Imagine America invaded by a foreign power, one that has quadruple the population and industrial base. Imagine that this enemy has free access to the world’s goods as well as an inexhaustible supply of cannon fodder from the proletariat of other countries, while America itself is tightly blockaded from the outside world. New York and...
Whatever President Bush says about the âfamily valuesâ of the growing horde of illegal Mexican immigrants, chilling newspaper accounts and cold data tell a different tale. On April 29, 2005, an illegal alien from Guatemala, Ronald Douglas Herrera Castellanos, was power washing a deck at the Nagle home in New City, New York. In her...
From the December 1991 issue of Chronicles. In 1920, when Rose Wilder Lane met Dorothy Thompson, Lane was 33 and working in Paris, writing publicity stories for the American Red Cross. She had started out in California at the San Francisco Bulletin; written biographies of Herbert Hoover, Henry Ford, and Jack London; and she would...
A generation arose and took its place in the life of Russia, which did witness Boris Nemtsov as a political heavyweight. The governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region, vice-premier, who was seen as an heir to Yeltsin, breathtaking ascension in his political career, and an ability to make country-wide policy—all this left Boris Nemtsov together...
Progressive arrogance. Technocratic overreach. Social engineering. Racial tension. Expanding executive powers. Aggressive and endless waves of “experts.” Economic disparity and unrest. “Us” versus “them.” All are characteristics of social and political life in recent years in the United States. So much so that some pundits and observers apparently find the combination alarming and unique—even unprecedented—in...
The collapse of communist systems has not eliminated the need for a better understanding of the impact they had and how and why they persisted. Only in the aftermath of their unraveling has it become possible to gain insight into these matters as books earlier suppressed are published and as the people of the former...
In Britain, the late 1940’s and early 50’s were probably the hardest years of the 20th century. For millions of people, the postwar decade was one of icy nights in gaslit rooms, interminable queues, and meals composed of whale fat and tinned beef—the comically vile ingredients of a serious sacrifice that particular generation is unlikely...
Thomas Fleming’s criticism of Ludwig von Mises and his student, Friedrich von Hayek (“Abuse Your Illusions,” Perspective, January), overlooks or misinterprets major contributions of both. In Socialism (1922), Mises was the first economist to show the unworkability of socialist systems. He based his analysis on the impossibility of establishing a price structure for the various...
“The tone and tendency of liberalism . . . is to attack the institutions of the country under the name of reform and to make war on the manners and customs of the people under the pretext of progress.” —Benjamin Disraeli Although Paul Gottfried begins his most recent book with what...
An idea from Horace Greeley and the post-Civil War burst of national imagination has come to the fore again.
On occasion I have written here about the evils of photography, while other readers of this magazine may remember my having voiced more general apprehensions with respect to the transformation undergone by the human mind in an age when, by pressing a button, a suburban housewife may proclaim herself Baudelaire or Monet. Recently, I found...
Some years ago I was interviewed by a reporter for Corriere della Sera, Italy’s most prestigious newspaper. He had heard that I was a follower of Umberto Bossi, leader of the secessionist Lega Nord, and he wanted to know what plans I had for breaking up the United States. After disclaiming any secessionist political agenda,...
Can a culture celebrate those who want to destroy it and still stand? We are about to find out in this fateful November. Until recently, I thought the word “demonic” no more than a figure of speech. It carried a chill dislodged from religious myth and absorbed into literary aesthetics. As an accessory to prose, I...
Chappaquiddick Produced and distributed by Entertainment Studios Directed by John Curran Screenplay by Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan A Quiet Place Produced by Platinum Dunes Directed and written by John Krasinski Distributed by Paramount Pictures On July 18, 1969, Sen. Edward Kennedy infamously drove off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island. He had left a late-night...
For more than a week after his encounter with Jacinta Ruiz, Héctor avoided the Pink Store, finding an excuse to drive Jesús “Eddie” to Geronimo’s Bar & Grill in Deming—which Jesús much preferred anyway—instead. All this time, the Centaur’s statue stood on the top shelf of his computer hutch, where he had to make the...
The sun broke through the thin, whispery clouds, and its reflection in a pool of water collected from the previous night’s rain caught my eye. Suddenly the day was bright and the morning as clear and joyful as hope itself. Resurrection Day. It was Easter morning in a year that will surely be marked down...
photo of Rosa Ponselle as Reiza in Oberon Of course my account of “the vocal scene” is not by the late George Jellinek—that cultured gentleman of Hungarian background. He had an extensive, even encyclopedic knowledge of the history of singing. His presentations of The Vocal Scene were the best things of their kind I have...
