In “Don’t Blame Bryan!” (Reactionary Radicals/Radical Reactionaries, October), Jeff Taylor takes Michael Kazin to task for identifying William Jennings Bryan as the man who built the ideological bridge between 19th-century laissez-faire government and the modern liberal welfare state birthed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Dr. Taylor writes: “[Kazin] offers no detailed evidence to support this claim...
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What Happens When a Few Volunteer and the Rest Just Watch
The American Military System Dissected The purpose of all wars, is peace. So observed St. Augustine early in the first millennium A.D. Far be it from me to disagree with the esteemed Bishop of Hippo, but his crisply formulated aphorism just might require a bit of updating. I’m not a saint or even a bishop,...
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Banana Republicans
Shortly after the election of 1988 one grand old man of the Republican Party told me he thought Mr. Bush could do a creditable job so long as his administration faced no major crises. The very minor crisis of the abortive coup in Panama was the first serious test of this thesis, and it would...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Teddy Rebel in Portland
The political establishment in California has become self-admittedly secessionist in recent months, rebelling specifically against federal immigration policy and more broadly by raising the possibility of leaving a backward and reactionary country that does not share its culture and its politics. The secessionist spirit is spreading on the left and in leftist portions of the...
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Winners and Losers
I thought that Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota might be a cut above the general run of politicians when I noticed that he was one of four Democratic senators who voted against the Bush administration’s recent “immigration reform” bill, designed to replace the American population with Third World coolie labor. That prompted me to get...
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Apocalypse Now
“If a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.” American evangelicals, according to former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “are the Israelis’ best friend in the whole world.” In return, they dubbed him “the Ronald Reagan of Israel.” That so many are still surprised by those statements indicates that, by and large, those...
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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...
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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...
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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,...
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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....
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Chronicles Unbound, Live Today 3-5 PM
Chronicles Unbound, the official radio program of the best magazine on earth, is on the air and streaming live today, 3-5 PM. Join Tom Fleming, Scott Richert, and host Paul Youngblood as they discuss the Obama administration's war against ...
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The Grove City Horror Show
Civil rights activists called Rev. Jerry Falwell “hysterical” for claiming that the recently passed Civil Rights Restoration Act could require churches to hire a “practicing, active homosexual drug addict with AIDS to be a teacher or youth pastor.” His claim was dismissed as a ploy by a televangelist to squeeze more money out of a...
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“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...
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Trump’s Comprehensive Volte-Face
During the presidential campaign and in the immediate aftermath of his election victory, Donald Trump had made a number of conciliatory remarks about Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and the possibility of substantial improvement in relations between Washington and Moscow. On the campaign trail he also made the well-publicized statement that NATO was obsolete, and last...
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Liberalsim and Its Discontents
Barack Hussein Obama’s triumphal progress to the presidential mansion was fueled by the utopian sentimentality that dominates the political thinking of large segments of the U.S. population. Here was a dream combination—dark (but not too dark) skin with the manners and platitudes of a classic Midwestern liberal. It was like lackluster Hubert Humphrey or George...
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Lawless Roads
It is 10:00 P.M. as you step off the Greyhound bus in Laredo, Texas. By all rights you should feel exhausted after your 36-hour ride from Minneapolis. But the truth is, you feel pretty good. The air is cool but muggy on this late-August night. You are told that the Rio Grande is just a...
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Civilization and the One Percent
As a confirmed member of the Ninety-Nine Percent, I do not believe that the One Percent has too much money. I think that it does not have money enough. Even President Obama is unclear about his reasons for wanting to raise taxes on the well-to-do (the people with an income of $250,000 he regards as...
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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...
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Giving the Devil His Due
Over at Takimag, Chronicles contributing editor Tom Piatak has a thought-provoking piece on the proposal to extend $25 to $50 billion in government-backed loans to the Big Three automakers. Among other points completely ignored by those who reflexively shout “Let them die!” whenever the American auto industry is mentioned are, as Tom notes, that as...
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SPLC Restrains Itself On Bundy … Daily Kos Smears Him
The “range war” in Sen. Harry Reid’s Nevada between hardscrabble rancher Cliven Bundy and the federal government appears to have ended. The Bureau of Land Management has retreated, having seized Bundy’s cattle and tasered and arrested his son. Bundy and the BLM are fighting over his refusing to pay fees to use federal lands for...
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Time to Get Over the Russophobia
Unless there is a late surge for Communist Party candidate Pavel Grudinin, who is running second with 7 percent, Vladimir Putin will be re-elected president of Russia for another six years on March 18. Then we must decide whether to continue on course into a second Cold War, or engage Russia, as every president sought...
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American Empire
Developed nations should assist poorer states by doing no harm. Washington should end government-to-government assistance, which has so often buttressed regimes dedicated to little more than maintaining power and has eased the economic pressure for needed reforms. The United States should stop meddling in foreign affairs which matter little to America; the result is usually...
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We Were Right About Foreign Policy
U. S. leaders continue vindicating Chronicles with their disastrous foreign policy decisions. President Trump doesn't appear eager to break this trend.
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The Cost of Welfare
perspective 8 | Topsy-Turvy by Thomas Fleming views 12 | Uncle Sam Goes Bust by Doug Bandow 16 | Take the Money and Run: Entitlement Politics by Mark G. Brennan reviews 20 | Mal de Mer by Chilton Williamson, Jr. [Sea Changes by Derek Turner] 22 | Why Garry Wills? by James Kalb [Why Priests? A Failed Tradition by Garry Wills]...
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Putin’s Miscalculation
“This is worse than a crime,” Talleyrand famously said of Napoleon’s execution of the Duke of Enghien: “it is a mistake.” The same can be said of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, almost four weeks after it was launched. However the battle turns out–even if the Russian army achieves its operational...
