After wearing out the patience of television viewers over an entire year of premature campaigning, the two political parties will soon be informing us of their choices. Will the presidential election of 2008 really come down to a contest between two leftist anti-Christian senators representing New York? Or will Al Gore, even more bloated with...
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Fighting for Orthodoxy Among the Methodists
The Episcopal Church, with two million members, drove off the cliff in 2003 by electing its first openly homosexual bishop. In 2005, the United Church of Christ (1.1 million members) officially endorsed same-sex “marriage,” though the UCC had already long been ordaining active homosexuals. This year, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (4.9 million members),...
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Lament for a Lost Love
Oh, England! How have I loved thee, even though most of my forebears came from the doubtful Scots and Welsh borders, and not a few were 17th-century refugees from the turmoil of the German states. I am old enough to remember when many, many of us regarded you as our Mother Country, despite all the...
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The Sheriff and the Goatman
“May not a man have several voices . . . as well as two complexions?” —Nathaniel Hawthorne In George Garrett’s stories the conflict often arises between a wild lone Outsider and a generally conscientious but insecure Establishment figure; in Peter Taylor’s stories the conflict is likely to take place between generations, the revolt of the...
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Denied Justice
Joe Occhipinti continues to be denied justice. As Greg Kaye reported in the October 1993 Chronicles, Occhipinti was the highly decorated undercover agent for the Immigration and Naturalization Service who was framed, tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison for doing his job too well. Fluent in three languages, Occhipinti had distinguished himself as an expert...
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Our Next Mideast War—Syria
Jeb Bush has spent the week debating with himself over whether he would have started the war his brother launched on Iraq. When he figures it out, hopefully, our would-be president will focus in on the campaign to drag us into yet another Mideast war— this time to bring down Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria....
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Imagining the West
“The curious have observed that the progress of humane literature (like the sun) is from the East to the West. . .” —Nathaniel Ames As both a reality and an interpretive problem, the American West has retained its long-established hold on the attention of our scholars. And the same is true of Western American literature:...
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Double Down: Illegal Aliens and Crime
For too long now I have heard that illegal immigrants are not criminals and that they have come to America only to work. Not really. Whether or not they want to work, they have already committed a crime by illegally entering the United States. I am still naive enough to think that national sovereignty should...
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A Most Consequential Presidency
As Donald Trump is about to be nominated for a second term, how his presidency has already altered the orientation of his party is on display. Under Trump, the GOP ceased to be a party of small government whose yardstick of success was how close it came to a balanced budget. Trump signed on, this...
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Cast-iron Man
John C. Calhoun is perhaps the most hated historical figure in modern America. There may be others who offer more succinct and intuitive criticisms of America’s institutional decay; many have led stronger movements for reform and challenged the ruling establishment in ways more forceful than he did. But in the scholarly world, where historians and...
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South Africa—Yesterday and Today
“The trouble with people is not their ignorance. It is the number of things they know that ain’t so.” —Mark Twain During 1986, the fury of the left’s outrage with human rights in Chile abated globally and was redirected against South Africa. The reasons given were the vestiges of the apartheid system and an alleged...
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California Crash
“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-a, wipeout.” —The Surfaris Maybe we just had it too great out here in California. Perfect weather. World-class universities. High-paying middle-class jobs. Reasonably priced housing. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. The Beach Boys. California girls. Hollywood. Disneyland. Now the state is crumbling fast into the ocean. Still can’t beat the weather—until unemployment forces you to move to...
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The Curious Career of Billy the Kid
For most of the 19th century, the American West was a fairly tranquil place. The myths of Hollywood and the wishful thinking of certain revisionist historians notwithstanding, throughout the region, for every gunfighter there were a hundred stockbrokers, and for every outlaw, ten-thousand farmers. The West was urban as much as rural, settled as a...
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Science and Religion
I gather that the Texas Board of Education has done something commendable, but I don’t know exactly what because the Washington Post (my source) was too busy deploring it to describe it. I assume it was something great because it reduced the Post to stammering incoherence. “Unbelievable” was only the beginning; “worse than silly ....
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True Love Ways
For the past 40 years, Rockford’s Midtown district has seen more downs than ups. Centered on Seventh Street from First Avenue to Broadway, southeast of the main part of downtown, Midtown—once a bustling commercial and cultural center at the heart of a Swedish neighborhood—was, for far too long, a haven for prostitution and drug use. ...
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The War Years
World War II seems both near and far away. In one sense, it seems like only yesterday that I was 17 years old, in uniform, and in Georgia and California. In another sense, that period is ancient history. We have traversed a century or more in human experience since the early 1940’s. The conflict was...
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Gabriel’s Horn
Surely, no American city has endured such a history of disaster as Charleston, set beguilingly beside the Atlantic upon her fragile spit of earth between the Ashley and Cooper rivers. Fires, floods, epidemics, blockades, sieges, bombardments, hurricanes, and earthquakes have repeatedly scarred her, but arguably the great Charleston earthquake of 1886 was the most destructive...
