Philip Roth: The Anatomy Lesson; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 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.” If...
Thomas Carlyle wrote that “History is the essence of innumerable Biographies.” While that description does not cover all the duties of historianship, it is true in an important sense. History that becomes too abstract loses its vital connection with the lives of real human beings. The people of the past were human, and we are...
Pop pulled the sky-blue 1963 Chevy Impala out of the driveway in Wayne, Michigan. With Mom and three kids along for what our family would call our 9,000-mile trip, he jogged a block to Michigan Avenue, which, as US 12, always beckoned West to Chicago and, beyond that, to California. The kids: Johnny, nine; Caroline,...
One of the more interesting recent books of popular history, Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, stakes out the period between the outbreak of World War I to almost the present. In Johnson’s intellectual framework, the boundaries of modernity are marked by two great revolutionaries: Albert Einstein, who threw the thinking world into a turmoil of doubt...
I suppose there’s no point in writing in advance about “comprehensive immigration reform,” since by the time this magazine reaches your hands the point may be moot. The Gang of Eight may well have tossed Congress the perfect bipartisan plan, and President Obama may have run down Pennsylvania Avenue, pen in hand and surrounded by...
Excerpts from a speech at Providence College given on Thursday, Oct. 21, 2010. Two sets of fallacies have dominated the mainstream debate about the Ground Zero mosque—and before we go any further, let’s get this straight: it is a mosque, frantic insistence by the Qusling elite to use one euphemistic misnomer or another notwithstanding....
The contrast between the importance of the subject of Richard Buel’s new book—New England’s defiance of federal authority during the years of commercial embargo and war with England—and the dullness and conventionality of the narrative reminds us that history is too important to be left to the current occupants of the academy. To enter the...
Edward Lawrence Schieffelin’s story seems like something made up by a Hollywood writer long on cliche and short on imagination, for his silver strike epitomized the hopes and dreams of every sourdough prospector who ever wandered the lonely mountains, valleys, and streams of the American West. For years he searched in vain, living on the...
The current evangelical elite came of age at a time when secular influences tried to stay neutral toward Christianity; The faith competed as an equal in the marketplace of ideas. But those days are over. In our age of secularist hostility, evangelicals need new tactics.
Of late, our demographic soothsayers have been assuring us that by 2040 or thereabouts America will no longer be a Caucasian-majority country, and that with the eclipse of the white majority there will be, to belabor the obvious, no majority culture. For many this is cause for celebration. Among minorities, or at least those who...
“Layze Ameeze de tayze ameeze sont mayze ameeze.” A drunken redneck recited this at me late one night in 1965, at Andy’s Lounge. Andy’s was one of Charleston’s last “blind tigers”—a speakeasy, complete with gambling and homely B-girls, that defied even the closing laws that the other scofflaw establishments observed. I went there often to...
“Down to Gehenna and up to the throne, He travels the fastest who travels alone.” —Rudyard Kipling Not as horrible as Calcutta or as ugly as Seoul, Bangkok, spreading along the flat flanks of the Chao Phraya river, is the whorehouse of Asia. Berth girls and boys will do anything you...
The Economist contemptuously called him France’s “wannabe Donald Trump.” He’s been accused by The Atlantic of using the “Trump playbook.” Not to be outdone, Britain’s New Statesman dubbed him a “TV-friendly fascist.” French anti-racism and rights groups, including SOS Racisme, have filed complaints against him. Already thrice convicted of inciting racial hatred, he is due...
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...
When the king of Poland, Jan Sobieski, defeated the Ottoman army at the Siege of Vienna in 1683, that army of 23,000 soldiers did not have scores or hundreds of thousands of hungry and desperate civilians at its back, hoping to find a new life in Europe. The Ottomans were attempting a military invasion of...
“States’ rights? You can’t be serious! What do you want to do—restore Jim Crow or bring back slavery?” Any serious discussion of the American republic always comes aground on this rock, and it does not matter which kind of liberal is expressing the obligatory shock and dismay, whether a David Corn leftist at the Nation,...
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....
[McCain and Soros: The Most Dangerous Man in America, Bankrolled By the Most Evil Man in the World] “While the natural instincts of democracy lead the people to banish distinguished men from power,” Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, “an instinct no less powerful leads distinguished men to shun careers in politics, in which it...
Sin City Produced by Dimension Films Directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller Written by Frank Miller Distributed by Dimension Films and Miramax Films So you have been wondering what happened to Frodo, a.k.a. Elijah Wood, after he drifted off into that glorious sunset at the end of The Return of the King? It seems...
Any government, foreign or domestic, which tampers with our freedoms and attempts to impose “political servitude,” demands our fierce and unceasing opposition.
“The Noise of the City Cannot Be Heard” was the title of a very popular song in the Soviet Union just after World War II. According to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the song was so much in demand that “no singer, even the most mediocre, could perform it without receiving enthusiastic applause.” The Soviet Chief Administration of...
Fifteen years after I arrived in the West, I can no longer recall how I first became aware of Edward Abbey, though I do know that I had been the book editor of a national magazine for nearly four years before the name penetrated my consciousness. (The parochialism of the New York literati.) But I...
You remember. It was supposed to be twenty-first-century war, American-style: precise beyond imagining; smart bombs; drones capable of taking out a carefully identified and tracked human being just about anywhere on Earth; special operations raids so pinpoint-accurate that they would represent a triumph of modern military science. Everything “networked.” It was to be a glorious...
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...
During the Cold War, occasional resorts to war or threats of war by the United States were justified by the need to keep communism in check. This justification had the advantage of being based on a real threat—notably in Berlin in 1949, in Korea in 1950, and during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The...
The incoming Trump administration already knows how to fix our border crisis. What it requires is the strength and support of the American people.
