Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the Periphery, and the Future of France, by Christophe Guilluy (New Haven: Yale University Press; 184 pp., $25.00). The French dislike what they call “Anglo-American economics” even more than they dislike English and American cookery; also, more recently, progressive Anglo-American views regarding the supposed identicality between the sexes. Christophe Guilluy,...
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Genes vs. Culture
In the current American definition of democracy, all adult citizens should have the right to vote and otherwise participate in politics. Earlier exclusions of women or nonwhites have been disallowed. Similar rules are supposed to apply to preferred positions in civil society. In a meritocracy, it has been believed until recently, individual capability should count...
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Comeback Time for Christians
The Holy Father—Pope Benedict XVI—offers to let Episcopalians and other Anglicans of Catholic disposition join the Roman Catholic Church, while retaining characteristics of their Anglican identity. And who in the booming pagan market cares a flying broomstick what the pope does about anything? Not the Wiccans, an estimated 340,000 strong. ...
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UVA: Facts Versus the Left’s Narrative
For a news professional, it is hard to say which is more discouraging: that Rolling Stone published an imaginary tale of gang rape from a crazy college girl without double-checking her story, or that no one at Rolling Stone was fired after the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism issued a report that revealed top-to-bottom...
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A Transformational President
Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek, portrays Andrew Jackson as one of America’s transformational presidents, including him in the company of Lincoln and the two Roosevelts. He highlights the crucial events that took place during the 17th president’s two terms in office (1829-37), maintaining that three of those incidents effectively define him. The first (and foremost)...
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A Dirge For Bosnia
“Whom I served—by him I was buried!” —14th-Century Bosnian Inscription “For now I began to get the news from Croatia,” wrote Mrs. Ruth Mitchell, an American in Dubrovnik, in May of 1941. “I could not believe a quarter of them. Unfortunately, I was soon to know that they were a weak understatement of the truth....
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America as a Proposition Nation
There is a popular superstition that defines America as a “Proposition Nation,” created and proclaimed by the obiter dicta about “all men” in the second sentence of the 1776 Declaration that the 13 colonies “are and of right ought to be free and independent States.” Is America a Proposition Nation? No, for the very simple...
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Das Kowpital
“Has anyone ever seen a clean cow?” —Anonymous It’s hard to know where to begin to respond to Jeremy Rifkin’s apocalyptic new book, Beyond Beef. You could start with Chesterton’s famous remark on “believing anything,” or some of the paleoconservative ruminations on “Gnosticism.” Perhaps in a time when Oliver Stone’s paranoid (and lucrative) fantasies pass...
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Tulsi at the Turning Point
Tulsi Gabbard's farewell to the Democratic Party sounds more like a declaration of war. Most of her remarks would pass muster at a Trump rally.
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The Moral Minority
The word “minority” represents one of those inversions of value (that typify socialist regimes. Derived, obviously, from the Latin minor (smaller or less in respect of size, importance, age, etc.), “minority” has been used in English to express both the immature years before adulthood and the losing side of a judicial opinion. Most significantly, it...
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Church Shopper
Like the French, we Americans live in, to borrow from Claude Polin, a “me-first” society. Each and every man is the measure of all things, his own arbiter of that which is beautiful, true, and of good report. Reared on the Disney principle (You can be whatever you want to be, or, Be true to...
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Soviet Strategy
“He crucified noble, he sacrificed mean, He filled old ladies with kerosene. While over the waters the papers cried ‘The patriot fights for his countryside!'” —Rudyard Kipling, “The Ballad of Boh da thone” For 40 years two topics have dominated popular discussions of international conflict. The first is the specter of nuclear war...
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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 than time wasted on politics. Politicians, to their credit, know that it...
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America First
In this 1996 essay, the late Congressman James Traficant illustrates the Washington establishment’s habitual subordination of America to foreign interests.
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“I’m Liberated; Free at Last!”
Pat Buchanan has taken more punches than Chuck Wepner, hut unlike the Bayonne Bleeder, Buchanan has a good right hook (or is it now a left?) of his own. The year began with Buchanan defending his feisty anti-interventionist manifesto A Republic, Not an Empire: Not since the days of Arkansas Sen. William Fulbright, the one...
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Just Another Tequila Sunrise
It may be several years before the results of Census 2000 are available in anyy usable form, but certain trends have already begun to emerge from the raw data. Most significantly, as Chilton Williamson, Jr., and Roger McGrath have pointed out earlier in this issue, the Hispanic population in the United States continues to grow...
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And What Isn’t . . .
In this collection of his occasional papers, David Frum once again demonstrates his worthiness to the harmless persuasion. Having agonized over his uneven prose, I finally concluded that Frum’s intellectual weaknesses are his practical strengths. His writing never offends anyone in the political mainstream, or upon whom his career as a publicist may depend. It...
