If New York’s attorney general can smear and destroy an online publication simply because she does not agree with its contents, there’s no meaningful free speech in America anymore.
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Scouting and Sin
The Boy Scouts of America have recently been accused of sins against Democracy, in the form of discrimination against atheists, homosexuals, and women. Four recent lawsuits have challenged the organizational prerogatives of the Scouts. The families of nine-year-old twins Michael and William Randall of Anaheim, California, and eight-year-old Mark Welsh of Chicago are suing to...
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Multiculturalism in Theory and Practice
I came by my lifelong interest in foreign languages and cultures honestly. Mv grandfather, Andrew Jackson King, Jr., migrated to a Hispanic-populated area of the Territory of New Mexico in 1906. Acquiring a small ranch, he hired some (Spanish-speaking) Basque shepherds and raised sheep—for a while, that is, until one morning he discovered that both...
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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...
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EXCLUSIVE: Guns and Roses
When one William Kostric walked into a protest outside a town hall meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, at which the President of the United States was present, carrying a loaded gun—“Of course it was loaded,” he told Chris Matthews later, “what kind of fool would carry around an unloaded gun?”—he ...
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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,...
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Immigrant Birthright
Any doubts you may have had about the absurdity and falseness of American electoral politics would have been removed if you had lived through the barrage of advertising that preceded our South Carolina presidential primary. Every single one of the Republican candidates pretended to have become Horatio at the Bridge, single-handedly holding back the onslaught...
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On True Finns
In the December issue of Chronicles, Edward Dutton writes about the peculiar self-censorship that characterizes Finnish political and cultural life (“Letter From Finland: Finland, Democracy, and Those Cartoons,” Correspondence). This reality was confirmed as the magazine was likely going to press, when the Finnish prime minister told journalists that they should not ask government ministers...
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The Remnants of Realism
Philip Roth: The Anatomy Lesson; Farrar, Straus & Grioux; New York. Louis Auchincloss: Exit Lady Masham; Houghton Mifflin; Boston. In the opinion of Tom Wolfe, “the introduction of realism into literature… was like the introduction of electricity into machine technology. It was not just another device. It raised the state of the art to a new magnitude.”...
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White Anxiety and the GOP
White anxiety is the single greatest driver of right-wing politics in the United States, and it is as understandable as the fear one feels while trying to avoid death by drowning.
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An Albanian Travelogue
I’ve just returned from Albania, almost 22 years after visiting that country for the first time. In July 1991 I went there on an assignment with U.S. News & World Report, only weeks after the country’s borders were finally opened to foreigners after 45 years of hermetic isolation. I have visited many countries over the years,...
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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....
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With the Nietzscheans of Naumburg
The old cathedral town of Naumburg, where Friedrich Nietzsche spent 12 of the first 18 and seven of the last ten years of his life, is located in the southeastern corner of the Land (province) of Sachsen-Anhalt, roughly halfway between Weimar and Leipzig. In late April and early May of 1945, this part of Germany...
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Piltdown Man
Virginia Woolf once wrote that human nature suddenly changed in the year 1912. Such things tend to be at the whim of later generations of critics, but there’s no doubt that the idea of an acceptable form of public entertainment underwent a rude shock in the years just before the outbreak of World War I. ...
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A Warring Visionary
British scholar Timothy Stanley has produced the first significant biography of Patrick J. Buchanan, describing his life from his boyhood in Washington, D.C., up to the present. Stanley’s book is written in a breezy, informal manner—Buchanan is referred to as “Pat” throughout—and it makes for quick and generally enjoyable reading. Stanley gets much right in...
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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...
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National Love-Fest
Jackie, Tiger, and Ellen—not as catchy as Martin, Bartin, and Fish, or Abraham, Martin, and John, but good enough to mesmerize the press this spring. In one respect, the mainstream media were right: Jackie Robinson was a courageous man; Tiger Woods is an extraordinary golfer; and Ellen DeGenerate—well, two out of three ain’t bad. But...
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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....
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Recovering the Dignity of Truth
We Episcopalians—we’re just so special, don’t you know? We worship in such special ways. Our churches look so special, as do we ourselves—an indication of our social gifts. And when we fight, when we commence to break the church furniture over one another’s heads—at such moments we’re just, you might say, disgustingly, regurgitatingly special; so...
