The Greek and Roman classics had a great influence on George Gissing, not least because the literature and history of antiquity provided him with a kind of refuge from the grim realities of the modern industrial and commercial world. Gissing was a highly cultivated man who was at home in several foreign languages—French, Italian, Spanish,...
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The Political Vocation
In his book on declining social morality and the transformations of liberal ideology, Brad Stetson goes after deserving targets. He unmasks the liberalism that holds the media, universities, and the publishing industry in thrall and stresses the will to total domination that accompanies liberal concerns about racism, sexism, self-actualization, and the costs of low self-esteem....
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The Bombast and Glory of William Jennings Bryan
For three decades, William Jennings Bryan streaked across the sky of American politics, his brightness never fading despite countless failures. Renowned for his zealous Christian faith, he appropriately expired immediately after his final and most glorious defeat, at the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925. In A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan, author...
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Environmentalism, Culture, and Politics
The following remarks are excerpted and arranged from a series of letters exchanged between Ed Marston, publisher of the environmentalist newspaper in Paonia, Colorado, High Country News, and Chilton Williamson, Jr., of Chronicles, in response to questions posed by Mr. Williamson during January and February 1996. Does a traditional Western culture exist today, and are...
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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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A Torch that Had to Be Drowned
There comes a time when a man must put away his boyhood infatuation with professional sports, especially when they have been so profoundly marred by money interests and woke politics.
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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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The Post-Marxist Left’s Race Problem
A recurrent theme in Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980) is how the prospect of a coalition between poor blacks and poor whites has often struck fear in the hearts of the wealthy classes in American history. Not surprisingly, Zinn longed for the emergence of an interracial coalition that, in his...
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His Truth Is Marching On
Like most “whose hearts pump Confederate blood,” Chilton Williamson, Jr., in lamenting the failure of Dixie’s attempt at secession (“The Revenge of the Confederacy,” What’s Wrong With the World, January), neglects to address the elephant in the bed. That critter is, of course, slavery, the “peculiar institution” at the core of what Williamson sees as...
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Biblical Values—or Vegas Values?
Almost all of the declared and undeclared Republican candidates for 2016 could be found this weekend at one of two events, or both. The first was organized by the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition, and held in Point of Grace Church in Waukee. Dominated by Evangelical Christians, who were 60 percent of Republican caucus-goers in...
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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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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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Remembering Cleanth Brooks
Cleanth Brooks, one of the giants of literary criticism, died last May 10. He was 87 years old. He taught thousands of us how to read a poem or a story. Some he taught over a half-century by way of the classroom, some in his numerous public lectures across this country and abroad, and many...
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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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On Celebrity
I must take up computer and mouse in indignation. How could you include Elvis on your “celebrity” cover? What possessed you to put the King amongst a group of the world’s great sleazeballs? And at the head of the table? Have you no shame, gentlemen? True, the King was famous, and true, in his latter...
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Going Back to Charleston
The United States were once precisely that, a union of unique and independent states—each making its own literary and intellectual contribution to the national experience. Of these states, none was so peculiar as South Carolina, and for much of its intellectual history, South Carolina was Charleston. In the generation before The War, Charleston was in...
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An American Family Covenant
“I used to say to my father,” he says, “‘If my class at Yale ran this country, we would have no problems.’ And the irony of my life is that they did.” —Louis Auchincloss, interview with Trevor Butterworth, Financial Times, September 21, 2007 In January (one year after his death at the age of 92),...
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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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True Grit
A remark one often hears from the current crop of film critics is that John Wayne might indeed merit the iconographic status conferred on him by tens of millions of ordinary cinemagoers around the world, were it not for the troubling matter of his alleged evasion of military service during World War II—an issue, it...
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Pragmatic Destruction
Greek writers, and writers coming after them for the next 2,000 years, attributed the short life and violent end of democratic governments to democracy’s infallible tendency toward demagoguery and the dispossession of the wealthy and educated by the poor and ignorant. Tocqueville thought democracy’s fatal weakness to be uniformity of thought and opinion, and 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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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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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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Moldovan Elections: A Deadlock on Europe’s Periphery
Occupying some two thirds of the old czarist province of Bessarabia, with the rivers Dniester to the east and Prut to the west, the Republic of Moldova is a small, poor, landlocked state. Its parliamentary election, held on November 28, should have been irrelevant to anyone except the faraway country’s three and a half million...
