Grover Cleveland, in all of his offices, from the first day to the last, steadfastly followed the principles of Jeffersonian conservatism.
1118 search results for: Forgotten%2525252BHistory
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Desperate Pretense
After two years of desperate pretense that the Bush administration is but the long afternoon of the Reagan era, many of Mr. Bush’s conservative supporters now begin to suspect that morning in America is fast lurching toward chaos and old night. The President’s apparent willingness to consider tax increases, despite his best-known campaign promise, and...
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Dwight Macdonald
A Rebel in Defense of Tradition is the title of Michael Wreszin’s 1994 biography of Dwight Macdonald (1906- 1982). It is a very good title, by which I mean something more than a “handle”; it is a precise phrase, a summary properly affixed to the memory of an extraordinary man. The emphasis of Wreszin’s biography...
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Backstage: The Hidden Heroes of MAGA
In the end the task of making America great again will depend upon the backstage crew of ordinary Americans who are doing the hard work of making America good again.
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The Prism’s Prison
Sometimes it seems that I have become the master of a single plaintive note, sung by the disembodied voice of the patron saint of grasshoppers, Marie Antoinette, from somewhere beyond the tomb. And it is true that often, when I reread whatever I have written, I am reminded of Russian dictionaries of fenya, or for...
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It Was the Worst of Times
The French Revolution was a cancer that metastasized and spread through Western societies, weakening them to the point of collapse. Even the European and American right did not escape being contaminated by the forces they struggled against, and, certainly, by the end of the 19th century, it was increasingly difficult to frame a conservative argument...
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Some Church Lives Matter More Than Others
Here is a textbook illustration of how the corporate media’s sins of omission can be far more damning than the corrupted industry’s sins of commission. Over the weekend, thousands of patriotic citizens descended on Washington, D.C., to protest election fraud and defend President Donald Trump. Left-wing “black bloc” mobs threw water bottles,...
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Reel Crimes, True Illusions
True Crime Produced by Malpaso Productions Directed by Clint Eastwood Screenplay by Andrew Klavan and Larry Gross Released by Warner Bros. The Matrix Produced by Groucho II Film Partnership and Silver Pictures Directed by Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski Screenplay by Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski Released by Warner Bros. Clint Eastwood’s True Crime lives...
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The Great Unrest
Bro. Billy Joe had been correct, Héctor reflected bitterly: Abdul Agha and the Crusade for Souls were a nationwide story all right, though everyone tried to pretend it was nothing more than a curious local phenomenon. From the start, the New Mexico media had sought the appropriate tone in reference to a “certain unrest” in...
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Remembering Tender Mercies
In the years just before America’s entry into World War II, thousands of people, shaken and scattered by the Great Depression, made their way to Houston, where the shipyards were booming. My people wound up there, too. The place they lived was called West End, rows of little white houses set up on cinder blocks,...
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Copperhead Road
I grew up in Alden, New York, a small town about 20 miles east of Buffalo. My parents still live there, and they (especially my mother) are very active in the town historical society and its museum. In that museum is a worn old wooden desk, unremarkable except for the sign that explains that it...
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The Big Bore of Arkansas
“‘Jour printer, by trade; do a little in patent medicines; theatre-actor—tragedy, you know; take a turn at mesmerism and phrenology when there’s a chance; teach singing—geography school for a change; sling a lecture, sometimes—oh, I do lots of things—most anything that comes in handy, so it ain’t work. What’s your lay?’” —The Duke, Huckleberry Finn...
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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 Yankees...
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A False Flag, or Fog of War over Ukraine?
A Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 bound for Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam was shot down in eastern Ukraine Thursday afternoon, killing all 298 passengers and crew. It was hit as it cruised at 33,000 feet above the war-ravaged Donetsk Oblast, 35 miles west from the Russian border. The airliner’s demise has the potential to escalate the...
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Restore the Constitution!
In recent years, American politics has been preoccupied with moral questions, or what are now called “social issues”: sexual immorality, sodomy, abortion, pornography, and recreational drugs. Some conservatives want the federal government to play a role in opposing these evils. Many libertarians, on the other hand, want the government, state and federal alike, to treat...
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If God Ran the State Department
“In the Name of the most Holy & undivided Trinity.” A Thus begins the Treaty of Paris (1783) by which Great Britain formally conceded the existence of the independent United States of America. This matter-of-fact invocation of the Triune God of Christianity stands in sharp contrast to the stirring tributes to human authority in the...
