In the run-up to the November elections, Republicans comforted themselves by passing around an analysis by the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office showing that spending on the Iraq war so far has been “only” $709 billion. They pointed out that President Obama’s wasteful stimulus actually cost $100 billion more. And they touted the $709 billion number...
2702 search results for: Southern%252525252525252525252525252BHeritage
Post
Nationalism Looking Pretty Good
If conservatives carried revolvers, they’d probably reach for them at the sound of the word “nationalism.” Perhaps it’s just as well they don’t carry revolvers, since nationalism usually makes its appearance armed with considerably bigger guns. In the Europe of Metternich and Castlereagh, nationalism was the vehicle for the revolutionary destruction of dynastic and aristocratic...
Post
The Tragedy of Mexico
Twenty-eight years ago, in the summer of 1980, I moved to Guadalajara, Mexico, to take a job teaching English and journalism at a university there. The job ended just as soon as it began: On the first day of classes, the university, a private institution with connections to the country’s thriving neofascist movement and, thence,...
Post
The Puritan Legacy Birthed the American Creed
Right-wing critics of Christianity often quote from The Hour of Decision, the last work of a once widely read German historian of philosophy, Oswald Spengler. This short, graphically composed book was published in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler took power in Germany. Although it has never been proven, there is a suspicion that the Nazi government disposed...
Post
Putting Policies Before Personalities
A candidate’s character matters, of course, but what matters most at this moment in history is which candidate proposes policies that will build a better America.
Post
Don’t Tread on Us
In the closing days of 1993 two familiar specters, recently absent from our nightmares, returned to haunt the global consciousness: the Russian bear, in the person of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and the Yellow Peril, in the form of North Korea. There were, of course, other bugbears to frighten the children of democracy—the parade of new Hitlers...
Post
Erdogan’s Welcome Miscalculation (II)
There was only an en passant reference to Syria at the end of my analysis of Erdogan’s defeat three days ago. This subject deserves closer scrutiny. His controversial policy vis-à-vis Damascus now appears to have been a major factor in his defeat, and Turkey’s likely fine-tuning of her posture in the months ahead may have...
Post
Wymyn Don’t Wyn
The girly-men at the New York Times and a perpetually aggrieved feminist you’ve never heard of finally got what they wanted. In August, Augusta National Country Club, home of the storied Masters Tournament, finally admitted two women: Condoleezza Rice, a neocon secretary of state under President George W. Bush, and the fetching Darla Moore, a...
Post
Putin’s Gamble: Playing the Terrorist Card
When Russian President Vladimir Putin called President Bush shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks to express his solidarity, pundits East and West took this as a sign of what one American columnist called the coming “earthquake” in U.S.-Russia relations. Putin was aiming to shift his policy focus westward, away from his previous “Eurasianist” effort...
Post
Pandora’s Box
Globalization is remaking the world in ways that will profoundly affect how people do business, govern themselves, and even make war. We may debate what the driving force behind globalization is—capitalism or technology, for example—but there is no doubt that capital goods, services, people, and ideas cross borders with increasing speed, frequency, and ease. Actions...
Post
Sounding the Trump
In important ways, a revolutionary process has begun. So argues Ilana Mercer in the best extended analysis yet published of the Trump phenomenon: “Trump is getting an atrophied political system to oscillate” in “an oddly marvelous uprising.” For us revolutionaries there is still a long way to go, but we are entitled to a “modest...
Post
Build the Wall, Mr. President
10 USC § 2808 gives the President authority to use the military to undertake construction in the event the President declares a national emergency. It has been used, without controversy, to build military facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. 33 USC § 2293 is an even clearer grant of statutory authority to the President to order construction, “without...
Post
What the Editors Are Reading
An unfortunate effect of more than two decades of war between the West and the Middle East, and the resulting terrorist campaigns launched from there, is the replacement of the charm, even the magic, the historical Persia held for Europeans—and for me—by their opposite: contempt, disgust, even fear. In the late 80’s and the 90’s...
Post
Keeping an Eye on Grandpa, the Terrorist
I’ve just learned I may be a terrorist. On Aug. 13, the Secretary of Homeland Security issued a statement warning about an increase in domestic and foreign terrorism. At the end of the document’s summary were these words: “Such threats are also exacerbated by impacts of the ongoing global pandemic, including grievances...
Post
Understand Me Completely
Ordinary people, we are told, ordinarily speak in cliches, bromides, and dotty banalities, and it is the task of the literary artist, of the playwright in particular, to give them expressive and convincing words. This is the practice of Aeschylus and Shakespeare, of Tennessee Williams and Tom Stoppard. The success of heightened language upon the...
Post
The Bad Theology of Our Israel Über Alles Foreign Policy
Christian dispensationalism explains the fervor with which some in the Republican Party support the interests of the nation of Israel as if they were always our own.
