One of my history department chairmen had the habit of hiring at whim as instructors various unqualified people, lacking appropriate degrees and without the vetting that was usually done. A new, more professional chairman decided, rightly, to get rid of them. One was a radical African-American preacher, notorious for complaints and a cavalier attitude toward...
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Is Trump Going Neocon in Syria?
Is President Donald Trump about to intervene militarily in the Syrian civil war? For that is what he and his advisers seem to be signaling. Last week, Trump said of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s campaign to recapture the last stronghold of the rebellion, Idlib province: “If it’s a slaughter, the world is going to get...
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The Long March Through the Constitution
In the opinion of Marshall DeRosa, one of the contributors to this book, The transition from states’ rights to unitary nationalism, i.e., domestic imperialism, was the most significant development in American politics. This marks one of the worst fears of the framers coming to fruition, tyranny. That is a self-evidently correct judgment. It is also...
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The Obamanation of Desolation
The appearance of John McCain and Barack Obama at Saddleback, California’s “purpose-driven” church marks the ultimate ascent of Rick Warren to the Gantry-in-Chief of the P.T. Barnum Church of America. Warren’s success is living proof of Barnum’s oft-quoted observation that there is a sucker born every minute. In the event, Obama’s imitation of Christianity was...
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What the Editors Are Reading
Having written the book on Bill Bryson (literally—for Marshall Cavendish’s Today’s Writers & Their Works series, 2010), I have been looking forward to the film version of A Walk in the Woods (1998) since I first read Bryson’s semifictionalized account of hiking the Appalachian Trail. Robert Redford, who produced the movie and stars as a...
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Iran: The Score, the Options
In recent weeks the proponents of an American war against Iran have been getting impatient with President Obama’s apparent unwillingness to get with the program. Joe Lieberman, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman, and Howard Berman, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, now press the President to impose a short time limit on the...
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What’s Next for the Right?
The Republican Party must get its own house in order, suppress the influence of its establishment members, and offer a coherent, principled, and politically viable program to the American electorate.
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The Case for Laissez-Faire Capitalism
Under laissez-faire capitalism, government is limited to armies, which keep foreign bad guys from attacking us; police, to quell local criminals; and courts, to determine guilt and innocence. This is roughly the position of minimal-government libertarians, or minarchists. The foundation of law in this system is the non-aggression principle (NAP). The NAP provides that anyone...
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An Appeal from Thomas Fleming
Your mind is a terrible thing to waste—which is what will happen if Chronicles and its web go under because of lack of support. The election is over, and the Republicans have won their much predicted victory. It was only a matter of days before GOP legislators began to run away from the big issues:...
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What the Border Crisis Reveals About Our Leaders
Instead of taking the responsible approach of admitting sanctuary policies are a failure and reversing course, mayors have taken absurd steps to appear to be leading while maintaining their good standing among those adhering to the anti-borders orthodoxy.
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The War on White Teachers
“It’s a new day, and a new way!” exulted Adelaide Sanford on television in early 1985. A black supremacist and member of the New York City Board of Education, Sanford was the candidate for schools chancellor of the Reverend Al Sharpton and “activist attorneys” Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason (both of whom have since...
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Texas Gov. Abbott Fumbles on Border Security
Two Texas National Guardsmen sat in a “non-tactical” vehicle near the Mexican border and south of Laredo, Texas on the morning of Jan. 18. The Army Times reported that the men got out to assist Border Patrol in stopping a Chrysler 300 after it was seen picking up six migrants. As they approached, the driver, a suspected smuggler,...
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Does Anyone Feel a Draft?
I grew up in the Volunteer State of Tennessee, so called because of its citizens’ enthusiastic response to the First Mexican War. Maybe growing up there colors my view that wars ought to be fought by folks who want to fight them-and it certainly in creases my estimate of the number of young men who...
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Fall of a Titan
Pat Buchanan’s new book is another tour de force. Suicide of a Superpower builds on the prophetic warnings first articulated in such earlier books as The Great Betrayal; A Republic, Not an Empire; and, most importantly, Death of the West. The current work exhibits the most famous paleoconservative’s trademark word-crafting verve, encyclopedic knowledge of history...
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Is a New GOP Being Born?
The first four Republican contests—Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada—produced record turnouts. While the prospect of routing Hillary Clinton and recapturing the White House brought out the true believers, it was Donald Trump’s name on the ballot and his calls for economic patriotism, border security, and an end to imperial wars that brought out...
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Frank Meyer’s Fusionism and the Search for Consensus Among Conservatives
Frank Meyer’s attempt to codify a conservative consensus must be understood in the context of his day, when remnants of the Old Right were marginalized and conservatism was dominated by anti-Communism.
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Still the Colonies
Since the days when Tom Paine set himself up as chief propagandist for the emerging American colonies the United States has been subject to invasion by British journalists. They come for a variety of reasons. Tired of tax collecting in England, Tom Paine came to start anew, and if doing so involved the common sense...
