The customary division of national laws of citizenship into the “principles” of jus soli (place of birth) or jus sanguinis (line of descent) denotes the objective criteria most often used to determine one’s citizenship. But the conceptions of political membership that have vied for supremacy in Anglo- American law implicate a different, more fundamental dichotomy—one...
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Remembering Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Ours is an age of politicization. No matter the problem, real or imagined, proposed solutions are always couched in the language of politics. No subject can be discussed without constant reference to its political ramifications. Whatever position a political leader may adopt with respect to a current “issue,” it must be judged not by its relevance...
The Gospel of Pluralism
“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...
Political Poltergeists
“They’re back,” cries the little girl in the movie, when the demons from Hell reappear on her television screen. The phrase, a cliché in the cliché-driven headlines of the Washington Post and Time, comes to mind at the beginning of every election cycle, as gibberish-driveling demons like Hillary and Joe, Sarah and Newt get interviewed...
Prophet Sustained
When National Review published a special obituary issue on James Burnham soon after his death in 1987, perhaps the most remarkable contribution came from the pen of John Kenneth Galbraith. The Harvard economist reminisced about the eager welcome with which he and fellow New Dealers in the Roosevelt administration had received Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution:...
Interview With a Condemned Academic
Michael Millerman was a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto when he got into trouble. The trouble wasn’t drugs or alcohol, debt, or academic improprieties. Nor was he troubled by poor academic performance. The trouble was that he was reading, examining, and translating the works of controversial political thinkers influenced by Martin Heidegger. His...
The Populist Politics of Austria
In this small nation’s elegant capital in November 1992, newspaper headlines bannering the Clinton presidential victory temporarily displaced the local story of the moment: a decisive political coup by Jörg Haider, leader of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ). Although it is quite clear that Austria’s status quo, socialist-conservative, “Red-Black” alliance has functioned effectively as...
Getting Back to Nature
“Human rights are fictions—but fictions with highly specific properties.” —Alasdair MacIntyre In 1960 John Courtney Murray, S.J., warned of the possibility that America was slipping into a new barbarism. In his best known work, We Hold These Truths, Father Murray said that barbarism “threatens when men cease to talk together according to reasonable laws.” Argument...
Nobody but the People
In the “Prologue” to his massive biography of Sen. Joe McCarthy, historian Thomas Reeves describes a scene that took place in Milwaukee, in the senator’s home state, in November, 1954, only a month before his colleagues voted to condemn him and thereby effectively to terminate his career. The scene was a mass celebration of McCarthy’s...
Winning the Culture War
The first thing we have to learn about fighting and winning a cultural war is that we are not fighting to “conserve” something; we are fighting to overthrow something. Obviously, we do want to conserve something—our culture, our way of life, the set of institutions and beliefs that distinguish us as Americans. But we must...
Politics Without a Right
It took only a few days after the rout of the Republicans in their battle to drive Bill Clinton from office for the leaders of the Beltway Right to decide that the war was over and the only thing left to do was announce surrender. Four days after the Senate “acquitted” the President of the...
John-John Is My Co-Pilot
Aside from the non-resignation and non-ruin of President Clinton and the non-campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, the biggest non-event of 1999 was undoubtedly the non-survival last summer of John F. Kennedy, Jr., who, true to the traditions of his family, managed to seize international headlines when his own recklessness and incompetence led to disaster—this...
The Southern Tradition and the Black Experience
I am, to say the least, honored to receive your Richard Weaver Award and to be invited to share some thoughts with you tonight. Richard Weaver observed, in Ideas Have Consequences: “There is ground for declaring that modern man has become a moral idiot. . . . For four centuries every man has been not...
The Mystery of Arthur Koestler
“It is notgood to look too long upon these turning wheels of vicissitude, lest we become giddy.” –Sir Francis Bacon It was apt that 1984, the Orwellian Year, should see the reissue of Arthur Koestler’s two-volume autobiog raphy (first published some three dec ades ago) and that the year should also see the...
This Is Conservatism?
“Isn’t it pretty to think so?” —Ernest Hemingway There are two fictions that most American conservatives have taken to heart. First, that the Republican Party stands for conservative ideas and principles; second, that there has been a conservative renaissance in the last several decades, a resurgence that culminated with the Reagan presidency and continues into...
The Now and Future Pat Buchanan
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...
In the Fullness of Time
Perhaps the best way to understand and appreciate Joseph Pappin’s unique achievement is to consider this fine book in the light of previous scholarship that attempts to ascertain the religious and moral sources and foundations of Edmund Burke’s political philosophy. John Morley, the chief Victorian authority on Burke and the source of all subsequent empiricist,...