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Government of the People
The doctrine of states’ rights has returned to the American political scene. Leftist and liberal governors have been dusting off the arguments of John C. Calhoun and echoing the speeches of Strom Thurmond in preparation for their defiance of the national government. The battle is being fought on several grounds. In Massachusetts, the fight is...
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Revolution and the American Mind
“The world has never had a good definition of liberty.” —Abraham Lincoln Food lines lengthen in Moscow; show trials continue in Beijing; bicycles replace motor vehicles in Havana. As the Warsaw Pact and Berlin Wall crumble, so does the standing of Mao and Che, even on college campuses. The closing of this millennium may not...
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American Delusions
“And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie . . .” —2 Thessalonians 2:11 American public life thrives on delusions treated as facts: *That you can have a First World economy and military with a Third World population. *That the U.S. government, which has almost unlimited access...
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Love and Hate in Dixie
“I will never be able to hold her again, but I forgive you.” So said Nadine Collier, who lost her mother in the massacre at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, offering forgiveness to Dylann Roof, who confessed to the atrocity that took the lives of nine churchgoers at that Wednesday night prayer...
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From the Family of the Lion
“There is a kind of revolution of so general a character that it changes the tastes as well as the fortunes of the world.” —La Rochefoucauld There is a popular myth of Abraham Lincoln, our 16th President, that is known to most Americans. According to the orthodox version of this highly sympathetic construct, Lincoln was...
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Universities and Students of South America
By 1921, a few years after the Bolshevik revolution, students at Argentine universities had begun to agitate for equal rights with professors and were demanding the same rights for the cleaning staff. It sounds like the spring of 1968 in Paris and Columbia University, but in South America it was old stuff by then. Students...
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Amnesty, for the Record
It is not a stretch, perhaps, to regard the Senate vote of over two thirds (68-32) in favor of a mass amnesty of illegal immigrants as signaling the eclipse of the historic American people, those brave and liberty-loving folk who created the United States out of a continental wilderness. The bill has the Orwellian title...
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The Neo-Ottoman Empire
Contrary to Washington’s official rhetoric, the U.S. government is an ally, not an opponent, of Islamic extremism—a foe, not a defender, of Western civilization. Not since the Turkish siege of Vienna (1526) has Europe faced the threat of a Muslim occupation of significant portions of the continent; it does so now because of the foreign...
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Man, Man, and Again Man
“Qualis aitifex pereo” -Nero I cannot remember a time when I was not what would be called an environmentalist. I spent much of my childhood on an earth unconstricted by concrete streets and unburdened by the weight of buildings. I was never happier than when I was out fishing with my father or picking berries...
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A Strange Career
C. Vann Woodward, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and a contributing editor to The New Republic, is the leading liberal historian of the South. For three decades his encyclopedic knowledge and detailed historical investigations have produced works that have set the pattern for subsequent historians. Woodward accepts the title “liberal,” if somewhat...
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A Local Globalist
“But they who shared with me my life’s adventure. Who tossed their ducats like dandelions into the sunlight, I know that somewhere they with songs are building, Golden Towers more beautiful than my own.” —”Golden Symphony” Here we have a series of books—two more are planned—that restore to view the literary career of John Gould...
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Lincoln and God
Before the first shots were fired in the U.S. Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln had begun to style himself as an instrument of the Lord. But as William H. Herndon, a law partner and Lincoln biographer, wrote, “[t]he very idea that he was in the hands of an invisible, irresistible, ...
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Outgrowing the Past
When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Kelo v. City of New London, a chill wind blew across the rural South. The Court upheld the decision of the city fathers of New London, Connecticut, to grant a private development corporation the right to condemn a middle-income residential neighborhood, evict the property owners,...
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Normal Germans, Nervous Europeans
The saga of Europe’s debt crisis can be dispiriting for anyone interested in the future of the Old Continent. There is, however, another, perhaps larger story lurking beneath the tales of billions and bond yields, and that is the story of Germany’s changing role. Although French President Nicolas Sarkozy gladly rushes toward any camera or...
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The Discarded Image
Mitch Landrieu and his growing coalition of disgruntled minorities and public-school-educated leftists give us an idea of where a divided, majority-ruled America is heading. In May, the mainstream media sacrificed valuable airtime and column space normally devoted to unsourced White House leaks to laud the New Orleans mayor’s effort to remove four monuments to the...
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Zora Neale Hurston’s White Mare
When novelist Zora Neale Hurston died penniless in a Florida nursing home in 1960, she was buried in a charity cemetery in an unmarked grave, an ironic resting place for a talented American writer and folklorist who, by all accounts, was a dazzling and memorable personality. Though her success had never been more than modest,...
