Many conservatives insist that some distant, long-past event supposedly causes all our current woke silliness. I call this the "inverted Whig interpretation of history."
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Birth of a Non-Nation
In the United States, liberation from foreign domination and liberation from the past (the republican and democratic features of government) were largely the result of the American Revolution, which was spontaneous in origin, successful, moderate in its outcome, and—above all—supported by a considerable part of the population. This fortunate historical experience may lead many Americans...
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Old Route 66
Now, I’m a poor Oakie and I’m heading out west. I’m pulling a long trailer and my car’s doing its best. We hit a long mountain and she began to boil. She blew a head gasket and it started dripping oil. The wheels is out of balance, she shimmies and she shakes. But it keeps...
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Do We Not Have Enough Enemies?
Asked bluntly by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos if he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin is “a killer,” Joe Biden answered, “Uh, I do.” Biden added that he once told Putin to his face that he had “no soul.” Biden also indicated that new sanctions would be imposed on Russia for the poisoning of dissident Alexei Navalny...
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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, and inevitable deaf power which...
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A Story of the Days to Come
Early in December of last year, while President-elect Clinton was trying to come up with a Cabinet that would “look more like America,” the U.S. Census Bureau published a report that told us what America really looks like and what it will probably look like 60 years from now. Presumably, Mr. Clinton will have departed...
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No Other Epitaph
Written documents should be interpreted with an eye toward discerning the intent of the author. When the Constitution of the United States is the text under consideration, the relevant intentions are those of the men who drafted and ratified the document. This proposition reflects a long-established canon of construction: common-law judges as far back as...
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The Struggle for the Gate of Tears
Houthi attacks on Israeli allied vessels in the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait are disrupting the world economy and prompting the U.S. to intervene. Known as "The Gate of Tears," this strait is the gateway for much of the world's commerce.
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The Quandry of Tribal Sovereignty
Native American resistance, resilience, and perseverance remain prevalent. The limits of Native American sovereignty remain mysterious.
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Tracts Against Capitalism
Peaceful Valley is a bucolic residential neighborhood in Clemson, South Carolina. The middle-class homeowners who live there are not land speculators hoping to turn a profit. Many are like Kathleen Dickel, a 50-year-old high-school German teacher, who owns a two-story contemporary house with a deck surrounded on two sides by deep woods. Kathleen stained the...
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The Real American Dilemma
This remarkable editorial by Chronicles’ longest-serving editor offered one of the first and best analyses of America’s immigration problem.
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What the Editors Are Reading: January 2021
First the crazies tore down statues they deemed offensive. Next they vandalized churches. Then they demanded trigger warnings on classic movies like Gone with the Wind and Blazing Saddles. If these monsters ever discover libraries, books will be next. Let me suggest you hoard copies of William McNeill’s The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963) before...
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On Reparations
Philip Jenkins is certainly right about the rising trajectory of demands for reparations for slavery (“For What We Have Done, and What We Have Failed to Do,” Vital Signs, November 2000). I hope, but am doubtful, that he is also right about the potential of this gambit for exposing the root absurdity of liberal social...
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Fruitless Grain
The great American story for at least 100 years has been a tale like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman Major Molineux”: the rube who comes to the city and loses his innocence. Like Jack in the fairy tale, we are eager to trade in the family cow for a chance to...
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Bob Mathias
One of the greatest Olympians of all time, Bob Mathias, is all but forgotten today. He was born in 1930 in Tulare, in the heart of California’s San Joaquin Valley. Robert Bruce Mathias was his name, but everyone called him Bob. Bob had extraordinary coordination from infancy onward. Although plagued by anemia, which caused him...
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China’s Future: Ascendency or Fragmentation?
As the American Empire declines, many see the People’s Republic of China, with its dynamic economy and powerful military, surpassing the United States and emerging as the new world power. The reality is more complex, and China’s future more uncertain. According to one set of statistics, China has seen impressive economic growth as a result...
