Our Founding Fathers understood that they had inaugurated a republican federal union unique in its balance and distribution of powers. Unlike their descendants, who self-indulgently congratulate themselves on their democracy, the Fathers also understood that the preservation of such a regime was a daunting and demanding task, requiring virtue (in the masculine Roman sense) on...
Less than a month after President Bush unbosomed his latest reflections on political philosophy before the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, one of the latest victims of his administration’s crusade to foster the “global democratic revolution” in Iraq was grousing that what the administration planned for his country simply wasn’t democratic enough. The Grand...
As everyone who has not been in total coronavirus quarantine knows, Harvey Weinstein was recently condemned to death for sexually assaulting six Hollywood wannabes. Actually, he was given 23 years in prison, but in view of his 67 years of age, it would have been far more dramatic and fitting for the former Hollywood film...
“I esteem . . . Toleration to be the chief Characteristical Mark of the True Church.” —John Locke It is fitting that the most confused and confusing legal tradition in America today is First Amendment case law regarding religious liberty. It is confusing because at the Founding a young nation composed principally of strongly religious...
In the midst of the cold war declared by the NYPD against our ultra-liberal mayor, the hot wars in Ukraine, Syria, and Iraq, I could not help but notice a well-written and hard-hitting piece by traditionalist Catholic attorney Christopher Ferrara for redoubtable Remnant newspaper. Now, why is Ferrara’s “The Remnant’s Man of the Year” article,...
The March issue of Chronicles coincides with the 30th anniversary of the passing of novelist, essayist, poet, and conservationist Edward Abbey. This column appears as a chapter in The Hundredth Meridian: Seasons and Travels in the New Old West (Chronicles Press). It may or may not make sense for the living to think in arbitrary...
On July 15, 1870, the French Empire mobilized its armed forces, and the following day, the North German Confederation—led by Prussia—followed suit. Once the Franco-Prussian War was declared, actual combat began with startling rapidity. The Prussians won a decisive victory at Sedan at the start of September, capturing French Emperor Napoleon III. Even so, the...
Paul Fussell’s enemies are “habitual euphemizers, professional dissimulators,” and the “Disneyfiers of life.” He is in favor of cojones, which is why he ends up in one of his essays liking the Indy 500 in spite of himself, comparing it favorably to the violence of the Falklands War, which is going on while he watches...
Errol Leslie Flynn was an unlikely icon—thin lipped, beady eyed, and blessed with a mild case of rhinophyma (big-nose syndrome), much exacerbated by booze and age, not to mention an (at one time) impenetrably thick Australian accent. On meeting the young Flynn, other children would take one look at him and burst into tears. Despite...
Right on, Sam Francis (“The Ruling Class,” January 1997)! And if you want to get an idea of who the oligarchs are, look at the list of those who put up the two billion dollars for the recent election. Barbra Streisand, the Raidys, etc. As to when the great American experiment of self-government started falling...
One of the ironies of American political discussion in the last generation or so— indeed, of the last century—has been that, for all our boasting and braggadocio about being a nation founded on the proposition that all men are created equal, it is almost impossible to find any significant American social thinker who really believes...
“Demography is destiny,” sociologists and demographers tell us. No. Morality is destiny. Demography stems from that, as does economics. Americans now are learning that lesson the hard way. Tax rates, debt, deficits, trade policy, monetary policy, government spending, and other factors all affect economic growth and prosperity. But they’re all trumped by demographics—and above that,...
Israel’s campaign to rid its neighboring lands of their inhabitants, including Christians, recalls the situation of the first Christmas. Is there a like hope?
On the pavement flank of the café, my field of vision was being traversed, with the quiescent regularity of Attic horsemen galloping along the circumference of a drinking vessel, by strange women. Making their way up the Fulham Road, past the famous cinema, some of them moved in little groupings, like schools of gamboling goldfish;...
Last June, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, loosed a posse of some 700 well-armed and irate citizens to win back control of the streets and parking lots of Phoenix from the local goons. The sheriff’s pronouncement, “We’re going to get the bad guys,” alarmed the local ACLU, which likened the militia to “a...
Of Gods and Men Produced by Why Not Productions and Armada Films Directed and written by Xavier Beauvois Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics Director Xavier Beauvois’s Of Gods and Men quietly, one might say austerely, meditates on the faith and courage of nine French Trappists who faced death at the hands of Muslim fanatics...