T. S. Eliot was a traditionalist, but he was also an aesthete, one who defended the independence of art and lauded the highly individualistic work of various modern poets. The caricatures never do him justice.
I recently returned to Toronto from a long visit to Poland, a trip on a Polish LOT Airlines jet that took only nine-and-a-half hours but would have taken months in an earlier age. In general, Toronto represents one extreme of modern development, to which Poland is a happy opposite. Nevertheless, there is a considerable Polish...
The murder of 21 Christians in a New Year’s Day bomb attack in Alexandria will accelerate the ongoing exodus of the Coptic community from Egypt. Its members know that they are second-class citizens. After some three-dozen attacks over the past three decades, resulting in three hundred ...
One way to learn patience is to travel by train from Naples to Palermo. The train is excruciatingly slow, and the traveler seldom has a soul to complain to, but the journey is ideal for basking in the picturesque countryside. It was here that Caravaggio, fleeing the Roman carabinieri after assaulting a man, sought refuge,...
My Downtown is dying. That is perhaps saying too little; Downtown is nearly dead. The neat, grid-patterned, wellpayed streets of the old Baton Rouge, the white hot cement Huey Long pounded Florsheim heel and toe against, the small optimistic stores set up in the 30’s and 40’s and equipped with illuminated signs in the 50’s...
Drowned drumlins swarmed in the brilliant bay, and ravens like those that plagued Saint Patrick croaked from the chasm below my feet as they rolled lazily half a mile above County Mayo. The ravens’ harsh call was an onomatopoeic reminder of my present eminence, Croagh Patrick, the 2,510-foot cone that dominates the great inlet of...
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...
Webster’s defines culture as a variation of the verb cultivate. It is time, therefore, for us to look at what, as a nation, we are cultivating. In our government schools, which we persist in calling “public,” students are taught that virtually any loose community can be called a society, and that the world is driven...
For as long as young Villem could remember, hunkeys had occupied the lowest rung in Punxsutawney’s social pecking order. The Italians had their various business enterprises; the Irish had their legions of bishops, monsignors, and priests; and the Slavs were miners known by the pejorative hunkey. Vil’s father, Juraj Oddany, dug coal, as did two...
“One bates an author that’s all author.” —Lord Byron The line between the Old America and the New is closer than most of us think. A single generation separates not only the Western pioneer from the St. Louis suburbanite, it separates the New Woman from the Old. Rose Wilder Lane, child of westering parents, was...
The constitution of the state of Texas, my friends, is not what you carry to the beach for light summer reading. Light? Not at 90,000 words and 377 amendments. As Dr. Johnson said of Paradise Lost, “No man ever wished it longer.” Yet longer it gets, election year by election year, as the sovereign voters...
A poet’s critical prose holds interest for many people. Scholars examine it for clarifications or contradictions of the poet’s verse, admiring readers for echoes of the language that captivated them in the poetry, to which students and new readers may want some kind of “authorized introduction.” When writing about the work of others poets reveal...
America is an Idea and the First Universal Nation. So say the bedizened oracles and prancing shamans of the American Empire—empire, for what is universal cannot be a nation. But people don’t live on an idea. They live on land—lush or dry, rocky or fertile, according to their fates. If they are lucky, it is...
When I first heard of the young man who had opened fire in a Salt Lake City shopping mall, killing (I think) six and wounding three, I immediately began to wonder to which group of pschopaths the kid belonged: spoiled suburban white boy or Muslim. When it took more than an hour to release the...
The impeachment proceedings were the subject of an extraordinary suggestion made by Pat Caddell, a former pollster for the Democratic Party, at the “Dark Ages” retreat for members of the “conservative movement” over New Years’ weekend. Caddell told the gathering that the problem with the Republican Party was that they couldn’t seem to pick the...
Intellectual conservatism in Europe began its odyssey with Donoso Cortes in the 19th century, only to end its shipwrecked voyage a century later with Oswald Spengler. European conservatism has always been a panic-stricken response to the egalitarian torrents that have been sweeping over Europe since the American and French Revolutions. After 1945, the anus mundi...
