Pro-life Republicans must somehow convince their opponents that opposition to abortion is a deeply held belief about human life—not an attack on women.
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At the End of Italy
I am writing this from a cottage near Santa Maria di Leuca, on the southernmost tip of Italy in the Adriatic. As the luggage, including my maps and guidebooks, only arrived yesterday, I cannot really be expected to say anything worth believing about the land or the people. As for the curious inner workings of...
Syria: Increasing Danger of Escalation
In the days and weeks ahead President Obama will face an important decision: whether to allow the conflict in Syria to escalate by approving Turkey’s and Saudi Arabia’s direct intervention, or to come to terms with the continued survival and expanding area of control of the government of Bashar al-Assad. Informed commentators note that this...
U.S. Attorney Sassoon’s Dubious ‘Principled Resignation’
Former federal prosecutor Danielle Sassoon’s stated reasons for resigning rather than dropping charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams are legally suspect.
Are Democrats Kicking Away Their Future?
Not so long ago, Democrats seemed the party of the future. “Inevitable!” predicted some pundits, for demography is destiny. Moreover, in 2020, Democrats, who had won the popular vote six times in seven presidential elections, swept the popular vote again, by 6 million ballots. And they captured both houses of Congress. The future did seem...
The Return of the Grand Inquisitor
“Without the spiritual rebirth no political changes will make people free. But the spiritual rebirth, a Christian rebirth, is the ascent of a free man, and not of Russian nationalism, the cult of homeland, fatherland, and one’s country.” -Mihajlo Mihajlov in “Some Timely Thoughts” (written in 1974 in response to Letter to the Soviet...
Bad, Bad Boy
“Big Jim” Folsom (1908- ), governor of Alabama (1946-1950, 1954-1958), was said to have entered office on a collision course with the state’s two major economic estates, big business and big agriculture. The 20-county Black Belt (a name derived from its soil, but equally descriptive of population composition) traverses the state just south of center....
Books In Brief
Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the Periphery, and the Future of France, by Christophe Guilluy (New Haven: Yale University Press; 184 pp., $25.00). The French dislike what they call “Anglo-American economics” even more than they dislike English and American cookery; also, more recently, progressive Anglo-American views regarding the supposed identicality between the sexes. Christophe Guilluy,...
Jefferson’s Cousin
From the June 2002 issue of Chronicles. There are probably more judicial biographies of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall than of all the rest of the Supreme Court justices combined, so why another one? R. Kent Newmyer, historian and law professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, undertook to write a work...
#MeToo: Stalinism in Drag
We live in a Puritan country, in which self-righteousness is eternally wedded to cheap theatrics. This explains the dual phenomena of Meryl Streep and Hollywood’s earnest commitment to distributing her films to every country on the planet. Like all good Puritans, self-righteous Americans are sure to be the most depraved of anyone. So when Tinseltown,...
Comeback Time for Christians
The Holy Father—Pope Benedict XVI—offers to let Episcopalians and other Anglicans of Catholic disposition join the Roman Catholic Church, while retaining characteristics of their Anglican identity. And who in the booming pagan market cares a flying broomstick what the pope does about anything? Not the Wiccans, an estimated 340,000 strong. ...
No Tears for Argentina
“The failure of Argentina,” writes V.S. Naipal, “so rich, so underpopulated, is one of the mysteries of our time.” The 2001 Nobel laureate has not been the only observer to express bewilderment regarding the failings of a country so blessed with resources and so impoverished as a nation. As Argentina slides into the economic abyss...
Anglo-Americana
From the October 1990 issue of Chronicles. In 1858, as British and French forces pushed their way to Peking in the Opium Wars, Josiah Tatnall, commander of the neutral American naval squadron, intervened to save the British ships from Chinese guns and tow them safely out of range. When asked why he had abandoned his...
America as a Proposition Nation
There is a popular superstition that defines America as a “Proposition Nation,” created and proclaimed by the obiter dicta about “all men” in the second sentence of the 1776 Declaration that the 13 colonies “are and of right ought to be free and independent States.” Is America a Proposition Nation? No, for the very simple...
Empire Strikes Back
” . . . To sit in darkness here hatching vain empires.” —Milton During his discussion of the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie in his classic Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Joseph Schumpeter asked whether “in the end such complete emancipation was good for the bourgeois and his world.” He concluded that it had not...
Ron Paul Rising
When the Old Gray Lady finally deigned to take notice of Ron Paul’s presidential bid, it was in the form of a long piece in the New York Times Magazine by Christopher Caldwell, a piece that confirmed the definite feeling of déjà vu I get when I note the energy, the enthusiasm, and the surprising...
