As I write this at the end of April, the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia is in its fourth week. Albania—predictably—has been turned into a NATO base, and the Kosovo Liberation Army is openly recruiting volunteers in NATO countries, including the United States, where both U.S.-born Albanians and Albanian resident aliens are allowed to join the...
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Schadenfreude for National Review’s ‘Canceled’ Editor-in-Chief
It is difficult to summon sympathy for Rich Lowry, who has engaged in exactly the kind of willful canceling of others as is happening to him now.
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Shock and Awe by Hamas
This weekend’s unprecedented attack on Israel from Hamas exposes weaknesses in intelligence, fault lines in ongoing efforts to maintain stability and peace in the broader Middle East region, and potential dangers ahead for all parties.
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Europe’s Belgian Future
If you plan to read only one book on foreign affairs in the next year, you should read Paul Belien’s A Throne in Brussels. Belien is a lawyer and a journalist, a rare free-market advocate who understands the importance of ethnic identity. On one level, Belien’s book is a ruthless investigation of the history and...
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The Conservative Strikes Back
The Democrats picked Jim Webb to offer their response to the President’s State of the Union Address for the same reason they anointed him to face Republican Sen. George Allen in the November 2006 election: his opposition to the war in Iraq, which is bolstered by his surpassing valor in Vietnam. The risible aspect of...
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The Real Cabal
After nearly two decades of paleoconservative criticism, complaints, and general grousing about the ideological hegemony of the neoconservatives, the establishment press finally began to notice the existence of the latter. Between the time of President Bush’s factually flawed “Axis of Evil” State of the Union Address in 2002 and the “end” of the war with...
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The Habsburgs and the Balkans: A Rich, Uneven Tapestry
Much ill-informed and superficial nonsense has been published in recent weeks on the Habsburgs in general and on their role in the Balkans in particular. This is a pity because that role is genuinely interesting, often filled with drama and heroism, and in its final stages marked by hubris, folly, and tragedy. Well worth a...
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Two Between the Ribs
How does he get away with it? Ever since Bonfire of the Vanities, I have wondered at Tom Wolfe’s success. The success itself is well deserved: Wolfe is a dazzling writer, without peer as an observer of contemporary American life. But can’t the brilliant social and literary critics of New York figure out what he...
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Remembering R. L. Dabney
Robert Lewis Dabney was an American theologian and seminary professor. He was also a philosopher who wrote extensively on cultural and political issues of the second half of the 19th century. In our own day, when there is much confusion over what defines conservative political theory, we would do well to look to the writings...
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The Art of Creation An Interview With Dean Koontz
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”—Samuel Johnson G.K. Chesterton was an avid reader of popular fiction, particularly the so-called “penny dreadfuls,” whose everyday morality and concentration on plot and character made them more wholesome reading than the pretentious productions of modernist literature. Chesterton’s prejudice is shared today...
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Bob Mathias
From the August 2013 issue of Chronicles. One of the greatest Olympians of all time, Bob Mathias, is all but forgotten today. He was born in 1930 in Tulare, in the heart of California’s San Joaquin Valley. Robert Bruce Mathias was his name, but everyone called him Bob. Bob had extraordinary coordination from infancy onward. ...
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Voices in the Air
By the middle of the second month of the Republican Revolution, acute observers were beginning to see that the revolution might actually go somewhere if only the Republicans were not in charge of it. Aside from such irritating contretemps as the revelations of Speaker Newt Gingrich’s book deal, his instantaneous dumping of historian Christina Jeffrey...
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Kamala Harris, Hollywood, and the ‘Aaron Sorkin Democrat’
Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee means the age of the Aaron Sorkin Democrat may have reached its end.
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Why Russia Does Not Fear an Iranian Bomb
When President George W. Bush met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Bratislava, Slovakia, this past February, the first item on the White House’s laundry list of discussion points for the summit was nuclear programs, including Russian aid to Iran’s nuclear-power effort. After the meeting, Putin told reporters that the issue of nuclear proliferation was...
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“You Have To Commit!”
We were on the practice field preparing for a team that ran the option. Our scout team was running the upcoming opponent’s offense. To our surprise, the scouts executed the option perfectly, which left our outside linebacker frozen halfway between the quarterback, cutting off the block of a tight end, and a trailing halfback arcing...
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Church Business
Church conventions are the business of summertime in democratized Christian America. While normal, sane men are taking their boys to ball games or running trot lines by the light of a Coleman lantern, grown men (and women) are sitting in earnest before professional parliamentarians and video monitors in conference centers across the fruited plane, armed...
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Affirmative Scholarship
“An excellent scholar! One that hath a head filled with calves’ brains without any sage in it.” —John Webster Thomas Sowell has become a virtual one-man publishing industry, and Preferential Policies is his latest contribution to the Sowell book-of-the-year club. It is not surprising to find that this scattered and woefully disorganized potboiler is part...
