There is a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 classic North by Northwest in which the characters look out at a brooding Mount Rushmore from the dining-room terrace of the Sheraton-Johnson Hotel in Rapid City, South Dakota (since renamed the Hotel Alex Johnson). There are Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington, and Theodore Roosevelt peering back, and shortly after...
“The liberal idea is obsolete,” said President Putin in a recent interview with the Financial Times (27 June 2019), “it has outlived its purpose. When the migration problem came to a head, many people admitted that the policy of multiculturalism is not effective and that the interests of the core population should be considered.” Of...
The morning of Sept. 11, 2001 was unusually beautiful in Brooklyn, fresh and cloudless after the previous day’s thunderstorms, with temperatures in the mid-60s. It was Primary Day, and around a quarter to nine my wife had set out for our polling place at a local school to vote. Just short of arriving, she...
The received wisdom today seems to be that, with the downfall of Soviet communism, socialism has lost its pungency. Not only has Marxism proper reputedly crumbled, together with the Berlin Wall, but the somewhat watered-down type of socialism that survives Marxism has been forced to come to terms with its archrival, economic liberalism, which is...
Despite much handwringing about British colonial misdeeds in Africa and the Caribbean, the systematic, purposeful extermination of more than a million Irish during the potato famine of the 19th century gets little attention.
“I figured if he was there, I’d make sure he wasn’t there [again],” Harlan Drake, a 33-year-old truck driver, told Det. Sgt. Scott Shenk of the Shiawassee County Sheriff’s Department. But on the morning of September 11, 2009, James Pouillon was there, sitting across the street from Owosso High School as he had on so...
One of the dumber remarks of the 1984 Presidential campaign—a campaign notable for its dumb remarks—came from Joe Frank Harris, governor of Georgia. Asked if he approved of Geraldine Ferraro, he replied: “Yes. I asked her if she had eaten grits and liked them, and she said, ‘Yes’—and she passed the test.” He should have...
“A politician . . . one that would circumvent God.” —William Shakespeare In preparing my review of this riveting biography, I gathered samples of what has recently been written about Richard M. Nixon, and I must say they make a bewildering collection. Here are a few: “A monster of a million disguises.” Andrew Kopkind, the...
The future has been all the rage for the past two centuries. Modernism, as an ideology, might almost be defined as the cult of the future, whether in science fiction or in Utopian political creeds like Marxism. Even in its death throes modernism was able to spawn “futurology,” a pseudo-science as richly comic as phrenology....
Nineteen eighty-nine was a year of great joy for lovers of freedom everywhere. For it was the “revolutionary” year in which totalitarian communism, throughout Eastern Europe and perhaps even in the Soviet Union itself, suddenly collapsed like a house of cards. Many of our pundits, equating complexity and permanent quasi-gloom with profundity, sternly warned us...
Stan Evans has described bodies of thought as having “lifecycles”; they emerge, thrive for a while, and, unless continually nourished, eventually hollow out and pass away. Having reached the end of its lifecycle, liberalism, as a coherent body of thought, is dead. There are still liberals, of course. But the tradition derived variously from John...
It is possibly a good thing that more writers are not sportsmen and outdoorsmen. The relationship between art and sport is a complexly curious one, since a case can be made for a sporting element in writing that is, of course, wholly cerebral (though not necessarily noncompetitive and nonviolent). In writing, as in the nonliterary...
There are days and places in history when time seems to stand still and, in the space of a moment, the fate of future centuries is decided. At dawn on October 7, 1571, the spectacle would have made a strong impression on anyone who looked out at the waters breaking upon the straits that join...
As we all know, during the Civil War, an expansive, democratic, progressive, multiethnic North defeated a bigoted and reactionary South, so that government of the people, by the people, and for the people should not perish from the earth. Like so many commonly held beliefs about the war (which are now being enforced as official,...
But for the death and suffering it has caused to thousands of innocents, the Liberian imbroglio would have an almost farcical quality—Graham Greene meets Lehar. On one side, there was the LURD (Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy), a ragtag army of heavily armed but poorly trained and undisciplined rebels. They nevertheless have the upper...
What is a populist? This much used (and abused) term has gone through several American incarnations. First, it was the name of a 19th-century political party whose program was as vague as its success was short-lived: The party combined an untenable admixture of Southern agrarianism and social-democratic panaceas leavened with a healthy hatred of Eastern...