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Our Triumph in Iraq
Iraq is conquered; unfortunately, winning the peace is proving far more difficult. Bringing down an unpopular, isolated dictatorship in a wreck of a country is one thing. Creating a liberal, multiparty, multiethnic democracy where one has never existed is quite another. Officially, the Pentagon proclaims that we will stay “as long as necessary” and leave...
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Church Arsons: The Real Story?
It was one of the biggest stories of 1996: Black churches were burning all across the South, the seeming victims of a nationwide upsurge in racial hatred. Tens of thousands of horrified Americans rushed to contribute money toward the reconstruction of black churches. We now know there never was any firm evidence of a church-arson...
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The Disappearing Middle Eastern Christians
Fourteen centuries of Islam have fatally undermined Christianity in the land of its birth. The decline of the Christian remnant in the Middle East has been accelerated in recent decades, and accompanied by the indifference of the post-Christian West to its impending demise. Once-thriving Christian communities are now tiny minorities, and in most countries of...
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Books in Brief: November 2021
Klara and the Sun: A Novel, by Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf; 320 pp., $28.00). A conservative disposition imposes costs but limits downside surprises. If you always expect rain, you have to lug your umbrella around wherever you go. But you never get wet. Likewise, if you see life through a Menckenian lens, worstcase scenarios sometimes play...
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Blacks on Abortion
The U.S. black population has been disproportionately devastated by the practice of abortion, yet many black leaders have been cajoled into dutifully mouthing the abortion politics of their white leftist overlords.
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Not to Worry
Me seemes the world is runne quite out of sqaureFrom the first point of his appointed sourse,And being once amisse, growes daily wourse and wourse.—Spenser, The Faerie Queene It looks like the economy is going bad, but don’t worry. Congress will make sure the bankers and speculators don’t suffer. Could military failure in Iraq have...
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Identity Politics Means Rule by Useful Idiots
Identity politics is now the term du jour and its meaning is clear enough on a superficial level—choosing people according to their physical characteristics and sexual preferences. The left wants more people of color, women, and gays in influential positions, while the right insists that these traits are secondary to competence in a given job....
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The Stupid Party Rides Again
On November 4, 2008, voters decisively rejected the Republican Party, voting for Barack Obama over John McCain by a margin of 52.8 percent to 45.9. Obama won 365 electoral votes to McCain’s 173, including every state in the Northeast and industrial Midwest; every state on the Pacific Coast; Florida, the state that ensured George W....
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Are the Good Times Over for Joe?
“When sorrows come,” said King Claudius, “they come not single spies but in battalions.” As the king found out. So it seems with President Joe Biden, who must be asking himself the question Merle Haggard asked: “Are the good times really over for good?” Consider the critical issue with voters today: the state of the...
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Where Have You Gone?
Joe DiMaggio, where have you gone? One could add Babe Ruth, Bobby Hull, and Dick Butkus. On good days American sports stars were treated more as gods than as mortal heroes, but on bad days they were booed mercilessly by fans. Booing is a grand old American tradition, but like nearly everything that’s traditional, it’s...
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Letter From the Lower Right
Taxing Matters In a North Carolina newspaper not long ago-a North Carolina newspaper – I actually read an editorial urging Tar Heel legislators to raise the state tax on cigarettes. What is the world coming to? The state’s present tax, I gather, is the lowest in the nation. You would think North Carolinians would join...
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Regional Anthem
A century ago, the American Midwest was in the ascendant, widely acknowledged as the nation’s vital Heartland, a place characterized by a morally strong and independent populace, a relatively egalitarian distribution of wealth in land (the classic 160 acre family farm), and true democratic values. The print media of the day celebrated its distinctive farm...
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Nationalism, True and False
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 the other, and depending on their talents,...
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Washington Politics
Teddy Kennedy, the famed moral exemplar, read his former senatorial colleague John Ashcroft the riot act during confirmation hearings. Ashcroft was extreme; his constitutional understanding of gun control was “radical.” The senatorial face grew flush—presumably with anger, since it was a bit early in the day for more potent stuff. Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware...
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The Brazil of North America
To observe the decades-long paralysis of America’s political elite in controlling her borders calls to mind the insight of James Burnham in 1964—”Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide.” What the ex-Trotskyite turned Cold Warrior meant was that by faithfully following the tenets of liberalism, the West would embrace suicidal policies that would bring about...
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Polemics & Exchanges: December 2024
Chronicles readers comment upon and critique recent pieces by Geoff Shepard and Jeremy Carl.
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Ernest Van Den Haag, R.I.P.
Ernest once told me that, for most of his political life, he had been a neoconservative without knowing it. He did not mean that he necessarily admired or agreed with the godfathers of neoconservatism, but that he was a child of the Enlightenment, an enemy of credulity and superstition, whether those commodities came packaged in...