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Same-Sex Marriage: The Continuing Conversation
Immanentizing the eschaton via Obergefell v. Hodges, Justice Anthony Kennedy has achieved his long-sought goal—namely, to be to 21st-century America what Bonaparte was to 19th-century Europe. In respectable quarters Justice Kennedy is considered a world-historical personage, having made the oxymoron “same-sex marriage” the law of the land. Several years ago, in a letter to the...
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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.
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Living the Jacobin Dream
In 1793, the Jacobins, surfing the wave of Parisian mob violence, intimidated their less resolute colleagues into eliminating both the principle of monarchy and the existence of its politically superfluous incarnation, Louis XVI. Not content with killing a living king and pronouncing a death sentence in absentia on all the princes of the blood who...
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The Obamanation of Desolation
The appearance of John McCain and Barack Obama at Saddleback, California’s “purpose-driven” church marks the ultimate ascent of Rick Warren to the Gantry-in-Chief of the P.T. Barnum Church of America. Warren’s success is living proof of Barnum’s oft-quoted observation that there is a sucker born every minute. In the event, Obama’s imitation of Christianity was...
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Dark Clouds Ahead
If America’s contested election ends in Joe Biden’s inauguration, the world will be less safe. Biden is an instinctive interventionist who has supported bad policies for decades. He was an outspoken advocate of Bill Clinton’s military interventions in the Balkans in the 1990s, and in the early 2000s he supported both the War in Afghanistan and...
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The Christian and Creation
Where does man fit into nature? What is his response to the created universe? Lynn White has argued that the Christian position is at the very heart of the environmental crisis. He, and others, see the biblical view of the dominion of man over nature as being responsible for our misuse of our natural resources....
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What’s Next for the Right?
The Republican Party must get its own house in order, suppress the influence of its establishment members, and offer a coherent, principled, and politically viable program to the American electorate.
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A Future for Europe
Political scientists are now grumpy. Instead of waxing enthusiastic about the 40 days that shook the world—let us say from the crumbling of the Berlin Wall to Ceausescu’s execution—they resent the brutal intrusion of reality on their slumber. It used to be so comfortable to think in terms of superpower pseudo-polarity, and global democratization is...
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The President’s Painted Corner
A prudent power will always seek to keep open as many options as possible in its foreign-policy making. An increasingly rigid system of alliances, coupled with mobilization blueprints and railway timetables, reduced the European powers’ scope for maneuver in the summer of 1914 and contributed to the ensuing catastrophe. The United States, by contrast, entered...
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Red Cloud’s War
The Oglala Sioux chief Red Cloud is generally portrayed as someone who chewed up the U.S. Army in battle after battle. He was, in the words of one author, “the first and only Indian leader in the West to win a war with the United States.” This conclusion is based on the Army’s decision to...
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What the Border Crisis Reveals About Our Leaders
Instead of taking the responsible approach of admitting sanctuary policies are a failure and reversing course, mayors have taken absurd steps to appear to be leading while maintaining their good standing among those adhering to the anti-borders orthodoxy.
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Sing Me Back Home
Sing me back home with a song I used to hear Make all my memories come alive Take me away and turn back the years Sing me back home before I die Merle Haggard was a real American. At its best, his music was folk art, Americana poetry, each song capturing a snapshot of his...
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The Grit, the Grime, and the Glory
January 8 I first came to Pisa in 1988. Christian Kopff had persuaded me to apply to make a joint-presentation of work that grew out of my dissertation on the colometry of Aeschylus. Feel free to skip this tedious pedantic digression: What is colometry? Perhaps it is better not to ask, but, properly...
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The Middle-Class Moment
With a whoop and a holler, politicians have suddenly discovered that there’s a wild animal called the American middle class prowling around, the voting booths, and officeholders are pounding down the stairs to make sure the rough beast does no damage once it gets inside the house. Almost every issue that has emerged in national...
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Lessons From France
On the French nightly news for Monday, June 12, the anchor’s face was so grim that, at first, I thought the French forces in Bosnia had suffered serious losses. But, no, he was reporting on the French municipal elections, the first round of voting for mayors of cities with populations of 30,000 or more. The...
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Books in Brief: March 2021
America’s Revolutionary Mind, by C. Bradley Thompson (Encounter Books; 584 pp., $32.99). Thompson’s examination of colonial America’s natural rights political culture and the effects of the Declaration’s oft-quoted passage about unalienable rights is not likely to please members of the traditional right, and as such I consider it required reading. Thompson presents copious evidence that...