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Be Angry at the Sun
Peace is busting out all over, and along with the prospect of peace comes the debate over how to spend the so-called “peace dividend,” supposing there is such a dividend. The administration doesn’t think there is, and Secretary of Defense Cheney has warned against spending the money saved on defense until it is in the...
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More Hand-Wringing About the Radical Right
In A World After Liberalism, Matthew Rose displays an excellent prose style, but his ideas about the so-called radical right are unrealistic, inconsistent, and not well-grounded in a historical understanding of liberalism.
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Melting Down Art and History
After the Civil War, former North Carolina governor Zeb Vance became a U.S. senator. His Northern colleagues enjoyed his affable nature and sense of humor, and some of them invited him to Massachusetts during a break in government business. While there, Vance attended a party, and eventually required a visit to the outhouse, where his...
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After the Deluge (Review: Immigration and the American Future)
It should be obvious to anyone who has taken the slightest trouble to examine the immigration question that America is faced not with an immigration “problem,” or even a “crisis,” but with a massive ...
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The Constitution, R.I.P.
On July 22 of this year, the Washington Times published, as the weekly installment of its “Civil War” section, a long article by a gentleman named Mackubin Thomas Owens, described as “professor of strategy and force planning” at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, under the headline, “Secession’s apologists gut Constitution, history.” The...
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Trump and the GOP Border War
In the 2016 race, June belonged to two outsiders who could not be more dissimilar. Bernie Sanders is a socialist senator from Vermont and Donald Trump a celebrity capitalist and legendary entrepreneur and builder. What do they have in common? Both have tapped into what the bases of their respective parties believe is wrong with...
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‘International Chaos’—Connect the Dots to Biden
Biden's retreat from leadership is in keeping with his long-standing policies and example, with predictable results on the international scene.
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Diseconomies of Scale
“Free trade,” like “free love,” is a beguiling abstraction that hides more than it reveals. Absolute free trade would be an exchange of commodities between two people without the coercive intervention of a third party. But economic exchange is always embedded in a cultural landscape of noneconomic values, which impose restraints. Blue laws prevent trade...
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History and the Mime
Emperor, directed by Peter Webber, 2012, 98 minutes Hyde Park on Hudson, directed by Roger Mitchell, 2012, 94 minutes Anything not older than a half century past is not history but current events, a fact often lost on Hollywood. So perhaps we should be grateful for these two interesting though flawed dramatizations of the World...
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Will Justice Amy Star in ‘The Five’?
By nominating Federal Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, Donald Trump kept his word, and more than that. Should she be confirmed, he will have made history. Even his enemies would have to concede that Trump triumphed where his Republican predecessors—even Ronald Reagan, who filled three court vacancies—fell short. Trump’s achievement—victory in the...
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Lincoln, the Leiber Code, and Total War
The American Civil War was an unparalleled tragedy for the United States and the world. For it ensured that, thereafter, civilians everywhere were treated as “legitimate” targets in time of war. As in all wars, the victor wrote the official history of the conflict to extol its virtue and to demonize its opponent. Unlike in...
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A Not So Wonderful Life
“To us your good Samaritan was a fool to risk the security of his family to help a stranger.” —Joey Tai in Michael Cimino’s Year of the Dragon It has been more than a year since we put out the March 1989 number of Chronicles, “A Nation of Immigrants,” in which it was suggested that...
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What the Editors Are Reading
I’ve at times found the great English writer and apologist G.K. Chesterton wearisome for his seemingly unending parade of paradoxes, some of which strike me as the discovery of paradoxes for paradox’s sake. Yet paradox, as Peter Kreeft notes in his Foreword to ABCs of the Christian Life: The Ultimate Anthology of the Prince of...
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Cruising the Amazon
“Here the people could stand it no longer, And complained of the long voyage.”—Christopher Columbus Vacations follow fashion, like everything else, and now cruising is back. Full employment, cheap oil, a flush Wall Street—the problem is what to spend it on. And think of the Titanic. Never mind that it sank....
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Europe Is Not What It Seems
It would be logical for me to say that, returning to the United States after another four months this summer and fall in various countries of Europe, east and west, I found a great many misconceptions about the continent in American media and public opinion. Yet it would not be fair to limit myself to...
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Back to Barbarism
Much of the bioregional vision should appeal to conservative sentiments. As the pitiful remnant of America’s agrarian culture again falls victim to drought and depression, the bioregionalists call for a return to the land, a reconstruction of self-sufficient farm life, and a reverence toward the soil as the organic bond of human generations. As Ortega...
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The Executioner’s Tale
This “celebration” of his intense love affair with America will not likely teach Norman Podhoretz’s devotees anything new. For the most part, it incorporates material that can be found in earlier autobiographical writings and in Podhoretz’s other published recollections about life in New York literary circles. My Love Affair With America includes an extended description...