The foolishness of political debate in America has discouraged me from writing this column, but I have decided to come out of semi-retirement to ask this chicken-and-egg question: Which came first in America, the narcissistic obsession with personal trivia or the blogosphere? In other words, did Internet blogging reduce the mentality of young Americans to...
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Ted Turner Fights the War
The news that Jeff Shaara, author of Gods and Generals, will turn his novel of Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville into a made-for-TV movie should give pause hereabouts. A lot of folks who live within a rebel yell of Malvern Hill recall what Hollywood, with Ted Turner commanding troop movements, did to The Killer Angels and...
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Monuments Matter
The impending removal of Moses Ezekiel’s magnificent monument from Arlington National Cemetery follows well-laid out guidelines for obliterating the non-woke past everywhere in the culturally revolutionized West.
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Not Separate and Not Equal
Oh I’m packin’ my grip and I’m leavin’ today, ’cause I’m taking a trip California way I’m gonna settle down and never more roam, and make the San Fernando Valley my home. I’ll forget my sins, I’ll be makin’ new friends, where the West begins and the sunset ends. Cause I’ve decided where yours...
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Hatemongers
What do you call a man who loves his country but is not so enthusiastic about the government that confiscates half of his income? Who takes care of his own family but is not sure why, through tax policies and affirmative action, he is also supposed to take care of the children of other people...
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Europe’s Uncrowned Leader
“Total German triumph as EU minnows subjugated,” The Daily Telegraph headlines a report by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s latest diktat. Whoever wants credit must fulfill our conditions, she declared. Her conditions amount to capitulation by three vulnerable states on core policies, and further erosion of sovereignty for the rest of the eurozone. For...
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Perspectives on RPW
The late Mark Winchell’s recently published Robert Penn Warren: Genius Loves Company is a collection of essays focusing on Warren’s close associations and literary affinities. Warren was known as a kind and generous man who encouraged other writers in their work, helped those in need, and nurtured fragile friendships over a lifetime, sometimes with people...
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The Life of an ‘Old Republican’
From the December 1990 issue of Chronicles. Nathaniel Macon (Dec. 17, 1758- June 29, 1837), “Old Republican” statesman, the foremost public man of North Carolina in the early 19th century, was the sixth child of Gideon and Priscilla (Jones) Macon and was born at his father’s plantation on Shocco Creek in what later became Warren...
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Letter From Texas: Gott Mit Uns
As modern imperialism grows, even the regions within those countries under its rule become homogenized. Within the subnational regions, smaller ethnic enclaves, with their diverse cultures, tend to take one of two paths. They become tourist traps where the natives are totally ignorant of their own histories, differences, and contributions to the larger groups, until,...
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What Dr. Mudd Saw
“I have lost all confidence in the veracity and honesty of the Northern people, and if I could honorably leave the country for a foreign land, I believe our condition would be bettered.” —Letter to Frances Mudd, by Samuel Mudd, September 5, 1865 an injured John Wilkes Booth fled southward out of Washington and headed...
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Nikki’s Lost Cause
The hysterical response to Nikki Haley's Civil War comment simply shows that one is not allowed to contradict the narratives of our media betters or their interpretations of reality.
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Treason Prospers
As I (along with just about every other armchair strategist in the Western world) correctly predicted last year, the United States launched her war against Iraq in the early spring of 2003, but by the time she did so, the path of treason along which this country had been dragged to war was plain to...
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The Writer as Farmer
Nights are pitch dark here. Looking up at a wonderfully clear sky, I think of how few places today permit stars. The sickly yellow-brown blur of cities has killed the most glorious God-given beauty of all. With the stars has gone reverence, too, and maybe at least partly as a result of the same. With...
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The “R” Word
The GOP’s latest legislative attack on the South provides a good look at just how far the Republicans have gone on their racial and multicultural guilt trip. In July, President Bush and his Myrmidons saddled the country, in general, and Dixie, in particular, with a 25-year extension of the ill-conceived Voting Rights Act. If ever...
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White Like Me
Race is the American religion, which is why no one can talk about it truthfully. I do not mean that no one speaks his mind on the subject. Well-indoctrinated liberals can talk all day on why race does not matter, why the whole concept means nothing; and racialists can talk even longer on why it...
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The Broken Promise of American Life
The better future which Americans propose to build is nothing if not an idea which must in certain essential respects emancipate them from their past. American history contains much matter for pride and congratulation, and much matter for regret and humiliation. On the whole, it is a past of which the loyal American has no...
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The Catfish Binary, Part 2
Aquaculture—farming water for food as opposed to fishing it—is as old as civilization. The Romans did it; so did Mrs. Martin Luther. But catfish farming is an American industry, something of a native-born wonder. As I mentioned previously, catfish farms revitalized a vast area of the Deep South and provided Americans coast to coast with...
