If Turkey is not bluffing, U.S. troops in Manbij, Syria, could be under fire by week’s end, and NATO engulfed in the worst crisis in its history. Turkish President Erdogan said Friday his troops will cleanse Manbij of Kurdish fighters, alongside whom U.S. troops are embedded. Erdogan’s foreign minister demanded concrete steps by the U.S....
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Empire Strikes Back
” . . . To sit in darkness here hatching vain empires.” —Milton During his discussion of the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie in his classic Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Joseph Schumpeter asked whether “in the end such complete emancipation was good for the bourgeois and his world.” He concluded that it had not...
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Time to Start Naming Names
To survey the state of the American right—its friends, its enemies, its controversies—is to be nearly convinced we are living in Nietzsche’s nightmare world of “eternal recurrence.” The current battle for the soul of the “Stupid Party” is an eerie reenactment of the battle that engulfed the GOP in 1963-64, with a different Romney as...
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Our Fathers’ Fields
Conservatives in the 21st century lead subterranean lives, taking refuge in their obscurity and finding comfort only in the virtual memories of better times, memories all too often implanted from misleading books and films. Like aristocratic pagans in the afterglow of the Roman Empire, they are a despised minority who fight symbolic battles. In 382,...
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Moscow on Georgia
Vladimir Putin, at the end of February, was expected by pundits East and West to react sharply to the news of Washington’s plan to send military advisors to Georgia, aiding Tbilisi in its battle with Taliban-connected Chechen insurgents. The insurgents have long used Georgia’s Pankisi gorge as a rest camp and base for continuing their...
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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...
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Polka Can’t Die
Rockford’s annual On the Waterfront festival is just the sort of thing I should like—in theory, at least. Held every Labor Day weekend since 1985, On the Waterfront is the largest community event in Rockford and features both local and national musical acts. The entire downtown is closed to all but foot traffic for three...
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The New Yorker Under Glass
The first issue of The New Yorker (February 21, 1925) showed on its cover a dandy in top hat, high collar, and morning suit gazing through his monocle at a butterfly. The drawing is reproduced yearly, and butterflies became a cover motif. Whatever tastes, affectations, or snobbery the artist, Rea Irvin, wanted to suggest, it...
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Cry, the Beloved Community
From the rave reviews in the Wall Street Journal and other vehicles of low-octane conservatism, it seems that Tamar Jacoby has produced a work for the ages. Like earlier marvels by Dinesh D’Souza, John J. Miller, and Francis Fukuyama, this study was made possible by funds flowing from neocon foundations, a gesture thoughtfully repaid by...
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Sotomayor and the Last of the WASPS
If Judge Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed, the U.S. Supreme Court will consist of six Catholics, two Jews and precisely one white Anglo-Saxon Protestant in the form of Justice John Paul Stevens, who is 89 years old and boasts of two important WASP insignia: inherited wealth and a bow tie. He also thinks that Shakespeare’s plays...
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Educated at Home
“Let us eat and make merry.” —Luke 15:23 This has been a happy time: I’ve spent all day with my family, eaten a fine meal, played with my grandchildren, been to a baptism, and I went to communion.” These were the words of my uncle—with their telling rhetorical climax—on leaving his sister’s house in Eastern...
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Gelded Europeans
From 1979 to 1982, I was a Russian linguist stationed in Frankfurt, West Germany, with the 533rd Combat Electronic Warfare Intelligence (CEWI) Battalion, part of the 3rd Armored Division. If a war had come, assuming we hadn’t been nuked right away, we would have deployed within hours northeast to the Fulda Gap to listen to...
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Conspiracy Realism
Anyone claiming that international bankers, multinational company executives, members of the Bilderberg Group, elite academics, senior judges, United Nations officials and European Union strategists are working together to undermine the remnants of sovereignty and identity of old Christian nations through mass Third World immigration would be dismissed by our bien pensants as a conspiracy theorist. A...
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Unknown Soldiers
Thomas Carlyle wrote that “History is the essence of innumerable Biographies.” While that description does not cover all the duties of historianship, it is true in an important sense. History that becomes too abstract loses its vital connection with the lives of real human beings. The people of the past were human, and we are...
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The Present Age and the State of Community
From the June 1988 issue of Chronicles. The Present Age begins with the First World War, the Great War as it is deservedly still known. No war ever began more jubilantly, among all classes and generations, the last including the young generation that had to fight it. It is said that when Viscount Grey, British...