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The Attraction Offshore
With the government seizing at least half our incomes each year and the “multi-diversity” crowd sowing seeds of anger and disunity that could well lead to civil war down the road, I hear more and more people talking of places to relocate themselves and their capital: New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, and Costa Rica. And Chile....
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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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Yankee Slavers
“Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil.” —Edmund Burke The better part of a century ago, the great scholar A.E. Housman observed that most of the new books that came across his desk served no purpose whatever “except to interrupt our studies.” This is certainly the case today...
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Serbia Humiliated
On October 5, 2000, in an almost bloodless coup by the security forces staged against the backdrop of massive street protests, Slobodan Milosevic was removed from power in Serbia. Ten years later, many of those who cheered his downfall then (this author included) have nothing to celebrate. In the run-up to “Peti oktobar” they...
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Eyes on the Prize of Central Asia
In August, President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan announced that the capitol of the country would be moved several hundred miles north, from the green city of Almaty, where the presidential palace stands against a background of snow-capped mountains, to the bleak and windy steppes of north-central Kazakhstan, to the present city of Akmola. The official...
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A Different Drum
You turn on the radio for the weather report: “Sunny and warm today, with a high near 80. Light breeze out of the south at five miles per hour. Chance of rain less than ten percent.” Outside your window, you watch the winds rage and the rains pour. Which are you going to believe, your...
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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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Cincinnatus, Call the Office!
“ . . . a republican government, which many great writers assert to be incapable of subsisting long, except by the preservation of virtuous principles.” —John Taylor of Caroline On a summer morning in 1842, near the end of its session, the U.S. Senate was busy receiving committee reports. The Committee on the Judiciary reported...
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Nordic Conquests
In Northfield, Minnesota, St. Olaf’s College was celebrating the 17th of May—the day the sons of Norway wrote their constitution in 1814, declaring self-government and independence from Swedish rule. It was 1907, just two years after the Swedes had released Norway and Prince Carl had become Haakon VII. Thirty-one-year-old first-year instructor Ole Rölvaag gave the...
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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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Can’t Keep A Great Man Down
John Ganz focuses on American cultural and political wars during the 1990s, when two maverick candidates, Patrick J. Buchanan and H. Ross Perot, rocked the world of staid mainstream conservatism.
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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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A Book That Needs No Sequel
Rachel Maddow plays up the danger of a reemergence of America’s 1930s and 1940s domestic fascist movements to an absurd extent.
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The Cold War Never Ended
The recent invasion of South Ossetia by the U.S.-trained and -equipped Georgian army turned into a debacle for both Tbilisi and Washington. It also demonstrated that, for the U.S. government, the fall of the Soviet Union on December 8, 1991, did not mean the Cold War had ended. Washington simply shifted focus to the newly...
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Don’t Blame Calvin
In “1865: The True American Revolution” (Views, April) Claude Polin asserts that Calvinism somehow led to the division between North and South. Such an assertion is unsupportable. The main flaw lies in his defining Calvinism as built upon self-confidence that leads men “to rely exclusively on themselves to steer their lives.” The key tenet of...
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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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The Geopolitics of New Multipolarity
Excerpts from a lecture delivered at the IDC in Paris on May 27, 2014. For the French translation click HERE. For Russian, click HERE. During the Cold War, holding on to the continental rimland – from Norway, across central Europe, to Greece and Turkey – was the mainstay of America’s strategy and the rationale behind...
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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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We Were Right About Immigration
There was little critical discussion of immigration in the pre-Trump era save in the pages of paleoconservative publications such as Chronicles and Vdare. We were right and it's time to say so!
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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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Heroes in the Age of the Antihero
We Americans are in a serious quandary. Our national mythology—like the mythologies of most nations—requires us to pay tribute to the heroes of the past. Once upon a time, Fourth of July speeches routinely invoked the bravery of George Washington and his men, their sufferings at Valley Forge, and their surprise crossing of the Delaware. ...
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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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On Giving Yankees a Break
I have become resigned to the often gratuitous trashing of my Yankee heritage that is a regular feature of Chronicles. Sometimes, we even deserve it. After all, it is your magazine, and it’s a very, very good one. I cannot, however, let Clyde Wilson’s outrageous statement in “Confederate Rainbow” (Reviews, October 2001) go unchallenged. He...
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The Business of Escape
Peter Mayle has dominated the nonfiction best-seller lists in recent years with his chronicles of life in the south of France. A Year in Provence and Toujours Provence (both published in the United States in 1991) even spawned a fourpart television series, which was produced by the BBC and has run regularly on the Arts...