We speak as readily of the art of politics as we do of the art of cooking or writing, and what we have in mind in each case is what the French call savoir faire. This sense of “art” claims excellence for the activity of which the term is predicated, and since to know what...
By the end of 1998, it was no longer possible for any informed and honest person to claim that the massive immigration experienced by the United States since the 1970’s was not significantly altering the culture, economy, and politics of the nation. Last summer, the Washington Post, long a zealous opponent of immigration restriction, published...
Robert Frost published 11 books of poetry, won four Pulitzer Prizes, established himself as the unofficial poet laureate of the United States, and acquired a national and international literary reputation. Despite his fame as a poet and public speaker, and because of his friendship with such liberal Democrats as Vice-President Henry Wallace and President John...
From the August 1992 issue of Chronicles. Robert Frost published 11 books of poetry, won four Pulitzer Prizes, established himself as the unofficial poet laureate of the United States, and acquired a national and international literary reputation. Despite his fame as a poet and public speaker, and because of his friendship with such liberal Democrats...
Over the last 30 years, especially since the spring of 2020, Critical Race Theory (CRT) and its accompanying obsessions with “whiteness” and “white privilege” has almost overwhelmed discussion about race and racism in Western society. CRT “recognizes that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of the American society,” declares a definition from...
“In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.” —S.T. Coleridge When Kevin Phillips’s The Politics of Rich and Poor hit the best-seller list last summer, the Gipperites began to squeal like a worn-out fan belt in a used Toyota. “Anti-Reagan sophistry,” sneered David Brock of the Heritage Foundation in the Wall Street Journal....
“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...
In the beginning, the poetic birth of the city becomes visible in the Iliad in the warrior camp of the Achaeans, in what Pierre Manent calls—in one of his most striking formulations—the “republic of quarrelsome persuasion.” We are not, of course, concerned here with the city as defined by, say, urbanology or archaeology, but with...
Mr. Conor Cruise O’Brien’s “A Vindication of Edmund Burke,” (National Review, December 17, 1990), contains many long established truths about Burke’s politics—his consistency in principle, his remarkable insights and powers of prophesy, his strong critique of revolutionary ideology, and so forth. But amidst these trite truisms, which vindicate O’Brien’s subject only to the uninitiated, he...
A critique of the destinarian political philosophy of Francis Parker Yockey.
If there was any major difference between the presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan in 1995 and his first run at the Republican nomination in 1992, it was the relative calm with which his enemies greeted the announcement of his second candidacy and his rapid move last year to the forefront of the Republican field. Rabbi...
The Economist brands racism as “America’s constant curse,” and the question of race unnerves almost everybody, as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 airily outlaws discrimination in government, commerce, and schooling on grounds of race, gender, age, religion, or national origin, and the new, openly politicized White House policy on affirmative action (“mend it, don’t...
“Nature knows no equality.” —Luc de Varvenargues For about four years before the publication of The Bell Curve last fall, occasional news reports dribbled out tidbits of information about the book and its coauthor. The stories were often pegged to Charles Murray’s departure from the neoconservative Manhattan Institute in 1990 because of the institute’s discomfort...
The right’s failure in 2020’s election may herald the start of a new conservative ascension. But it cannot happen under the current Republican Party leadership. The problem is greater than the Republican-in-Name-Only politicians ignoring the legitimate charges of election-rigging and jumping Trump’s ship. For years, the established conservative political class has looked away from...
For a few moments during last year’s presidential election, it appeared that the American two-party system was headed for a meltdown. As the ineffectual Bush campaign drew to its merciful close, the resurgence of support for Ross Perot defied every principle of professional political punditry. In 1992, disaffected Middle Americans were key to the 19...
Stendhal had the delightful habit of ending his books with the closing dedication, in English, “TO THE HAPPY FEW.” The phrase is thought to be a borrowing from Henry V (“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers . . . ”) or perhaps from Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield, where the vicar anticipates his...
Americans entertain the peculiar idea that history—or, at least, “our history”—is the reign of continuity. In spite of all the talk about revolution, there appears to be a remarkable degree of stability in every substantial political rupture. The American Revolution was, in fact (we are told by historians), a “conservative one,” restoring the political order...
When I told friends that I was going to Italy to study the political situation there, the usual response was an amused puzzlement. Italian politics, I was informed, is like the Italian army: a grand opera performance of a comic opera plot. I am not so sure. Since the later Middle Ages, the Italians have...