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Republicanism, Monarchy, and the Human Scale of Politics
The Founding Fathers had to face hard and unprecedented questions about the size and scale of a political order. They occupied a vast region, and conventional wisdom said that such could only be governed by monarchy. They were determined to be republicans, however, and the conventional wisdom was that republics had to be small. The...
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Diversity Where It Counts
A work of genuine scholarship tells us what we did not know before and does so felicitously—it is a contribution to the world’s body of knowledge. Discouragingly, a majority of academic books that have bounced across my desk in recent years either regurgitate what was told better long ago, or are the distorted remnants of...
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Last Chance for the ‘Deplorables’
Speaking to 1,000 of the overprivileged at an LGBT fundraiser, where the chairs ponied up $250,000 each and Barbra Streisand sang, Hillary Clinton gave New York’s social liberals what they came to hear. “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” smirked Clinton to cheers and laughter....
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Saints or Stockbrokers?
“As long as virtue was dominant in the republic so long was the happiness of the people secure.” —Robert E. Lee John P. Diggins raises various, often profound, questions about the moral foundations of America as a political society. Diggins is fond of calling attention to what he considers the underlying cultural tensions in American...
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Regional Cinema
(A review of The Last Confederate; produced by Strongbow Pictures; directed by A. Blaine Miller and Julian Adams; written by Julian Adams and Weston Adams; and Firetrail; produced by Forbesfilm; written and directed by Christopher Forbes.) Like it or not, movies are the main art form of our time, the storytelling medium that reaches the...
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Sorting Out Jew-Haters
“The Jews” stand in people’s minds for so many things that you can find their despisers in places where there are not many Jews around to hate—or even enough to attract much attention to begin with. Take, for example, that outlying fringe of the settled world, New Zealand, where I spent last summer (winter in...
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A Boundless Field of Power
Does the United States Constitution still exist? There is one simple way to answer this question. Read any article or section of the 200-year-old document written to provide the citizens of a free republic with a short and simple guide to what their government can and cannot do and ask whether the language you have...
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The Future of American Nationalism
“All the evidence shows that differentiation which is not fragmentation is a source of strength. But such differentiation is possible only if there is a center toward which the parts look for their meaning and validation.” —Richard M. Weaver One of the most interesting of many superb memoirs of the American Civil War is that...
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Middle American Gothic
The bad weather of 1993 eliminated my usual fishing trips to northern Wisconsin, but the other day in Madison, where I go to use the library and relive the 60’s, I saw a sign for an instant oil change and lube: “Faster than an Illinois tourist.” Most people in Wisconsin are happy for the dollars...
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A Child of the Revolution
In his engaging biography of John C. Calhoun, Irving H. Bartlett reminds us that American political culture and the men who made it were not always as decadent and corrupt as they are today. Yet Bartlett’s book is not a partisan manifesto. He is respectful of Calhoun but not always sympathetic to his views, aspirations,...
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Imposing Utopia
George W. Bush campaigned for the presidency on a pledge not to engage in the nation-building experiments that characterized the Clinton years, and, like every other president of the 20th century, he did not simply break his major promises: He did exactly the opposite. Naturally, his administration has plenty of excuses. Failing to discover those...
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The Declaration of Independence and Philosophic Superstitions
It is common among our political elites and pundits to link the Declaration of Independence with Abraham Lincoln, who found in it the ground and telos of the American nation: the Enlightenment doctrine that all individuals are endowed with rights that precede and are independent of any political society. To define these rights, we must...
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Non-Partisanship
“Here in North Dakota, people vote Republican for president or for local offices because they’re seen as the white party,” North Dakota State University political science professor David Danbom told me. “But they’ll vote for the Democrats for Congress and some local offices to look after their economic interests in Washington or here at home.”...
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Not Simply Black and White
When the South African government was committed to perpetuating apartheid into the future, there were few in the West calling for economic sanctions. Only as South Africa has embarked upon reform—an end to the pass laws; an end to bans on black workers joining labor unions; integration of sports, hotels, restaurants—has such a campaign been...
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New Politics in Old Virginia
It took 114 years, but by 2000, Virginia had become a Republican state. What brought about such a great change in the Old Dominion? Let’s take a look back. Reconstruction was the low point of Virginia history. In 1865, a defeated and gutted state lost not only its cities, towns, farms, and one third of...
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Making a Hero Out of a Mass Murderer
The New York City Council honors the murderous Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Murderers can be honored, in some places, if their victims are white.
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Baseball and Marital Permanence
The game of baseball is centered on home: pitchers throw the ball over home plate, batters hit home runs, and fans root for the home team. Apparently, baseball’s preoccupation with home is no accident. According to a recent study by Denver psychologist Howard Markham, the average divorce rate in cities that have major league baseball...