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Men of the West—July 2005
PERSPECTIVE Heroes in the Age of the Antiheroby Thomas Fleming Unbreaking glass. VIEWS Guys of the Golden Westby Chilton Williamson, Jr.A glorious sunset. A Place to Standby Wayne AllensworthTexas and the making of men and heroes. Cowboy Heroesby Roger D. McGrathLearning the Code of the West. Effeminate Gospel, Effeminate Christiansby Aaron D. WolfFrom authority to...
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Living in a Glass House
In January of last year, Chilean actress Danielle Tobar made international news by moving into a glass house in downtown Santiago. During the short course of “Project Nautilus,” the intimate details of her daily life were open to the (largely prurient) curiosity of onlookers. After only six days, Tobar abandoned the house, claiming security concerns....
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A Latin American Game Plan for Donald Trump
According to an article in Forbes (November 16, 2016), “Mexico aside, [Latin America] barely featured at all in the presidential campaign. This overall situation will largely remain the same under the Trump administration.” The first sentence is a truism (when has Latin America, as such, ever “featured” in a U.S. presidential election?), and the second...
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Unjust War
“War is the trade of kings.” —John Dryden The single greatest force for consolidation of the national state is war. A truism, but one that American conservatives have been loath to admit. Ideologically committed to anticommunism, the conservative movement fell into lockstep with liberal troops in the Cold War, in the...
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Transatlantic Rifts
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, Europe was closer to America, politically and emotionally, than at any time since World War II. For a moment, the threat of Islamic terrorism had rekindled a dormant awareness on both sides of the Atlantic of just how much the Old Continent and the New World have in...
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The Christian Challenge in Islamic Africa
Moreno Religious persecution in Africa is particularly interesting since countries there go from one extreme to another in terms of religious tolerance. The growth of Islam is reconfiguring Africa’s religious landscape—at the cost of religious liberty. Frontline Fellowship, an evangelical group based in South Africa which operates in Sudan and other countries, provides these estimates:...
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Die, Belgium, Die!
Most English schoolboys learn this quip: Belgium is a country invented by the British to annoy the French. Which is just about true. And if you don’t understand why and how Belgium was invented, you won’t understand the significance of the elections in Belgium earlier this summer. In 1795 the revolutionary French occupied what were...
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Strange Customs
I had sworn I would not buy any carpets, and, in the end, I did keep that promise, but then one scorching hot day my friends finally came to pry me loose of the snug little corner of the hotel bar. Before I knew it, I was in the market, buying a preternaturally heavy wrought-iron...
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The Season of Rain and Death
A blood-red sun is setting on the horizon, distant but familiar, dull but glowing, like the bloodshot eye of a wounded Titan. Layers of pasty-blue, thin, translucent clouds drape the blood-eye image, as if they themselves were the misty, cloudlike shimmerings of heat rising from the sunbaked pavement, cooled by a late-summer rain. I stand...
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The Fear of Crisis
In the November 1986 Encounter, the Princeton University economist Harold James sets out to tell us “Why We Should Learn to Love a Crisis.” His explanation is not quite what we would expect from a champion of a market economy. In that economy, he says, crises serve a necessary function; states should not try to...
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Is America Led Today By Anti-Americans?
How can America unite again to do great things if we are led by people who believe America suffers from a great sickness of the soul, an original sin that dates back to her birth as a nation? Consider. After his long night of prayer for “the right verdict” to be pronounced—Derek Chauvin was convicted...
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Sunset in the Head
Proust wrote, in Time Regained, that “Style is a question not of technique, but of vision.” Technique may be said to inform and undergird the style, but the artistic vision has priority: It is the style. In Charles Edward Eaton’s recent collection, his 17th, comprising new verse (some published previously in Chronicles) and a generous...
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Pro-Lifers and the Psalmist’s Curses
On one bright, cold January day in the early 80’s I stood with a group of college students from North Carolina after the annual March for Life in Washington as we were received by Sen. Jesse Helms. He greeted us kindly and then regaled us with a few stories with that combination of gentility and...
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The View From Out Here
There is a story about the man who surprised another man in bed with his wife. “What did you do about it?” his friend demanded. “Hell,” replied the fellow in disgust, “the sonofabitch lied his way out of it!” My inclination, on this 15th day of February 1999, is to take the anecdote as a...
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How the Market Stamps Out Evil
In the year before the 1994 election, Ralph Reed announced that the Christian Coalition would broaden its focus. It would go beyond traditional social issues like abortion and school prayer and include economics. He made the case that the security of the American family, a central concern of any Christian political organization, is affected by...
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When Experts Attack
For over 30 years, the churches of America have been declining; their numbers, plummeting. Each year, a new set of numbers emerges from the various denominational headquarters, telling the tale. The liberal Protestant Mainlines are in the worst shape, as the figures for 2006 to 2007 indicate. According to the National Council of Churches, the...