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Conservative Commons
American conservatism in the late 18th century was unlike the European species, where popular “peasant” and articulate “aristocratic” conservatism were able to develop together and to maintain a common front against the ascendant bourgeoisie. With the exile of loyalists and the waning of the old Federalists, American conservatism was effectively decapitated; nevertheless, a popular conservatism...
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Europe Is Not What It Seems
It would be logical for me to say that, returning to the United States after another four months this summer and fall in various countries of Europe, east and west, I found a great many misconceptions about the continent in American media and public opinion. Yet it would not be fair to limit myself to...
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America’s Unsustainable Empire
Before President Trump trashes the Iran nuclear deal, he might consider: If he could negotiate an identical deal with Kim Jong Un, it would astonish the world and win him the Nobel Peace Prize. For Iran has no nuclear bomb or ICBM and has never tested either. It has never enriched uranium to bomb grade....
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On the Blue-Eyed Coulter
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,...
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Remembering Warren G. Harding
Harding was a consummate conservative governed by humility, kindness, and charity for all: principles that guided him in both his personal life and his political career.
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The Grandfather With the Tear-Gas Foundation Pen
Hard by the railroad station at the Michigan town of Plymouth there stands a bungalow so huge as to be almost majestic, now a kennel for well-bred poodles. There I was born, in 1918. The house—which belonged to my grandfather, Frank Pierce—was one of the earliest of prefabricated dwellings, purchased from Sears, Roebuck, and Company,...
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Hold the Gush
Like Virginia Woolf and Mary McCarthy, Rupert Brooke and Bruce Chatwin, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s striking appearance greatly enhanced her literary reputation. Readers were drawn to her poetry by her good looks and notorious sexual behavior. When she lost her health and beauty and became an alcoholic and a drug addict, she lost her following...
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Visions of Disorder
Richard Weaver once wrote that it was difficult to perceive the decline of civilization because one of the characteristics of decline was a dulling of the perception of value, and thus of the capacity to judge the comparative worth of times. Weaver, I think, did not have us common folk in mind, for whom it...
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True Grit
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...
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America’s Other War
Americans are understandably concerned about the grave security situation in Iraq. The United States has suffered more than 2,500 fatalities in that conflict and has yet to defeat the insurgency. Indeed, the level of violence in Iraq is increasing, and much of that violence now consists of sectarian bloodshed between Sunnis and Shiites. The American...
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Comment
Democracy, its failures, weaknesses, and sins not withstanding, is the only political system in which the entire social body is to decide on who should conduct its affairs in its name. By the electoral process the majority’s opinion is consecrated as a source of legitimate political power. Annals record many variations of democratic societies in...
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Alive and Well
The Tenth Amendment is alive and well in Ohio. On June 28, right before the state legislature recessed, Representative Michael Wise and Senator Grace Drake introduced into the Ohio General Assembly “House Concurrent Resolution No. 44” with 27 house cosponsors and 3 senate cosponsors. The resolution was referred to the House Committee on Economic Affairs...
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Forgetting China
I am unusual among American conservatives in feeling quite positive about the rise of a strong and prosperous China. Not long since, I was exploring Beijing’s thronged Wangfujing Street, which is consumer heaven, and it was sobering to realize that the ancestors of virtually all those prosperous customers would have been permanently hungry peasants who...
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America’s Forgotten 400th Anniversary
We seem to hear little this year about the arrival of the Pilgrims in Massachusetts in November 1620. Perhaps the coronavirus is the cause, or maybe the ugly mess and turmoil of our presidential election has overshadowed its remembrance. Or maybe political correctness has claimed another victim. Whatever the case, the 400th anniversary...
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Gabriel’s Horn
Surely, no American city has endured such a history of disaster as Charleston, set beguilingly beside the Atlantic upon her fragile spit of earth between the Ashley and Cooper rivers. Fires, floods, epidemics, blockades, sieges, bombardments, hurricanes, and earthquakes have repeatedly scarred her, but arguably the great Charleston earthquake of 1886 was the most destructive...
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The Faustian Bargain of Dorian Gray
Albert Lewin’s 1945 film, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is the perfect selection for this season of reflection about our mortality and the virtues we need to cultivate to make life worth living.
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Beautiful Losers
When T.S. Eliot said that there are no lost causes because there are no won causes, he probably was not thinking of American conservatism. Nearly sixty years after the New Deal, the American right is no closer to challenging its fundamental premises and machinery than when Old Rubberlegs first started priming the pump and scheming...
