke merely the esoteric passions of the antiquarian or the interminable controversies of partisans. Only Joe McCarthy has given his name to an enduring term of political abuse, and in American politics today there...
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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...