Caesar’s Column
If anything could make the modern presidency look good, it is the modern Congress. Intended by the Framers, through a misinterpretation of the British constitution, to offer a check to the executive branch, the federal legislature has in fact evolved into merely its partner and more often its lackey. The President now openly intervenes in...
Ahistorical Admonitions
“One age cannot be completely understood if all others are not understood. The song of history can only be sung as a whole.” —Ortega y Gasset In The Politics of Human Nature, Thomas Fleming has boldly undertaken to delineate a system of natural politics. A classicist by training, Fleming believes that “the collapse of Roman...
The Therapeutic Roots of Wokeism
A new order undergirded by therapism has taken form in the United States.
Religious Wrong
Despite the ocean of ink that has been spilled in the last several months on the “religious right,” perhaps the most sensible comment about it, or at least about its journalistic coverage and political analysis, was penned by John F. Persinos in an article published in the magazine Campaigns and Elections last September. “When examined...
Nationalism, Old and New
In the course of American history, nationalism and republicanism have usually been enemies, not allies. From the days of Alexander Hamilton, nationalism has meant unification of the country under a centralized government, the supremacy of the executive over the legislative branch, the reduction of states’ rights and local and sectional parochialism, governmental regulation of the...
Reality by the Tail
Luisa Valenzuela: The Lizard’s Tail; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; New York. The Lizard’s Tail reflects two important tendencies in Latin American fiction. One is a sense of obligation to make social and political commentary. Few Latin American writers escape the pressures to be active participants in the solution of economic, political, and cultural problems. As...
Iraq: Yesterday and Tomorrow
Nine years ago, just before the invasion of Iraq by the United States and her allies, Dr. Michael Stenton wrote a prescient article in Chronicles looking forward to the likely Iraqi reaction and its consequences (“Our Yesterday and Your Today,” Views, February 2003). Stenton’s article described the British experience in Mesopotamia almost a century ago...
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...
Will Europe Survive?
The recent emergence in Western Europe of increasingly successful political parties based on opposition to Third World immigration and the utter failure of such parties to appear in the United States raise the question posed in the headline of this column. Most Americans of sensible political views have assumed for the last century that Europe...
The Flawed Attempt to Make a Religion for the Right
In these troubled times of pandemics, racial conflict, and economic instability, disagreements over American conservatism may not sound particularly important. Yet, when “cancel culture” tactics are being applied to the right, the meaning of conservatism is no longer just an academic talking point. This hostile climate has rekindled robust debate on what exactly conservatism means....
Germania Tremens
“What wonders I have done, all Germany can witness. . . . “ —Christopher Marlowe Anyone who has lived in Germany eventually realizes that Germany is a nation of hypochondriacs. Germans spend far more than Americans on nostrums, vitamins, tranquilizers, and elixers; Americans may watch “Dynasty,” but the most popular TV show in the Federal...
Glad To Be of Use
“Satiate with power, of fame and wealth possessed, A nation grows too glorious to be blest; Conspicuous made, she stands the mark of all. And foes join foes to triumph in her fall.” —George Crabbe, Thelibrau In the last year, Michael Lind has emerged as the new wunderkind of American political discussion. He was the...
Remembering Willmoore Kendall
Among the 20th-century conservative movement’s legendary leaders, Willmoore Kendall (1909-1967) stands out as the one who most effectively offered a grounding in a specifically American philosophy. There is also a timeliness in this remarkable political scientist’s thought. Our society has become divided to an extent that Kendall might well have found horrifying—although not surprising. His...
Pigs Is Pigs
Politics is like the weather: No matter how blue in the face we talk ourselves, no matter how many virgins we sacrifice to Odin, our leaders do not improve, and the drought continues. The fates who determine the destinies of nations are no more obedient to our words than the little gods of wind and...
Sam Francis’s Mad Tea Party
Reading up for a book on the fate of democracy since Tocqueville published Democracy in America in 1835, I recently came across an excellent study, Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville, by Alan S. Kahan. Professor Kahan includes these men in a group of...
Sam Francis’s Mad Tea Party
Reading up for a book on the fate of democracy since Tocqueville published Democracy in America in 1835, I recently came across an excellent study, Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville, by Alan S. Kahan. Professor Kahan includes these men in a group of...
Cast-iron Man
John C. Calhoun is perhaps the most hated historical figure in modern America. There may be others who offer more succinct and intuitive criticisms of America’s institutional decay; many have led stronger movements for reform and challenged the ruling establishment in ways more forceful than he did. But in the scholarly world, where historians and...