Post
No Peace for Iraq
From Operation Desert Storm, unleashed against Iraq by President George Bush, up to the present moment, the attack on Iraq has been relentless. As I write, a report of a U.S. sortie over Iraqi skies and a clash with Iraqi anti-aircraft guns is hitting the wires—yet another skirmish in the continuous low-level warfare that has...
Post
Violent Revolution
This past spring, while Congress was engaging in its usual mock debate about tightening immigration, hundreds of thousands of Mexican-Americans took their case to the streets. In the first round of demonstrations, Chicanos, waving Mexican flags, demanded rights for illegals and declared that all those who favored enforcing the law were racists. We all heard...
Post
The Left’s Delusions on Crime and Policing
The death of George Floyd and the reaction that followed have seen an explosion of hysterical accusations, breast-beating, and lying that is extreme even by the standards of the last half-century. It is no exaggeration to say that reason and common sense have largely fled the scene, and there has been an incredibly weak reaction to...
Post
Moving Targets: The Trouble With Early Primaries
The 2008 presidential contest has dominated political news for over a year, starting almost immediately after the 2006 midterm elections. Most of the coverage has devolved, as it always does, to discussion of the “horse race” among the candidates, the competition for fundraising, and an insufferably large number of debates and fora that few actual...
Post
On Migration
Samuel Francis’s new book America Extinguished and Joe Scotchie’s review of it (“While America Sleeps,” March) deal with the problems resulting from unlimited mass immigration—people from foreign countries bringing a different culture and values to America. Neither one, however, deals with the fact that the United States has experienced and still faces similar and equally...
Post
The Growing Irrelevance of the NCC
The National Council of Churches (NCC) is the Hugh Hefner of the religious world: aging and not dealing well with it, trapped in the fashions of the 1960’s and 1970’s, financially troubled, still offensive but no longer shocking, blissfully unaware of obsolescence, and feebly trying to disco at a time when retirement might be in...
Post
Not Even Migrants Want to Live in America’s Dying Cities
America has taken on financial and social debts it cannot pay as a result of excessive immigration, and the consequences of those decisions have adversely affected all but the wealthy elites among us.
Post
Rights of Clergy
I saw my old friend Browne recently. The subject eventually turned to the politics of religion and the religion of politics. I asked him what he thought about the current Anglican debate over homosexuality, and I wondered aloud if it had anything to do with the obvious unmanliness of the clergy—the final phase of what...
Post
Serbia Betrayed by Her Leaders
Talking to CKCU 93.1FM in Ottawa, Dr. Srdja Trifkovic considers the extraordinary readiness of the government in Belgrade to compromise Serbia’s national and state interests in order to demonstrate its subservience to the “international community.” A recent batch of Wikileaks cables from the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade drastically illustrates the extent of institutionalized political...
Post
The Other America
Remembering, as I often have cause to do, the late Samuel Francis’s formulation “anarcho-tyranny,” I have an enhanced respect for the wonder that is our nation, for the wisdom of the government, and for the phonetic ambiguity of the word mandate, particularly as related to the blow for freedom and equality struck by the latest...
Post
Here, on the Other Side of the Ring of Fire
Americans read the increasingly panic-stricken reports of deepening catastrophe at Fukushima 1, speed to the pharmacy to buy iodine and ask,
Post
The Litmus Test for American Conservatism
Abraham Lincoln is thought of by many as not only the greatest American statesman but as a great conservative. He was neither. Understanding this is a necessary condition for any genuinely American conservatism. When Lincoln took office, the American polity was regarded as a compact between sovereign states which had created a central government as...
Post
Americans Souring on Biden—and Washington
The California recall election turned out well for the Democrats. With Gov. Gavin Newsom sinking in the summer polls, the party had been staring starkly at the prospect of losing the nation’s largest state and seeing its governor replaced by talk-show host Larry Elder, who had vaulted into the lead among the 46 candidates seeking...
Post
The Diner’s Refrain
With former president Bill Clinton settled into his new headquarters on New York’s 125th Street, in central Harlem, the danger for the culinary crowd is that he may now take to hanging out at Sylvia’s, the famous soul-food restaurant barely three blocks away on Lenox Avenue near 126th. For almost 40 years, the family-owned restaurant...
Post
At Sea Again
A perfect 360-degree horizon, occluded in the nearer distance by cloud shadow and smears and smudges of squall, is something sensed, not seen. All around lies a mottled expanse of turquoise, wine-blue, cobalt, and purple patches streaked with brilliant sunshine alternating with gray shadow and scuffed into variously textured sheets ruffled and smoothed by the...
Post
Still Sorry After All These Years
With all the mud spattered on the Confederate Battle Flag of late, you knew it wouldn’t be long before Ol’ Virginny scrubbed up for Jamestown’s 400th anniversary with a grandiloquent apology for slavery. And Georgia, New York, and other former colonies of the original 13 will soon join the state in the confessional tub and...
