“Down to Gehenna and up to the throne, He travels the fastest who travels alone.” —Rudyard Kipling Not as horrible as Calcutta or as ugly as Seoul, Bangkok, spreading along the flat flanks of the Chao Phraya river, is the whorehouse of Asia. Berth girls and boys will do anything you...
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Kosovo: A Threat to Israel’s Survival
There are many self-styled friends of Israel in the United States who have been enthusiastically supportive of Kosovo’s independence for years. People like Sen. Joe Lieberman, Rep. Elliot Engel, Morton Abramowitz, William Kristol, Douglas Feith and ...
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Collegiate Bread and Circuses
Ah, the good ol’ days! If only they were as frolicsome and fulfilling as they commonly seem in the rearview mirror! All that notwithstanding, the shaky balance that, in university settings, once seemed to prevail between academics and athletics gives the past a certain golden glow. You know what I’m talking about if you recall...
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Gifted Amateurs
Since they first appeared in the late 19th century, professional academic historians in the United States have been pretty much Establishment men (though, in other days, they did observe some canons of evidence and reasoned argument, and an occasional maverick appeared to remind that historical understanding should be an evolving debate and not a party...
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Remember From Whence Thou Art Fallen
“Forget about Europe!” shriek the neo-isolationists. “Only Britain and Israel matter. We saved the French twice in one century, and they still think they have a right to follow their own foreign policy.” Americans used to have somewhat longer memories. When General Pershing arrived in Paris in 1917, his aide and orator declared, “Lafayette, we...
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Virtue-Signaling Ourselves to Death
Republicans seem perfectly content to repeatedly proclaim the mass exodus of black voters from the Democratic Party’s “plantation,” only to be proven wrong time and time again.
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Dark Clouds Ahead
If America’s contested election ends in Joe Biden’s inauguration, the world will be less safe. Biden is an instinctive interventionist who has supported bad policies for decades. He was an outspoken advocate of Bill Clinton’s military interventions in the Balkans in the 1990s, and in the early 2000s he supported both the War in Afghanistan and...
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The Christian and Creation
Where does man fit into nature? What is his response to the created universe? Lynn White has argued that the Christian position is at the very heart of the environmental crisis. He, and others, see the biblical view of the dominion of man over nature as being responsible for our misuse of our natural resources....
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The Way of the World
In his essay on “self-reliance,” Emerson wrote that “travelling is a fool’s paradise.” He was referring to those who travel to escape the boredom or sadness of their lives, and who hope to return home somehow transformed. Yet we may add those who travel to boast (“Look, here I am at the Parthenon!” or “I...
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By Their Incompetence, Biden and Harris Strike a Blow Against the Deep State
More Americans than ever understand that the uproar over the upcoming election is less a contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, and more a campaign to remain in power by what some call the deep state.
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A Future for Europe
Political scientists are now grumpy. Instead of waxing enthusiastic about the 40 days that shook the world—let us say from the crumbling of the Berlin Wall to Ceausescu’s execution—they resent the brutal intrusion of reality on their slumber. It used to be so comfortable to think in terms of superpower pseudo-polarity, and global democratization is...
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A Divided Subcontinent
A 31-gun salute boomed at daybreak on August 14 in Islamabad to mark Pakistan’s 60th anniversary of independence from British rule—or, to be precise, her birth as a Muslim state that resulted from the bloody partition of India in 1947. That event was accompanied by the largest mass migration in history, as over ten million...
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Suicide by (Legal) Immigration
I was fortunate to grow up before the Immigration Act of 1965 began an incremental and insidious change in the ethnic composition of America. I had friends whose parents were immigrants. I thought nothing much of it because the parents had all come from countries in Northern or Western Europe and almost immediately became indistinguishable...
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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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Jerks on a Shopping Spree
“He who dies with the most toys wins.” Every year on Black Friday, American shoppers brave the bad weather and go out to do battle with other shoppers in a contest that will determine who pays the least for the most stuff they are better off without. Twenty years ago, the worst these victims of...
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Dark Winter of a Grand Old Party
It has been a dreadful three months for the Grand Old Party. On Nov. 3, President Donald Trump seemed to have lost the White House by narrowly losing three crucial blue states he had won in 2016—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—and Georgia and Arizona as well. Trump immediately mounted an acrimonious two-month...
