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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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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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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America, the Globalist Grift
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."
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Church and Nation: A Credal Nation, Part 3
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...
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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...
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Let America Be America
Donald Trump claims he will make America great again. Hillary Clinton responds that America has never quit being great. Bernie Sanders seems to have his doubts that America has ever been great, but he would be happy to try to make her so if only the American people would give him the power to make...
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Crowned With Thorns and Glory
[Jefferson Davis: Unconquerable Heart, by Felicity Allen (Columbia: University of Missouri Press) 808 pp., $34.95] “As the tug bore him away from the ship, he stood with bared head between the files of undersized German and other foreign soldiers on either side of him, and as we looked, as we thought, our last upon his...
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Reinventing America
“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...
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The Celebration of Chagall
Whimsy—clumsy or fantastic—fills the minds of those viewing the art of Marc Chagall. Two hundred oil paintings, gouaches, etchings, stained glass, and theater designs, chosen for their quality and their significance in the artist’s career, drawn from public and private collections throughout the world (including generous loans from the artist’s family), were on display at...
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Is There Hope for the Federal Courts?
In a radio address last year, President Clinton railed against congressional Republicans who were stalling on his nominees to the federal bench and had even threatened some sitting judges with impeachment. Their actions, he claimed, had endangered our tradition of judicial independence, and were an attack on the rule of law itself. The truth, of...
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Home and Abroad
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...
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The King James Bible at 400: Love’s Labor’s Lost
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...
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Deep as Dante
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,...
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El Gringo y El Mexicano
America has not been a nation for well over a century. She is more like an Indian stew: Never taken off the fire, the mess of wild carrots and fish is gradually transformed by the daily addition of squirrels and squash, birds and deer, and the odd bit of human body. By the end of...
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A Reluctant Revolutionary
Wendell Berry is a Democrat, pacifist, and critic of organized religion. Add to this the fact that he is a writer whose work has proved compelling to many conservatives, and he becomes a bit mysterious. At times Berry himself has seemed somewhat bemused by the cultural conservatives who frequently promote his work. Once we consider...
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Canadian Populism: Alive and Well
“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...
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Blazing Melons and Parmley’s Law (Rated R)
That’s right. Parental discretion advised. It’s hard to write about 20th-century culture in terms suitable for innocent ears. The other evening, some of us were sitting around the living room watching Blaze, the movie in which Paul Newman portrays Governor Earl Long of Louisiana. (If you haven’t seen this good-humored adaptation of stripper Blaze Starr’s...
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The Revenge of the Confederacy
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...
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Socialists and Democrats Will Rule Serbia
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 ...
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Groundhog Days, Javelina Nights
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...
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Resurrecting the Old Right
For those who may have noticed, I’ve been absent from this venerable magazine for more than 12 years. Upon returning, I feel obliged to give an account of what I’ve learned in the intervening time. Aside from visiting my family and doing research for several monographs, I’ve been pondering the vicissitudes of the American right....
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Father Abraham: Conservative?
The bicentenary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln has seen the publication of a host of new books and magazine articles celebrating the legacy of the 16th president. Lincoln’s popularity is probably at its highest point thus far, and Honest Abe is defended by writers on both ends of the political spectrum. Liberals have been...
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Education and Community
“Truths would you teach, or save a sinking land? All fear, none aid you, and few understand.” —Alexander Pope Poet, critic, and teacher Marion Montgomery is known to have taken a fortnight’s break from a book project in order to write another book! Ever since coming out a few years ago with the Prophetic Poet...
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Myths to Kill For
“I’ve got a little list, I’ve got a little list,” twitters the Lord High Executioner in a famous line of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, and indeed these days who doesn’t have one? Abortion protester Paul Hill seems to have had a little list of his own, and early in the morning on July 28 of...
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On American Heroes
In “A Hero Among Heroes” (Sins of Omission, March), Roger McGrath wrote, “Ever since the late 1960’s, the cultural Marxists of academe have worked assiduously to destroy American heroes.” I surely agree with him; however, he uses the term cultural Marxist, which sounds to me like an oxymoron, since Marxists have no culture in the...
