Shortly after the election of 1988 one grand old man of the Republican Party told me he thought Mr. Bush could do a creditable job so long as his administration faced no major crises. The very minor crisis of the abortive coup in Panama was the first serious test of this thesis, and it would...
Twenty years ago Leon Hadar published Quagmire: America in the Middle East, an eloquent plea for U.S. disengagement from the region. He warned that American leaders had neither the knowledge nor the power to manage long-standing disputes involving faraway people of whom we know little. Attempts at meddling, he wrote, invariably made the various actors...
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...
” . . . 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....
One of many reasons conservatives are so often at a disadvantage in political discussions is that we do not see why there should be any discussion, since we do not recognize a problem open to discussion at all. Take, for instance, assimilation. If you do not believe the United States should be accepting immigrants in...
For the third time in our generation, independent voters could be the balance of power in this year’s presidential election. In 1968, Alabama Gov. George G. Wallace, standardbearer of the American Independent Party, received 13 percent of the popular vote, a sum greater than the difference between Hubert H. Humphrey and the victor, Richard M....
Tucker Carlson's voice is too important to silence because he speaks for so many people.
At the moment the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of states to enact parental consultation abortion statutes, the abortion-advocacy organizations went into high gear. The Hodgson v. Minnesota and Ohio v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health decisions “endangered teens,” they claimed, and NOW President Molly Yard charged that the Court had “thrown down the...
In the first year of Cyrus the king the same Cyrus the king made a decree concerning the house of God at Jerusalem, Let the house be builded, the place they offered sacrifices, and let the foundations thereof be strongly laid. Mesopotamia was the cradle of empires, but it was also their grave, as the...
—“If a temple is to be erected, a temple must be destroyed.” —Friedrich Nietzsche When the Cold War ended in 1991, American conservatives rejoiced over the triumph of democratic capitalism, which had struggled for over half a century, first against the rise of fascism, and then against the Soviet bloc and...
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...
Many of the same characters involved in lawfare against President Trump are implicated in the untruthful ambush of me and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
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...
The issue facing Biden and his party is not whether to call Ibarra “illegal,” “undocumented” or a “newcomer,” but whether they intend to protect Americans from gang members.
Writing in this issue of Chronicles, Frank Brownlow, the scholar and literary critic, quotes W.H. Auden as having described logic as “a condition of the world,” like aesthetics and ethics. Auden was right, which makes advanced liberalism’s rejection of logic so dangerous. Five nights a week on FOX News, week after week, Tucker Carlson in...
The schedule is rather monotonous for a lecturer invited to the big cities where universities are usually located. First comes the airport, then the car with the polite, smiling young man as a guide, then hotel room and restaurant, podium, introduction, photo graphs, the lecture itself-then the whole thing in reverse order the next day....
In Huysmans’ Against the Grain (1884), the precious hero Des Esseintes has “the idea of turning dream into reality, of traveling [from France] to England in the flesh as well as in the spirit, of checking the accuracy of his visions.” He orders a servant to pack his bags, calls a cab, and stops in...
Dean Gooderham Acheson was born in Middletown, Connecticut, on April 11, 1893, into a stable world of which Europe was the center and where America was poised to attain hemispheric dominance. That world’s certainties were shattered in the trenches of Northern France, but the shock was less profound among America’s northeastern aristocracy—to which Acheson belonged...
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? —Psalm 137:4 But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel. —1 Timothy 5:8 The county that became...
The boy choir of Duke University has been done away with, apparently at the behest of one of the campus ministers, a woman who had never even attended any of the services at which the choir performed but who complained that the group was one of the “subtle and not so subtle vestiges of male...
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” For proof of this axiom, we need only look at the foreign policy pursued by the U.S. government since the end of World War II. The United States emerged from World War II militarily victorious but politically deformed. Instead of a republic, it was now a...
At the dawn of the 21st century, few of today’s public (or private) school students would argue with you if you told them that the United States of America was founded upon the principle, proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal.” They would offer no argument, perhaps, except that they...
Most of what we see and read from the government and its media organs are variations on a tired but persistent theme of irreversible progress toward utopia. (William Pfaff has a new book arguing that secular utopianism, even more than war profiteering or career advancement, is what drives U.S. foreign policy, making it impervious to...
The sheer incongruity of the deceased Ray Liotta appearing in a new release added a hint of fascination to "1992," an otherwise formulaic heist picture produced by rap artist Snoop Dogg.
For years I’ve been listening to the hot air produced by Conservative Inc. about the political conservatism of Martin Luther King, Jr., who was dedicated to “self-government based on absolute truth and moral law.” Supposedly King was also a proud member of the GOP. This last claim is not even remotely true, as Alveda King,...
The move toward mass, direct democracy in the large nationstate derives much of its appeal from an image of direct democracy reminiscent of the Athenian Assembly, or of the New England town meeting. But such an appeal is mistaken. The social conditions for face-to-face interaction and deliberation present on a small scale are not present...
With impeccable timing, I interviewed Eisenhower biographer and Colin Powell booster Stephen E. Ambrose just days before Powell’s Noble Renunciation of Ambition. But before our chat disappears into that void (de?)populated by Milton Shapp’s Inaugural Address and the Oscar acceptance speech of Pauly Shore, I retrieve this exchange: Me: One way to look at Eisenhower...
It is an unwritten law of American politics that the politicians who devote themselves to the single-minded pursuit of power and wealth must pretend to be men of the people. The 1996 presidential campaign might have been scripted by Frank Capra, since virtually every candidate is a would-be John Doe or Jefferson Smith, taking on...