Serbian Patriarch Porfirije and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban call for Christian unity and solidarity against the rising tide of woke degeneracy in the Western world.
Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight . . . —Psalm 144:1 According to the Washington Post, McAllen, Texas is an “all-American city,” albeit one “that speaks Spanish.” So it’s small wonder that “immigration isn’t a problem for this Texas town—it’s a way of life.” ...
This past week, word came to me that a close friend and book-review editor of a major daily newspaper had been laid off after 16 years of service. The book page, one of the nation’s best, would be reduced by half, and his “replacement” would be a youngster from the city desk, a competent young...
A year after the American debut of Jascha Heifetz in 1917, James Huneker wrote an interesting sentence in the New York Times: “Much has been said of Heifetz and his musical gifts compared with great violinists of the time—Ysayë, Kreisler, Elman, Zimbalist, Kubelik, and Maud Powell.” We notice that one of these great violinists is...
A little-remembered provision of the U.S. Constitution: “No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States” (Article I, Section 9). By this proviso the Founding Fathers affirmed the republican principle that nobody is entitled to power merely because of who he is. Americans wanted to repudiate the hereditary privilege of the Old World...
Last week saw one-hundredth anniversary of an event which greatly impacted the destinies of Europe and America for decades to come. It passed unnoticed by the media. On March 3, 1918, the Bolsheviks signed a peace treaty with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk. Far from sealing the Kaiserreich’s historic triumph in the East, its brutal...
As I write, it’s already been three weeks since the Academy Awards broadcast on March 7, and I’m still surprised that the judges for Hollywood’s annual ceremony of self-love named The Hurt Locker Best Picture of 2009, awarding it six Oscars in all. The pooh-bahs of mediocrity voted for art rather than commerce, and so...
Upon his return from a week-long stay in Budapest, Srdja Trifkovic provides an assessment of Hungary’s current political scene in his weekly roundup of world affairs for Serbia’s top-rated Happy TV network. He also looks at the central European country’s role in EU politics, which occasionally may appear disproportionate to its modest size and resources....
The Chesterton Review continues on, after celebrating its 30th anniversary last year. Back in 1974, on the centenary of the birth of the great English writer G.K. Chesterton, a small and seemingly insignificant literary journal was launched in England in honor of his memory. At the time, it seemed that the memory was fading. England,...
The May 6 general election in England was one of the most eagerly contested in recent history. At stake were 649 parliamentary seats (one vote has been postponed because of the death of a candidate) for which there were almost 4,150 candidates. Also up for grabs were 4,222 local council seats in 164 English local...
At dinner, ten-year-old Johnny is sullen and uncommunicative. It has been a bad day. His parents pass off his ill humor as “going through a phase.” Actually, it was an easy day—taken up with “another stupid school assembly.” Johnny had sat there, bored, listening to people drone on about diversity and tolerance. When a lesbian...
The doctrine of states’ rights has returned to the American political scene. Leftist and liberal governors have been dusting off the arguments of John C. Calhoun and echoing the speeches of Strom Thurmond in preparation for their defiance of the national government. The battle is being fought on several grounds. In Massachusetts, the fight is...
In the first two decades of the century, President-elect Joe Biden’s choice for secretary of state supported U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. He was an ever-reliable liberal interventionist. This same Antony Blinken could spend the first years of a Biden presidency helping extricate our country from the misbegotten wars he championed....
The interstate highways, John Steinbeck complained in his 1962 memoir Travels with Charley, “are wonderful for moving goods but not for inspection of a countryside. When we get these thruways across the country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.” When...
Europeans from Cortes to Graham Greene, and Americans from Ambrose Bierce to the contemporary tourist who is offered sugar-candy skulls to buy on the Day of the Dead and has his car stopped by men in anonymous uniforms toting guns, have discovered Mexico to be a country characterized by a ferocious reality that very often...
“War is the health of the state,” said Randolph Bourne; it is also a bonanza for political intellectuals and for the marionettes who are put through their paces on FOX and CNN. At the outbreak of World War I, Bourne saw the same phenomenon, though admittedly on a higher scale (Paul Begala and Chris Matthews...
In her chosen role as doting public grandmother to both Bill and Hillary Clinton, columnist Mary McGrory is ever on the alert for opportunities to whip from her journalistic handbag her favorite images of those two extraordinary kids. In true grandma-like fashion, she is transfixed by their every utterance and sees their failures as simply...