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Remembering Robert E. Lee
Forbearance is a moral principle from which General Robert E. Lee rarely if ever wavered, and his unflinching practice of that virtue is the primary reason that he should be remembered today.
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The Remnants of Realism
Philip Roth: The Anatomy Lesson; Farrar, Straus & Grioux; 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.”...
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Ground Zero Mosque: Correcting the Non-Debate
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 ...
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The Goading of America
Fisher Ames is the Founding Father who draws a blank. Few people today have heard of him, yet he wrote the final version of the First Amendment, and his speech on Jay’s Treaty, delivered when he was the leader of the Federalists in the First Congress, was called the finest example of American oratory by...
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September 11: Ten Years After
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...
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The Coming Counter-Coup Against the GOP
The right’s failure in 2020’s election may herald the start of a new conservative ascension. But it cannot happen under the current Republican Party leadership. The problem is greater than the Republican-in-Name-Only politicians ignoring the legitimate charges of election-rigging and jumping Trump’s ship. For years, the established conservative political class has looked away from...
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Big Surprise
“When we gained power, the country was at the edge of the abyss; since, we have taken a great step forward.” —unnamed African government minister Tocqueville in the 19th century, and Solzhenitsyn in the 20th, noted that conformity of thought is powerfully prevalent among Americans. I have always thought that a strong justification for freedom...
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The Great Parental Replacement
Parents are being replaced by woke educators, radical school counselors, gender queer-promoting librarians, meddling school-based health clinic staffers, and Big Pharma drug and jab peddlers.
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Scouting and Sin
The Boy Scouts of America have recently been accused of sins against Democracy, in the form of discrimination against atheists, homosexuals, and women. Four recent lawsuits have challenged the organizational prerogatives of the Scouts. The families of nine-year-old twins Michael and William Randall of Anaheim, California, and eight-year-old Mark Welsh of Chicago are suing to...
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How to Respond to Tradwife Envy
It won’t do to obsess with condemning the unreality of celebrity tradwives living the dream. Their popularity points to something fundamental about the human condition and it deserves a serious answer.
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Conservative Education: Caveat Emptor!
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...
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Letter from South Tyrol: Austria’s Crimea
There are many arbitrarily drawn borders in the world, none more so than the one on the Brenner Pass (4,500 ft) between Austria and Italy. As you drive south along the Brenner Autobahn, the Alpine landscape does not change. Only the bilingual signposts indicate that you have crossed from Austria into Italy. Most people speak German, and all local stations...
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On True Finns
In the December issue of Chronicles, Edward Dutton writes about the peculiar self-censorship that characterizes Finnish political and cultural life (“Letter From Finland: Finland, Democracy, and Those Cartoons,” Correspondence). This reality was confirmed as the magazine was likely going to press, when the Finnish prime minister told journalists that they should not ask government ministers...
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It Could Happen to You
Waco, as we go to press, stands for “We ain’t comin’ out.” Americans can and do make jokes about anything, particularly current events. That’s the good news. The bad news is that ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms—nee Bureau of Prohibition and now part of the Treasury Department, today under Lloyd Bentsen, former U.S....
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Same-Sex Marriage: The Continuing Conversation
Immanentizing the eschaton via Obergefell v. Hodges, Justice Anthony Kennedy has achieved his long-sought goal—namely, to be to 21st-century America what Bonaparte was to 19th-century Europe. In respectable quarters Justice Kennedy is considered a world-historical personage, having made the oxymoron “same-sex marriage” the law of the land. Several years ago, in a letter to the...
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If God Ran the State Department
“In the Name of the most Holy & undivided Trinity.” A Thus begins the Treaty of Paris (1783) by which Great Britain formally conceded the existence of the independent United States of America. This matter-of-fact invocation of the Triune God of Christianity stands in sharp contrast to the stirring tributes to human authority in the...
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An Albanian Travelogue
I’ve just returned from Albania, almost 22 years after visiting that country for the first time. In July 1991 I went there on an assignment with U.S. News & World Report, only weeks after the country’s borders were finally opened to foreigners after 45 years of hermetic isolation. I have visited many countries over the years,...
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The World Imperiled by ‘Repair’
Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, recently published an article in Foreign Affairs which encapsulated the agenda of the globalist elite for the incoming Biden administration, should the former vice president be sworn in on Jan. 20. “When he first enters the Oval Office,” Haass writes, “President-elect Joe Biden will be greeted by an inbox...
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A Letter from Switzerland: Alpine Redoubt Stays Neutral
Switzerland provides a model for a morally neutral foreign policy based on pragmatic interests rather than “defining values” and self-proclaimed exceptionality. Americans need to learn from the Swiss.
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Claude Polin: A Remembrance
My wife and I shall visit Paris again this fall, as we have done for years, but the city will be an empty place for us following the death of our dear friend and my revered colleague, Claude Polin, on July 23. Mercifully, Claude was spared the horrors of modern death in a nursing home...
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A Warring Visionary
British scholar Timothy Stanley has produced the first significant biography of Patrick J. Buchanan, describing his life from his boyhood in Washington, D.C., up to the present. Stanley’s book is written in a breezy, informal manner—Buchanan is referred to as “Pat” throughout—and it makes for quick and generally enjoyable reading. Stanley gets much right in...
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A New Path to Peace
Israel’s recent siege of Lebanon, which has imposed a crippling humanitarian, economic, and psychological setback on her northern neighbor, may return Syria to the center stage of Middle Eastern politics. Considering Syria’s enduring influence over Lebanon and the Palestinians and her close ties to Iran, ignoring Syria no longer serves America’s (or Israel’s) interests. Even...