“No womman of no clerk is praised.” —Chaucer An old-fashioned historian can be forgiven for feeling a touch of empathy for the bewildered Egyptians upon whom Yahweh emptied the vessels of wrath some 3,500 years ago. The Hebrews’ God plagued the Egyptians for a matter of days, but the stern Minerva who reigns over academe...
During the presidential campaign and in the immediate aftermath of his election victory, Donald Trump had made a number of conciliatory remarks about Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and the possibility of substantial improvement in relations between Washington and Moscow. On the campaign trail he also made the well-publicized statement that NATO was obsolete, and last...
It is 10:00 P.M. as you step off the Greyhound bus in Laredo, Texas. By all rights you should feel exhausted after your 36-hour ride from Minneapolis. But the truth is, you feel pretty good. The air is cool but muggy on this late-August night. You are told that the Rio Grande is just a...
Recently I ordered a bit of merchandise from a Carolina town about 30 miles away. It took some time to arrive. With a little research I discovered that the package had been sent by the USPS to Baltimore! And then to Charlotte, 90 miles from its destination and 120 miles from it place of shipping....
A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education ed. by Gail Heriot and Maimon Schwarzchild Encounter Books 336 pp., $28.99 Scholars increasingly treat the issue of race with kid gloves. As the cancel culture accelerates, race—always a sensitive topic—has become nearly taboo. Any serious exploration of the correlation of intelligence and race is...
A BBC television spy series, M I-5, which is now being marketed to the U.S., portrays a heroic group of British government agents who have been beefed up and empowered since 9/11 to fight the rising threat of terrorism. In the first episode, the ...
Now, when world food supplies are more uncertain than they have been for more than a century, the United States badly needs a national agricultural policy. While Congress and its agricultural committees are putting the finishing touches on another farm bill to replace the one expiring, it is not likely that we’ll get what we...
The Feds now control my backyard—in direct defiance of the Ninth and Tenth amendments. I have heard and read many stories over the years about imperial intrusions into private affairs, but I recently learned about these firsthand when I tried to refinance my mortgage to take advantage of lower interest rates. I immediately ran up...
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....
When President George W. Bush, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and Mexican President Felipe Calderón met in Quebec in mid-August, they were greeted by news stories that had migrated into the mainstream media from the populist fringe, alleging that the three national leaders were conspiring to create a supranational North American Union (NAU). Responding to...
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...
In February, I returned to Sweden after a 15-year absence, and discovered a very different land. In 1976, Americans were viewed with suspicion. We carried the immediate legacy of the Vietnam imbroglio and a vague reputation as “protofascists.” These were the heady early days of Prime Minister Olaf Palme. The Swedes were, as always, polite,...
Thank you for this honor, and for this very handsome prize. It means all the more because I am privileged to share it with Richard Wilbur. [Editor’s note: Richard Wilbur was the 1996 recipient of The Ingersoll Foundation’s T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing.] I have long admired the art and craft and wisdom of...
In the December issue of Chronicles, Edward Dutton writes about the peculiar self-censorship that characterizes Finnish political and cultural life (“Letter From Finland: Finland, Democracy, and Those Cartoons,” Correspondence). This reality was confirmed as the magazine was likely going to press, when the Finnish prime minister told journalists that they should not ask government ministers...
Philip Roth: The Anatomy Lesson; Farrar, Straus & Grioux; New York. Louis Auchincloss: Exit Lady Masham; Houghton Mifflin; Boston. In the opinion of Tom Wolfe, “the introduction of realism into literature… was like the introduction of electricity into machine technology. It was not just another device. It raised the state of the art to a new magnitude.”...
“Most women have no Characters at all,” wrote Alexander Pope: “Good as well as ill, / Woman’s at best a Contradiction still.” The contradiction of womanhood will perhaps never be fully solved, but it has generally been considered manageable within marriage and family. Outside of the home, women are . . . well, we’ve made...
I’ve just returned from Albania, almost 22 years after visiting that country for the first time. In July 1991 I went there on an assignment with U.S. News & World Report, only weeks after the country’s borders were finally opened to foreigners after 45 years of hermetic isolation. I have visited many countries over the years,...
Nineteen ninety-one was Operation Desert Storm. In 2003, it is Operation Shock and Awe—or was it Awe and Terror, or Shlock and Glock? We make progress backward, as befits the new millennium. Twelve years ago, the Pentagon at least managed to get the desert into it. The Mesopotamian Desert, as the troops have discovered on...
British scholar Timothy Stanley has produced the first significant biography of Patrick J. Buchanan, describing his life from his boyhood in Washington, D.C., up to the present. Stanley’s book is written in a breezy, informal manner—Buchanan is referred to as “Pat” throughout—and it makes for quick and generally enjoyable reading. Stanley gets much right in...
Jackie, Tiger, and Ellen—not as catchy as Martin, Bartin, and Fish, or Abraham, Martin, and John, but good enough to mesmerize the press this spring. In one respect, the mainstream media were right: Jackie Robinson was a courageous man; Tiger Woods is an extraordinary golfer; and Ellen DeGenerate—well, two out of three ain’t bad. But...
As a nonnative from a cold-weather climate, I have observed that there are four seasons in Arkansas’ Delta: warm, hot, scorching, and malarial. Another way to understand the weather in this part of the South is through the eyes of a ubiquitous inhabitant: the mosquito. They bite in February; aerial insecticide spraying commences in May;...
We may long for the romantic and heroic days when acts of military derring-do were performed by Medal of Honor recipients, but it looks like the future belongs to the ugly, impersonal, and utilitarian.