The political hostility of the United States today is directed at no one more than America’s European-descended whites—the group whose ancestors are largely responsible for settling, building, and defending this country. That is not to say others contributed nothing, but that the largest contributions and, indeed, the central elements of America’s political and cultural institutions...
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John F. Kennedy: Character and Camelot
John F. Kennedy first gained national attention at the age of 23. His book Why England Slept, published in 1940, became a best-seller and earned the new Harvard graduate plaudits as a man of learning and thoughtfulness. Kennedy was heard from again in the summer of 1944 when the New York Times carried a front-page...
Clark’s Tale
Alan Clark, who died in 1999 at the age of 71, was one of the Conservative Party’s most iconoclastic, amusing, and controversial—yet thoughtful—figures. In a party top-heavy with temporizers and economic reductionists, in an age full of angst, his cheerful disregard for delicate sensibilities was a joy to behold, even when you did not agree...
The Hague Tribunal: Bad Justice, Worse Politics
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once referred to the Cheka as “the only punitive organ in human history that combined in one set of hands investigation, arrest, interrogation, prosecution, trial, and execution of the verdict.” He was probably mistaken about “human history,” but his anger was just. What he chronicled was indefinite imprisonment without trial; investigations and indictments...
Time for a Conservative Reformation
The fate of conservatism is thought to be hanging in the balance these days, and with it, perhaps, the fate of the country, of a political party, of presidential candidates, of a movement. Well, good. Now is the time for reevaluation or, dare I say it, reformation. “Conservatism isn’t just passivity,” wrote Joseph Sobran in...
A Faith Misplaced
Progressive arrogance. Technocratic overreach. Social engineering. Racial tension. Expanding executive powers. Aggressive and endless waves of “experts.” Economic disparity and unrest. “Us” versus “them.” All are characteristics of social and political life in recent years in the United States. So much so that some pundits and observers apparently find the combination alarming and unique—even unprecedented—in...
Race and the Classless Society
A few months ago I was on a long plane ride when something rather startling happened: Someone sitting near me was actually polite. He was in the seat immediately in front of mine, and before reclining he turned to look over his shoulder and asked—asked!—if I would mind if he leaned a little bit into...
When the Center Does Not Hold
The federalism of the American founders provides a way to contain Americans’ cultural differences within the political system and maintain order.
Middle American Mellow?
Since the 1960’s, American politics at the national level has primarily consisted of an endless search for a new majority. The Democratic Party’s embrace of the civil-rights movement kicked off the quest by undermining the New Deal coalition that combined white Southerners with white, ethnic, Northern union members, allowing the Republican Party to invade the...
The World Goes Its Way
A French writer argues that “humanity” has become the accepted “version of the universal” in contemporary Western thought, functioning as the “action” of modern democratic polity. While Pierre Manent’s thesis is a convincing one, political and social occurrences in the past decade seem to indicate that the West’s humanitarian “version” is becoming discredited at an...
“Banding” Together
Race-norming’s likeliest successor is something called “banding.” If you see references to a “diversity-based sliding band,” do not expect to encounter something as agreeable as a Dixieland ensemble. No, the term is only a euphemism for the latest subterfuge to scuttle rank-order selection of top scorers on tests for hiring and promotion. It’s better, you...
Lincoln’s Legacy: Foreign Policy by Assassination
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” For proof of this axiom, we need only look at the foreign policy pursued by the U.S. government since the end of World War II. The United States emerged from World War II militarily victorious but politically deformed. Instead of a republic, it was now a...
Truth or Consequences
“I don’t know where democracy will end, but it can’t end in a quiet old age.” —Klemens von Metternich Rowland Evans and Robert Novak were among the first political commentators to designate the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan a watershed date in American political history. From their perspective in 1981, “What was so quickly started...
Pedestaled Power
Post-Christian beliefs permeate the culture. A stroll across the majority of university campuses, five minutes of channel surfing, the U.S. Supreme Court’s First Amendment case law, popular behavior and that of the American elite—these are proof positive that Christianity in the 21st century bears little resemblance to the Christianity of America’s not too distant past. ...
Perfect for This Moment
The hero of the hour, if not the messiah of the New Age, is Barack Obama, a gentleman whose name might lead you to suspect him of being an Afghan terrorist or the most recent American puppet candidate for the presidency of Iraq but who, in fact, is merely the freshman senator from the state...
We Can’t Vote Ourselves Out of This: Organizing a Middle American Resistance
The American right needs a Middle American resistance united in its focus on internal secession and self-government, one that does not rely on national politics or bet on political saviors.
