“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...
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The Grinch Who Stole Kwanza
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...
White Like Me
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...
On Politics and Race
Now that Samuel Francis’s two-part installment on his “Rise and Fall” appears complete (April and May 1996), it’s time for the readers of Chronicles to hear the rest of the story. What he did not disclose was the nature of his blatantly white supremacist writings that appeared in a newsletter called American Renaissance. In the...
Race and Racism: A Brief History
Today, many Americans presume that the debate over slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries turned on the question of race. Though race was an ingredient in the Great Debate, it was no more than a pinch of salt. Both proponents and opponents of slavery tended to hold the same view of blacks. The superiority...
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...
The Declaration of Independence and Philosophic Superstitions
It is common among our political elites and pundits to link the Declaration of Independence with Abraham Lincoln, who found in it the ground and telos of the American nation: the Enlightenment doctrine that all individuals are endowed with rights that precede and are independent of any political society. To define these rights, we must...
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...
Race and Racism: A Brief History
Today, many Americans presume that the debate over slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries turned on the question of race. Though race was an ingredient in the Great Debate, it was no more than a pinch of salt. Both proponents and opponents of slavery tended to hold the same view of blacks. The superiority...
The Crime of Noticing
Compared to most writers, both now and in the past, Steve Sailer speaks to the moment and has a firm grasp on what is happening around the world.
Race and Freedom
Thomas Sowell: The Economics and Politics of Race: An International Perspective; William Morrow; New York If valley Girls could read, Thomas Sowell’s book would gag them with the facts. The author, a Chicago-educated economist now at the Hoover Institution, presents his readers with a carefully researched book that is replete with facts about economics, politics,...
The Casualties of Political Warfare
When political loss becomes a personal catastrophe for so many, it’s time for the left to reevaluate its priorities.
Looking Backward
A man from Mars visiting the United States at the beginning of 1997 might have thought that the country was wobbling on the brink of political crisis. He would have learned that the White House was occupied by a gentleman immersed in so many scandals that even supermarket tabloids could not keep track of them...
The Monism of Perfection
I first encountered Kenneth Minogue as a sophomore at Columbia, when his name appeared on a reading list for a course in modern political philosophy. The professor, it goes without saying, was a radical who had his own reasons for disliking liberalism, but I do not recall his criticisms, if any, of Minogue and his...
Democracy and the Golden Mean
A naive visitor arriving in the United States from abroad might conclude from the popular emphasis on “moderation” in contemporary American political discourse that Americans live under a government that represents a moderate theory of the appropriate scope and power of the state and harbors only modest political ambitions. If he happens to be a...
The Unprotected Class
To combat anti-white discrimination is not something we should do for whites but for all Americans, because if we don’t change the course we are on, we are all going to suffer.
Myths to Kill For
“I’ve got a little list, I’ve got a little list,” twitters the Lord High Executioner in a famous line of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, and indeed these days who doesn’t have one? Abortion protester Paul Hill seems to have had a little list of his own, and early in the morning on July 28 of...
Tales From the Politically Correct Crypt
Our nation is clearly in the midst of a culture war. The most important battles are not being fought in Washington, D.C., but in our media, churches, schools, civic organizations, youth groups, and universities. Western civilization, as we have known it, and America, as we have known it, are losing. Much of the time, the...
Suicide of the Right
After spending several weeks in deep hugger-mugger at the Republican Party platform committee this summer, the leaders of the right wing of the GOP emerged triumphant. Their deeply beloved and totally useless Human Life Amendment was reaffirmed. The obnoxious statement of “tolerance” for the opinions of those who disagree with the amendment was excised. Language...
Equality or Privilege
“Everything in American politics always comes down to the race question,” says one of our collaborators. School choice plans, for example, are either condemned for enabling the white middle classes to liberate their children from the hell of public schools or praised for giving black families the prospect of sending their children to the suburbs....
Mr. Lincoln’s War: An Irrepressible Conflict?