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High Stakes in the Immigration Battle
The presidency of Donald Trump has made some things many of us suspected for a long time perfectly clear, as a former president used to say. Our enemies no longer hide what their agenda is, and job #1 on that agenda is replacing what Archie Bunker used to call “regular Americans” with foreigners. Thus, the...
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Memories: Glimpses of Notables
In my senior year I was editor of the high-school newspaper. (We even won a prize from the Columbia University School of Journalism.) What I remember most is the literary progeny on my staff. It included the daughter of Burke Davis, a well-known writer of the time; the daughter of the historian Richard N. Current;...
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The Mandela Mandala
Every year, the Christian calendar is more and more marginalized by anti-Christian “holidays” and commemorations. In 2013, the first week of Advent, by decree of President Obama and National Public Radio, was displaced by Nelson Mandela Week. Since we were only in December, I could not wait to see what our masters will pull out...
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The Jungle of Empire
One of the redeeming features of imperialism is that it makes for great adventure stories. The works of H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling and the literature of the American West from James Fenimore Cooper to Louis L’Amour would not have been possible without the empires and imperial problems that provide the setting for their...
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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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Kosovo Blowback Reaches America
The story: four Albanian Muslims from Kosovo, plus a Turk and a Jordanian, are arrested for conspiring to attack Fort Dix, a military base in New Jersey, with AK47s and “to kill as many soldiers as possible” (U.S. Attorney’s Office). The Mainstream Media spin: “Four ...
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Books in Brief: America’s Revolutionary Mind
America’s Revolutionary Mind, by C. Bradley Thompson (Encounter Books; 584 pp., $32.99). Thompson’s examination of colonial America’s natural rights political culture and the effects of the Declaration’s oft-quoted passage about unalienable rights is not likely to please members of the traditional right, and as such I consider it required reading. Thompson presents copious evidence that those...
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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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The American Proscenium
French Proscenium William Styron was recently honored by the French government, which made him a Commander of Arts and Letters. In accepting the award, Styron remarked, “Vive la France, Vive l’Amerique and all good things.” Styron may not have a very strong grasp of French, but he loves the country: “I feel particularly good here,...
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The Last Gentlemen
“Friendship is like two clocks keeping time.” —Anonymous Walker Percy was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 7, 1916, the eldest son of a prosperous lawyer and a Georgia socialite. In addition to patrician lineage, Percy enjoyed a birthright of wealth and privilege. With these amenities, however, came a familial predisposition...
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A Lost Art
Readers first met Lee Pefley as an old man who returns to his hometown resolved to chastise public nuisances with a stick. Tito Perdue’s first novel, Lee (1991), took some reviewers by surprise: the elegantly crafted naiveté seemed to strike a balance between Borges and (to my mind) Kenneth Patchen. What some of them seemed...
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Rumors of War
By the seventh month of Donald Trump’s presidency a surreal quality to U.S. foreign policy decision-making had become evident. It is at odds with both the theoretical model and historical practice. When we talk of the “behavior” of states, what we have in mind is the process of decision-makers defining objectives, selecting specific courses of...
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Motels and Filling Stations
Rural and small town America is nearly dead. A distinctive culture rooted in family farms, weakening since 1900 and seriously diseased since 1960, emerged from the 1980’s in a terminal state. In Iowa alone, the last ten years saw a net out-migration of 280,000 people, a full tenth of the state’s population, with most of...
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No Place Like Home
“If any man hunger, let him eat at home.” —1 Corinthians 11:34 Fred Chappell’s Family Gathering, his first book of poems since 1995’s Spring Garden: New and Selected Work, is a collection of short verse portraits that allows Chappell to display his considerable gifts for miniature (a talent also on display...
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A Ukrainian Tragedy
Having designated a traditionalist, conservative, overwhelmingly Christian Orthodox Russia as the enemy, the rulers of an Orwellian "Great Reset" West will be free to cancel conservatives of all stripes even more radically than before.
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The Civil War and Perestroika
To calculate where a cannonball will land, it is necessary to know its initial angle of trajectory and the amount of force that propels it. It is the persuasive thesis of W. Bruce Lincoln that the Russian Civil War was the historic explosion that ever since has determined the direction and velocity of the Soviet...