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Traveler’s Tales
Coelum, non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt was Horace’s observation on the narrowing effects of travel: “Those who go across the sea change their weather but not their mind.” It is the rare tourist who gets more out of his expeditions than a confirmation of his prejudices. One of the most intelligent visitors to...
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Deformations of Justice
If a U.S. administration formally attempted to establish an authoritarian police state, its efforts would almost certainly encounter bitter and even violent resistance; recent experience, however, has shown that remarkably authoritarian and unconstitutional methods can be established without provoking serious protest, provided they are introduced piecemeal and justified by the rhetoric of good intentions. In...
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American Icons
“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...
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The Autocrat of the Dinner Table
“But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue?” —Edmund Burke Murray Rothbard was like the elephant the blind Chinamen in the story tried to describe. Everyone who knew Murray saw only one or two sides of him: There was Murray the happy warrior who campaigned for the soul of the Old Right, the New...
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The Real Cabal
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...
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Retreat From Eden
You do not need to be a reader of this column to surmise that the South of Italy is as close as one can get to Paradise without being a Nazi war criminal, in which case, needless to say, one resides in South America. We’ve got everything in Sicily, from medlars in springtime and tangerines...
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Equality or Privilege
“Everything in American politics always comes down to the race question,” says one of our collaborators. School choice plans, for example, are either condemned for enabling the white middle classes to liberate their children from the hell of public schools or praised for giving black families the prospect of sending their children to the suburbs....
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Democrats’ Big Gamble on the Border Crashers Will Pay Political Dividends
Even if the Democrats fail to bestow the franchise on illegals immediately, their beneficiaries do offer enormous near-term and long-term uses for the party.
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Bob Mathias
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. ...
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Nationalism in a Manufactured Nation
The problem with Italian nationalism is that it is a manufactured concept resting on flawed foundations. Its political class is rotten to the core and its recent election offers only a false promise of rebirth and renewal.
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Voices in the Air
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...
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Impractical Separation
An interesting debate on the right concerning the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution neglects to consider that the founder’s Constitution may no longer be our framework of government.
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Supreme Court’s Drifting Days Are Done
This scrupulously objective book may be considered a gift to conservatives who have long despaired about the possibility of principled legal tenets regularly prevailing in Supreme Court opinions. For decades this long-suffering group has watched Republican Supreme Court appointees concur in various left-wing crackpot decisions that have become the law of the land. Thankfully, such...
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Kazin and Caligula?
“Our literature is infested with a swarm of just such little people as this—creatures who succeed in creating for themselves an absolutely positive reputation, by mere dint of the continuity and perpetuality of their appeals to the public.” —E.A. Poe In our age the business of literature has become as stale and well-organized as the...
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Tom Wolfe, R.I.P.
When Tom Wolfe’s debut novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, was published in November 1987, the book was greeted with effusive praise and became a best-seller, although some literati seemed offended by Wolfe’s highly descriptive prose, the hyperbole, exuberant punctuation, and occasional sound effects. After film rights were sold for $750,000 that winter to Peter...
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“You Have To Commit!”
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...
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Tally and Record
The Immigration and Naturalization Service announced last June that to “regain control of the border” the INS will now begin to deport and possibly jail aliens and smugglers entering our country illegally. If you’re wondering whether this hasn’t been INS policy all along, think again. In the Southwest, repeat offenders have traditionally been released just...
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The White-Guilt Grifters
The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto by Charles Blow Harper Collins 256 pp., $26.99 Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson Random House 496 pp., $32.00 The verbal tics of the orthodox Marxist vocabulary in mid-20th century Europe made it virtually impossible for communists to camouflage themselves. Ex-communist author Arthur Koestler...
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Kosovo and the Albanian Drug Trade
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...
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On Crime and Vigilantism
Like Roger McGrath (“Treat Them to a Good Dose of Lead,” January 1994), I “grew up in a Los Angeles that had very little crime.” We, too, “locked the door to our house with a skeleton key, when we remembered”—until we lost the key. Professor McGrath does not attempt to account for the absence of...
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The Conservative Strikes Back
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...