“[T]he contest is really for empire on the side of the North, and for independence on that of the South, and in this respect we recognize an exact analogy between the North and the Government of George III, and the South and the Thirteen Revolted Provinces. These opinions…are ...
Beyond Conservatism
“Paleoconservatism” is an awkward word, but then what it purports to describe is an awkward thing. The word in the English language that it most resembles is “paleontology”—the scientific study of fossils—and a fossil is precisely what most of the enemies of paleoconservatism accuse it of being. Coined in 1986 or ’87, the word was...
A Christian Critique of American Foreign Policy
My last (and only other) visit to the United States was early in 1986. I was visiting the Capitol at the invitation of a friend who, at the time, was working for a Republican member of the Senate. It was on the day of President Reagan’s State of the Union Address, hi the silence and...
Racial Politics
Whatever the new Republican majority does with the immense congressional power it seized in last November’s elections, it will probably be unimportant compared to the force that started to emerge in the same elections and which the national leadership of the Republican Party, and even more the Democratic Party, tried to ignore, denounce, and destroy....
Plutomania
“In these days a great capitalist has deeper roots than a sovereign prince, unless he is very legitimate.” —Benjamin Disraeli Appearing just in time for the Enron and WorldCom scandals and the ensuing stock-market plunge, Kevin Phillips’ harsh new scrutiny of the trends toward the concentration of wealth and power in the emerging American social...
How Republican Supreme Court Justices Gave Us Affirmative Action
A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education ed. by Gail Heriot and Maimon Schwarzchild Encounter Books 336 pp., $28.99 Scholars increasingly treat the issue of race with kid gloves. As the cancel culture accelerates, race—always a sensitive topic—has become nearly taboo. Any serious exploration of the correlation of intelligence and race is...
The New Right of the Old World
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...
Race Erased
Racism, Not Race starts from the assumption that biological races do not exist, rants leftward from there, and finishes by slapping the white-supremacist label on Trump voters.
Reinventing America
“Fox populi.” —Anonymous No public figure in American history is more inscrutable than Abraham Lincoln. While this is in some measure due to his extraordinary deftness as a politician, it is primarily the result of his astounding success in refounding the Republic in his own image. So thoroughly did Lincoln reform our collective historical and...
The Most Patriotic Conservative
I first encountered the name Samuel T. Francis in 1984, when Joe Sobran thrust a nondescript-looking little book, published in typically amateurish format by the University Press of America, into my hands and asked my permission to review it. (I was, in those days, the literary editor for National Review.) Its title was Power and...
Political Trust-Busting
In the “nihilistic politics of the 1990’s,” warns a newswriter for the Wall Street Journal, “party loyalty counts for almost nothing.” The writer means obeisance to the two major parties, which the civics books imply are ordained by God to rule us. In fact, America needs a breakup of this two-party system, which looks more...
Bookshelves
COMMENDABLES Nightfall for Liberalism? by Richard John Neuhaus George Parkin Grant: English Speaking Justice; Notre Dame; $4.95 paper. “Liberalism in its generic form is surely something that all decent men accept as good-‘conservatives’ included. Insofar as the word ‘liberalism’ is used to describe the belief that political liberty is a central human...
Tyranny In a Good Cause
Democracy or Republic? might well be the title of the D debate between liberals and conservatives on the nature of the American political system. (In the view of some liberals, the easiest way to spot a conservative is the habit of referring to America as a republic.) Democracy, in the strict procedural sense of one...
The Left: A History of Violence
The sight of American leftists getting on their moral high horses to attribute blame to conservatives for the growth of political violence in America is exasperating, to say the least. The dispatch of mail bombs to critics of Donald Trump and the shootings at a synagogue in Pittsburgh were like manna from heaven for these...
A Mighty Long Fall: An Interview With Eugene McCarthy
Senator Eugene McCarthy is America’s senior statesman without a party. An Irish-German Minnesota Catholic who left the seminary for academe, McCarthy was elected to the House of Representatives in 1948 and the Senate in 1958. He was the link between the Old Progressives of the Upper Midwest and the postwar liberals; as time goes by,...
