“Thou shalt not portray a white male in an heroic light.” Thus reads the first commandment of the politically correct. Ever since the late 1960’s, the cultural Marxists have been engaged in a drive to destroy American heroes—if they are white males. This was not always a difficult task. Historians from an earlier generation had...
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,...
“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),...
When Chronicles asked me to provide a refutation of Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission report (“Rejecting the ‘Proposition Nation,’” April/May 2021), I knew it would be controversial. I was right. Michael Anton wrote a lengthy rebuttal at American Greatness (“Americans Unite,” May 1, 2021). I don’t mind Anton circling the wagons to defend his friends. That is admirable. That said, his...
As I write this at the end of April, the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia is in its fourth week. Albania—predictably—has been turned into a NATO base, and the Kosovo Liberation Army is openly recruiting volunteers in NATO countries, including the United States, where both U.S.-born Albanians and Albanian resident aliens are allowed to join the...
The Democrats picked Jim Webb to offer their response to the President’s State of the Union Address for the same reason they anointed him to face Republican Sen. George Allen in the November 2006 election: his opposition to the war in Iraq, which is bolstered by his surpassing valor in Vietnam. The risible aspect of...
After nearly two decades of paleoconservative criticism, complaints, and general grousing about the ideological hegemony of the neoconservatives, the establishment press finally began to notice the existence of the latter. Between the time of President Bush’s factually flawed “Axis of Evil” State of the Union Address in 2002 and the “end” of the war with...
From the August 2013 issue of Chronicles. 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. ...
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...
By the middle of the second month of the Republican Revolution, acute observers were beginning to see that the revolution might actually go somewhere if only the Republicans were not in charge of it. Aside from such irritating contretemps as the revelations of Speaker Newt Gingrich’s book deal, his instantaneous dumping of historian Christina Jeffrey...
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...
The American short story is moribund. The passing of giants (Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, John O’Hara, Irwin Shaw, Peter Taylor) has relegated the form to the purgatory of academic hackdom and its innumerable ideological ax-grinders paying homage to a plethora of multicultural grievances. In the 1980’s, we had a short story “renaissance” of sorts (so,...
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...
The demands of life are endlessly self-contradictory. It is a supreme compliment in intellectual life, for example, to be called original; but it can be alarming to discover something—so alarming that people have been known to turn tail and run when they do. To take a philosophical instance: Leibniz, as Bertrand Russell tells in his...
We were on the practice field preparing for a team that ran the option. Our scout team was running the upcoming opponent’s offense. To our surprise, the scouts executed the option perfectly, which left our outside linebacker frozen halfway between the quarterback, cutting off the block of a tight end, and a trailing halfback arcing...
Maybe because the Sage Brush Rebellion coincided with the energy boom of the late 70’s and early 80’s when Western industrialists and developers were firmly in the saddle, its rhetoric rarely, if ever, achieved the intensity that Rocky Mountain politicians and other public spokesmen have used in denouncing the Clinton administration’s efforts to redesign the...
“Fox populi.” —Anonymous No public figure in American history is more inscrutable than Abraham Lincoln. While this is in some measure due to his extraordinary deftness as a politician, it is primarily the result of his astounding success in refounding the Republic in his own image. So thoroughly did Lincoln reform our collective historical and...
Charity. Old version: Open-handedness toward our neighbour in need. New version: Getting the government to spend other people’s money on politically favoured groups, at home and abroad. All Men are Created Equal OV: We are all made in the image of God and deserve respect. (Besides, an Englishman over here is just ...
“An excellent scholar! One that hath a head filled with calves’ brains without any sage in it.” —John Webster Thomas Sowell has become a virtual one-man publishing industry, and Preferential Policies is his latest contribution to the Sowell book-of-the-year club. It is not surprising to find that this scattered and woefully disorganized potboiler is part...
Speaking to 1,000 of the overprivileged at an LGBT fundraiser, where the chairs ponied up $250,000 each and Barbra Streisand sang, Hillary Clinton gave New York’s social liberals what they came to hear. “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” smirked Clinton to cheers and laughter....
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...
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...
“As long as virtue was dominant in the republic so long was the happiness of the people secure.” —Robert E. Lee John P. Diggins raises various, often profound, questions about the moral foundations of America as a political society. Diggins is fond of calling attention to what he considers the underlying cultural tensions in American...
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....
“The Jews” stand in people’s minds for so many things that you can find their despisers in places where there are not many Jews around to hate—or even enough to attract much attention to begin with. Take, for example, that outlying fringe of the settled world, New Zealand, where I spent last summer (winter in...
Does the United States Constitution still exist? There is one simple way to answer this question. Read any article or section of the 200-year-old document written to provide the citizens of a free republic with a short and simple guide to what their government can and cannot do and ask whether the language you have...
