Texas Politics, by Wilbourn Benton, professor of political science at Texas A&M, is a textbook that surveys the constitution of the state of Texas, with heavy emphasis on the written, legal structure of how the state is run. Much of the book is a dry summary. When he can, the author tells the story of...
2679 search results for: Southern%252525252525252525252525252525252BHeritage
Post
Memories: Glimpses of Notables
In my senior year I was editor of the high-school newspaper. (We even won a prize from the Columbia University School of Journalism.) What I remember most is the literary progeny on my staff. It included the daughter of Burke Davis, a well-known writer of the time; the daughter of the historian Richard N. Current;...
Post
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...
Post
Media Windbags
Emotional outbursts and misleading rhetoric from our political class and TV opinionators leave Americans confused about everything from Putin's motives to Caitlyn Jenner's degeneracy.
Post
Kosovo Blowback Reaches America
The story: four Albanian Muslims from Kosovo, plus a Turk and a Jordanian, are arrested for conspiring to attack Fort Dix, a military base in New Jersey, with AK47s and “to kill as many soldiers as possible” (U.S. Attorney’s Office). The Mainstream Media spin: “Four ...
Post
Jackson and the American Indians
Everyone knows that Andrew Jackson wanted American Indians annihilated, defied the Supreme Court in a famous challenge to Chief Justice John Marshall, and forcibly removed the Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeast to lands west of the Mississippi River. What everyone knows is not true. Once a venerated American hero, Andrew Jackson has been attacked...
Post
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....
Post
Why the Left Can’t Let Go of Jan. 6
To understand what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s select committee investigation of the Capitol Hill events of Jan. 6 is all about, a good place to begin is with the sentencing hearing last week of Paul Hodgkins. A crane operator from Tampa, Florida, Hodgkins, 38, pleaded guilty to a single count of obstructing a joint session...
Post
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...
Post
The Flamingo Kid
It is a truism to note that H.L. Mencken, like his great vitriolic predecessor Jonathan Swift, was a thoroughgoing misanthrope. So perverse was Mencken’s vision of human existence that he preferred to read King Lear as farce rather than as tragedy—since nothing, he was fond of saying, could be more farcical than death. But if...
Post
Motels and Filling Stations
Rural and small town America is nearly dead. A distinctive culture rooted in family farms, weakening since 1900 and seriously diseased since 1960, emerged from the 1980’s in a terminal state. In Iowa alone, the last ten years saw a net out-migration of 280,000 people, a full tenth of the state’s population, with most of...
Post
The Message of Tokyo’s Kowtow
Hubris will do it ever time. The Chinese have just made a serious strategic blunder. They dropped the mask and showed their scowling face to Asia, exposing how the Middle Kingdom intends to deal with smaller powers, now that she is the largest military and economic force in Asia and second largest on earth....
Post
Il Whig in Italia
Some years ago I was interviewed by a reporter for Corriere della Sera, Italy’s most prestigious newspaper. He had heard that I was a follower of Umberto Bossi, leader of the secessionist Lega Nord, and he wanted to know what plans I had for breaking up the United States. After disclaiming any secessionist political agenda,...
Post
Aaron D. Wolf: A Man of Faith and Family
The executive editor of Chronicles, Aaron Wolf, died suddenly and tragically on Easter Sunday. He left behind a loving wife and six children, and colleagues and contributors to this magazine who admired him greatly. Aaron worked for Chronicles for 20 years, and his journey reflects where the magazine and the conservative cultural movement it represents...
Post
Contingency and Chance in Scottish and American History
Why did the Americans win and the Jacobites lose? The classic answer is that the Americans represented the future, a future of liberty, freedom, secularism, and individualism. The Jacobites were the past, reactionary and religious, the products of a hierarchical society motivated by outdated dynastic loyalty. This difference was supposedly reflected in their military methods,...
Post
Writing Without Letters
Whatever happened to the old middle-to-highbrow American culture? Once upon a time, there was a fair-sized literate class that kept up on fiction and verse by reading the great organs of literary opinion. These days there is a great gulf between serious literature and general-interest journalism. “Literary” magazines—Kenyon Review, Daedelus, or Sewanee Review, for instance—now...
Post
Trump’s Deft Game
President Donald Trump does not want to be goaded into war with Iran, which is wise. He does not want to appear weak in the aftermath of the attacks on the Saudi oil installations–for which Iran has been blamed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (“an act of war”), and others–which is understandable. By inviting the...
Post
To Arms!