An Invisible Border
The first question that comes to mind regarding the Minutemen movement is: “What do these people imagine they’re actually doing, sitting camped out down there on lawn chairs on the Southwest border?” The second is: “What do they mean to accomplish by doing it?” I imagine a representative Minuteman’s answer to the first question would...
The Winding Passage Back to Plato
In The Narrow Passage, Glenn Ellmers reminds readers of the need for a robust understanding of nature in any well-grounded conservatism.
Choose Your Side
The first thought that occurred to me upon receiving a review copy of David Garrow’s hefty biography of our former president was, besides its weight (four pounds), how the jacket photograph perfectly expresses what is revealed in 1,084 pages of text. It was taken in 1990 while Obama was at Harvard Law School, three years...
A Quota Queen for the Court
If the U.S. Senate rejects race-based justice, Sonia Sotomayor will never sit on the Supreme Court. Because that is what Sonia is all about. As the New York Times reported Saturday, the salient cause of her career has been advancing persons of color, over whites, based on race and national origin. “Judge Sotomayor, whose parents...
Harry Jaffa and the Historical Imagination
In the 1970’s, Mel Bradford and I were teaching at the University of Dallas, which offered a doctoral program in politics and literature. Students took courses in both disciplines. It was a well-designed curriculum and produced some first-rate scholars. Bradford had long been interested in political theory, but the program probably encouraged him to read...
The Post-Christian Moral Order
Wokeness isn’t Marxism. It’s the new moral order for the managerial State.
The Goading of America
Fisher Ames is the Founding Father who draws a blank. Few people today have heard of him, yet he wrote the final version of the First Amendment, and his speech on Jay’s Treaty, delivered when he was the leader of the Federalists in the First Congress, was called the finest example of American oratory by...
American Icons
“Thou shalt not portray a white male in an heroic light.” Thus reads the first commandment of the politically correct. Ever since the late 1960’s, the cultural Marxists have been engaged in a drive to destroy American heroes—if they are white males. This was not always a difficult task. Historians from an earlier generation had...
The Lion of Idaho
The latest fad among leftist historians, according to the New York Times, is the study of the conservative movement. “By marrying social and political history,” the Times announced, “this new wave of scholarship is revising the history of Americans on the right”—a prospect that is at once depressing and potentially rather promising. The depressing...
The Revolution in Civil Rights Law
It has been nearly 30 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By banning discrimination in employment and public accommodations the law was meant to minimize the role of race in the daily lives of Americans. Its result has been the opposite. The doctrine of “disparate impact” has had the astonishing...
The War for Western Civilization
The fate of conservative political philosophy depends on the ability of educational institutions to transmit the Western tradition and way of life to students.
Conservative Movement R.I.P.?
WICK ALLISON When one is asked about the future in the context Chronicles has set, the obvious response is to talk in political terms. But conservatism is not a political phenomenon. I have always been uncomfortable with references to the “conservative movement” when I read the political press or some of my favorite columnists. It...
The Lion of Idaho
From the November 1998 issue of Chronicles. The latest fad among leftist historians, according to the New York Times, is the study of the conservative movement. “By marrying social and political history,” the Times announced, “this new wave of scholarship is revising the history of Americans on the right”—a prospect that is at once depressing...
Revolt of the 300-Pound Beefy Guys
Discontent is the parent of all radicalism, and in these happy days, Pat Buchanan’s third and ever more radical challenge to the globalist ruling class may not attract the political following it deserves. The national happiness that smothers healthy political disgruntlement is due to the success, by conventional standards, of the Clinton presidency. There is...
The Fires of America’s Cultural Revolution Were Already Burning
Christopher Rufo excavates several unpleasant and destructive left-wing thought streams that are eroding the social order on which we all depend. His prescriptions for action are convincing, though it is less certain whether his diagnosis is accurate.