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Immigration Deform
I suppose there’s no point in writing in advance about “comprehensive immigration reform,” since by the time this magazine reaches your hands the point may be moot. The Gang of Eight may well have tossed Congress the perfect bipartisan plan, and President Obama may have run down Pennsylvania Avenue, pen in hand and surrounded by...
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The War of Mexican Aggression
” . . . As honest men it behooves us to learn the extent of our inheritance, and as brave ones not to whimper if it should prove less than we had supposed.” —John Tyndall Much in the news recently, especially in the Southwest, is the problem of illegal immigration from south of the border....
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Ten Most Wanted List
The FBI’s most recent Ten Most Wanted List was published on May 6. In this, the fifth year of our Global War on Terror, it may come as a surprise to some that the latest addition to the list isn’t a terrorist or even a murderer, but Warren Jeffs, the leader of a bizarre sect,...
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A Houdini of Time
“I am against the prophets, saith the Lord, that steal my words every one from his neighbour.” —Jeremiah 23:30 After seven years on public and private payrolls as senior editor of the King Papers Project, Clayborne Carson has finally produced the first volume of MLK’s papers. The project began in 1984, and since 1986 has...
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The Rise and Fall of the Evangelical Elite
The current evangelical elite came of age at a time when secular influences tried to stay neutral toward Christianity; The faith competed as an equal in the marketplace of ideas. But those days are over. In our age of secularist hostility, evangelicals need new tactics.
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Color Me Kweisi
For a quick fix on how a particular organization sees itself and its purposes, inspect its official name, especially if the organization dates from a more forthright and transparent time, when assorted reformers wore their hearts on their letterheads. The purpose, the raison d’être, of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded...
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Sit Down, Be Comfortable!
Which of our editors wrote this indictment of post-Christian America? More than a few of us begin to see that while wealth accumulates in these United States, man seems to decay. Corruption corrodes our political and industrial doings. In our private lives a pervading relativism, an absence of conviction about what is the good life,...
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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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The Future of Europe
When the king of Poland, Jan Sobieski, defeated the Ottoman army at the Siege of Vienna in 1683, that army of 23,000 soldiers did not have scores or hundreds of thousands of hungry and desperate civilians at its back, hoping to find a new life in Europe. The Ottomans were attempting a military invasion of...
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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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On Nationalism
Though current discussions of nationalism are incredibly confused and Wayne Allensworth in “The Nationalist Imperative” (February 1996) does a pretty good job in showing the fragility of the modernist version, what he proposes as the “primordial” counterpart is ridiculous. Let me register a few objections. The Bowie anecdote is amusing but highly misleading. What follows...
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The Dream Ticket
[McCain and Soros: The Most Dangerous Man in America, Bankrolled By the Most Evil Man in the World] “While the natural instincts of democracy lead the people to banish distinguished men from power,” Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, “an instinct no less powerful leads distinguished men to shun careers in politics, in which it...
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Nationalism or Patriotism?
Those who know C.S. Lewis’s short book The Four Loves will remember that Lewis speaks of the four different kinds of love: affection, friendship, eros, and charity. But, in a preliminary chapter about “likings and loves for the sub-human,” he writes about “love of one’s country” or patriotism. He points out that, in the first...
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An Undesirable Independence
Given the wars and rumors of war from North Korea to the Middle East, the last thing America needs is to reignite the proverbial powder keg in the Balkans, a region that has been fairly stable for the better part of this decade, especially when compared to the bloody 1990’s. That precarious stability could be...
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This Fourth of July, Let’s Remember Who We Are
Any government, foreign or domestic, which tampers with our freedoms and attempts to impose “political servitude,” demands our fierce and unceasing opposition.
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Arizona’s Got Sand
On October 26, 1881, a gunfight erupted in a vacant lot on Fremont Street in Tombstone, Arizona, that would go down in history as the Shootout at the OK Corral. Virgil, Wyatt, and Morgan Earp and Doc Holliday stood on one side, and Tom and Frank McLaury and Ike and Billy Clanton on the other. ...
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Are the Forever Wars Really Ending?
“There is no… sound reason for the United States to continue sacrificing precious lives and treasure in a conflict not directly connected to our safety or other vital national interests.” So said William Ruger about Afghanistan, our longest war. What makes this statement significant is that President Donald Trump has ordered a drawdown by mid-October...
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Why Paleoconservatism Matters
A young reader explains how and why Chronicles has played such a central role in his development as a thinker and citizen.
