Fraud and deception among society’s heroes draw attention to contradictions and inconsistencies in its value systems. Because American culture applauds entrepreneurship, independence, and ambition, for example, scientists have been encouraged to develop independent imaginations and innovative research, to engage in intense competition, to strive for success. Ironically, Americans also want their whitecoated heroes to be...
2702 search results for: Southern%252525252525252525252525252525252BHeritage
Post
Christianity Today Editor Russell Moore: ‘We Have No King But Caesar!’
Russell Moore’s recent editorial about the indictment of Donald Trump is a passive-aggressive attack on the former president and his supporters.
Post
A Northern Light
Living in Italy, as I have done for some years, may result in an incremental loss of the vivid sensation, in my view all but indispensable in a writer, that the world as a whole is a barbarous place. It is then that I feel I must go back to London, to immerse myself afresh...
Post
A Rapid Untergang?
The Western world in general, and Europe in particular, are threatened not only by a numerically small, overtly jihadist cadre of “radicalized” individuals engaging in terrorism. The West is in mortal peril from a demographically explosive, ideologically highly developed, yet decentralized and structurally amorphous Islamic movement. To discuss the world-historical implications of this movement—which has...
Post
Stage Props & Program Notes
Eugene O’Neill’s life was a purgatory, as he never ceased informing us. His final plays, those written or revised from 1939 on, leave us with a vision of him plodding at last toward the top of that inverted mountain, the man emerging from his lifelong torments and the artist from his befuddlements. O’Neill is unique...
Post
NYT Reporter Who Regrets Kavanaugh Hit Writes Book Defending the Media
The internal logic of the book David Enrich just wrote does not square with his statements about his own conduct.
Post
Remembering Walter E. Williams
Addressing a Boston anti-slavery audience in 1865, abolitionist Frederick Douglass asked, “What shall we do with the Negro?” The answer he provided was a favorite of the conservative economist Walter E. Williams, though if Douglass were to utter it today he would probably be condemned by Black Lives Matter and deplatformed from social media: ...
Post
A Grave Mistake
Alexander Cockburn, columnist for the Nation and author of Corruptions of Empire and The Golden Age Is In Us, has long been regarded as an enforcer of far-left orthodoxy. But in recent months, Cockburn has taken an unorthodox stance on such issues as the militia movement, the “county supremacy” movement, and federal police power. When...
Post
Sunset in the Head
Proust wrote, in Time Regained, that “Style is a question not of technique, but of vision.” Technique may be said to inform and undergird the style, but the artistic vision has priority: It is the style. In Charles Edward Eaton’s recent collection, his 17th, comprising new verse (some published previously in Chronicles) and a generous...
Post
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...
Post
The Third World Revisited
“Sixty thousand blacks are annually embarked from the coast of Guinea, never to return to their native country; but they are embarked in chains; and this constant emigration which in the space of two centuries might have furnished armies to overrun the globe, accuses the guilt of Europe and the weakness of Africa.” —Edward Gibbon...
Post
Moment of Unity in a Disintegrating World
“An act of pure evil,” said President Trump of the atrocity in Las Vegas, invoking our ancient faith: “Scripture teaches us the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” “Our unity cannot be shattered by evil. Our bonds cannot be broken by violence,” Trump went on in his...
Post
Roots of a New World Order
Though Thomas Knock draws no explicit comparisons between Woodrow Wilson’s plans for a post- Great War world and the policies George Bush tried to fashion for a post-Cold War world, his use of the term “New World Order” in the title of his book is clearly meant to steer the reader to think in parallel...
Post
Obama’s Fatal Mistake
Never underestimate the stupidity of our rulers. When Judge Andrew Napolitano of Freedom Watch asked me if I thought President Obama would intervene in Libya, I said, “No, he’s too smart for that.” I attribute my misreading of events to my reading of the President’s general demeanor. Obama projects the aura of a disinterested scientist,...
Post
The View From Out Here
There is a story about the man who surprised another man in bed with his wife. “What did you do about it?” his friend demanded. “Hell,” replied the fellow in disgust, “the sonofabitch lied his way out of it!” My inclination, on this 15th day of February 1999, is to take the anecdote as a...
Post
When Experts Attack
For over 30 years, the churches of America have been declining; their numbers, plummeting. Each year, a new set of numbers emerges from the various denominational headquarters, telling the tale. The liberal Protestant Mainlines are in the worst shape, as the figures for 2006 to 2007 indicate. According to the National Council of Churches, the...
Post
Russell Kirk and the Negation of Ideology
“The magnificent cause of being, / The imagination, the one reality / In this imagined world . . . ” —Wallace Stevens Though ten years have passed since his death on April 29, 1994, Russell Kirk has yet to be the subject of a definitive intellectual biography. In his own posthumously published autobiography, The Sword...
