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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Rethinking the Saudi Connection (II)
The Saudi military intervention in Yemen was launched, according to Riyadh, to “restore the legitimate government” and protect the “Yemeni constitution and elections.” This sudden desire to fight for constitutions and elections sounds odd, coming from an absolute monarchy which is consistently combating efforts at democratization at home or in its neighborhood. As Ali Alahmed,...
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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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A Highly Acceptable Man
Conscience and its Enemies is a collection of Robert George’s recent writings for a general audience. In addition to the title topic, it includes chapters on the defense of natural marriage, the protection of life from conception to natural death, the nature of moral reasoning, and the need for limited government. Overall, the pieces in...
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Our Alien Victims
If only Roger Barnett had known the courts would lynch him for defending himself. Or maybe he did know and still decided to stand his ground. Either way, the owner of the Cross Rail Ranch in Douglas, Arizona, on the U.S. border with Mexico, may soon be $87,000 poorer. The left-wing Ninth U.S. Circuit Court...
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Repudiating the National Debt
Before the Reagan era, conservatives were clear about how they felt about deficits and the public debt: a balanced budget was good, and deficits and the public debt were bad, piled up by free-spending Keynesians and socialists, who absurdly proclaimed that there was nothing wrong or onerous about the public debt. In the famous words...
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The Great Clarifier
Not even President Trump’s most ardent admirers would claim that he is a “Great Communicator,” the title bestowed on the last resident of the White House who could plausibly be seen as governing, at least in some respects, as a conservative. But Donald Trump might just be a great clarifier: His words and actions cause...
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Our Lady of The Price Is Right
Let the Buddhists have their mandalas; give the Muslims Mecca; we have The Price Is Right. Five days a week at 11:00 A.M., soaring audio and video levels, howling graphics, and dizzying camera shots herald the appearance of a ministry as fervent as any in the world. The names of the chosen few are called...
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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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Waiting for John Brown
Letter from Pergamum-on-the-Potomac Just imagine if a deranged Tea Party activist known to rant on social media against Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had gunned down a bunch of Democrats. Would Republican officials get away with saccharine expressions of “this is an attack on all of us,” “we stand united,” and similar vacuities? Hardly. They’d...
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Nationalism, True and False
From the December 1997 issue of Chronicles. Ruling classes exercise power through combinations of coercion and manipulation—what Machiavelli called force and fraud, or the habits of the lion and the fox that he recommended to princes who wish to stay in power. Like most princes, most ruling classes tend to be better at one than...
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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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Art Is Always Political When the Government Starts Giving Grants
“In the background of the entire tedious debate over the NEA, the First Amendment has loomed, misunderstood and abused as usual, claimed by some as justification for their right to express a preference for causing pain to others during the sex act and asserted by others as the basis for a constitutional right to receive...
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Old Progressives Don’t Die
Surprisingly enough, in many ways journalist and commentator John T. Flynn was a typical progressive. Long a figure of prominence on the American right, he was not politically active in the time of Woodrow Wilson, whose domestic policies he much admired. He did, however, first gain prominence as a muckraker denouncing the financial chicanery of...
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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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Chronicling the Fall
“Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than malice can be in the intent.” —Halifax The correspondence of Edmund Burke, whose letters help to illuminate his published works, was not available in a complete edition until 1978. Today, however, it seems that every aspiring journalist begins saving his correspondence even...
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On Making the Chronicles Pilgrimage
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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The Chastity Amendment
The appearance of an article about American church life on the front page of the Washington Post is a rare occurrence. But the approval by the Presbyterian Church (United States) of a church law requiring celibacy of its non-married clergy gained front-page attention in the Post not just once but twice this year. Treatment of...
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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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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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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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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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The Folly of Propositional Democracy
California continues its essential role as the proving ground for bad ideas. The latest is the demolition of “popular” initiatives to decide important issues. Of the 11 initiatives on the ballot last November in the Golden State, 8 were funded primarily by multimillionaires, according to MapLight, which tracks election funding. And Proposition 30, Gov. Jerry...
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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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Downriver Blues
The paint is peeling on the exterior wall of the United Steelworkers Hall in Southgate, Michigan, a symbolic reminder of the dangerous times faced by America’s 700,000 steelworkers. Workforce downsizing; the emergence of mini-mills to complement the old integrated, hot- and cold-roll production process; and price deflation and multilateral trade agreements like NAITA have combined...