Concerning Scott P. Richert’s reservations about secession, as expressed in the October Rockford Files (“To Secede or Succeed?”): Maybe “many proponents of secession seem reluctant to consider” some of the alleged drawbacks of secession. There certainly are risks. The architects of unitary nationalism weren’t dummies. The grants economy, the safety net, Social Security, and the...
Post
Letter From South Africa
I spent March 1985 in South Africa as a guest of several South African universities. I lectured to academic audiences, traveled in the rural areas of Transvaal and the Cape Province, spent a day in Soweto, visited the Crossroads slum in Cape Town and the Black township of Alexandra in Johannesburg. I talked to Black ser vants and Black leaders,...
Post
Syria’s Violent Stalemate
The international crisis may be over, but the multisided war in Syria is continuing. On Friday government planes bombarded rebel positions in the eastern city of Deir al-Zor after heavy clashes claimed the life of one of President Bashar al-Assad’s top military intelligence officers. In the long-contested city of Aleppo, a renewed rebel assault on the city’s...
Post
A Nation of (Proletarian) Immigrants
One of many reasons conservatives are so often at a disadvantage in political discussions is that we do not see why there should be any discussion, since we do not recognize a problem open to discussion at all. Take, for instance, assimilation. If you do not believe the United States should be accepting immigrants in...
Post
The German Swindle
To walk along a narrow ridge or cliff path, German-speakers will tell you, you have to be schwindelfrei. The French word vertige exists in English (vertigo), but we would be more likely to say “dizziness.” The German word is for vertige or dizziness der Schwindel, but Schwindel also can mean what it does in English—swindle....
Post
A War on Whites?
Alabama Republican congressman Mo Brooks generated outrage among the usual suspects this week by telling Laura Ingraham that the Obama Adminstration’s push for amnesty for illegal immigrants is “a part of the war on whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party. And the way in which they’re launching this war is by claiming that...
Post
Dealing With the Devil
I do not normally take pronouncements from show-business folk seriously—they are almost always publicity ploys—but in the Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg case against Beijing’s “Genocide Olympics,” I will gladly make an exception. We all know that there is something rotten at the heart of modern sport, starting with the Olympics, which was, once upon...
Post
Abe-Worship
At the end of the recent remake of Planet of the Apes—turn the page now if you still plan to see it—the hero escapes from said planet and its monstrous chimp-tyrant, General Thade. Returning to Earth at night, his spacecraft crashes in, of all places, the Reflecting Pool at the Washington Mall, and he solemnly...
Post
The Voice That Won’t Be Silenced
Tucker Carlson's voice is too important to silence because he speaks for so many people.
Post
Frankly, My Dear
The publication of Gone With the Wind in 1936 was a major event in publishing—if not literary—history, compounded by the overblown movie of 1939 and by worldwide sales that continue to this day. Margaret Mitchell was overwhelmed by the reaction, which was complex and multifold. The novel was read by people on both sides in...
Post
Alone Among Strangers
At the moment the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of states to enact parental consultation abortion statutes, the abortion-advocacy organizations went into high gear. The Hodgson v. Minnesota and Ohio v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health decisions “endangered teens,” they claimed, and NOW President Molly Yard charged that the Court had “thrown down the...
Post
Standard Practice
The human tempests presently sweeping the country—rape allegations at the University of Virginia and in the U.S. military, racial protests and rioting over police conduct, growing and growling bitterness during the sweetest of seasons—have as much to do with moral decay as with circumstances. A moral system presupposes some general level of personal restraint in...
Post
Looking for Moral Foundations (in All the Wrong Places)
A debate unfolded in March last year in American Greatness between Chronicles contributor Mark Pulliam and the Claremont Institute’s Edward Erler, a devotee of Harry Jaffa. According to Erler, Robert Bork and others who adhered to strict constitutional originalism were essentially moral nihilists because they would not apply natural law standards to our governing document....
Post
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....
Post
Honest Journalist
Why are the phrases “honest journalist” and “free press” so often greeted with a snicker? Of course, everyone exempts his own columnist or talking head from the general condemnation, but most Americans also exempt their own congressman from the universal condemnation of Congress as a body made up of toadies and swindlers. To see the...
Post
Breeze Over the Border With Me
Let’s conduct a thought experiment. Imagine that you have just landed at New York’s JFK International Airport after a 15-hour flight from Mumbai. Although you splurged for a business-class ticket, the extra-large seat, constant parade of food, and infinite selection of video entertainment didn’t help you forget you were trapped in a steel tube 35,000...
Post
Is Laken Riley’s Life Worth Less Than George Floyd’s?
The issue facing Biden and his party is not whether to call Ibarra “illegal,” “undocumented” or a “newcomer,” but whether they intend to protect Americans from gang members.