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Hobbesian State of Anarchy
Albania has descended into the Hobbesian state of utter anarchy, which seldom happens to a European country. Armed mobs have ransacked stores, unruly soldiers have stolen cars at gunpoint, foreign nationals have been evacuated by helicopter from embassy compounds, and rebels have stolen some 100,000 light arms from government arsenals. The sinking in March of...
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Mormons and Modernism
“So pale grows Reason at Religion’s sight, So dies, and so dissolves in supernatural light.” —John Dryden Leonard Arrington: Brigham Young: American Moses; Alfred A. Knopf; New York. Richard L. Bushman: Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism; University of Illinois Press; Urbana, IL. Jan Shipps: Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition; University of Illinois Press; Urbana, IL. Ernest...
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Old Dutch Buggies & New Asian Shrimp Boats
Both Witness and Alamo Bay explore the tensions that arise when dissimilar cultures meet, when people must meet the demands of an alien land. In Witness, a streetwise Philadelphia homicide detective, hardened by a climate of violence and corruption, must hide out among the peaceful Amish of rural Pennsylvania Dutch country. In Alamo Bay, a...
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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 services....
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Trump and the Invasion of the West
“It is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart,” says former first lady Laura Bush of the Trump administration policy of “zero tolerance,” under which the children of illegal migrants are being detained apart from their parents. “Disgraceful,” adds Dr. Franklin Graham. “We need to be . . . a country that governs...
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Scouting and Sin
[This article first appeared in the January 1992 issue of Chronicles.] The Case Against the Boy Scouts The Boy Scouts of America have recently been accused of sins against Democracy, in the form of discrimination against atheists, homosexuals, and women. Four recent lawsuits have challenged the organizational prerogatives of the Scouts. The families of nine-year-old...
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Why Has the Land Turned on Me?
I have showered more love on this old 1940’s farmhouse than on any person living. Certainly, I’ve spent more money on it than I care to count. But more than the house itself—an undistinguished structure made interesting only by my renovation—it’s the land I fell in love with. The way my foot sinks into the...
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Trump’s Sun Belt Hopes and Rust Belt Needs
Trump should do everything he can to win the Sun Belt, and black and Hispanic voters, away from Biden. But his priority must be to win back the Rust Belt states and white voters he lost in 2020.
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Bush’s Whips, McCain’s Scorpions
“He [John McCain] did everything that we asked of him, including arming the KLA.” —Albanian lobbyist Joe DioGuardi When I hear the word Belgrade pronounced, I can almost smell the soft coal smoke tainting the chilly air of early spring. Waking in the Palace Hotel on Toplicin Venac, the slightly sour smell has filled the...
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To Secede or Succeed?
Over a decade ago, Don Livingston organized a Liberty Fund Colloquium in Charleston, South Carolina. One of the sessions examined whether any movement toward political decentralization was possible without at least the threat of secession to back it up. On that subject, most of the attendees agreed: Whether one regards secession as good in itself,...
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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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Onward and Upward
Like the Roman cursus honorum, the ascending path of neoconservative success is carefully prescribed. Instead of the progress from aedile to consul, however, the journey leads through hackwork up to the glories of publishing with Basic Books, appearing on TV talk shows, and gracing the mastheads of neocon magazines. David Frum managed to move through...
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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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On Crusading
Kudos to Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, whose “New Grand Strategy” (American Interest, December) tells us what sensibly ought to be. The stooges inhabiting Foggy Bottom will never look up from their feed troughs to show half the intelligence of your master diplomat. I wish him Godspeed on his new ventures, and wish that Obama had the...
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Snowden’s Asylum
“We’re extremely disappointed that the Russian government would take this step despite our very clear and lawful requests in public and in private to have Mr. Snowden expelled to the United States to face the charges against him,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said. He added that Barack Obama might now boycott a bilateral...
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Thoughts on Brown People
A nine-year-old boy in Phoenix earned a three-day suspension from the Abraham Lincoln Traditional School for committing a “hate crime,” reports the Arizona Republic. The boy reportedly used the phrase “brown people” while arguing with another student. He was then questioned by a detention-room officer—the mother of the offended “brown person”—who demanded to know “why...
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Good News, Illegals: There’s an App for Self-Deportation Now
The Trump administration is redesigning the Biden administration’s infamous CBP One phone app that facilitated illegal immigration into an instrument for self-deportation.