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The Nationalist Moment
Ever since the end of the Cold War, the standard of respectability in politics has been clear. Respectable politicians are those who believe in international trade agreements, sing the praises of mass immigration, and insist that military force should be used to advance some abstract notion like democracy—whether under the auspices of the United Nations...
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After Strange Gods
In Hungary last October, U.S. diplomat André Goodfriend noted that Americans’ “right to express their views would be protected under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.” Making clear that his sympathies lay not with U.S. citizens arrested in Budapest but with the Hungarian officials who had arrested them, he hastily added, “We’re glad to...
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Only a Madman Laughs at the Culture of Others
The opening sentence of Herodotus’ Histories, which recount the wars fought between Greece and Persia in the early fifth century B.C., unrolls like a long musical phrase rising to its Homeric crescendo and then dying away into momentary quiet: Herodotus of Halicarnassus here publishes the results of his research, in order that the actions performed...
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Unbaptized America
The Godless Constitution is a self-described polemic against those who believe that the United States was, is, or should be a “Christian nation.” Essentially a historical analysis of the religious influences on the Kramers of the Constitution, the book explores the superficially curious omission of God, even the simplest and most formal invocation, from that...
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Against the Black Pill
We suffer an oligarchic, feminizing regime that is hostile to most of the defining elements of traditional American identity. But, we also enjoy a golden age of dissent. Now is not the time for despair.
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New York vs. New York
From the July 2001 issue of Chronicles. “The feeling between this city and the hayseeds. . . is every hit as hitter as the feelings between the North and South before the War. . . . Why, I know a lot of men in my district who would like nothin’ better...
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The Suicide Strategy of the West
Americans, it has been observed, have little or no strategic sense. Strategy, as any schoolboy used to know, comes from a Greek word meaning “generalship” in the broad sense of the art of “projecting and directing” (OED) a campaign as opposed to the tactical abilities needed to marshal men on the battlefield. The American can-do...
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The Republican Party’s Welfare Queens
Republicans routinely portray themselves as fiscal guardians. In truth, they, like the Democrats, are irresponsible wastrels. Outlays are up by one third under President George W. Bush, making him the biggest spender since Lyndon B. Johnson. As the Cato Institute’s Stephen Slivinski observes, “Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still...
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Weasel Words
Dr. Fleming, Mr. Cadfael, and now Mr. Navrozov in recent posts have opened a fruitful discussion of the American tendency to debase the language with prettified terms in order to disguise reality and enforce conformity of thought. Actually this is nothing new and is in part a product of what our two most penetrating foreign...
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Caravan Puts Trump Legacy on the Line
Our mainstream media remain consumed with the grisly killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, and how President Donald Trump will deal with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Understandably so, for this is the most riveting murder story since O.J. Simpson and has strategic implications across the Middle East....
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Rediscovering the French in Early Florida
Long-forgotten is the early struggle between the Huguenots and the Spaniards for colonization of Floridian territory, where the Timucuan Indians dwelt.
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On the Declaration
I disagree with Stephen B. Presser’s statement (The 225th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence: A Chronicles Roundtable, June 2001) that the Declaration of Independence is not part of the U.S. Constitution. True, as the professor says, the Declaration was not adopted by conventions in the 13 states in the manner prescribed in the seventh...
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Give Me That Old-Time Religion
In my 1950’s childhood, boys and men, hair slicked down with tonic, girls and ladies in mantillas and hats primly veiled with mesh worshiped at small country churches against which lapped the green and white fields of late-summer tobacco. On Easter Sundays, prissy and full of ourselves on such a special occasion, my sister and...
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Caucasian Games: The Score
A week after Georgia’s failed attempt to conquer the breakaway province of South Ossetia, the crisis is over. The only major issue still unresolved concerns Mikheil Saakashvili’s motivation. His order to attack on the night of August 7-8 was a breathtakingly risky move; but was it a calculated, or reckless gamble? That Saakashvili acted with...
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Short Views
Some people love to go to Washington. The sight of so much power and wealth is exhilarating, especially for young conservative writers who discover that their names are recognized on the Hill. For many, however, the reaction is just the reverse. Within a few hours they are mulling over certain scriptural passages in Eliot—”Oh my...
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Andrew Lytle, R.I.P.
Andrew Lytle died on his couch at his log cabin home on December 12, 1995. Such a passing was and will be known as it can only be known by family and friends who shared with him a wealth of love. The intimacies of privacy were qualified as they must be by the ritual of...
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Could Biden Finally Destroy ‘Our Democracy™’?
In being the selfish bonehead Joe Biden has always and demonstrably been, there is hope that he could perform an act of unintentional patriotism by taking down the sham regime that has propped him up for so long.