Recent events raise the question whether an England that has imported so many different peoples of the world is still recognizable.
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Gerald Who?
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...
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George O’Brien: American Star
WWI veteran George O’Brien became a star in Hollywood with his breakout performance in John Ford’s silent film epic, The Iron Horse. Handsome and built like the top athlete he was, O’Brien appeared in 11 more Ford movies and 85 films altogether, a successful career punctuated by voluntary and selfless distinction in two more wars,...
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Family Formation in America
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...
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Paris Personified
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...
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Why They Fought
The late Jean-François Revel wrote a once-famous book with the title Comment les démocraties finissent. Revel was not a stupid man, and I thoroughly enjoyed the afternoon “we tired the sun with talking,” but as a political philosopher, he was a prisoner of the leftist ideology that treats terms like equality and democracy as substantial...
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Just East of the Indian’s Nose
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...
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The Better Way
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...
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From Household to Nation
If there was any major difference between the presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan in 1995 and his first run at the Republican nomination in 1992, it was the relative calm with which his enemies greeted the announcement of his second candidacy and his rapid move last year to the forefront of the Republican field. Rabbi...
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Attachment and Loss
Blue Jasmine Produced by Perdido Productions Written and directed by Woody Allen Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics Grim. That’s the first thing to say about Woody Allen’s new movie, Blue Jasmine. The second is that its lead, Cate Blanchett, gives one of the best performances by an actress since Vivian Leigh played Blanche DuBois...
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Coalition of the Unwilling?
Recently, I attended a conference in Washington, D.C., that focused on the dilemmas involved in the expansion of NATO. One of the American speakers, referring to the membership of the small Baltic nation of Estonia in the U.S.-led security organization, expressed concern that the Estonians could force the Americans into a military confrontation with the...
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La Florida
In an expedition that began in 1538 and endured until 1543, Hernando de Soto and six hundred men failed to discover in what is today Florida and the Lower American South that which they craved most to find—gold. Four centuries later, a young writer, poet, and novelist native to the region trained his genius on...
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Missed Manners and Creeping Laws
All societies regulate personal behavior: That is part of what makes them societies, instead of mere aggregations of isolated individuals. Societies differ enormously, though, in just how they perform this regulation, how much they rely on law and the state, rather than informal or private means. If I walk into a crowded room wearing a...
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The Man of Mode
“Man at his best” is both the slogan and promise of Esquire magazine. “Best,” in this context, turns out to mean all that money can buy in the way of automobiles, wristwatches, adoring women, and clothes. Fernando Lamas’ paradoxical aphorism (taken seriously by a dull-witted comic who parlayed it into a career) sums it up:...
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Of Women and Wanderlust
Elizabeth Arthur: Beyond the Mountain; Harper & Row; New York. Blanche d’Alpuget: Turtle Beach; Simon &Schuster; New York. Janet Turner Hospital: The Ivory Swing; E. P. Dutton; New York. by Bryce Christensen Home, as Robert Frost observed, is that place “where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” But...
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Lincolnism Today: The Long Marriage of Centralized Power and Concentrated Wealth
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 ...
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The Family Against the Globalists
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...
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The Mysterious Mountain
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...
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Scala Jerkitudinis: The Subspecies
The Great American Jerk is a chameleon who changes colors according to circumstances, from obsequious to bullying, from pious to lewd. He may, on some occasions, display buck-waving generosity and on others check-splitting stinginess, but underneath there is always the baby boy or girl who wants what he or she wants, whether it is...
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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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Trump, the Deplorables, and the Aforementioned “Sh-thole”
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...
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Truth Is on Trial With Kavanaugh
While we await the FBI’s seventh investigation into Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s background, some considerations: All four of Christine Blasey Ford’s witnesses to a party where he allegedly attacked her deny the party ever happened. The first narrative having run its course, the Democratic War Room spun out another dubious claim of sexual assault. The second...
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The Fire Next Time
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...
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The Old Left Wasn’t Very Leftist
While researching a book on antifascism, it became clear to me that the contemporary left has strange ideas about what earlier leftists believed. This is especially true in the ascription of a certain timelessness to intersectional politics, which today’s antifascists are all about. In How Fascism Works by Yale Philosophy Professor Jason Stanley, and in...
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Trumpism Has a Future Now
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.
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Clash of Civilizations
I am a “liberal Democrat” who likes to read different perspectives on the many issues facing our country. I picked up Chronicles to read your article on Rolling Stone’s and Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s egregious misreporting (“UVA: Facts Versus the Left’s Narrative,” News, June), which I’m interested in as a UVA alumna and parent. When Mr....
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Empire’s Bloody End
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.