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The British Invasion of the Ozarks
Chronicles readers may recall my “Old Route 66” (September 2013) and “Keep the Water on Your Right” (February 2015) motorcycle travelogues, in which I rode through small towns and rural areas to reconnect with the land and people of America. A road trip can do this like no other kind of journey, and doing one...
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Double Down: Illegal Aliens and Crime
For too long now I have heard that illegal immigrants are not criminals and that they have come to America only to work. Not really. Whether or not they want to work, they have already committed a crime by illegally entering the United States. I am still ...
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A City-State on a Hill
Mark Peterson’s new book traces the development of Boston from its founding in 1630 to the end of the American Civil War. In large part the book is a biography of the city, but from the unique perspective of Boston as a city-state and a commonwealth Peterson calls “remarkable for its autonomy, including an independent...
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Ethiopia Lifts Her Hands
In a classic book of humor entitled The Experts Speak, we find an impressive collection of failed prophecies and wildly inaccurate predictions: Television would never catch on, nobody needs a personal computer, and so on. I occasionally think there might be a place for a parallel volume of religious forecasts gone stunningly wrong. Such an...
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Whose Atrocities?
The Last Samurai is the latest movie to treat us to the spectacle of the U.S. Army slaughtering American Indian women and children. Playing a disillusioned captain, Tom Cruise suffers from nightmares for his role in the dastardly deed. He finds honor and redemption as a Great White Samurai in Japan. Many movie reviewers have...
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Is the American Century Over For Good?
“Politics stops at the water’s edge” was a tradition that, not so long ago, was observed by both parties, particularly when a president was abroad, speaking for the nation. The tradition was enunciated by Sen. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan in 1947, as many of the Republicans in the 80th Congress moved to back Truman’s leadership...
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Decent Folk From Georgia
“Livin’ is like pourin’ water out of a tumbler into a dang Coca-Cola bottle. If’n you skeered you cain’t do it, you cain’t. If’n you say to yoreself, ‘By dang, I can do it!’ then, by dang, you won’t slosh a drop.” This sample of dialogue conveys something of the tone, language, and philosophy of...
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Syria and Our Deaths of Despair
Just two days after the alleged April 9 chemical attack in Douma, Syria, TV host Tucker Carlson asked Mississippi Republican Sen. Roger Wicker, “What is the American national security interest that would be served by regime change in Syria?” Wicker responded, “Well, if you care about Israel you have to be interested at least in...
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The Revolt of the French Masses
Charles de Gaulle, on the subject of Algeria: “Pinay, the facts may prove me wrong, but History will prove me right.” Finance Minister Anoine Pinay: “But, Monsieur le Président, I thought History was written with facts.” Since for the vast majority of human beings historic myth, as André Malraux believed, is infinitely more appealing than...
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Forever 1965
In Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court struck down the coverage formula of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA). Under the formula, states or their political subdivisions are “covered jurisdictions” if they maintained in the 1960’s and early 70’s tests or devices (e.g., a literacy test or moral character requirement) as a prerequisite...
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How I Spent My Christmas Vacation
The day after Christmas this family took off for the National Cheerleaders Association’s High School Cheerleaders National Championship in Orlando, Florida. The National Cheerleaders Association’s High School Cheerleaders National Championship is not the kind of event a parent—this parent, anyway—ever anticipates attending. It is the kind of event a parent discovers herself at because of...
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Blizzard
Storms and other phenomena of nature have their own distinct sounds. Those who have survived a tornado often say that it sounded “like a train.” A volley of cannon fire accompanies every thunderstorm. The gale-force winds of a hurricane howl at nearly 200 miles per hour, as the rain strikes objects with the velocity of...
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Give Us Educated, Skilled Immigrants Yearning to Support Themselves
Biden is welcoming destitute migrants, instead of newcomers who are educated, have job skills to succeed in today's economy, speak English and arrive ready to provide for their families.
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Crowned With Thorns and Glory
[Jefferson Davis: Unconquerable Heart, by Felicity Allen (Columbia: University of Missouri Press) 808 pp., $34.95] “As the tug bore him away from the ship, he stood with bared head between the files of undersized German and other foreign soldiers on either side of him, and as we looked, as we thought, our last upon his...
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Why Can’t Biden Stop This Invasion?
Article IV of the Constitution addresses the obligations of the federal government to the state governments that were being asked to surrender aspects of their sovereignty to form our new Union. “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government,” reads Article IV, “and shall protect each of...
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Electoral Map Chaos
As of this writing, Texas is the only state in the union whose citizens have no earthly idea when, or if, they will hold a primary election for the two major parties this year. The primaries depend on a reapportionment map of the state, which doesn’t exist. The U.S. Constitution clearly states that “Representatives ....