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Living in Interesting Times
The public discourse in both hemispheres seems to be legitimizing the coming of World War III. These are interesting—if not terrifying—times.
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Prophet Sustained
When National Review published a special obituary issue on James Burnham soon after his death in 1987, perhaps the most remarkable contribution came from the pen of John Kenneth Galbraith. The Harvard economist reminisced about the eager welcome with which he and fellow New Dealers in the Roosevelt administration had received Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution:...
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The Town I’ve Never Seen
I shouldn’t have been surprised; I’d heard similar stories from my wife. But the more dramatic stories had always involved someone I didn’t know. This was a seven-year-old girl giving an eyewitness account at the dinner table. “The guerrillas came to Aunt Lucy’s house and told her to fix supper for thirty people,” my...
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Sympathy for the Spartan
History—be it that of 1619, or 1776, or some other significant year or event—is often abused in this day and age. One of the latest victims of such historical misrepresentation are the Spartans, whom Lee Smith in a column for Tablet treats rather unfairly. Smith describes the blood-curdling behavior of the antidemocratic Spartans at the end of...
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Breaking the Cowboys
I had occasion to visit Pendleton, Oregon recently. It is the “purple mountains’ majesty, above the fruited plain” that we sing about, only the peaks that rim the valley bowl are the Blue Mountains, and the fruit of the land is animal as well as vegetable. Pendleton is famous for its glorious woolens, which you...
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Bring on the GOP!
The awful Obama is pushing terrible things on our country like socialised medicine, big spending, corporate bailouts, affirmative action, and amnesty for illegal aliens. He must be defeated so the Republicans can get in and push socialised medicine, big spending, corporate bailouts, affirmative action, and amnesty for illegal aliens. Obama ...
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To the Lighthouse
When Camilla, the elderly spinster daughter of the infamous Captain Jack Fennel and matriarch of the Fennel family, sees her house guest holding an antique spyglass, she comments, “My father’s glass. Dr. Danvers. Are you planning a voyage?” Actually, the voyage is already underway for the young history professor who shows symptoms of seasickness the...
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It’s Stupid, the Economy
Why should “a magazine of American culture” take so keen an interest in the question of immigration? That question has been posed all too frequently by journalists who can only think of one answer: bigotry. Sometimes the word is xenophobia or nativism or even anti-Semitism (apparently on the grounds that the bottom-line of all discriminations...
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The Zoophiles of Gaza
A video, reportedly shot by an Israeli drone over the war-torn Gaza Strip has been circulating on various social networks. The footage shows several Hamas fighters, decked out in kuffiya headscarves, having sexual intercourse with a goat or a sheep. Stunningly revolting, but hardly surprising. After all, zoophilia was always quite common, if not widespread...
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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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In Praise of Christian Walls
“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” Pope Francis declared on his flight back to Rome last week.The political implications of his statement have been considered in some detail in recent days, but his assertion also needs to be examined in the light...
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Adieu, France
Emmanuel Macron’s victory in the French presidential election provides conclusive proof that no major European nation can save itself from demographic and cultural suicide through the electoral process. That outcome is not merely a victory for status quo politics, which millions of lower-middle-class French people prefer, but a triumph of the globalist establishment. Macron is...
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Exposing the Woke School Counselor Cabal
The American School Counselor Association trains counselors to be "master manipulators" of children, but whistle blowers are exposing them.
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Religious Discrimination, Real and Imagined
As I was scrolling the news one August day, my attention was drawn to an article recounting the story of a woman wearing a niqab who was ejected from a bus in the Netherlands, a country that enacted a partial ban on the full veil. The prohibition mitigates security fears in places where concealed identity...
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Call It What It Is—an Invasion
With all due respect for a distinction that Chronicles Foreign Affairs Editor Srdja Trifkovic and some diplomats in America and Europe have tried to make, I can’t see how Russian President Vladimir Putin’s marching of armies into Donetsk and Lugansk earlier this week does not constitute a good old-fashioned invasion. Although Russian armies, in a...
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Clandestine Groups
Terrorism in France has usually come—in recent years—from clandestine Muslim groups engaged in a perpetual jihad against the West. But recent attacks attributed to Corsican separatists provide another example of a violent nationalism rearing its head at precisely the time when Europe’s policy elite is proclaiming a new era of unity and cooperation. The immediate...
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Rehabilitating Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was the finest American writer to be transformed into a “personality” in his own lifetime and, like François Villon, to be known less for his work than for his person. As is so often the case with figures of public celebrity, the facts of Poe’s life have been obscured by layers of...