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In God We Fail
The recent flood of secession petitions in the wake of the re-election of President Barack Obama has raised secession to something more than the curiosity or esoteric joke that it has been heretofore. In the 1990’s an occasional newspaper article appeared about the League of the South or the Vermont independence movement, treating them as...
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The Heart’s Geography
I took out the atlas the other day to figure out the routes of the voyagers retraced by Jean Raspail on his first trip to the United States. In the event, it proved impossible to plot a French expedition on a modern map of the United States. Maps are political abstractions. They encourage us to...
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Athens and Jerusalem V: The Germanization of Christianity
Some Tedious but Necessary Preliminaries The title of James C. Russell's The Germanization of Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious Transformation does not sound like the opening shot in a war against Christianity. However, ever since Sam Francis' apparently glowing review, conservative neopagans, atheists, and Nordicists have trumpeted the book ...
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By Any Means Necessary
Was there a point at which American liberals consciously adopted Jacobinism, or did it just creep up on them gradually? This question was brought into rather sharp focus earlier this year when the PBS series American Experience presented an expensive two-part documentary entitled “Reconstruction: The Second Civil War.” The series recounted the story of Reconstruction,...
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Hezbollah Degraded
Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to switch the focus from Gaza in the south to Hezbollah in the north was an operational success of the highest order and a political masterpiece.
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Seeing the Wizard Off
A historical sense can be a wonderful thing to have. Not long ago, for instance, someone reminded me that when Christianity was as old as Islam is now, the Inquisition was going full tilt. When Islam gets to be two thousand years old, he suggested, maybe it’ll be as guilt-ridden and effete as Christianity has...
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Surprise! Surprise!
In 1988, I wrote in a review in these pages, “If there is any young historian out there who wants to know where the cutting edge is in American historical understanding, it is . . . the new and coming field of Northern history.” Complicity is one of a half-dozen or more books published in...
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More Than a Statue
“Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swoln, and drowns things weighty and solid.” —Francis Bacon At the height of his career, William Gilmore Simms was ranked with the best writers produced by the United States. In the Northeast, his novels were considered inferior only to Cooper’s, and there were many...
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The Multicultural Lie
Rockford, Illinois, the home of The Rockford Institute and Chronicles, was established in a series of migratory ripples: first Yankees, then Scots, then Swedes. A later wave of immigration brought many Italians, both from Sicily and Northern Italy. Today, German-Americans are the largest ethnic group in Rockford, as they are in the United States as...
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Thrice-Told Tales
Politics and tale-telling are virtually inseparable activities. Great political events—wars, rebellions, social crusades—do not exert their full measure of influence until they are whittled into legends. More than one British statesman has derived his understanding of the Wars of the Roses from Shakespeare’s Histories, and in the United States the stories of Washington at Valley...
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The Eurozone: Time for a Divorce
The events of recent months present the eurozone as a dysfunctional bourgeois family, the latter-day Buddenbrooks morphing into Karamazovs. At the plot’s core is the loveless marriage of two incompatible, increasingly embittered partners. Teutonius is a rich yet parsimonious workaholic who abhors mortgages and long holidays. His much younger spouse, Meridiana, has inherited all the...
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Europe’s Uncrowned Leader
“Total German triumph as EU minnows subjugated,” The Daily Telegraph headlines a report by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s latest diktat. Whoever wants credit must fulfill our conditions, she declared. Her conditions amount to capitulation by three vulnerable states on core policies, and further erosion of sovereignty for the rest of the eurozone. For Greece, Evans-Pritchard explains, the terms...
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Understanding the Shifting Realities of the Right
Historical circumstances make realignments inescapable and attempts to define “conservatism” apart from an understanding of these shifts results in wild mischaracterizations.
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In Praise of Accents
A few years ago, sitting on the floor of the U.S. House with my friend Rep. Jim Walsh of Syracuse, I said of the member who was speaking: “Curt’s dyed his hair.” Jim looked at me, very seriously, and said: “Curt’s dad is here?” People who grew up in East Tennessee, as I did, are...
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Confederate Rainbow
As we all know, during the Civil War, an expansive, democratic, progressive, multiethnic North defeated a bigoted and reactionary South, so that government of the people, by the people, and for the people should not perish from the earth. Like so many commonly held beliefs about the war (which are now being enforced as official,...
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Reading Obituaries
Reading obituaries is part of reading the newspaper and can be oddly rewarding. It’s instructive and even inspiring to read about lives and careers. Sometimes, we read about strangers, sometimes celebrities, sometimes even people we know—or knew. The gravity of the occasion requires a formulaic response: Without considering the matter, we all know how an...
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The Life of an ‘Old Republican’
Nathaniel Macon (Dec. 17, 1758- June 29, 1837), “Old Republican” statesman, the foremost public man of North Carolina in the early 19th century, was the sixth child of Gideon and Priscilla (Jones) Macon and was born at his father’s plantation on Shocco Creek in what later became Warren County. The Macons were French Huguenots in...