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Space Art
“The land of the heart is the land of the West.” Catholic readers of American literature have always recognized that the difference between Eastern and Western fiction is the difference between New Canaan, Connecticut, and Tuba City, Arizona. A. Carl Bredahl’s book is a comprehensive as well as original attempt at defining the nature, of...
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Is Biden Right? Does the Left Own the Future?
Before he appeared at his first solo news conference of 2022, President Joe Biden knew he had a communications problem he had to deal with. Namely, how to get off the defensive. How to avoid spending his time with the White House press corps defending his decisions and explaining his actions as allegations of failure,...
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George Gissing in Rome
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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A Drought in Leadership
California has been living off its legacy of water projects for the last several decades like a lazy, self-indulgent, trust-fund recipient.
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Media More Dishonest Than SPLC
Whatever the wisdom of Pamela Geller’s Mohammed cartoon event in Garland, Texas — and there’s much not to like about it, as Chronicles executive editor, Scott Richert, wrote of Charlie Hebdo’s repulsive fare after the massacre at the magazine’s office — one thing ought not be forgotten: No matter what kind of event Geller had...
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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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Republicanism, Monarchy, and the Human Scale of Politics
The Founding Fathers had to face hard and unprecedented questions about the size and scale of a political order. They occupied a vast region, and conventional wisdom said that such could only be governed by monarchy. They were determined to be republicans, however, and the conventional wisdom was that republics had to be small. The...
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We’ll Get Him Next Time
After two years and tens of millions of dollars, the Mueller investigation ended in a shattering anticlimax for Democrats. On March 22, Special Counsel Robert Mueller sent Attorney General William Barr his report, and Barr promptly informed Congress that Mueller found no collusion between Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. Mueller recommended no prosecutions—though Barr’s...
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Good Lovers Are Dead Lovers
Charley Bland, as his father describes him, would have been a prodigal son except he never had the gumption to leave home. Still, he has the charm most lost souls have, and for the widowed, 35-year-old narrator of Mary Lee Settle’s eleventh novel, returned home to West Virginia from a Bohemian life in Europe, this...
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Blood Relations
In 1840, when Edgar Allan Poe wrote the first modern detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” an unsuspecting public scarcely realized it was witnessing the birth of a new genre that would actually become the most ecumenical of all literary forms. Since Poe’s time, the detective story has flourished among readers of every...
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On Paleoconservatism
Although I agree with most of the ideas expressed in your round table “What Is Paleoconservatism?” (Views, January), I believe it is a serious mistake to call this persuasion by such a name. The liberals must love you for so hobbling yourselves. To the average person, the name brings one of two things to mind:...
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Rule by Assassination
“Justice has been done,” chortles President Obama and his spokespeople. ”Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, good bye,” chanted the proles on the streets of New York. There are already T-shirts on sale saying “Obama got Osama.” I am surprised not to have heard of a procession of little people in...
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The Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan
Hoping to bolster its geopolitical position, a great power sends troops to Afghanistan and installs a puppet leader. That leader has little authority with the influential tribal chieftains and insufficient means to buy their complicity. Resistance soon grows into a full-blown insurgency, which leads to harsh reprisals by the occupying forces. The vicious circle becomes...
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“Little Democracies”: The Disunification of Italy
I’ve been sent on a fool’s errand: to explain Italian politics. As those of you who have spent extended periods of time in the “Mediterranean boot” know, this is a challenging task. Understanding it requires doggedness—and a bit of masochism, too—given the internecine struggles for power and influence, the political divisions, intrigue, and tensions that...
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The Seminole Slavery Story
Despite repeated claims to the contrary by American elites, slavery is not a uniquely American, or even a uniquely white enterprise. Peoples of all nations and colors have engaged in the institution throughout history. One such example is easily found in the compelling history of the Seminole people. Joseph Cotto, of Cotto/Gottfried podcast fame, has self-published an...