Tulsi at the Turning Point
Tulsi Gabbard's farewell to the Democratic Party sounds more like a declaration of war. Most of her remarks would pass muster at a Trump rally.
Our Fathers’ Fields
Conservatives in the 21st century lead subterranean lives, taking refuge in their obscurity and finding comfort only in the virtual memories of better times, memories all too often implanted from misleading books and films. Like aristocratic pagans in the afterglow of the Roman Empire, they are a despised minority who fight symbolic battles. In 382,...
University The New Overseas Campus
The inauguration of Lagado University’s new campus in Plagho-Plaguo, the capital of Dismailia, is generating great excitement throughout the Diversity Community. As President Bleatley has said, LU’s “Semester in Dismailia” is guaranteed to challenge Eurocentric cultural values on every level and at every turn. It centers the Other, presents the Absent, privileges Multiplicity, and promises...
Church Shopper
Like the French, we Americans live in, to borrow from Claude Polin, a “me-first” society. Each and every man is the measure of all things, his own arbiter of that which is beautiful, true, and of good report. Reared on the Disney principle (You can be whatever you want to be, or, Be true to...
Giving the Devil His Due
Early in the morning factory whistle blows, Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes, Man takes his lunch, walks out in the morning light, It’s the working, the working, just the working life . . . One of the oddest ironies of our postindustrial age is that conservatives—true conservatives, not the various utopian...
Bridge of Hope
In 1958, when the first barbed-wire barricades were rolled out by the British colonial government across Ledra Street in the capital of Cyprus, it seemed inevitable that the seeds of division would yield a bitter harvest of intercommunal conflicts, regional tensions, and, finally, the partition of the whole island. Where minarets and churches once jostled...
Episcopalians Go Interfaith
An interfaith education conference in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the Episcopal Church warned that evangelicals and evangelism are potential obstacles to positive relations between Christianity and other religions. Among the featured speakers at the Interfaith Education Initiative was Methodist theologian Wesley Ariarajah, a former official of the World Council of Churches who has denied the...
New York vs. New York
“The feeling between this city and the hayseeds. . .is every hit as hitter as the feelings between the North and South before the War. . . . Why, I know a lot of men in my district who would like nothin’ better than to go out gunnin for hayseeds.” —George...
The Muslim Brotherhood, Our Ally
The Obama Administration’s Middle Eastern policy is irrational and detrimental to American interests in the region. The decision to support the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and Egypt is the strategic equivalent of Emperor Nicholas I Romanov’s support for the Habsburgs in suppressing the Hungarian revolution in 1849. The cost of that geopolitical blunder was...
The Saudi Presence in the United States
For all the investment the United States has made in prosecuting the “War on Terror” in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Saudi presence in the United States has gone largely unnoticed—although it may be the most lethal terror front of all. U.S. politicians have been intoxicated by Saudi petrodollars for decades. Saudi greenbacks led Spiro Agnew...
The Gascon of Europe
Now that communism is dead, a new specter is haunting much of Europe—the specter of nationalism. In several countries, for the first time since World War II, what may be conveniently termed nationalist, right-wing, populist parties are on the verge of coming to power, or at least of gaining respectable numbers of seats in government....
The West’s Fear That Dare Not Speak Its Name
With the drowning deaths of 27 migrants crossing the Channel from France to England, illegal migration from the Third World is front and center anew in European politics. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has proposed that France take back to its shores all migrants who cross the Channel illegally and come ashore in Britain. In the...
To Preserve the American Tribe
“A nation scattered and peeled . . . a nation meted out and trodden down.” —Isaiah 18:2 “It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of looking insufficiently progressive.” Pat Buchanan quotes this aphorism of Charles Péguy in his latest book, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion...
Polemics & Exchanges: August 2022
Correspondence on "More Hand-Wringing About the Radical Right," by Paul Gottfried and "A Fork in Europe's Road," by Srdja Trifkovic.
In Praise of Tyranny
“I’m always sorry when any language is lost,” Samuel Johnson told Boswell during their tour of the Hebrides in September 1773, “because languages are the pedigree of nations.” Linguistic pride is not a dead artifact of Romantic nationalism. It is alive and well today, among the Quebecois and among the supporters of a constitutional amendment...
Success and Failure in Higher Education
Nelson County, Marion County, and Washington County are collectively referred to by their inhabitants as the Kentucky Holy Land, and I don’t think the expression is meant to be entirely whimsical. Settled in the late 18th century by English Catholics from Maryland, the rolling green country is to this day marked by cattle farms, distilleries,...
Georgia: The Score
Russia’s recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia makes it imperative to analyze the situation in the Caucasus dispassionately and comprehensively. The mainstream media (MSM) treatment of the crisis has been predictably monolithic, however -- almost as biased (“bad ...