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The American Proscenium
Politics and Prayer One of the high points of this fall’s campaign season was the vigorous debate over the place of religion in America’s public life. In retrospect, it may some day be regarded as the most meaningful public discussion of the question in this century. The exchange began early in the campaign when...
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Frank Meyer’s Fusionism and the Search for Consensus Among Conservatives
Frank Meyer’s attempt to codify a conservative consensus must be understood in the context of his day, when remnants of the Old Right were marginalized and conservatism was dominated by anti-Communism.
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Virtual Democracy
Dittoheads were depressed at the end of April, when Rush Limbaugh announced his “trial separation from the Republican Party.” As in so many divorce cases, the charge was infidelity: the GOP had caved in on the minimum wage. Even though a good moral case might be made for the concept of a living wage, there...
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The Revolution That Isn’t
The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 306 pp., $26.95 Conservatives have a love-hate relationship with technology. Although we often decry the effects of the usage of new technologies on societal traditions, it is conservative...
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Men of the West—July 2005
PERSPECTIVE Heroes in the Age of the Antiheroby Thomas Fleming Unbreaking glass. VIEWS Guys of the Golden Westby Chilton Williamson, Jr.A glorious sunset. A Place to Standby Wayne AllensworthTexas and the making of men and heroes. Cowboy Heroesby Roger D. McGrathLearning the Code of the West. Effeminate Gospel, Effeminate Christiansby Aaron D. WolfFrom authority to...
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Theresa May’s Miscalculation
Last Thursday the Conservative Party suffered a major blow in the general election in the United Kingdom, the third such race in as many years. It had not been due until May 2020, but Prime Minister Theresa May decided to call a snap election on April 19 and obtain a “stronger mandate.” At that time the governing party...
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A “Goodwill” Tour
Hillary Clinton’s visit to Africa in late March, which was billed as a “goodwill tour” to strengthen America’s ties with developing nations, combined business with pleasure. In between meetings and photo-opportunities with African heads of state, Mrs. Clinton and her daughter Chelsea did a little taxpayer-funded sightseeing in the wilds of Uganda, Tanzania, and other...
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Strange Customs
I had sworn I would not buy any carpets, and, in the end, I did keep that promise, but then one scorching hot day my friends finally came to pry me loose of the snug little corner of the hotel bar. Before I knew it, I was in the market, buying a preternaturally heavy wrought-iron...
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An Obsolete Congress
“Here, sir, the people govern,” said Alexander Hamilton in 1788, as he argued for the direct election of members to the proposed U.S. House of Representatives. “Here they act by their immediate representatives.” A working democratic republic was not a new idea, but what was new was putting the idea to the test. The task...
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One Nation, Under Which God?
On May 5, President Joe Biden left out the word “God” in his proclamation on the annual National Day of Prayer. Some critics on the right claimed Biden was the first president in American history to do so. Of course, those detractors fail to mention that the National Day of Prayer commemoration only dates back...
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Grappling With Armageddon
The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War; by Fred Kaplan; Simon & Schuster; 384 pp., $18.00 In 1958, former RAF officer Peter George (under the pseudonym Peter Bryant) wrote Red Alert, a novel about a communication accident that almost triggers a nuclear war. In a series of short, increasingly tense, time-stamped chapters,...
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The Year in the Novel, 1991
What we have here—not even the President has had the effrontery to deny it—is an intellectual recession. I cannot think of a year in which more; bad books received more serious attention. These weren’t just lapses but a pattern, and one need not be paranoid to look for explanations. What people do is, mostly, what...
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Is Mayor de Blasio an Anti-Asian Bigot?
“Though New York City has one of the most segregated schools systems in the country,” writes Elizabeth Harris of the New York Times, until now, Mayor Bill de Blasio “was all but silent on the issue.” He was “reluctant even to use the word ‘segregation.'” Now the notion that the liberal mayor belongs in the...
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Secrets of the Muddled East
The struggles of the Middle East cannot be summarized or dismissed in chalking it all up to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. There’s much more at play in the region.
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Frontier Taliban
To understand the impact of the event known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre, it is useful to focus on the date of that atrocity: September 11, 1857. On that Friday morning, Mormon militiamen lured the members of a California-bound wagon train into an ambush. Collaborating with Paiute Indian allies, the Mormons slaughtered 120 people. Many...