The Great Transparency Racket
“Democracy Dies in Darkness” is the motto of the Washington Post. The editors of the Post belong to the honorable group of which Norman Podhoretz once confessed himself a member—Idolaters of Democracy. They idolize Big Government also, that implacable enemy of democracy, or so democrats believed before the 1930’s. No doubt the editors could demonstrate...
Vive la New Right
Guillaume Faye: Truths and Tributes by Pierre Krebs, Robert Steuckers, and Pierre-Émile Blairon Arktos Media 210 pp., $27.50 La puissance et la foi: Essais de théologie politique by Alain de Benoist PG de Roux 336 pp., EUR$39.00 I stumbled upon the writing of Alain de Benoist more than a quarter century ago as a graduate...
Shoot the Losers
The novelist F. Reid Buckley once told a story about a Mexican woman who worked for his family as a maid or nanny during the 1930’s. The woman knew that Buckley’s father, William F. Buckley, Sr., was a strong opponent of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential campaign. When she learned that Roosevelt had...
Slobodan Miloševic, Our S.O.B.
Our government is capable of swift and efficient action when it decides that the regime in a foreign country has outlived its usefulness, or has become a “threat” to what passes for national security inside the Beltway. Grenada, Panama, and Haiti all come to mind, but the methods deployed in this geographic area tend to...
The Illusions of Democracy
We live by our opinions. While other people’s opinions are called illusions, if they pose no threat to our interests, and prejudices if they do, we call our own opinions “truth” or principles, if we are fools: “the most positive men are the most credulous,” as Pope observed, probably having scientists in mind. If we...
The Rise and Fall of the Texas Republican Party
How did the Texas Republican Party, which was in the forefront of the battles to win the Republican presidential nomination for Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Ronald Reagan in 1976 and 1980, become a wholly owned subsidiary of Karl Rove and George W. Bush? Today, the Republicans in Texas control every statewide elected office, yet...
The Great Debate: Lincoln’s Legacy
The year 1975, for those of us old enough to remember, was a calm and quiet time in the United States. The Vietnam War and Watergate were both over, the riots and protests had ceased, and everybody liked our presiding nonpartisan president, who shared the name of America’s most iconic car company. The music was...
Stopping the Long March Through the University
“A Leninist cannot simply be a specialist in his favorite branch of science. . . . He must be an active participant in the political leadership of his country.” —Slogan of Moscow University Substitute “professor” for “Leninist” and the quotation would appear almost a cliche to many American academicians. Yet such corollary Leninist themes and...
The Meaning of Donald Trump
Nearly half a year into the new administration in Washington, it remains too early to tell how many of President Trump’s unquestioned pratfalls and errors in judgment, most of them resulting from emotional indiscipline, stubbornness, and political inexperience as well as the necessary thicker skin experience would have given him, are attributable to the President...
The Ruling Class
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...
The Modern Conception of Sovereignty
The question of sovereignty reappeared at the end of the Middle Ages, when many began to ask not only what is the best possible form of government, or what should be the purpose of the authority held by political power, but what is the political bond that unites a people to its government? That is...
Culture Politics
“The results of political changes are hardly ever those which their friends hope for or their foes fear.” —T.H. Huxley In political circles, it has become fashionable to talk about “culture wars.” The discussions usually touch on the issues of abortion, euthanasia, sexual orientation, school prayer, gun control, and welfare, among others. These are issues...
Remembering George Carey
George Carey arrived at Georgetown University in 1961, the same year that I did. He was a young professor teaching courses on American government when I was a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences, where he taught. My first experience with him as a student was notably unpleasant. Taking his first exam, I went...
Science and Democracy
A virtue of America’s quadrennial election cycle is its success in revealing and giving form to whatever popular malaise has set in over the past four years, whether the results of the elections themselves address the disorder or not, and occasionally in raising real issues, even if only by implication. In this respect, the presidential...
A Conservative in Crisis
Those who have only a passing acquaintance with the history of post-World War II conservatism are not likely even to have heard of Francis Graham Wilson. Yet, before the emergence of William F. Buckley, Jr., and National Review or the publication of Russell Kirk’s Conservative Mind, Wilson had already marked out the grounds for an...
Italy’s Donald Trump
Politicians and businessmen do not always see eye to eye. In ancient Rome the political elite, the Senatorial Order, squabbled with the wealthy Knights of the Equestrian Order. Cicero advocated a “Concord of the Orders,” where senators and knights would work together against the political ambition and military might of Crassus and Julius Caesar. Neither...