As a first-time attendee of the Summer School (“The American Midwest,” The Rockford Institute’s Fourth Annual Summer School, 2001), I can sincerely say that I had one of the best times of my life—intellectually, spiritually, and socially. Having strong family roots in the Midwest, my regional pride and knowledge of this beautiful section of the...
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Pro-Lifers and the Psalmist’s Curses
On one bright, cold January day in the early 80’s I stood with a group of college students from North Carolina after the annual March for Life in Washington as we were received by Sen. Jesse Helms. He greeted us kindly and then regaled us with a few stories with that combination of gentility and...
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‘Civil War’ Shows American Divisions Through a Glass, Darkly
Civil War centers around an imagined conflict within America set in a disturbingly near future or an alternate present.
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It’s Just Business
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...
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CPAC moves to Rockford?
Here’s how you’ll know the conservative movement means something again: When the Conservative Political Action Conference, which just held its annual meeting, moves from Washington, D.C. to Rockford. Or Dubuque. Or Peoria. Or Helena. Or San Antonio. Or Bakersfield. Anywhere but the District of Corruption. I attended a couple CPACs back in the mid-1980s, at...
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Property Owners Under Assault
It should be a property owner’s dream. Thirteen acres in the heart of America’s largest city, bordered by two of its most prominent streets, Broadway and 42nd Street. Famous shopping and tourist attractions are all within walking distance. Broadway theaters, Fifth Avenue, the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, Madison Square Garden. Major transportation hubs like...
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Foreign Gangs Take Root in America’s Sanctuary Cities
For too long, America’s liberal sanctuary city mayors could preen about their superior compassion with little to no cost. The Biden-Harris border crisis is changing that.
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The Ugly Beautiful Losers
“Beautiful losers” was the phrase Sam Francis borrowed from Leonard Cohen to sum up the failure of the American conservative movement. Beautiful or not, American conservatives have been losers from their movement’s inception, and the same can be said for every conservative movement since the French Revolution and going back at least to the Enlightenment,...
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Roger Stone’s Case Shows the Left’s Control of U.S. Courts
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...
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American Renaissance Man
Charles Fletcher Lummis was born near Bristol, New Hampshire, in 1859 and received an extraordinary education at the feet of his father, Henry Lummis, an erudite Methodist minister. This homeschooling was so effective that, by the time young Charlie got to Harvard, he found that he had already read through its then-rigorous classics curriculum. Bored...
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Special Ops at War
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...
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Why I Am an Episcopalian
A friend of mine was having a theological discussion with his cleaning lady one day (people do that sort of thing in the South), and the subject of the End of Time came up. They agreed that the signs are all in place, and that it must be coming soon, if the Bible is to...
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Ubuntu!
William Murchison gets right to the point in his eloquent account of mainline Protestantism’s near-terminal degeneration, written poignantly from an Anglican’s perspective: Whenever traditional Christianity clashed with late-twentieth-century culture, the Episcopal Church normally weighed in on the side of the culture: for enhanced choice in life, for more laxity and less permanence in belief. Don’t...
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The Republican Party’s Welfare Queens
Republicans routinely portray themselves as fiscal guardians. In truth, they, like the Democrats, are irresponsible wastrels. Outlays are up by one third under President George W. Bush, making him the biggest spender since Lyndon B. Johnson. As the Cato Institute’s Stephen Slivinski observes, “Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still...
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Are Trump and Putin Right?
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...
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Five Plays in Search of a Character
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...
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Waste of Money
Media MIA’s Vietnam Reconsidered: Lessons from a War;Edited by Harrison E. Salisbury; Harper & Row; New York. James Dunkerley: The Long War, Dictatorship and Revou1tion in El Salvador;Junction; London. It has been a decade since America withdrew its troops from Vietnam. Unfortunately, scores of servicemen remain officially unaccounted for, their fate shrouded...
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A Christian Critique of American Foreign Policy
My last (and only other) visit to the United States was early in 1986. I was visiting the Capitol at the invitation of a friend who, at the time, was working for a Republican member of the Senate. It was on the day of President Reagan’s State of the Union Address, hi the silence and...