Triberalism
After three decades in which the term “liberal Democratic media” has come to seem an almost complete redundancy, many students of American journalism today are no doubt stunned to learn that, prior to the 1960’s, this nation’s printed press was regarded by most prominent liberals and Democrats as a bastion of conservatism and Republicanism. When...
Why the Politics of Grievance Is a Winning Strategy for the Democrats
The Democratic Party decided to abandon the working class and become the party of grievance groups generations ago. This is what it is today; there's no going back.
Politicized Christianity
On a recent Sunday, my church bulletin ran this edifying announcement: “Is cutting health, income assistance, nutrition and safety guarantees of millions of children and shredding the national safety net for children the kind of reform we support? Call President Clinton to let him know what you are for. ‘I was hungry, thirsty, homeless, sick...
Divided Loyalties
James Cobb admirably assesses the loyalties of C. Vann Woodward, one of the most influential historians of the 20th century, whose best-known books explored the rise of the New South and the emergence of the Jim Crow regime.
Secessionist Fantasies
Throughout the first half of the present year, “secession” became the new watchword for a growing number of people on the American right. Economist Walter Williams has written at least two newspaper columns openly advocating secession. Jeffrey Tucker of the Ludwig von Mises Institute describes secession as “the cutting-edge issue that defines today’s anti-statism,” and...
Remembering Edward C. Banfield
For decades, Edward C. Banfield taught within the Ivy League environment despite being a right-winger who favored empirical investigation over theories and feelings.
The Pros and Cons of Immigration: A Debate
Jacob Neusner, Graduate Research Professor of Humanities and Religious Studies, University of South Florida Martin Buber Professor of Judaic Studies, University of Frankfurt Immigration nourishes America, affirming the power of its national ideal: a society capable of remaking the entire world in the image of humanity in democracy. No country in the world other than...
The Politics of Hispanic Identity
The federal government officially recognizes “Hispanic”—an artificial and arbitrary concept devoid of ethnic, racial, cultural, or linguistic meanings—as a legitimate collective identity for two reasons. Domestically, it is to create a “Hispanic nation” within the United States, to inflate the numerical size of that “nation,” and to have all members of that “nation” eligible for...
Darwin in the Dock
The 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex should be a time of celebration for his many fans. However, my advice to Darwin’s admirers is: Don’t pop the corks yet. The last couple of years of “woke” culture have cast a pall over the legacy of the...
The Great Conservative Death Wish
The unremitting success of the left’s march through Western institutions hardly suggests that liberals suffer from a death wish; on the contrary, it is conservatism that appears to be consuming itself.
Typefaces – Pulpits and the Press
“The grand Pulpit is now the Press,” Thomas Carlyle argued a century and a half ago, adding that “the true Church of England, at this moment, lies in the Editors of its Newspapers. These preach to the people daily, weekly; admonishing kings themselves; advising peace or war, with an authority which only the first Reformers,...
Enthusiastic Democracy
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...
A New Right Arises in Poland
The year 2019 was an eventful one in Polish politics. Out of a boring and meaningless dispute between two wings of Polish liberalism, there arose a new political force determined to shake up Poland’s political culture. Eleven MPs from the new Confederation Party appeared in the Polish Parliament, the Sejm, after last October’s parliamentary elections....
Conservative Balance-of-Power
A remarkable yet unreported trend in U.S. politics over the past decade is the balance-of-power held by conservative political parties in federal elections, if we define balance-of-power as a vote total equal to or greater than the difference in votes between the Democratic and Republican candidates in a race. Some media pundits noted that Green Party...
Beating Affirmative Action
Is the composition of the Supreme Court the be-all and end-all of important societal conflicts? Are there effective ways that conservatives can address these conflicts—manifest in political battles over such things as affirmative action—apart from the Court? The Supreme Court’s decision in Fisher v. University of Texas, handed down on June 23, means affirmative action...
An Electorate of Sheep
Even the weariest presidential campaign winds somewhere to the sea, and this month, as the ever dwindling number of American voters meanders into the voting booths, the sea is exactly where the political vessels in which the nation sails have wound up. Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. It is symptomatic of...
Enthusiastic Democracy
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...
Restless Natives
Everyone over the age of thirty has seen the movie Casablanca several times. It is a classic love story, in which beautiful women turn out to count for less than politics and killing Germans takes precedence over both love and marriage. In actuality, Casablanca has very little to do with love: the love affair, told...
Civil Rights or Property Rights?