Post
Against the Black Pill
We suffer an oligarchic, feminizing regime that is hostile to most of the defining elements of traditional American identity. But, we also enjoy a golden age of dissent. Now is not the time for despair.
Post
The Closing of the Conservative Mind
Why do we call it liberal education? When an eighteen-year-old graduates from high school and goes off to college to pick up a smattering of history and literature, why should we describe his course of study as the liberal arts? Educators once knew the answers to these questions, but it has been many years since...
Post
There Once Was a New England
A few years ago, I was talking about Timothy Dwight to an audience of people old enough to appreciate both his Christian orthodoxy and his old-fashioned patriotism. When I mentioned Dwight’s passion for farming and his devotion to agriculture as a way of life, a man from Dwight’s adopted state of Connecticut informed me that there...
Post
Managing the Quagmire
Twenty years ago Leon Hadar published Quagmire: America in the Middle East, an eloquent plea for U.S. disengagement from the region. He warned that American leaders had neither the knowledge nor the power to manage long-standing disputes involving faraway people of whom we know little. Attempts at meddling, he wrote, invariably made the various actors...
Post
The Goyim Aren’t Always Wrong
A small people with a distinctive religion, the Jews throughout history have tried to avoid imitating the Gentiles (that is, everybody else), lest assimilation destroy the faith and the group that embodies it. In fact, Scripture’s passionate denunciation of idolatry led the ancient rabbis, “our sages of blessed memory,” to condemn certain practices under the...
Post
The Present Age and the State of Community
From the June 1988 issue of Chronicles. The Present Age begins with the First World War, the Great War as it is deservedly still known. No war ever began more jubilantly, among all classes and generations, the last including the young generation that had to fight it. It is said that when Viscount Grey, British...
Post
The War of Mexican Aggression
” . . . As honest men it behooves us to learn the extent of our inheritance, and as brave ones not to whimper if it should prove less than we had supposed.” —John Tyndall Much in the news recently, especially in the Southwest, is the problem of illegal immigration from south of the border....
Post
Decline and Fall
I am very far from original in noticing similarities in the histories of Rome and America—republics that became empires. The decline and fall of the former has often been thought to foretell the fate of the latter. A Frenchman some years ago wrote a fairly convincing book called The Coming Caesars. Such analogies are interesting...
Post
Mr. Kennan’s America
No admirer of George F. Kennan’s should be surprised by the angry tone of the reviews his recently published Diaries has been receiving. Of the several I have read, in the British as well as the American press, all were, to some extent or another, willfully unsympathetic. That is only to have been expected, Kennan...
Post
Detroit Shakedown
Stevie Wonder wants to become mayor of Detroit. He’s had some trouble determining precisely when the election will be held, but no matter. He believes that he can be the mayor of Motown in the 90’s. Now, this is no Sonny Bono and Palm Springs. Bono is decidedly a working-class stiff compared with the Retin...
Post
White House Sets Border Fire, Sues States for Trying to Put it Out
The current, temporary custodians of the executive branch are akin to landlords who took over a safe, secure apartment building and have let it become dangerous and crime infested.
Post
Imperialism From the Cradle to the Grave
In the first year of Cyrus the king the same Cyrus the king made a decree concerning the house of God at Jerusalem, Let the house be builded, the place they offered sacrifices, and let the foundations thereof be strongly laid. Mesopotamia was the cradle of empires, but it was also their grave, as the...
Post
World War III With China: How It Might Actually Be Fought
[This piece has been adapted and expanded from Alfred W. McCoy’s new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.] For the past 50 years, American leaders have been supremely confident that they could suffer military setbacks in places like Cuba or Vietnam without having their system...
Post
Putin’s Unsureness of Touch
President Vladimir Putin has been facing several crises that could undermine Russia’s strategic interests. His inability to respond quickly and effectively reflects lingering complacency within areas of Moscow’s sphere of influence. Azerbaijan’s offensive against the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, encouraged and abetted by Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is testing Moscow’s ability to remain neutral in...
Post
A Tale of Two Cities
Visits in the space of ten days to Toronto, Ontario, and then Tifton, Georgia, demand reflective analysis for stronger reasons than the compelling force of alliteration. The city and the town are so different that the visitor to both is driven to look for the faintest similarities. Once that effort is made, however, sweeping conclusions...
Post
Robert Frost: Social and Political Conservative
From the August 1992 issue of Chronicles. Robert Frost published 11 books of poetry, won four Pulitzer Prizes, established himself as the unofficial poet laureate of the United States, and acquired a national and international literary reputation. Despite his fame as a poet and public speaker, and because of his friendship with such liberal Democrats...