A year after the nasty secret got out of how race-norming works on the nation’s most widely used job test, the establishment news herd suddenly discovered the story. There were spots on NBC Nightly News and the Today Show, a front-page story in the Washington Post, an editorial in the New York Times, and a...
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...
For the past six months the United States has been experiencing another of the racial fits that have recurred more or less regularly across the half-century since the civil-rights protests of the 1950’s and the Civil Rights Acts of the 60’s that abolished legally sanctioned segregation in this country. In this spasm, as in past...
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...
That political ideology and activism have become a new religion is something the average individual sees signs of nearly every day. A black man is killed in an altercation with police and his face instantly becomes an icon to be carried in protests, his name a phrase to be repeated with adoration. A slogan such...
“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...
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...
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:...
The latest election cycle did not deliver happy results for the political right. Our dismay is compounded by the strong impression of an unfair result. Whatever you think of the integrity of last November’s elections, it cannot be denied that in the months prior a great many very big thumbs—Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the...
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...
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...
Yes, I know I promised to write about the Georgia state flag controversy, but that prospect was too depressing. Let me address instead a couple of more entertaining topics, namely the 43rd annual Mountain Dew Southern 500 NASCAR Winston Cup Series Race and the recent presidential election. By the time you read this you’ll know...
Welcome to Darlington. The cradle of Southern stock car racing. The sport was born near here the first time a U.S. Revenue agent figured that he could catch a moonshiner running along a twisty hack road with a car load of booze. No way. . . . Darlington is tradition. First of the big tracks...
I am running against myself in the November 5 general election. For the second time in my brief legislative tenure, I am providing constituents with “None of the Above” (NOTA) adhesive ballot stickers. Michigan election law docs not provide a NOTA option, but it does allow write-in campaigns using stickers. So I have produced NOTA...
A new order undergirded by therapism has taken form in the United States.
The tedium that descended upon the nation’s politics last winter when Bush II ascended the presidential throne was relieved briefly in the waning days of the Clinton era by the bitter breezes that wafted around some of the new President’s Cabinet appointments. After repeatedly muttering his meaningless campaign slogan, “I’m a uniter, not a divider,”...
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...
Recent press reports inevitably describe Serbia's Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica as a
Several years ago, while still at the Washington Times, I published a column on the occasion of the appearance of The Bell Curve in which I wrote, What you think the state ought to do about race has little to do with what you think about race. It has everything to do with what you...
The current evangelical elite came of age at a time when secular influences tried to stay neutral toward Christianity; The faith competed as an equal in the marketplace of ideas. But those days are over. In our age of secularist hostility, evangelicals need new tactics.
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...
Political analysts, consultants, and “scientists,” envious of the success of economists in turning the study of wealth creation into a scientific discipline and a lucrative profession, are always searching for rules and laws to explain and discover certain regular and logical structures in human efforts involved in winning, preserving, and expanding power. Elections provide a...
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...
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...
The avalanche of identity politics has spurred an interest in studying income inequality along cultural lines. Surprisingly, leftists have deviated from their fixation on class warfare to privileging race and gender disparities. It is even more bewildering that few writers recognize the devaluing of class dynamics in popular debates. Invariably, income inequality is mainly about...
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...
Our great-great-grandfathers, if they were American voters, enjoyed greater opportunity to change policy with their votes than we do today. It is a paradox that as the number of Americans permitted to vote has increased over the past century, the power of those votes has diminished. Many legislators and judges, in their hearts, do not...
Several years ago, I purchased a used copy of Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974), one of the five most important books on American slavery that have appeared in the last 50 years. The previous owner had inserted a series of newspaper clippings of book...
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...
Though John C. Calhoun was a distinguished American statesman and thinker, he is little appreciated in his own country. Calhoun rose to prominence on the eve of the War of 1812 as a “war hawk” in the House of Representatives and was the Hercules who labored untiringly in the war effort. While still a congressman,...
“The way to have power is to take it.” —W.M. Tweed When on January 3, 1949, Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas was sworn in as a United States senator, an era in the politics of his state had come to an end, a period that had begun when Reconstruction concluded. Similar events occurred in other...
The political plum on last year’s Christmas pudding, so to speak, was l’affaire Lott, which, erupting at the birthday party for retiring Sen. Strom Thurmond in early December and continuing until Trent Lott’s less-than-voluntary resignation as Senate majority leader three weeks later, threatened to ruin Kwanza for just about everybody. The Lott crisis was an...