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Buying Up American Symbols
The Japanese have been zealous in buying up American symbols: golf courses, movie studios. Rockefeller Center, the Mariners. Recently, however, they are beginning to learn that cosmopolitanism can be a two-way street. In January, American sumo wrestler Chad Rowan became the first foreigner to be awarded the rank of “Exalted Grand Champion.” Six feet five...
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What the Editors Are Reading
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...
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Strategic Blunders
It has been a summer of major strategic blunders by the United States and Russia over Ukraine and by the United States in the Middle East, where the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS, now renamed simply the Islamic Caliphate) has emerged as a major player, threatening what little remains of the region’s stability....
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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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Su Rancho Es Mi Rancho
Reading the newspapers, I wonder which straw will break the camel’s back when it comes to illegal immigration. What will finally cause Americans to rise up and take back their country? The tenth family killed by an illegal-alien drunk driver? The 100th housewife butchered by an illegal-alien murderer? Or the next lawsuit that awards damages...
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A Desirable Transit Point
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...
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More Buchanan, Less Kushner.
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....
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The Way We Are Now—The Campaign
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 ...
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Smear Campaign
“The tone and tendency of liberalism . . . is to attack the institutions of the country under the name of reform and to make war on the manners and customs of the people under the pretext of progress.” —Benjamin Disraeli On April 14, 1996, the Washington Post published a 2,700-word article by liberal journalist...
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Beautiful Excess
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...
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Hillary’s Watergate?
After posting Friday’s column, “A Presidency from Hell?,” about the investigations a President Hillary Clinton would face, by afternoon it was clear I had understated the gravity of the situation. Networks exploded with news that FBI Director James Comey had informed Congress he was reopening the investigation into Clinton’s email scandal, which he had said...
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Virtue-Signaling Ourselves to Death
Republicans seem perfectly content to repeatedly proclaim the mass exodus of black voters from the Democratic Party’s “plantation,” only to be proven wrong time and time again.
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The Way of the World
In his essay on “self-reliance,” Emerson wrote that “travelling is a fool’s paradise.” He was referring to those who travel to escape the boredom or sadness of their lives, and who hope to return home somehow transformed. Yet we may add those who travel to boast (“Look, here I am at the Parthenon!” or “I...
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Peaceable Kingdoms
“The consent of all nations is the law of nature.” —Cicero On the Law of Nations is a powerful brief in favor of what the United States Supreme Court in 1900 declared to be “the customs and usages of the civilized world.” (In Paquete Habana, the highest court declared international law to be “part of...
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By Their Incompetence, Biden and Harris Strike a Blow Against the Deep State
More Americans than ever understand that the uproar over the upcoming election is less a contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, and more a campaign to remain in power by what some call the deep state.
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On Bursting Bubbles
Greg Kaza (“Economic Liberty and American Manufacturing,” Views, January) is to be congratulated for seizing hold of two important realities: that the late 1990’s saw a financial bubble of historic proportions, the origins and implications of which are poorly understood; and that incomes for the median- and lower-wage earner, when adjusted for inflation, have seen...
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Hamas is Israel’s Golem
Hamas is a golem, a monstrous creature from Jewish folklore created from mud and made animate, which escaped his master and turned against him.
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A Monumental Proposal
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...
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Moldova: A Neo-Cold-War Battlefield
Recent developments in Moldova have placed the former Soviet republic, strategically placed at the hub of Central and Southeastern Europe’s energy corridors, at the center of Russia’s occasionally tense relations with the West. On February 7, echoing the rhetoric and mindset of half a century ago, Senator Richard Lugar, a leading NATO expansionist and Russophobic...
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Jackson and the American Indians
Everyone knows that Andrew Jackson wanted American Indians annihilated, defied the Supreme Court in a famous challenge to Chief Justice John Marshall, and forcibly removed the Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeast to lands west of the Mississippi River. What everyone knows is not true. Once a venerated American hero, Andrew Jackson has been attacked...
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Why the Left Can’t Let Go of Jan. 6
To understand what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s select committee investigation of the Capitol Hill events of Jan. 6 is all about, a good place to begin is with the sentencing hearing last week of Paul Hodgkins. A crane operator from Tampa, Florida, Hodgkins, 38, pleaded guilty to a single count of obstructing a joint session...
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Great Expectations
Foreign aid, like other forms of aid, is a subsidy that distorts choice. The distortion takes many forms; for example, aid is sometimes put to uses unintended by the giver; it also lets the recipient pursue activities below their real cost. Since President Harry Truman launched the foreign-aid crusade, U.S. economic aid to developing nations...
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Tom Fleming’s Complainte
George Garrett used to tell the story of a young writer who visited him in York Harbor, Maine. The writer, who had worked in a prison, wore a cap emblazoned with the letters SCUP, which stood for something like South Carolina Union of Prisons. Sharing some of George’s sense of humor—which bordered on the wicked—he...