“We have sung of the soldiers and sailors, but who shall hymn the politicians?” —Herman Melville The great classicist and poet A.E. Housman once wrote that the work of a scholar in the humanities is not like that of a scientist examining specimens under a microscope—it is more like the work of a dog searching...
Observing Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a Democratic House imperil a U.S.-Turkish alliance of 60 years—by formally charging Turkey with genocide in a 1915 massacre of the Armenians—the question comes to mind: Does this generation have the maturity to lead America? About the horrors visited on Armenians in 1915, that year of Turkish triumph over the...
April 19, 1995, is a date etched in the minds of all who live in Oklahoma City, because it was on that day at 9:02 A.M. that the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was bombed. Just as most Americans alive at the time of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination remember where they were when they...
“Mandalorian” star Gina Carano made headlines this week when she was fired from Disney. Her crime? Authoring a social media post comparing the censorship of conservatives to Nazi persecution. Disney’s decision set off a salvo of justified attacks on the company. But while the self-righteous anger is gratifying to fans both of Carano’s acting and...
A year or so ago, I discovered the work of Czech author Karel Capek who died on the eve of World War II. He was very popular in Eastern Europe and is barely known in the West. Most famous for his science fiction masterpiece War with the Newts (the salamanders, not the repulsive Republican politicians),...
When I was in my middle teens I read all or most of Sinclair Lewis’s work. It seems impossible, but it is a fact nevertheless that Main Street will be a century old next year, and Babbitt in 2022. I took my copy of the latter from the shelf the other day (Signet Classic edition,...
There is a profound difference between the ancient and medieval view of children and the modern cult of the child. The Rousseauean idolatry of nature and worship of savages, popularized through a certain brand of sentimental poetry, helped to establish a picturesque ideal of the innocent, angelic child. St. Augustine was not inclined to hold...
Only a few weeks into the latest round of horrors in Syria, we are getting used to the debasement of “intelligence” to serve the crudest political ends. In September, President Hollande showed the U.N. secretary general and journalists round the French military intelligence HQ at Creil north of Paris, where the amazed visitors admired the...
For the life of me, I can’t see why anyone under the age of, say, 55 would want to listen to Bruce Springsteen, never mind revere him as a deep and important artist, or pay upward of $200 to be crammed into a football stadium to attend one of his concerts. Surely the only pertinent...
James Jatras has attempted to define the nature and cause of anti-Orthodox sentiment among opinion-makers in the West in his February article “Pravoslavophobia.” There is certainly a degree of prejudice in the mundane sense of a bias based on ignorance, and this is compounded by the tendency of journalists and politicians to frame the complexities...
As the Republican primaries drew to a finish last spring, the several pundits whom the Grand Old Party carries in its pockets began to sing the praises of the man who was emerging as the winner. Partisans of his rivals—Steve Forbes, Lamar Alexander, Phil Gramm, and others—started lining up to kiss hands and bend knees...
Is President Obama a “change agent” on the level of Franklin D. Roosevelt, with a New New Deal comparable to FDR’s New Deal? Michael Grunwald’s book details the enactment and operation of Obama’s almost $800 billion stimulus bill, officially called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Though he covers only the first months...
It is not morbid thinking to remember that Christmas is a call to love one another as we reflect on our mortality.
There are two archetypes of the charming idler. One, rather like myself, is likely to be unemployed de métier. The other drifts in and out of employment, trading on social connections, borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, pandering, dealing cocaine, walking dogs, selling Impressionist pictures, joining the Foreign Legion, working on a perpetuum mobile, discovering...
In the year 2000, many conservatives, with or without holding their noses, turned out to vote for George W. Bush. One of the Republicans’ strongest selling points during the campaign was Governor Bush’s oft-repeated declaration that his administration would not engage in nation-building experiments. After eight years of President Clinton’s busybodying in the Balkans, where...
For evidence that academics miss the obvious, look no further than the 1996 study by two Midwestern psychologists on the proclivity of white Southern males to resort to violence when their honor is challenged. What a surprise! Psychologists Richard Nisbett (University of Michigan) and Dov Cohen (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) conducted a series of...
Mr. Holmes Produced by BBC Films and See-Saw Films Directed by Bill Condon Screenplay by Jeffrey Hatcher from Mitch Cullin’s novel, A Slight Trick of the Mind Distributed by The Weinstein Company Mr. Holmes is the film adaptation of Mitch Cullin’s curious 2005 novel A Slight Trick of the Mind. Reading the novel, I was...