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LA’s Cult of the Dead
One of the many hearses that ply Hollywood Boulevard is different from all the others. The long gray Cadillac sports a sunroof, air-conditioning, and a cargo of live bodies, not dead ones. The vehicle is the flagship of Grave Line Tours, and every day its driver leads his seven passengers, each with a window seat,...
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The Profiteering Migrant-Industrial Complex
Migrants complain about rotten food. The worst rot is inside the Adams administration's handling of this emergency.
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Don’t Have a ‘Merry Little Christmas’
I was sitting in my local coffee shop when “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” began playing over the café’s speaker. Perhaps because this Christmas is so fraught with fear and uncertainty, this song caught my attention. I pushed aside my other thoughts and gave my full attention to the music, hunting down the lyrics...
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Forgetting Colin Kaepernick
Colin Kaepernick, the former star quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, made the decision during the 2016 NFL preseason to kneel during the playing of the National Anthem. Other athletes quickly followed suit, some by kneeling, others by raising a fist to protest “racial injustice” in America. Outrage predictably followed, with opinion polls suggesting that...
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The True ‘White Privilege’
The left talks often about so-called white privilege. Being “white” is a privilege, in that it is a privilege to be a biological, spiritual, and moral heir of the best civilization the world has known, from the Old Testament and Homer via Rome and Constantinople, via the leftward turn of the Renaissance and the heresy...
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One City, Three Faiths
Simon Sebag Montefiore’s latest book is an ambitious yet incomplete survey of Jerusalem’s history. It begins with the Exodus from Egypt and concludes with the reunification of the Holy City under Israeli rule in 1967. Unlike the author’s magisterial biographies of Stalin, which demonstrated an excellent knowledge of the relevant material and brought to light...
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In Search of Absolutes
Caveat lector—shortly after glancing through the early pages of James J. Thompson, Jr.’s accurately but flamboyantly titled Fleeing the Whore of Babylon, I wondered how in this vale of tears I could complete the job assigned to me by Chronicles. How dreadful to contemplate yet another conversion-to-the-One-True-Faith story, this conversion, moreover, from Seventh-Day Adventism. I...
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Labor Left in the Lurch
It became clear on Labor Day 2022 that the American left has no use for Americans who make a living with their hands, particularly if those hands are white and masculine.
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The Conservative Search for Order
The terms liberal and conservative (nearly always paired in that descending order) are now so confused as to be almost entirely useless. Originally, liberal was used to denote the ideology that aimed at the liberation of human individuals from the restraints of Church establishments, aristocratic and monarchical privileges, and legal restrictions on business and international...
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Westerns: America’s Homeric Era on the Silver Screen
Some time around 800 b.c., Homer put the heroic tales of the Achaeans into lyric form: battles, expeditions, adventures, conquests. The tales were inspiring, heroic, tragic, triumphal. Greeks recited Homer’s iambic pentameter for centuries; so, too, did we as schoolchildren—as inheritors of Western civilization. We Americans, however, also have our own Homeric Era. While the...
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The Lure of Black Gold
January 14, 1991. As I write, more than half a million American and Allied soldiers are massed on the northeastern frontier of Saudi Arabia, arrayed against the million soldiers of Saddam Hussein. At issue is the sovereignty of Kuwait, a feudal monarchy that happens to enjoy the highest per-capita income on the planet. But, more...
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Long Before Trump, We Were a Divided People
In a way, Donald Trump might be called The Great Uniter. Bear with me. No Republican president in the lifetime of this writer, not even Ronald Reagan, united the party as did Trump in the week of his acquittal in the Senate and State of the Union address. According to the Gallup Poll, 94% of...
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Terminators, Inc.
“Hieronymo’s mad againe.” The cover of the August issue of The Atlantic Monthly, titled “Drone Warrior,” features a picture of President Obama and the question, “Has It Become Too Easy for a President to Kill?” I should have thought “Stop me before I kill again” or, perhaps, “I’ll be back” would...
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Pardon the Pardons
It is reported that “faithful adherence to legal principle sometimes [takes] a back seat to the more compelling demands of politics.” This appears to be a pointed assessment of a little-publicized controversy surrounding the pardon of four convicts by last year’s Acting Governor of Arkansas, dentist Jerry Jewell. As president pro tempore of the state...
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The English Rejoice at Scotland’s Coming Independence
Everyone in Britain knows that it is just a matter of time before Scotland becomes independent and reverts to medieval chaos. The English Labour Party’s plan of establishing a devolved but subordinate parliament in Edinburgh to be dominated forever by inept Labour MPs recruited from the decaying slums of Glasgow has failed. The secessionist Scottish...
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North and South
The proprietor of the restaurant M——A——, known as “Ricotta,” likes to share with his intimate friends—for the most part fecund, avuncular family men who, between them, did upward of a thousand years in the high-security Section 2 of the city’s thistle-shaped Ucciardone jail, awaiting trial on accusations of various victimless crimes, usually involving government building...