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Christian Rout in the Culture War
A Democratic Congress, discharged by the voters on Nov. 2, has as one of its last official acts, imposed its San Francisco values on the armed forces of the United States. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is to be repealed. Open homosexuals are to be welcomed with open arms in all branches of the armed...
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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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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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The American Exception
A favorite exhortation of those seeking to further restrict or remove the private possession of firearms in the United States is to “look at other countries,” where lower murder rates are supposed to be a result of gun control laws. The underlying presumption beneath these laws is that guns cause crime. Getting rid of guns,...
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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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Will ISIS Rise Again? Trump’s Winning Strategy?
In his weekly roundup of world events for Serbia’s Happy TV network, Dr. Trifkovic discusses the future of the Islamic State. He also looks at a viable strategy for President Donald Trump to emerge victorious from the impeachment battle. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ2EPtvxQ_c&app=desktop (Translated from Serbian, slightly abbreviated.) Q: What has changed with the killing of al-Baghdadi?...
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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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The Next Militia Panic
Only a fool would try to foretell the course of U.S. politics a few months in advance, let alone several years in the future. The fact that Democrats are riding high after their electoral triumph last November does not necessarily mean that they will win the White House in 2008. But just suppose that January...
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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 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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Lessons from Montgomery
At 11:30 A.M. (CST) on Thursday, November 13, 2003, Roy Moore, chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, was removed from office, and the will of the people of the sovereign state of Alabama was thwarted by a unanimous vote of the nine-member panel of the Court of Judicial Ethics. In deciding Glassroth v. Moore,...
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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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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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Palm and Pine
David Gilmour’s witty and elegant, original and useful book chronicles “Kipling’s political life, his early role as apostle of the Empire, the embodiment of imperial aspiration, and his later one as the prophet of national decline.” Sympathetic yet aware of Kipling’s faults, Gilmour shows that his ideas were more subtle than those of a crude...
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Cowboy Heroes
Whatever happened to Randolph Scott ridin’ the range alone? Whatever happened to Gene and Tex And Roy and Rex, the Durango Kid? Whatever happened to Randolph Scott His horse plain, as can be? Whatever happened to Randolph Scott Has happened to the best of me. So sang the Statler Brothers in their 1974 country hit. ...
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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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National Liberation Literature
“The Devil understands Welsh.” —Shakespeare Years ago, in the North Welsh town of Llanrwst, I bought a copy of Dylan Thomas’ Collected Poems, and a 50-year-old Welshman present, a Baptist, teetotalling, nonsmoking, nondancing insurance agent, said, “A wonderful boy and a great poet: a terrible loss to Wales.” It was the first time I had...
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Is Trump Capturing the ‘Law and Order’ Issue?
Did President Donald Trump launch his Twitter barrage at Elijah Cummings simply because the Baltimore congressman was black? Was it just a “racist” attack on a member of the Black Caucus? Or did Trump go after Cummings after a Saturday Fox News report that his district was in far worse condition than the Mexican border...
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Scarlett and Michael
The other night, while watching The Godfather on television for roughly the 50th time, I was struck by a parallel that had never occurred to me before. The movie’s sentimental musical score reminded me of “Tara’s Theme” in Gone With the Wind. My mother used to whistle that melody all the time; she loved the...
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The Tyranny of Democracy
Winston Churchill’s backhanded praise of democracy as “the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried” is usually cited as the last word on the subject. It is a good way of closing off a dangerous topic of discussion, and it works quite well with that vast majority of people...
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Spring, Like a Lion
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...
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A Zeitgeist of Another Color
Among the many questions about the new presidency of George. Bush with which the lips of Washington were afroth this spring was whether Lee Atwater is for real. The thirty-seven-year-old head of the Republican National Committee who made the name of Willie Horton as familiar to American households as the Domino’s Pizza gremlin is one...
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The Critical Flaw in Critical Race Theory
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...
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The Logic of the Map
Soon after his election in 1844, James K. Polk sat down with the historian George Bancroft and, before offering him the Cabinet post of secretary of the Navy, sketched the four objectives of his presidency. They were to lower the tariff, restore the independent treasury system, extend American sovereignty over the vast Oregon Country (claimed...