The following article by Charles G. Mills appeared originally at the website of FGFBooks.com and is reprinted with permission. Christian morality requires that the victors in war show mercy to the losers. Mercy is a form of charity, the greatest of the virtues. If we do not show mercy, we should not necessarily expect it...
I was recently perplexed to see in the news that Harvard, the oldest institution of higher learning in the nation, had declared that, though master has no etymological relation to slavery (but rather to magister), the word would nevertheless be abandoned as a title for a resident supervisor of student housing, and be replaced by...
Iraqi Christians are paying the price of the Bush administration’s desire to remove Saddam Hussein. The Iranian Revolution and the rising influence of militant Islam have already forced the secular Iraqi dictatorship to make concessions to proponents of Iraq’s Islamicization, but the threat of a U.S. attack, together with a widespread feeling in the Arab...
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...
My father told me about his combat experience in World War II just once when I was a boy. I must have been under ten, and we were in a car at night. My clearest memory of what he told me is the story of the deer his unit killed with their carbines, and of...
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...
William F. Buckley, for all his strengths, left behind a deeply flawed magazine and movement, which was very much to his demerit.
During the presidential campaign Donald Trump horrified the bipartisan foreign policy mandarinate by suggesting that NATO was “obsolete” and useless against the only real threat faced by Europe: the massive influx of violent Muslims applauded by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the “EuSSR” bureaucracy in Brussels, and the Obama Administration. Trump also indicated that America’s treaty...
Clyde Wilson’s View in the April issue (“Society Precedes Government: Two Counterrevolutions”) was excellent. A New England “Yankee” (my great-grandfather was captured and put in Libby Prison during the war) and a Bunyanesque Calvinist at that (I might as well completely alienate myself from your editorial staff while I’m at it), I attended school in...
To calculate where a cannonball will land, it is necessary to know its initial angle of trajectory and the amount of force that propels it. It is the persuasive thesis of W. Bruce Lincoln that the Russian Civil War was the historic explosion that ever since has determined the direction and velocity of the Soviet...
The truth is that the vitriolic reaction to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis this week says everything about the foreign blob’s personal and vocational insecurities, and nothing about DeSantis’ call for measured prudence in Eastern Europe.
Sam Tanenhaus just penned a lengthy profile in Esquire of Pat Buchanan describing how Buchanan’s three unsuccessful presidential campaigns helped lay the groundwork for Trump’s successful campaign this year. Tanenhaus quotes Buchanan as telling the New York Times, in 2000, “When the chickens come home to roost, this whole coalition will be there for somebody....
Both Witness and Alamo Bay explore the tensions that arise when dissimilar cultures meet, when people must meet the demands of an alien land. In Witness, a streetwise Philadelphia homicide detective, hardened by a climate of violence and corruption, must hide out among the peaceful Amish of rural Pennsylvania Dutch country. In Alamo Bay, a...
When I hear of the books in the history of publishing that were self-published, I react like Lenin, who, on hearing of the 5,000 print run of Mayakovsky’s poem 150,000,000, scoffed that it was “a colossal waste of paper.” E.E. Cummings, for instance, published The Enormous Room at his own expense, petulantly dedicating it to...
“It is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart,” says former first lady Laura Bush of the Trump administration policy of “zero tolerance,” under which the children of illegal migrants are being detained apart from their parents. “Disgraceful,” adds Dr. Franklin Graham. “We need to be . . . a country that governs...
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover Produced by Kees Kasander Written and directed by Peter Greenaway Released by Miramax Films The Plot Against Harry Produced by Michael Roemer and Robert Young Written and directed by Michael Roemer Released by King Screen Lust, greed, betrayal, murder, and revenge are not at all unusual...
I have showered more love on this old 1940’s farmhouse than on any person living. Certainly, I’ve spent more money on it than I care to count. But more than the house itself—an undistinguished structure made interesting only by my renovation—it’s the land I fell in love with. The way my foot sinks into the...
Over a decade ago, Don Livingston organized a Liberty Fund Colloquium in Charleston, South Carolina. One of the sessions examined whether any movement toward political decentralization was possible without at least the threat of secession to back it up. On that subject, most of the attendees agreed: Whether one regards secession as good in itself,...
“For who can be secure of private right, If sovereign sway may be dissolved by might?” —John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel Dryden’s question, posed more than 300 years ago, supposes a just distinction but also a connection between one kind of rights, which he calls “private,” and another, “sovereign sway,” or legitimate public order. The...
Like the Roman cursus honorum, the ascending path of neoconservative success is carefully prescribed. Instead of the progress from aedile to consul, however, the journey leads through hackwork up to the glories of publishing with Basic Books, appearing on TV talk shows, and gracing the mastheads of neocon magazines. David Frum managed to move through...
California continues its essential role as the proving ground for bad ideas. The latest is the demolition of “popular” initiatives to decide important issues. Of the 11 initiatives on the ballot last November in the Golden State, 8 were funded primarily by multimillionaires, according to MapLight, which tracks election funding. And Proposition 30, Gov. Jerry...
Democracy is not on the ballot. What is on the ballot is a huge slice of the leadership and ruling class of the national Democratic Party. Democracy has not failed America, the reigning Democrats have failed America.
A nine-year-old boy in Phoenix earned a three-day suspension from the Abraham Lincoln Traditional School for committing a “hate crime,” reports the Arizona Republic. The boy reportedly used the phrase “brown people” while arguing with another student. He was then questioned by a detention-room officer—the mother of the offended “brown person”—who demanded to know “why...
Parents, some say, are people who use the rhythm method of family planning. One might better say that parents are optimists, people who think that the present is good and the future probably better. People who look forward with confidence often have an extra child; those who think that their situation may worsen are cautious...