In recent decades, conflict within the broader conservative universe has witnessed the increasing marginalization of traditionalists, who consistently refuse to accommodate their detractors’ leftist ideological worldview. The camp that has been triumphant—so far—has generally been the one most willing to betray principle for temporary electoral convenience, as well as to sacrifice the loyalty of its...
An American television viewer will witness more violence in a single evening than an Athenian would have seen during a lifetime of theatergoing. Acts of violence were virtually prohibited in Greek drama, and Aristotle goes so far as to argue against the use of “mere spectacle” to produce the desired catharsis of pity and fear:...
I was born and reared in a small Michigan town known as the home of both Gen. George Armstrong Custer and the La-Z-Boy chair company, an accident of local history most people in town do not find strange. The juxtaposition of the annihilation of Custer’s forces at the Battle of Little Big Horn with the...
Hubris will do it ever time. The Chinese have just made a serious strategic blunder. They dropped the mask and showed their scowling face to Asia, exposing how the Middle Kingdom intends to deal with smaller powers, now that she is the largest military and economic force in Asia and second largest on earth....
The search for and, when it cannot be found, the construction of a usable past remains the overriding task of our official historians, who believe that we are forever on the cusp of a new age. The opposite could be said of Thucydides, who sought “an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to...
[This article first appeared in the June 1990 issue of Chronicles.] The recent successes of the American right depend, in part, on its ability to deflect lower-middle-class resentment from the rich to a parasitic “new class” of professional problem-solvers and moral relativists. In 1975, William Rusher of the National Review referred to the emergence of a “verbalist” elite,...
I’ll leave it for the birds to pick the salvageable bits out of Jason Michael Morgan’s vomitous screed (“Ride On, Proud Boys!” September 2019) and restrict myself to some much needed correction of this horrendously anti-cultural, anti-Christian, and therefore anti-Western (in the only sense in which “The West” has any real meaning) diatribe. The apparent...
“Everything is good when it comes from the hands of the Almighty; everything degenerates in the hands of man.” —Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile Not the least of the ironies of the modern age is that the more it pretends to rationality, the more it wallows in the irrational. In the last...
Did Pat Buchanan’s politics fail? That is not a question Joseph Scotchie’s biography explicitly seeks to answer, but it is one that a reader of the book cannot help asking. As the Reform Party’s candidate, in his third and last presidential bid, Buchanan earned less than one percent of the vote. In his exposition of...
Fashions do not feed us, they only ensnare us. They do not satisfy us, they only contribute to our ongoing dissatisfaction with the fleetingness of everything. But they always seem more appealing and urgent than what really matters and what will remain after the fashions have fled. English writer Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was once...
Radically recasting America’s formative years would be damaging enough, but The New York Times’ “1619 Project” is applying that same radical intellectual perspective on American history to contemporary social issues and problems. That intellectual perspective has its own history. It developed in earnest during the tumult and chaos of the Black Power radicalism of the...
Chapter One: Some Basic Concepts, Part One I have never been very good with dates, but it was some time in the mid 1980’s. Paul Gottfried, who was teaching at Rockford College, had come to my office, and we were discussing, as was our wont, the sad state of conservatism. (I do not recall...
Everyone hates Walmart nowadays. Environmental groups protest the company’s “greenwashing,” numerous violations of the Clean Water Act, and contribution to suburban sprawl. Traditionalists detest Walmart’s displacement of small, family-owned businesses with big-box stores that serve as little more than cash drop boxes for the Bentonville, Arkansas, mother ship. Organized labor, as expected, objects to the...
I shall not easily forget my first visit to Switzerland. The end of the war left my battalion encamped north of Perugia. Leave was suddenly generous, and rides in military transport easy to find, at least for a young ensign in the Brigade of Guards. Hoping to flush a retired uncle in the Bernese Oberland...
For the first time since Winston Churchill, Britain is governed by a master of language. There have been few such in Downing Street history; most of those who become prime minister have devoted their entire life-effort to climbing “the greasy pole.” Of the partial exceptions, George Canning, in 1797 a co-founder of the Anti-Jacobin, was...
“‘Tis time to fear when tyrants seem to kiss.” —William Shakespeare “Just the facts, ma’am.” Joe Friday’s prescription for getting at the truth has been followed by Seymour Hersh, whose investigation of the secret life of John F. Kennedy, America’s “prince of the people,” is peppered with facts as recalled by...
Who in modern Western society has not heard of that category of citizens honorably known as intellectuals? They profess to be the thinking part of the nation, the people whose special calling is to ponder public or private matters. Not possessed of a particularly low opinion of themselves, they even lay claim to a spiritual...