Gleichschaltung
When a new religion displaces an old one, the gods of the old faith become the demons of the new. So it is with the demigods and heroes as well, and as new cultures, races, and nations begin to blossom where once the fruits of European and American civilization flourished, it is not surprising to...
Among the Lakes
My advice to anyone who wants to see some of the most polite people around is to get to Chile soon—before we declare war on it or the media level it into the likeness of a London suburb, with a bust of Lenin in every town hall, tax-funded homes for lesbians, and a veto on...
Can Beijing Survive Hong Kong Fever?
Americans are caught up with the Ebola crisis and the Secret Service lapses in protecting the White House and the president’s family. But what is transpiring in Hong Kong may be of far greater consequence. Last weekend, Hong Kong authorities used pepper spray and tear gas to scatter the remnants of a student protest of...
Childish Ideologues
The NAACP vows to campaign against every senator who voted to confirm John Ashcroft as attorney general. Oh, how we ought to hope so! Get out there, guys! Show us what dopes you’re capable of being when you try hard! Ideologues—e.g., the folk who run the NAACP these days—don’t normally receive the attention they deserve....
The Two Faces of Freud
When Sigmund Freud took his children hunting for mushrooms he always insisted that they follow a certain ritual. Part of the ritual consisted of placing fresh flowers every day at the shrine of the Virgin near the wood. Although he publicly attacked religion as an illusion, Freud seems to have had a private preoccupation with...
Remembering Warren G. Harding
Harding was a consummate conservative governed by humility, kindness, and charity for all: principles that guided him in both his personal life and his political career.
The Case for Christian Distributism
Christian distributism celebrates the small and the human. It rests on strong home economies and demands the widest possible distribution and ownership of productive property. It favors worker ownership through cooperatives of necessarily larger machines and enterprises. It seeks and reinforces local communities, bound together by ties of kinship, faith, and trade. It welcomes lifelong,...
India, China, and U.S. Pacific Strategy
A major border clash took place between Indian and Chinese troops mid-June in the Western Himalayan region of Ladakh, on the disputed “Line of Actual Control” dividing the two Asian giants. Twenty Indian soldiers died, including a senior officer, and there were 43 reported casualties on the Chinese side. This was the bloodiest in a series...
Welcome to Dodge City
On the American frontier of previous centuries, the possession of a firearm was often a key to survival. In this regard, the frontier of 20th-century America, although different geographically, is very much like earlier frontiers. As different waves of Europeans arrived in North America, each took a distinct approach to trading guns with the Indians....
On the Confederate Flag
I would like to respond to Clyde Wilson’s excellent editorial (Cultural Revolutions, May 1996) on the Confederate flag. Mr. Wilson is correct in what he says, as far as it goes, but there is, or should be, more here than meets the eye. First, why do we really care what may or not be “offensive”...
The Empire State of Mind
Nigel Biggar's sophisticated history of British colonialism does not ignore the many benefits reaped by the recipients. His work is relevant to all Western nations, now threatened by faux radicals.
The American Crisis Without Alternative
The most important event of the waning years of the 20th century is the collapse of the last of the great national socialist powers whose rise and fall dominated the generations after World War I. The Axis easily defeated their liberal and imperial opponents, but were crushed by the national socialist regimes of the Soviet...
Kissinger’s Call for a New World Order
Among the works that first brought Henry Kissinger to academic acclaim was A World Restored, his 1950s book about how the greatest diplomats of Europe met at the Congress of Vienna to restore order to a continent shattered by the Napoleonic Wars. The balance-of-power peace these men achieved lasted—with the significant exception of the...
The Censored History of Internment
In March 1997, Japanese-Peruvians who had been interned in the United States during World War II called upon President Clinton to issue an executive order awarding them financial compensation similar to that awarded in 1988 to Japanese-American former internees and relocatees under Public Law 100-383. Simultaneously, these Japanese-Peruvians lobbied members of Congress to enact legislation...
Labor Left in the Lurch
It became clear on Labor Day 2022 that the American left has no use for Americans who make a living with their hands, particularly if those hands are white and masculine.
Krugman Oblivious to Inflation
Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman got upset on a recent plane flight when he saw Ron Paul on NewsMax TV on the jet’s telescreen. Krugman wondered, “Who knew there was such a thing? Is it there to serve people who find Fox News too liberal?” Actually, Newsmax, like Fox News, is neoconservative – that is,...
The Conservative Search for Order
The terms liberal and conservative (nearly always paired in that descending order) are now so confused as to be almost entirely useless. Originally, liberal was used to denote the ideology that aimed at the liberation of human individuals from the restraints of Church establishments, aristocratic and monarchical privileges, and legal restrictions on business and international...