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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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Out of Whole Cloth
Satan’s Silence is critical for understanding current debates over issues as diverse as feminism, the social position of children, the growth of therapeutic values and beliefs, and the status of American civil liberties. This might seem hyperbolic, but only to those who have escaped the recent clamor over the supposed epidemic of ritual and Satanic...
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As a City Upon a Hill
“A steady Patriot of the World alone, The friend of every country — but his own.” -George Canning John Crewdson: The Tarnished Door: The New Immigrants and the Transformation of America; Times Books; New York. Victor Ripp: Moscow to Main Street: Among the Russian Emigres; Little, Brown; Boston. Lewis A. Coser:...
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Listen My Children
Sometimes you wonder. Having been told by a Democrat that if we had “screwed up” at Saratoga we would today have national health insurance, I suppressed a number of reactions that came to mind by deciding to start smoking again. One was to suggest that if anyone needed health insurance, it could easily be obtained....
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The Declaration of Independence and Philosophic Superstitions
It is common among our political elites and pundits to link the Declaration of Independence with Abraham Lincoln, who found in it the ground and telos of the American nation: the Enlightenment doctrine that all individuals are endowed with rights that precede and are independent of any political society. To define these rights, we must...
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D.C. Vampires Devouring U.S. Economy
Check out the following chart of Real Median Household Income, which declined 9 percent nationally from 1999 to 2012. Find your state’s decline and meet me below. Notice the place at the top of list, which had no decline in Real Median Household...
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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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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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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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Chinese Exclusion
Five years ago, the California state legislature voted to apologize to the Chinese for former laws that discriminated against them, including the federal government’s Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which California congressmen championed. The apology bill was sponsored by state assembly members Paul Fong and Kevin de León. Fong said he was not planning on...
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Gnostic Epiphanies
Cormac McCarthy, 56-years-old, is the author of five published novels, which between them have sold approximately fifteen thousand copies in the original hardcover editions, published by Random House. (The Ecco Press, in New York City, is maintaining these titles in print in paperback.) Born in Rhode Island, reared in Tennessee, and traveled in Europe, McCarthy...
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Forty Years After
Americans have grown fond of celebrating anniversaries of one kind or another. I first noticed this new habit during the national thrombosis over the Statue of Liberty back in 1986, but more recently the habit has swollen into something like an epidemic. In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, we have endured the anniversaries of...
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The Cowardice of ‘Patriotic Courage’
That Donald Trump bothered to challenge the official outcome of the November 2020 election was an annoyance to a number of congressional Republicans, representatives and senators alike. Remarks issued on Jan. 6 by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell as the Senate was about to confirm the election of Joe Biden reflect these views: We cannot...
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2024: A Chaotic Year in Review
A noteworthy year full of developments in world affairs leaves us wary of the evil they reveal, and hopeful that this evil will never triumph.
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Egypt: Tips for Serious Travelers
My “Letter from Egypt,” with a comprehensive analysis of the country’s political, economic and social situation is coming in a few days’ time. For starters, let me present our readers with a few practical tips on how to make the most of this incredible country without spending many thousands of dollars/euros and without being herded...
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Judge Roy Moore vs. the ACLU
The American Civil Liberties Union is suing Roy S. Moore, the Etowah County (Alabama) Circuit Judge, for having the Ten Commandments on the wall of his courtroom and for beginning each session with a prayer, on the usual grounds that a “wall of separation” stands between government and religion. Judge Moore agrees—up to a point....
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What I Did on My Vacation
Last August found our family on a blue highway tour of the Northeast, angling across some of the remoter parts of central Pennsylvania and upstate New York to Lake Champlain, crossing on the ferry for a few days in Vermont. From Vermont, we nipped up to Montreal to extend fraternal greetings to the Quebec secessionists....
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Mexican in Name Only
For several years, Charles Truxillo, a professor at the University of New Mexico, has been proclaiming that the American Southwest will—and should—be reconquered by Mexico through massive immigration. Most politicians and media have either ignored Truxillo or tried to characterize him as an isolated extremist, claiming that most Mexican immigrants have no political agenda and...