“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce,” a saying attributed to Karl Marx, comes to mind in this time of Trump. To those of us raised in the Truman era, when the Red Army was imposing its bloody Bolshevik rule on half of Europe, and NATO was needed to keep Stalin’s armies from...
In the Anglo-American experience, the partisans of concentrated wealth and advocates for political centralization have long been connected. Over the last three centuries, that connection has grown stronger, and in the United States this process accelerated dramatically during and after the Lincoln administration. Lincolnism, the idea that the central state ...
I once knew a lady who ran for governor of the state of Pennsylvania on the promise that, if elected, she would run the state like a family. Unfortunately, she lost the election, so we will never know what that would have been like. (I am tempted to say that it would be impossible to run...
A dozen years ago (give or take), I tried to commission a piece for Chronicles on how Big Business was increasingly pushing a leftist social and cultural agenda. For years, the conservative orthodoxy in the United States had been that capitalist institutions, from mom-and-pop shops up to the largest corporations, were essentially conservative. (In the...
The wind that had risen directly after sunset blew hard down-canyon, filling the rocky bowl where camp was fixed with a sound like rushing water, scouring the open fire pit, and sending red sparks in sheets among the dry cacti and bushes. Between gusts, the coals in the bottom of the pit burned dark red...
Ten years ago, on the morning of September 11, I was in my apartment in California getting ready for work when a friend called. “Turn on the TV,” she said. “What’s going on?” “Just turn on the TV.” I turned on the tube in time to see the second airliner crash into the south tower...
The U.S. media are stoking the coalfires of populist nationalism with their breathless coverage of President Trump’s private and undoubtedly unwise comment that Haiti is a “sh-thole country.” The President denies using that specific language, but owns up to the substance of the comment. The New York Times has declared that Trump’s reported comment is...
Morgan Norval shares with this reviewer one characteristic both of us may soon have cause to regret: We live near Washington, D.C., one of the prime candidates for a major terrorist attack with unconventional weapons in the near future, an attack in which the victims will be numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Among those...
George Bush chose a risky moment for launching his New World Order. World stock markets have reacted to the vicissitudes of war with all the stability of a manic-depressive who won’t take his medicine when he’s feeling up and doesn’t see the point of taking it when he’s down. The mere rumors of war were...
Donald Trump has secured a future for Trumpism by picking J. D. Vance as his running mate. Trump has ensured that Trumpism will not only be about Trump.
The noun geopolitics and the adjective geopolitical are increasingly present in media discourse on world affairs. In principle, this is a good thing. Relating political power to the immutable imperatives of space and resources is essential to an analysis of world affairs that is free from the ideological baggage of American exceptionalism, whether Wilsonian or...
In A Continent Erupts Ronald Spector analyzes the complex conflicts of East and Southeast Asia in the 10 years after the end of World War II.
The contrived conviction of Roger Stone showed that America has a profoundly serious problem with its legal system. The reaction to President Trump’s commutation of Stone’s sentence by mainline media, and former and current prosecutors tells us that the president himself is likely to be prosecuted after leaving office. The roots of this problem lie...
Outside of my regular reading for the courses I’m teaching—this semester, this week, Livy’s History of Rome, Books 1-5, and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book 1—I have been reading mainly books and articles with some relation to nostalgia, broadly speaking. That has included what for me have been some gratifying discoveries, such as Thomas Molnar’s...
From Afghanistan to Somalia, Special Ops Achieves Less with More At around 11 o’clock that night, four Lockheed MC-130 Combat Talons, turboprop Special Operations aircraft, were flying through a moonless sky from Pakistani into Afghan airspace. On board were 199 Army Rangers with orders to seize an airstrip. One hundred miles to the northeast, Chinook...
Much of the blame for the deplorable state of higher education in America today must be traced back to the baneful influence of America’s most revolutionary educationist, John Dewey. In his enormously influential Democracy and Education (1915), Dewey defined education as “a freeing of individual capacity in a progressive growth directed to social aims.” In...
The Center for Immigration Studies reports this morning that the number of immigrants, both legal and illegal, in the United States is now 41.3 million, the highest it has ever been. Even as the American economy continues to sputter and many Americans face unemployment or underemployment, an additional 1.4 million immigrants entered the country between...