“I am on the one hand a kind of New York State Republican, conservative. On the other hand, I am a kind of a Bohemian type. I really don’t obey the laws. I mean to, but if I am in a hurry and there is no parking here, I park.” —John Gardner Batavia’s wandering native...
Four-and-a-half months into Pope Francis’s pontificate, it’s become more than a little tiresome to hear both his admirers and his detractors compare him with Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. “Benedict would never have done . . . ” rolls as easily off the lips of aging Call to Action types as it does off the...
Back in the spring there was a lot of hoo-rah in northern Virginia about a plan to build a shopping mall on part of the battlefield at Manassas (“Bull Run” to Yankees). At first, some of us down here suspected a federal plot to obliterate the reminders of two humiliating defeats, but it turned out...
Short reviews of "The American Cinema" by Andrew Sarris, and "Ressentiment" by Max Scheler.
World War II seems both near and far away. In one sense, it seems like only yesterday that I was 17 years old, in uniform, and in Georgia and California. In another sense, that period is ancient history. We have traversed a century or more in human experience since the early 1940’s. The conflict was...
Race is the American religion, which is why no one can talk about it truthfully. I do not mean that no one speaks his mind on the subject. Well-indoctrinated liberals can talk all day on why race does not matter, why the whole concept means nothing; and racialists can talk even longer on why it...
That the republic has degenerated from a Protestant-inflected localized republic to a centralized bureaucratic imperial state is something most conservatives take for granted. The reason for such a transformation, however, sometimes becomes more assumed than proved. This compounds the difficulty of convincing liberals, and even some “conservatives,” that such a transformation has occurred. The secular...
“The high-minded man must care more for truth than for what people think.” —Aristotle While being interviewed on William Buckley’s Firing Line, Harry Ashmore remarked that he had allowed the subject of his Unseasonable Truths: The Life of Robert Maynard Hutchins to tell the story of his life and work through the numerous quotations that...
Texas Here too. Here, as on the other unfurling Frontier of the continent, the great Prairie where a solitary cry fades out; Here too the lariat, the Indian, the yearling. Here too the secretive and unseen bird That over the clamorous strains of history Sings for one evening and its memory; Here too the mystic...
This volume is particularly notable for readers of this journal for two reasons: First, some of it has appeared in these pages, and, secondly and more importantly, the truths it conveys have been a part of the core vision of Chronicles as, literally, a magazine of American culture. But I think too that there are...
More psychiatrists will not solve the existential crisis of our society. A solution must lie elsewhere.
PERSPECTIVE Going Through the Motionsby Thomas Fleming VIEWS Recovering the Dignity of Truthby William MurchisonEpiscopalians and/or Anglicans. Fighting for Orthodoxy Among the Methodistsby Mark TooleySome good news. A Tale of Two Subversivesby Srdja TrifkovicBattling Christophobia in California and Serbia. NEWS Government-Managed Businessby Stephen B. PresserAs Silent Cal spins . . . REVIEWS Waiting for Charles...
The looming amnesty of millions of illegal immigrants is deeply unpopular with millions of Americans, and for good reason: If the immigration bill the Senate passed in June gets through the House, this nation is finished. The bill would not only legalize some ten million illegal aliens but bring in five times that many—legally—over the...
In the early months of 2010, a prisoner was brought to one of Israel’s most secure prisons, the Ayalon facility in Ramla, and put in a cell designed to hold the murderer of Yitzhak Rabin. None of the prison personnel were told so much as his name, nor was anything known about his alleged crime. ...
Questions concerning the relationship between morality and law were reignited when, during the Republican primary campaign, Donald Trump commented on the matter of abortion and (implicitly) women’s rights. When pressed by a journalist, Trump stated that, yes, women should be “punished” if their behavior is illegal or contrary to prevailing community standards. Though abortion is...
“Thanatology” or “death education” now competes with driver’s ed and “social problems” for the attention of the nation’s high schoolers. First introduced on America’s college campuses in the 1960’s by such luminaries as Edgar Jackson, Richard Kalish, Robert Kastenbaum, and Herman Feifel, death education has, like many other dubious pedagogical experiments, trickled down to the...
I turned forty-one this year. I left a psychological plateau (a crisis would have been way more exciting) and a legal career behind. I suppose an alcohol-fueled bender or an illicit affair broadcast on social media would be what most “folks” (as Barack Obama says) my age might do nowadays, but I opted for sobriety...