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Avoiding Democracy
Does America exist anymore, or is the nation only a fantasy concocted out of old Frank Capra movies, civics classes, and pamphlets from the Department of Education? The weight of the evidence suggests the latter. Twenty years ago—ancient history by the standards of the press—a considerable number of young men who refused to fight in...
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The Wrong War
The assault on American history continues apace, with the further removal of Confederate monuments and symbols, and the expunging of anything relating to slavery or slaveholders. Mounting any defense against this cultural warfare has been next to impossible, because it would seem to demand justifying slavery. The same considerations prohibit any criticism of the Union...
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A Voice From Down South
“Had he been even a Yankee, this genius would have been rendered immediately manifest to his countrymen.” —Edgar Allan Poe “All a rhetorician’s rules,” we learn from Hudibras, “teach him but to name his tools.” Professor Bradford, who knows much about the art of rhetoric, is a massive exception to this observation. This is a...
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Polemics & Exchanges
Bringing Up Buckley In his response to Jack Trotter’s essay on William F. Buckley, Jr. (“Defense of Bill Buckley,” Polemics and Exchanges, June 2020), Tom Pauken writes that Ronald Reagan as president “orchestrated an effective strategy that won the Cold War and dismantled the Soviet Empire.” This is a common misconception among both the right and...
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A Dirge Transposed
“A novel,” wrote Stendhal, “is a mirror carried along a road.” In Cyn-thia Shearer’s new book, the road, literally speaking, is that between the invented town of Madagascar, Mississippi, where the action is centered, and Memphis, the other major setting; metaphorically, it is the distance the South has traveled from about 1950 to the early 21st...
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Political Correctness in the History of the South
I was recently gifted The South Was Right, by James Ronald and Walter Donald Kennedy, an updated version of a work originally produced in 1994. Seeking an antidote to the PC historiography in which our universities are now awash, I happily plunged into this printed gift. The present “leftist ideologues,” more than their predecessors, hate...
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The One and Indispensable
When Bill C. Malone’s Country Music, U.S.A. first appeared in 1968, it was obviously the most careful, well-researched, judicious, and accessible book on any kind of American popular music, including jazz, that had been published up to that time. Three revisions later, and a passing of the torch by Malone to a successor charged with...
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Letter From the Lower Right
To begin with, an anniversary: September 20th of this year marked a decade since the death of Alabama Representative Ray Burgess. The Honarable Ray, described at the time of his death by the New York Times as “a volatile segregationist and sometimes [sic] lay preacher,” had a habit of bringing his pistol onto the floor...
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Dixie Dystopia
How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again. –Mark Twain Just in case you have not heard, we are in the midst of a Culture War. Death by Journalism? is a battle report from the front lines. The Last Confederate Flag and Bedford: A...
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Lincoln and the Death of the Old Republic
Official history venerates Abraham Lincoln as an apostle of American democracy who waged war on the South to preserve the Union and free the slaves. Official history is a lie. Lincoln was a dictator who destroyed the Old Republic and replaced the federal principles of 1789 with the ideological foundations of today’s welfare/warfare state. His...
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America’s Second-Worst Dynasty
Richard Brookhiser’s biographical study of four generations of the Adams family illustrates once again that the rich and complex history of our country remains a closed book to the ruling class and their literary apologists. Brookhiser reveals in his introduction that his purpose is to create a usable past: “The United States is formally an...
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Defiling the Sacred Dead of Gettysburg
Just two hours from where I sit writing this lies a battlefield where 50,000 American men and boys were wounded, killed, captured, or went missing over the course of three days roughly 160 years ago. Several months later, that field became a cemetery dedicated by President Abraham Lincoln in his famous Gettysburg Address, and a federally...
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Capitalism the Enemy
By a margin of 63-56, the South Carolina House of Representatives voted on May 10 to pull down the Confederate battle flag that has fluttered above the state’s capitol dome since 1962 and to remove it to “a place of honor” on the capitol grounds. The vote was the grand (or perhaps the petty) finale...
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Obama’s Manufactured Border Crisis
This summer’s border crisis—the near total collapse of any controls or security at our southern border, especially in South Texas—was manufactured by the Obama administration as a means of forcing through a mass amnesty, either via Congress or by executive fiat. Legalizing millions of illegal aliens now resident in these United States is the immediate...
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Allons, Enfants de la Patrie
It was years ago that I first read the collection of Donald Davidson’s essays called Still Rebels, Still Yankees. In one of them, “Some Day, in Old Charleston,” the doughty Last Agrarian addressed one of his perennial themes, the trashiness of modern civilization and the superiority of the Old Southern regime, by describing Charleston’s Army...
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Raising a Flag for Mr. Davidson
“An outlaw fumbling for the latch, a voice Commanding in a dream where no flag flies.” —Donald Davidson, “Lee in the Mountains” The University of Missouri’s publication of Where No Flag Flies: Donald Davidson and the Southern Resistance does much to redress a literary grievance. Donald Davidson, the late poet and professor of English at...