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To Hell With Culture
“The corruption of man,” Emerson wrote, “is followed by the corruption of language.” The reverse is true, and a century later Georges Bernanos had it right: “The worst, the most corrupting lies are problems wrongly stated.” How pertinent this is about so many matters present, including the use of the word culture. My conservative friends...
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Does God Believe in Gun Control?
“You are doing God’s work,” Brady Bill sponsor Charles Schumer remarked to Sarah Brady at a congressional hearing. And perhaps one could argue that if it took God seven days to make the world, people should not be able to buy a handgun in any less time. But did God really support the Brady Bill?...
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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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If It Ain’t Broke . . .
Greek teachers are frequently asked which text they recommend for introductory Greek. Although many new textbooks have come along since 1928, when An Introduction to Greek by Henry Crosby and John Schaeffer was first published, none has rivaled, much less surpassed, this old warhorse. It is not that the rivals are without merit. James Allen’s...
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Off the Hook
Officer Laurence Powell is off the hook, at least for now. Dealing a severe blow to the civil rights establishment and federal police power, the Supreme Court has overruled the Ninth Circuit Court’s motion to stiffen the sentence handed down in the federal trial of Powell and Stacey Koon, who were found guilty of violating...
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Come, Ye Thankful People
A “progressive” rap on “social conservatives”: All they crave is power to tell you whom to sleep with, and how, and what god (if any) to worship. This contrasts, naturally, with broad-minded types of the progressive persuasion, who don’t care what you do, morally speaking, so long as you don’t say or do anything insensitive...
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Season Your Admiration
Mission: Impossible 2 Produced by Cruise-Wagner Productions and Paramount Pictures Directed by John Woo Screenplay by Robert Towne Released by Paramount Pictures Hamlet Produced by Double A Films Directed by Michael Almereyda Screenplay by Michael Almereyda, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet Released by Miramax Films Small Time Crooks Produced by Sweetland Films Directed by Woody Allen Screenplay...
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The Goodness of King George
In The Last King of America, Andrew Roberts shows George III to be a much better man and king than the caricature presented by propagandists on both sides of the Atlantic.
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Little Goodbyes
The sun is breaking through, the dark green grass shimmering as it is swept back and forth by the wind like the mane of a wild mustang running along a plain. Down here, near Madisonville along I-45 South, the rains had come hard and heavy. The roadside is aglow in the white sunlight with the...
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Multiple-Choice Quandaries
The necessity of choosing is a fact of life. At even a tender age, one must choose between a doll or a tea set, a wagon or a tricycle, Captain Crunch or Frosted Flakes. As one becomes older, the choices become more difficult and more significant. When one is wise enough–lucky enough–to choose well, things remain...
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Moscow in Malibu
This new consideration of a well-worn subject is altogether justified for two salient reasons. The first is that Red Star Over Hollywood contains new material and judgment fortified by new research and information; the second, that the topic has been distorted not only by failures of interpretation but by continuing exploitation, even today. The Radoshes...
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Trump Is Right: The Left Wants a Bloodbath
No one has yet explained how Trump would end “democracy,” but as usual for the left, it seems to be a case of projection.
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Stereotyping Europeans (I): Poland
Having turned 60 last month I should start taking stock of my life, making the reasonable assumption that the best is behind me (infantile baby-boomer assertion that “sixty is the new forty” notwithstanding). Yes, I am doing that, but such musings are not to be shared. A byproduct, which may be of some interest to...
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Abe-Worship
At the end of the recent remake of Planet of the Apes—turn the page now if you still plan to see it—the hero escapes from said planet and its monstrous chimp-tyrant, General Thade. Returning to Earth at night, his spacecraft crashes in, of all places, the Reflecting Pool at the Washington Mall, and he solemnly...
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Conservative Commons
This article first appeared in the December 1987 issue of Chronicles. American conservatism in the late 18th century was unlike the European species, where popular “peasant” and articulate “aristocratic” conservatism were able to develop together and to maintain a common front against the ascendant bourgeoisie. With the exile of loyalists and the waning of the...
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History Lessons
As I write I have in front of me a number of statements, articles, and conference projects—and more are coming to my attention almost daily—indicating what amounts to an invasion of Eastern and Central Europe by Western zealots, do-gooders, investors, gurus, and sharks. They emanate from American and West European offices, banks, institutes, universities, and...
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Israel at 70: Bibi’s Troubled Hour of Power
For Bibi Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister save only founding father David Ben-Gurion, it has been a week of triumph. Last Tuesday, President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal as Bibi had demanded. Thursday, after Iran launched 20 missiles at the Golan Heights, Bibi answered with a 70-missile attack...