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The Greatest Revolution
Most people throughout the industrial world see cheap and readily available food as simply another modern amenity, such as electricity or running water. Few understand that agriculture has always been political, because it is tied to human survival. Even fewer know that the world is currently undergoing one of the greatest agrarian revolutions in history:...
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How Trump Turns Postmodernist ‘Truth’ Against Itself
Trump’s bombastic candor is actually a deeper form of truth-telling.
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Jihad Undefeated
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...
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Global Anarcho-Tyranny
The kind of regime that is being imposed on the world by what still passes for the West has two basic forms. The form preferred by the Democratic Party in the United States and by the European Union is multilateralist and therapeutic. The form favored by the people who currently control U.S. foreign policy is...
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Latino ‘Guerillas’ and the GOP
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...
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Conquista and Reconquista
As its subtitle indicates, this book dispels a number of imprecisions, equivocations, and outright lies regarding the Islamic conquest of Spain in late antiquity or the early medieval period. (The Romans called it Hispania, a word that evolved into the medieval Latin Spannia and eventually the modern España.) Its author, for many years professor of...
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A Very Special Ally
America’s political class is far more zealous about defending Israel than it is about defending America.
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Catholic Charity
I heard the latest twist in the story at the end of our two hours of teaching English at the Catholic mission. We volunteers taught the Latin American students—six simultaneous classes at different levels—in one big, noisy room. The noise of our lessons subsided when Sister clapped her hands to get everyone’s attention then started...
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Are Liberals Anti-WASP?
“A chorus of black commentators and civic leaders has begun expressing frustration over (Elena) Kagan’s hiring record as Harvard dean. From 2003 to 2009, 29 faculty members were hired: 28 were white and one was Asian American.” CNN pundit Roland Martin slammed “Kagan’s record on diversity as one that a ‘white Republican U.S. president’ would...
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Polemics & Exchanges
Founding Virtue To the list of those labeled as “social justice conservatives” by Brion McClanahan (“Reinventing Reconstruction,” February 2020) you can add the names of the Founding Fathers. Referring to them, Alexander Stephens (Vice-President of the Confederacy and author of the infamous “Cornerstone Speech”) wrote, “The prevailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and most of the...
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An American Bhagavadgita
“The United States of America—the greatest potential force, material, moral, and spiritual, in the world.” —G. Lowes Dickinson For Paul Johnson, American history was a non-subject in his days at Oxford and its School of Modern History in the 1940’s. “Nothing was said of America, except insofar as it lay on...
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The Ruined Tenement
“Every child should be taught to respect the sanctity of his neighbor’s house, garden, fields, and all that is his.” When James Fenimore Cooper insisted upon the inviolability of property, his conviction was as much the fruit of personal experience as it was the expression of his old-fashioned reverence for law and order. Upon returning...
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Polemics & Exchanges: May 2024
Chronicles contributors and readers tussle over Japanese culture, slavery, and NATO!
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The Third Muslim Invasion
They came in the early eighth century across the Straits of Gibraltar, unleashing terror and carnage across Iberia “like a desolating storm.” They were stopped deep inside today’s France, at Tours, by Charles Martel in 732. They kept attacking Europe throughout the Middle Ages, but their next sustained assault was at her vulnerable southeastern flank,...
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Civis Americanus Sum
“I was born an American; I will live an American; I shall die an American.” —Daniel Webster In the spring of 1963, my sister and I were invited, along with my parents, to a dinner party given by White Russian friends at their penthouse apartment in Manhattan, whose tall mahogany-framed windows overlooked lower Central Park. ...
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Biden’s Master Airbrushers in the Media
On July 21, President Joe Biden held a townhall in Cincinnati, taking questions from gushingly friendly CNN “journalists.” The room in which he spoke was half empty. From all appearances, Biden confirmed the suspicions of his critics that he is failing mentally and that what his “advisers” told him to say parroted the views of the left...