The Republic of Georgia’s desirability as an oil and natural-gas transit point has made her a pawn in a game that involves Washington, Moscow, Caspian Sea oil, and the fate of Iraq. And this game is, in turn, part of the great game going on in Central Asia. Since September 11, 2001, American policymakers have...
Some 20 years ago, my friend P.J. O’Rourke came to dinner at my New York house with his new bride. She was beautiful, reserved, intelligent, and after dinner called me a male chauvinist, racist antisemite and left the house in a fury. P.J. apologized and followed his bride out. To this day I haven’t figured...
Monday, MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” hosted a spirited discussion with Donald Trump on whether he was right in asserting that Muslims in New Jersey celebrated as the towers came down on 9/11. About Muslim celebrations in Berlin, however, there appears to be no doubt. In my chapter “Eurabia,” in “State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion...
A strongly shared sense of right and wrong has maintained a working peace and harmony within many societies over long periods. This is probably what saw the class-ridden British through an empire and two world wars. It is what kept the South ...
In recent years Actors Theatre of Louisville’s artistic director Jon Jory has come under fire for the relative weakness of his new play festival. He should be happy that this year’s season was stronger. Like any other genre, playwriting is a craft, and if nothing else was evident, it was clear from the eight plays...
The Hard to Catch Mercy, William Baldwin’s entrancing first novel, is bound to remind some readers of Mark Twain, especially of some of the bleaker pages of moral fables like The Mysterious Stranger and The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg. But Baldwin’s purpose is not to piggyback a Grand Master. He desires to remind us of...
Events are the building blocks of history. Narrative historians, starting with Thucydides, have focused on what they regarded as significant occurrences in order to present and evaluate the past. The import of some events can be recognized by astute observers almost as soon as they occur. Edmund Burke’s 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in...
The cloud was no bigger than a puff of white smoke above the western horizon at a point equidistant between the Henry Mountains and the Book Cliffs, It was a nice cloud, a point of interest in an otherwise banal sky, soft blue paling around the edges. I tamped down the cookfire I had built...
There is a picture in our family of my great-grandfather holding a Model 94 lever-action .30-30 carbine—”Treinta Treinta,” as it was affectionately called—with a cartridge belt strapped across his body. He fought in the Mexican Revolution with an American-made Winchester rifle. This little piece of family history pops into my mind now and then. Not...
Wayne Allensworth, in his poignant and beautifully written review of Saving Private Ryan (“The Face of Battle,” January), focuses on what is right with the film. However, I find much that is wrong, and, for me, the wrong outweighs the right. Nonetheless, Steven Spielberg makes an important contribution to the making of war movies by...
Over the last 30 years, especially since the spring of 2020, Critical Race Theory (CRT) and its accompanying obsessions with “whiteness” and “white privilege” has almost overwhelmed discussion about race and racism in Western society. CRT “recognizes that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of the American society,” declares a definition from...
The title of Chalmers Johnson’s latest book, the last in his trilogy of empire, invokes the Greek goddess of retribution. He named the first book in his trilogy after the CIA term for the harmful unintended consequences that sometimes result from the agency’s covert policies. “Blowback,” he wrote, “is but another way of saying that...
Jacques Barzun: A Stroll With William James; Harper & Row; New York. William James is the nearest thing to a thoroughly American philosopher this nation has produced. George Santayana complained that James felt compelled to play the part of a home-spun American a role enjoyed by our intellectuals from Ben Franklin to Ezra Pound. Santayana...
In 428 AD [sic], Giusto Traina has written a brief and engaging overview of the Mediterranean and Near East in the early fifth century. Traina, an ancient historian with a strong interest in classical Armenia, chose to survey the events of that year owing to its pivotal importance for the political and cultural history of...
Recent events raise the question whether an England that has imported so many different peoples of the world is still recognizable.
Snaking out from the Middle Atlantic states is a long distinguished line of political and literary Copperheads: Millard Fillmore, Horatio Seymour, Harold Frederic, Edmund Wilson, and the Pennsylvania duo of James Buchanan and John Updike. These men were certainly not proslavery, but they did view the Union cause with rather more skepticism than did their...