The interplay of race and economics in America has produced a new variant of political economy that we might call “multicultural capitalism,” a system in which property is, for the most part, privately owned, but its ownership is conditional on the race, sex, and—in some cases—the sexual orientation of the owner. In the pursuit of...
White Like Me
I have never seen Ireland, but, anchored decades ago aboard R.M.S. Saxonia in a foggy night redolent with the odor of burning peat off Cobh while the tender came and went between the ship and the dockside several miles portside, I have scented her. Queen Mary 2 does not call at Cobh, and so on...
End of the Liberal Dream
Hell hath no fury like a peaceable liberal whose peaceable cause seems to be losing—especially when that cause is represented by the liberal himself, as Hillary Clinton’s tirade in the guise of a concession speech in Manchester, New Hampshire, demonstrated. Liberals and liberalism are currently under siege in Western countries. So liberals are in a...
Stop Playing the Left’s Game
When Chronicles asked me to provide a refutation of Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission report (“Rejecting the ‘Proposition Nation,’” April/May 2021), I knew it would be controversial. I was right. Michael Anton wrote a lengthy rebuttal at American Greatness (“Americans Unite,” May 1, 2021). I don’t mind Anton circling the wagons to defend his friends. That is admirable. That said, his...
The Emperor’s Tattoo
“A monarchy that’s tempered with republican equality.” Who would have thought, 100 years ago, that by the end of the American Century the great burning public issue would be the Confederate flag? Back in 1900, Americans were eager to put their quarrels behind them. Rebs and Yanks had fought side by side in Cuba, and...
Burnham Agonistes
From the July 2002 issue of Chronicles. “Who says A must say B.” —James Burnham Most adult conservatives as well as many educated people know that James Burnham was an anticommunist author and columnist for William F. Buckley’s National Review; a number of others will be aware that Burnham’s name seems to flap through the...
Towers of Babel
“Nations have lost their old omnipotence; the patriotic tie does not hold. Nations are getting obsolete, we go and live where we will. Steam has enabled men to choose what law they will live under. Money makes place for them.” —R.W. Emerson While Pierre Manent’s Democracy Without Nations? concerns itself principally with the erosion of...
Sleepwalking in America
For the third time in our generation, independent voters could be the balance of power in this year’s presidential election. In 1968, Alabama Gov. George G. Wallace, standardbearer of the American Independent Party, received 13 percent of the popular vote, a sum greater than the difference between Hubert H. Humphrey and the victor, Richard M....
Resurrecting the Old Right
For those who may have noticed, I’ve been absent from this venerable magazine for more than 12 years. Upon returning, I feel obliged to give an account of what I’ve learned in the intervening time. Aside from visiting my family and doing research for several monographs, I’ve been pondering the vicissitudes of the American right....
Christian Nationalism—A Catholic Integralist View
Natural law, not liberalism, directs Man to his proper end.
Schizophrenia & Politics
The Confidence Gap: Business, Labor, and Government in the Public Mind by Seymour Martin Lipset and William Schneider; The Free Press; New York. ” American public opinion,” Theodore Roosevelt once said, “is a vast ocean. It cannot be stirred with a teaspoon!” Since then, assorted experts have tried, with increasingly sophisticated tools, to measure the...
The End of Politics
Politics are over in America. Political maneuvering will go on, of course, but the old civics-class view of American political life was based on a set of assumptions that are no longer operative. America was once far more homogenous than she is today. But the passing of the 1965 Immigration Act and the political and...
Reassessing the Legacy of George Wallace
There was a very odd occurrence in the “Cradle of the Confederacy” in July 1987: Presidential aspirant and civil rights activist Jesse Jackson paid a visit to the Montgomery, Alabama, home of George Corley Wallace. It had been 126 years since Jefferson Davis stood on the steps of the Alabama capitol and been sworn in...
The Hispanic Strategy
The question that has smoldered in the Republican mind for the last couple of years is not who will be the presidential nominee of the party in 2000, but rather, will George W. Bush win the Hispanic vote? Since some time in 1998, it has been an unquestioned assumption of many, if not most. Republicans—at...
The Fixer
This new biography of one of the great “fixers” in American political life, James F. Byrnes, creates the impression of an American Ozymandias, proclaiming by example the ephemerality of human greatness. Byrnes and his political colleagues did mold the world in which we live long after the last of them died; yet the scene of...
Rout of the Republicans
The first thing to be said about the presidential election of 2000 is that George W. Bush and the Stupid Party lost miserably. This is true despite their actual victory in the great post-election Florida chicken-scratch because, without Ralph Nader on the ballot, Al Gore would have won the election easily. Nader’s votes in Florida...