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Counting People and People Who Count
My curriculum vitae still includes a paragraph describing my activities as an “educational consultant,” though it has been some years since I went to Washington to read grants or evaluate schools for the Department of Education. It was all time wasted, less profitable ...
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Doing Well; Done Better
“These monstrous views, . . . these venemous teachings.” —Pope Leo XIII on socialism According to the jacket copy of Doing Well and Doing Good, Richard John Neuhaus is “one of the most prominent religious intellectuals” of our time (which helps explain our time). Neuhaus argues that while “Christianity has had nothing to say” to...
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The New Conservation Movement
To mainstream environmental activists, Ron Arnold merits special disdain. A former Sierra Club conservation committee member, Arnold now runs, with associate Alan Gottlieb, the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise in Bellevue, Washington. Together they wrote a 1993 expose of the environmental movement, Trashing the Economy: How Runaway Environmentalism is Wrecking America, which remains...
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A Forgotten Document
A few months after the close of the American Civil War there was a brief but intense and interesting correspondence between Lord Acton, the European historian of liberty, and General R.E. Lee, hero of the defeated Confederacy, on the issues of the war. In the course of this correspondence Acton commented that Appomattox had been...
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Macron in Washington
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...
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An Historian of Imagination
Forrest McDonald, the great historian of the American founding and early Republic, passed away on January 19 at the age of 89. Born in Orange, Texas, McDonald earned his doctorate from the University of Texas-Austin in 1955, and taught at Brown University, Wayne State University (Michigan), and the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. He retired to...
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The Spanish Civil War and the Battle for Western Civilization
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...
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Italian Justice
I have always hated students, a class as concrete to my mind as workers were to Karl Marx’s, a race as particular in my imagination as the Jews were in Alfred Rosenberg’s. Visiting a city like Florence, for me, is a painful experience, somewhere between what joining a gay-rights march would be for Taki or...
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Another Country
Most of my news this month has to do, one way or another, with country music. In a roundabout way, a story out of South Carolina last fall got me thinking about that particular contribution of the South to world civilization. It seems the dean of student affairs at the University of South Carolina asked...
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Storming the Castle Doctrine
Americans have been captivated by the February incident in Sanford, Florida, that resulted in the death of Trayvon Martin and the eventual arrest and charging of George Zimmerman. If the case could be resolved today, Trayvon Martin’s family would still be without a son, George Zimmerman—even if exonerated—will never live a normal life, Sanford Police...
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The Chechen War Far From Over
The Chechen War, as the Russian leadership discovered in early March, is far from over. On the night of March 2, a convoy of nine trucks, carrying about 100 Internal Ministry special forces troops from Grozny to the strategically important crossroads village of Pervomayskava, was ambushed by an estimated 40 Chechen boyevikiy (“fighters” or “warriors”)....
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Who Paid the Authors of the Border Bill?
Everything we know about the so-called “bipartisan” border bill suggests that it is has been worked out at the behest of powerful interests that have nothing to do with the will or interests of the American people.
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A Life in Literature
In May 2003, Christian Wiman was named the new editor of Poetry, the Chicago-based magazine that Harriet Monroe founded and made justly famous. This appointment came a year after Ruth Lilly made a massive gift to the magazine that brought its endowment to nearly $200 million and attracted enormous media attention. Wiman, born in 1966,...
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Do Democrats Want an Impeachment Fight?
“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...
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Your Future as a Terrorist
The Homeland Security apparatus has garnered quite a bit of attention lately for a paper that identified anti-abortionists, anti-immigrationists, and war veterans as terrorist suspects. (I thought “profiling” was forbidden, but in that matter, as so often these days, it would seem that some people are more equal than others.) Some Republican politicians are playing...
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That Demon Weed
When I hear all the talk about tobacco, I think of my Uncle Rollins, a green-visored straw hat on his salt-and-pepper head and a two-day stubble on his seasoned farmer face. He is standing in a field or by an unpainted barn as he crumbles a yellow-brown leaf and sticks a wad of ‘bacca in...