“How beastly the bourgeois is,” sneered D.H. Lawrence, “especially the male of the species.” What courage and imagination a writer must have to revile a social class that has been under attack for over a generation! Aristocrats (and would-be aristocrats) look down their noses at the bourgeoisie’s convention-bound moralism and dismal commitment to hard work...
In an established literary conceit, houses become people, and people become houses: Roderick Usher and the House of Usher, Quasimodo and Notre Dame. Similarly, people become their cities, and cities their people. Parisians is not an “important” book like Graham Robb’s magisterial work of the historians’ art, The Discovery of France. But it is indisputably...
Eleven years ago, I moved to Northwest Wisconsin, a region called the Wisconsin Indianhead because it is shaped like the profile of an Indian chief I live just east of the nose. After a career of publishing magazines and editing newspapers in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, I decided to take a...
A review of Winter’s Bone: A Novel, by Daniel Woodrell. The Missouri Ozarks are the western outpost of Appalachia. The hills are not as high as their elder brothers to the east, but they plunge down into narrow, labyrinthine valleys, where streams of cool, green water run. The surrounding soil is mostly shallow and full...
Band of Angels Produced and distributed by Warner Brothers Directed by Raoul Walsh Screenplay by John Twist Hostiles Produced by Le Grisbi Productions Written and directed by Scott Cooper Distributed by Entertainment Studios Motion Pictures I had never heard of the 1957 film Band of Angels directed by Raoul Walsh until I came upon it...
Most of us in the United States are hyphenated Americans: Hispanic-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Irish-Americans. Even WASPs have taken refuge in the term “Anglo-American,” as if the British stock did not define the American identity. At this point in our history, we have trouble even imagining a people that takes its nationality neat without the addition of...
French President Emanuel Macron’s three-day visit to Washington started on an awkward note when he kissed an obviously uncomfortable President Donald Trump. The scene was a symbolic reminder that the two leaders do not enjoy an “intense, close relationship” invented by the media. In reality Macron is, both ideologically and temperamentally, the polar opposite of...
The ascent of an anti-white egalitarian to House Democratic Leader shows that the American left intends to double-down on racial politics.
After a lengthy legal battle concluded in September, Spain’s Supreme Court gave its approval to the socialist government’s plans to exhume and remove the remains of General Francisco Franco from the Valley of the Fallen, where they have lain since his death in 1975. The controversial general led Spain’s Nationalist forces to victory over their...
The Anti-Drug Crusade contains the common hype along with always-commendable pledges to crack down on drug criminals and introduce “zero tolerance” for users. Nonetheless, President Bush’s war on drugs can only fail, for it insists on attacking the symptoms of the problem rather than the real disease itself. Social research on the use of illegal...
As Chronicles broke free of movement conservatism, we began exploring the disintegration of the family and we found many likeminded friends. It was an exciting time.
After President Bush’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Italy in July, it is almost certain that a new round of NATO expansion will be announced at the forthcoming summit in Prague, regardless of Moscow’s misgivings. The alliance will include Slovenia, Slovakia, the three Baltic republics, and possibly Rumania and Bulgaria. The consequences of...
America cannot afford another four years of an open-borders Democrat administration.
Sydney Poitier’s films were mature examinations of blackness in American life. Unlike those who followed him, he demonstrated that acting civilized way is not a class or race privilege, but a human obligation.
“If anyone is looking for a good lawyer,” said President Donald Trump ruefully, “I would strongly suggest that you don’t retain the services of Michael Cohen.” Michael Cohen is no Roy Cohn. Tuesday, Trump’s ex-lawyer, staring at five years in prison, pled guilty to a campaign violation that may not even be a crime. Cohen...
This beautiful little book—one that does much credit to its publisher— appears as a blessing amid the clutter and noise and ugliness that characterize the publishing industry as well as literary discourse today. A pleasure to hold and to behold, this volume is also the vehicle for rendering words, thoughts, and values that seem new...
Great Britain’s decision to transfer control of Hong Kong to Communist China by 1997 has spurred a flight from the colony. Despite reassurances from Beijing, money is flowing out of Hong Kong at an accelerating rate. Among those who are moving their assets are the Chinese crime syndicates—the Triads. While they are expanding their criminal...