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...
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...
Our once-sovereign nation has become nothing more than a morbidly obese cash cow for what the Biden administration now openly calls the "liberal world order."
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...
At the heart of Barack Obama’s “Patriotism Tour” speech (discussed recently by Dr. Fleming and Dr. Trifkovic) lies the concept of credal nationhood. In the previous two installments of “Church and Nation,” I have mentioned that credal nationhood makes no sense whatsoever without reference to the state, because the promotion of credal nationhood has always...
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...
In his engaging biography of John C. Calhoun, Irving H. Bartlett reminds us that American political culture and the men who made it were not always as decadent and corrupt as they are today. Yet Bartlett’s book is not a partisan manifesto. He is respectful of Calhoun but not always sympathetic to his views, aspirations,...
According to the latest opinion poll, published on July 16, President Putin’s approval rating among different segments of Russia’s electorate has risen to an unprecedented 66 percent. This may change quickly, however, if he comes to be perceived as weak and indecisive in handling the next stage of the Ukrainian crisis – the one that...
“Here in North Dakota, people vote Republican for president or for local offices because they’re seen as the white party,” North Dakota State University political science professor David Danbom told me. “But they’ll vote for the Democrats for Congress and some local offices to look after their economic interests in Washington or here at home.”...
It took 114 years, but by 2000, Virginia had become a Republican state. What brought about such a great change in the Old Dominion? Let’s take a look back. Reconstruction was the low point of Virginia history. In 1865, a defeated and gutted state lost not only its cities, towns, farms, and one third of...
Chronicles readers may recall my “Old Route 66” (September 2013) and “Keep the Water on Your Right” (February 2015) motorcycle travelogues, in which I rode through small towns and rural areas to reconnect with the land and people of America. A road trip can do this like no other kind of journey, and doing one...
The stock market is over 10,000, Michael Kinsley exhorted Pat Buchanan recently, and so America can do as it likes internationally in the exercise of the U.S. mega-military machine that Madeleine Albright has been slavering, throughout her Foggy Bottom years, to activate. America, according to journalistic convention, is fat, happy, and content, having arrived finally...
I was in seventh grade, and we were downstate for the annual Bible Bowl. Our little fundamentalist school fielded a team every year. We were the most conservative of fundamentalists, which mean that we were King James Only (affectionately KJVO). Along with soulwinning and no syncopation, KJVO was proof to the world that we were...
Brenda Wineapple’s new biography of the most brilliant flower of the New England Renaissance reminded me that it was time to reread Hawthorne. She delineated the man very well, got his politics almost right, but barely did justice to his work. Writing in 1847, ten years after the publication of Hawthorne’s first collection of stories,...
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. ...
Mark Peterson’s new book traces the development of Boston from its founding in 1630 to the end of the American Civil War. In large part the book is a biography of the city, but from the unique perspective of Boston as a city-state and a commonwealth Peterson calls “remarkable for its autonomy, including an independent...
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...
“October Revolution” is probably an apt description of Canada’s 1993 parliamentary elections, as the month marked the enthronement of a left-oriented political establishment and the ejection of the ruling Conservatives. The Liberal Party’s sweep to an absolute majority meant the relegation of the Tory Progressive Conservative Party to virtual extinction (it now holds only two...
In a classic book of humor entitled The Experts Speak, we find an impressive collection of failed prophecies and wildly inaccurate predictions: Television would never catch on, nobody needs a personal computer, and so on. I occasionally think there might be a place for a parallel volume of religious forecasts gone stunningly wrong. Such an...
The American political divide is no longer between Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, religionists and secularists. It is between roughly two halves of the country, each of which would be perfectly happy to see the other wiped, by violence if necessary, from the face of the earth. That was not how the North and...
or Why the Best Training for a Novelist in These Last Years of the 20th Century is an Internship at Bellevue or Cook County Hospital, and How This Training Best Prepares Him for Diagnosing T.S. Eliot’s ‘Waste Land’ But let us speak of vocations. What one ends up doing with one’s life is surely one...
The political situation in Serbia is both unprecedented and unexpected. No analyst had predicted, three or four months ago, that the election on May 11 would result in such impressive gains by the Democratic Party (Demokratska ...
The Last Samurai is the latest movie to treat us to the spectacle of the U.S. Army slaughtering American Indian women and children. Playing a disillusioned captain, Tom Cruise suffers from nightmares for his role in the dastardly deed. He finds honor and redemption as a Great White Samurai in Japan. Many movie reviewers have...
How a people as addicted to novelty as the modern American public can remain indifferent to an experience restricted to the last three or four of the thousands of human generations, drawing their airplane window shades to watch a movie or study an organizational chart, is—or ought to be—a subject of major interest to the...