Post
‘The Brilliant’ Larry Summers Tries to Trash Trump
Gerald Celente likes to mock “The Brilliant” Larry Summers, top economic guru to the Clinton and Obama administrations, and therefore a primary architect of America’s economic decay, especially of its middle class. Greg Palast detailed Summers’ long and close ties to Goldman Sachs, the primary beneficiary of the 2008 TARP bank bailout of Wall St....
Post
The Logic of Liberalism
Writing in this issue of Chronicles, Frank Brownlow, the scholar and literary critic, quotes W.H. Auden as having described logic as “a condition of the world,” like aesthetics and ethics. Auden was right, which makes advanced liberalism’s rejection of logic so dangerous. Five nights a week on FOX News, week after week, Tucker Carlson in...
Post
On Evangelical Education
Douglas Wilson’s article, “Why Evangelical Colleges Aren’t,” (Vital Signs, September) is provocative but unsubstantiated. It is also quietly self-serving, failing to mention his role as a founder of New St. Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho. His assertions about evangelical higher education ought to be measured against the facts of those colleges and against his own...
Post
Fairabia
Most Americans wouldn’t like it if they knew that a foreign government had built a school in the United States which teaches hatred of Americans and their country. Indeed, most Americans wouldn’t like it if they knew a foreign government had built a school here that teaches hatred of anyone or anything. Then again, most...
Post
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...
Post
Liberal Charity
Which is the main bastion of institutional liberalism: government or the corporate boardroom, which in addition to its own leftist philanthropy also funds multimillion-dollar foundations? With a cutback in public spending possible, due to voter disenchantment, the answer may be the latter, for universities and special interest groups intent on spreading secularism and nihilism are...
Post
Life in the Old Right
One problem with labeling ideological movements “old” or “new” is that inevitably, with the passage of time, the “new” becomes an “old” and the markers get confusing. In the modern, post-World War II right wing, there have been a number of “news” and hence “olds” over the past half-century. But what I call the “Old...
Post
A New Balance of Power
Seven years is a well-rounded time span, for better (“Behold, there come seven years of great plenty”) or for worse (“And there shall arise after them seven years of famine”). As we enter the final year of George W. Bush’s presidency, it is time to look at his septennial foreign-policy scorecard without malice, which his...
Post
Big Brother Sits for a Portrait
“It is highly desirable that people heading the party movement, be, at last, depicted in powerful Rembrandt colors in all their robust vitality.” —K. Marx What Khrushchev in his secret speech at the Congress of the Soviet Communist Party called “Stalin’s cult of personality” is, in fact, the most common and the most stable component...
Post
Jacobins—and Jacobins
At the dawn of the 21st century, few of today’s public (or private) school students would argue with you if you told them that the United States of America was founded upon the principle, proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal.” They would offer no argument, perhaps, except that they...
Post
Holding the Pass
It has been ten years since the death, at his home in the village of Mecosta, Michigan, of Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind and one of the main spokesmen for organized American conservatism as it was known throughout his life. While there were other architects of conservatism who were Kirk’s contemporaries, almost all...
Post
A Besieged Trump Presidency Ahead
After a week managing the transition, vice president-elect Mike Pence took his family out to the Broadway musical “Hamilton.” As Pence entered the theater, a wave of boos swept over the audience. And at the play’s end, the Aaron Burr character, speaking for the cast and the producers, read a statement directed at Pence: “(W)e...
Post
Can’t We All Just Make Better Movies?
The sheer incongruity of the deceased Ray Liotta appearing in a new release added a hint of fascination to "1992," an otherwise formulaic heist picture produced by rap artist Snoop Dogg.
Post
America: A Growing Servility
Here is Part 1 of the English version of Thomas Fleming’s interview with the Serbian magazine Geopolitika, on the decline of America: Geopolitika: What has happened to the United States? Observers in and outside of America have been commenting on America’s decline, both as a world power and as an inspiration and model for other countries. Within living...
Post
This Land Is My Sunshine
I know three people (and if I alone know three, there must be more of them out there) who think “This Land Is Your Land” is a country song—and one of the three sings it to the tune of “You Are My Sunshine.” Now, it’s a fact that Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs once recorded...
Post
Colin Powell, R.I.P.?
With impeccable timing, I interviewed Eisenhower biographer and Colin Powell booster Stephen E. Ambrose just days before Powell’s Noble Renunciation of Ambition. But before our chat disappears into that void (de?)populated by Milton Shapp’s Inaugural Address and the Oscar acceptance speech of Pauly Shore, I retrieve this exchange: Me: One way to look at Eisenhower...