“The Jews are a race apart. They have made laws according to their own fashion, and keep them.” —Celsus Jacob Neusner’s bibliography is as long as the laundry list of a professional football team. Only in his mid-50’s, Neusner has published more than two hundred books—including detailed studies of the various rabbinic commentaries on the...
This weekend’s unprecedented attack on Israel from Hamas exposes weaknesses in intelligence, fault lines in ongoing efforts to maintain stability and peace in the broader Middle East region, and potential dangers ahead for all parties.
Thank you for Don Livingston’s essay, “The Ancestry and Legacy of the Philosophes” (Views, July). Rarely have I read anything that shed so much light on such a large subject in such a short space. I have some disagreements with the essay, but they amount, I hope, to a friendly amendment. As Livingston sees it,...
“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...
“He canonizes himself a Saint in his own lifetime.” —Samuel Butler Exhibitionism is a sin yet to be legitimized in Father Andrew Greeley’s ongoing excursion into soft porn (or those novels which he euphemistically christens his “comedies of grace”). But Greeley, the exhibitionist, is on full display in his venture into autobiography (or this book...
A new report presents the stark reality in Xi Jinping’s Communist China as it relates to faith and religious freedom—but can the “free world” still present the alternative?
Last night we watched from the hotel terrace as a giant cargo ship cast anchor in the Tyrrhenian indigo and proceeded to unload fresh water for the whole of our sunburnt island, an enterprise which from that vantage point seemed a triumph of technology over nature. A moment’s reflection, however, would have neatly reversed the...
Thanksgiving is the time of year when Americans are supposed to take stock and give thanks. The mere fact that we can take stock should make us grateful to be alive and conscious. This Thanksgiving, I am particularly thankful that I don’t have to go anywhere by plane. Over the past three or...
Superbowl XXXVI, proclaimed by the National Football League to be a tribute to September 11 (themed “Heroes, Hope, and Homeland”) underscored the fact that there is something inauthentic about a spectacle that allows sports-bar patrons to experience masculinity vicariously by watching well-padded millionaires smash into one another for control of a leather ball. The Fox...
Mr. Jones Directed by Agnieszka Holland ◆ Written by Andrea Chalupa ◆ Produced by Film Produkcja ◆ Distributed by Samuel Goldwyn Films The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1965) Directed by Martin Ritt ◆ Written by John le Carré, Paul Dehn, and Guy Trosper ◆ Produced by Salem Films ◆ Distributed by Paramount...
Although the American frontier was officially closed 118 years ago, Americans remain in thrall to its mythic spell and the romance of the American West. Europeans have always viewed our cultural obsession with condescension, though they themselves—the Germans and the Italians especially—are hardly immune to its allure. (On my first visit to the Grand Canyon...
“Southerners live in the 18th century.” This common charge is not altogether false, since the peculiar habits, customs, and meanings of words found often in the American South are found also in 18th-century English authors. Most English-speaking people use the word “manners” now only in the senses designated by the Oxford English Dictionary as current:...
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the retreat of Leninist forces within the empire, hosannas have rung out in the Western world. “The Cold War is over, the Cold War is over,” the leaders of the West have exclaimed, and demands to turn swords into knitting needles have filled the air. At every...
As recently as the 1930’s, elderly black people in rural Maryland were still keeping headstrong children in line with the admonition that something called “pattiroll” would “get” them if they didn’t behave themselves. “Pattirolls,” or patrols, were gangs of Union Army soldiers who rode throughout the moonlit countryside enforcing curfews in occupied Maryland during the...
Probably, we should drop the whole Dukie mess. After killing enough trees to paper over the Western world and using up enough nonrenewable energy to fight at least a little war someplace, nothing has changed in the Research Triangle. Duke is still as expensive as ever, as “highly rated” as ever, and its lacrosse team...
In an age of anti-elite anger, it might seem otiose to publish an academic analysis of aristocratic ideas in Western thought. But as the post-1945 order rattles itself to pieces, it is time to look past its bankrupted beliefs and discredited leaders for other guiding principles—principles based on history instead of ill-defined and naive hopes,...
Nineteen ninety-two was an opportunity for Americans to reflect on both their past and their future. In less than a month, we celebrated the birthday of Columbus and the transfer of power from the New Deal to the Big Chill, from the civics-class pieties of George Bush to the Penthouse improprieties of Bill Clinton. I...