Post
Gianni, Get Your Gun
One of the most important reasons for the sweeping victory of Silvio Berlusconi and his House of Liberty in the recent Italian election was concern for public safety, which ranks as the number-one issue on the minds of voters, according to some polls. Berlusconi promised to do whatever was necessary to make people feel safer,...
Post
Macedonia unrest: ‘Warning to Skopje against new Turkish pipeline’
Srdja Trifkovic’s latest RT interview The Republic of Macedonia has become important to the U.S. policymakers in recent months, as it could be the only way for Russia’s proposed Turkish Stream pipeline to reach Central Europe. Washington does not want that to happen, as Srdja Trifkovic told RT in the latest live interview, and this...
Post
Rice Paddies and Tea Houses
The schedule is rather monotonous for a lecturer invited to the big cities where universities are usually located. First comes the airport, then the car with the polite, smiling young man as a guide, then hotel room and restaurant, podium, introduction, photo graphs, the lecture itself-then the whole thing in reverse order the next day....
Post
“A Pure American Type of a Rather Rare Species”
Dean Gooderham Acheson was born in Middletown, Connecticut, on April 11, 1893, into a stable world of which Europe was the center and where America was poised to attain hemispheric dominance. That world’s certainties were shattered in the trenches of Northern France, but the shock was less profound among America’s northeastern aristocracy—to which Acheson belonged...
Post
M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E
“First grubs obscene, then wriggling worms, Then painted butterflies.”—Alexander Pope, Phryne Maybe I’m bewitched, but I’m not bothered and certainly I’m not bewildered by Sean Griffin’s too divinely unbelievable disquisition on one of everybody’s favorite topics, and I’m not going to waste space by saying what that is, because you just...
Post
Cannibal Statistics
In debate, it is always possible to be right for the wrong reason. For instance, in supporting the proposition that cannibalism is immoral, I might argue that, historically, cannibalism encouraged the killing of human beings who might otherwise have been kidnapped by Arabs or rival African tribesmen and sold ...
Post
Uncle Sam, International Nanny
The Cold War may have ended, but Washington policymakers don’t seem to have noticed. America, facing no serious security threats, accounts for roughly 40 percent of the globe’s military spending. Our expenditures outpace those of Russia by three or more to one; America spends twice as much as Britain, France, Germany, and Japan combined. What...
Post
Nonconformist Historian
Eugene Dominick Genovese, r.i.p. Gene Genovese, 82, one the more important and controversial American historians of the 20th century, passed away quietly at his Atlanta home on September 26. A dockworker’s intellectually precocious son, who came up through Brooklyn College and Columbia University, Genovese embraced Marxism early in life, almost inevitably. And there was a...
Post
Left Behind
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? —Psalm 137:4 But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel. —1 Timothy 5:8 The county that became...
Post
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...
Post
Synthetic Syntheses
Sam Francis’s most enduring, as well as trenchant, political insight may have been his perception of what he caustically described as “the unique achievement of the political genius of the modern era.” Francis dubbed this “anarcho-tyranny”—“a kind of Hegelian synthesis of two opposites,” he explained, in which the failure of the state to enforce protective...
Post
The Supreme Court, Globalization, and the Teaching of Religion
Public figures talk about globalization as if it were the Rapture. We are told that, unlike Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus, we live in an era of international trade; so these days, we must worry more about what the world thinks and does. ...
Post
The Late-Coming Left
For years I’ve been listening to the hot air produced by Conservative Inc. about the political conservatism of Martin Luther King, Jr., who was dedicated to “self-government based on absolute truth and moral law.” Supposedly King was also a proud member of the GOP. This last claim is not even remotely true, as Alveda King,...
Post
DEMOCRATISM
The move toward mass, direct democracy in the large nationstate derives much of its appeal from an image of direct democracy reminiscent of the Athenian Assembly, or of the New England town meeting. But such an appeal is mistaken. The social conditions for face-to-face interaction and deliberation present on a small scale are not present...
Post
Exploits of the Noble Savage
Modern grievances are, at heart, about competition for resources, prestige, and power. All that has changed are the myths used to mask the claims and obscure reality.
Post
From Bryan to Buchanan
It is an unwritten law of American politics that the politicians who devote themselves to the single-minded pursuit of power and wealth must pretend to be men of the people. The 1996 presidential campaign might have been scripted by Frank Capra, since virtually every candidate is a would-be John Doe or Jefferson Smith, taking on...
Post
The Unbeliever
Suppose you are tired of hearing about roulette. Suppose the very thought of gambling, despite the metaphorist’s efforts to depict it as the great commonwealth of epochal disillusionment and hence universalize the experience, strikes you as tedious. Suppose you are the sort of man who insists that the only thing duller than watching people take...