Post
Reason’s Enemy
Copperhead Produced by Swordspoint Productions Directed by Ronald F. Maxwell Screenplay by Bill Kauffman Distributed by Brainstorm Media What makes a good war story? Cannons, bombs, bloody bodies, and bounding heroes? Stephen Crane’s short story “An Episode of War” demonstrates it can be achieved by other means. It fully registers the madness, horror, and folly...
Post
Whose Country Is It, Anyway?
Half a century ago, American children were schooled in Aesop’s fables. Among the more famous of these were “The Fox and the Grapes” and “The Tortoise and the Hare.” Particularly appropriate this Christmas season, and every Christmas lately, is Aesop’s fable of “The Dog in the Manger.” The tale is about a dog who...
Post
Why They Hate Jefferson
What a marathon of Jefferson-bashing we have had in the last few years. This book by the “global statesman” O’Brien follows several other critical biographies, all of which have been highlighted in the fashionable reviews. More than usually offensive to Jefferson admirers were a collection (The View from Monticello) by University of Virginia professors trashing...
Post
On the Road to Somewhere
This book is mistitled, in the sense that Richard Nixon is the least interesting of the multivarious subjects covered herein. The author, of course, is not to blame for that fact; and perhaps it was modesty that kept him from perceiving where the strengths of his collection really lie. These essays differ in depth and...
Post
Small-Town Schizophrenia
“I see the rural virtues leave the land. “ —Oliver Goldsmith Garrison Keillor, the writer, has finally made it big. Five years ago a regional cult figure and occasional contributor to the New Yorker, Keillor has now vaulted on to the cover of Time and to the top of the New...
Post
Russia and China: Beyond the Axis of Convenience
On January 27 Dr. Trifkovic presented a paper on the geostrategic significance of the Russo-Chinese partnership at the Dado Center for Interdisciplinary Military Studies of the Israel Defense Forces in Glilot, north of Tel Aviv. We bring you his remarks in a slightly abbreviated form. Almost exactly 116 years ago, in January 1904, Sir Halford Mackinder gave a...
Post
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...
Post
On ‘Good News’
The message of the thoughtful and beautifully written articles in Chronicles (December 1990) on “good news” seems to be this: things are very bad and bound to get worse, but if you resign yourself to the inevitable and concentrate on family and friends you may, with God’s help, get through it. If this is “good...
Post
Pro-migrant Dems Playing Russian Roulette with Our Safety
Allowing migrants—or anyone—to board airplanes without photo ID, and promoting ID cards that blur the lines between legal and illegal, sabotage us.
Post
Calvinism Without God
Forget the “culture wars” and the assault on Christianity. The real conflict in America is thoroughly secular—between environmental and ecological “religions”—or so says Robert Nelson. He makes the argument, long known to conservatives, that religion never really goes away. Modern secular religions, like these two, borrow heavily from the Christian tradition. As such, they inherit...
Post
The High Cost of Getting Started
Living at home with one’s parents and saving money is an increasingly attractive option for young, working adults facing high housing costs.
Post
Trouble With Iran
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared on October 26 that “Israel must be wiped off the map.” Invoking the words of Ayatollah Khomeini, he told an audience of 4,000 cheering students that a new conflict in Palestine would soon remove “this disgraceful blot from the face of the Islamic world.” The statement, made in the midst...
Post
A Province of the Republic
“Literature is an avenue to glory ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honors or of wealth.” —Isaac D’Israeli These volumes—one of letters, the other heavily dependent on correspondence—document and analyze, respectively, episodes of American literary history that feature three brilliant personalities. These volumes will surely attract readers on that basis, for...
Post
Shattering Lincoln’s Dream
I just got a copy of a thoughtful new book, Vindicating Lincoln: Defending the Politics of Our Greatest President, by Thomas L. Krannawitter. The book mentions me a couple of times, in polite disagreement. Krannawitter, now of Hillsdale College, is a disciple of Claremont McKenna College’s Harry V. Jaffa, as ...
Post
Americans Don’t Die!
Americans do not believe in death. At least, they live as if they will never die. This has been the case from colonial times. It is a consequence of seemingly limitless opportunity and a drive for upward mobility, denied to generations of Europeans. Indentured servants, laborers, persecuted minorities, and peasants tilling the soil of the...
Post
Lord, I Got Those Grays Ferry Blues
When I called Mike Rafferty to arrange a meeting to discuss a possible symposium on the demise of the local community, I had to choose a different date from the one I?wanted because Mike was busy that night. He was boxing at the Spectrum. Like Rocky Balboa, Mike Rafferty lives ten minutes from the Spectrum. ...
Post
50 Years Ago: The Day Nixon Routed the Establishment
What are the roots of our present disorder, of the hostilities and hatreds that so divide us? When did we become this us vs. them nation? Who started the fire? Many trace the roots of our uncivil social conflict to the 1960s and the Johnson years when LBJ, victorious in a 61% landslide in 1964,...
Post
Stop the Migrant Invasion
The Left insists migration is a humanitarian crisis. Wrong. It’s a lawless invasion. Europeans are fighting back. Americans should, too.