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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Imposing Utopia
George W. Bush campaigned for the presidency on a pledge not to engage in the nation-building experiments that characterized the Clinton years, and, like every other president of the 20th century, he did not simply break his major promises: He did exactly the opposite. Naturally, his administration has plenty of excuses. Failing to discover those...
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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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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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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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Libyan Complications
In his latest interview with Serbia’s most-watched private TV channel, Dr. Trifkovic looks at the renewal of tensions in Libya. [Translated from Serbian, abbreviated] Q: Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has confirmed that he is sending his country’s soldiers to Libya to support the Government of National Accord in its fight against the forces...
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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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“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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Blue State Mencken
In 1989, a volume of H.L. Mencken’s journals was published. The contents revealed, among many other things, impolite utterances by the Sage of Baltimore about blacks and Jews. (Mencken also sailed into the ways of “lintheads” and “mountaineers,” but that bothered no one.) The denunciations came fast and furious. As I recall, one journalist refused...
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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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Decent Folk From Georgia
“Livin’ is like pourin’ water out of a tumbler into a dang Coca-Cola bottle. If’n you skeered you cain’t do it, you cain’t. If’n you say to yoreself, ‘By dang, I can do it!’ then, by dang, you won’t slosh a drop.” This sample of dialogue conveys something of the tone, language, and philosophy of...
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Nixon, LBJ & the First Shots in the Judges’ War
The Democrats’ drive to defeat Neil Gorsuch is the latest battle in a 50-year war for control of the Supreme Court—a war that began with a conspiracy against Richard Nixon by Chief Justice Earl Warren, Justice Abe Fortas and Lyndon Johnson. By June 1968, Nixon, having swept his primaries, was cruising to the nomination and...
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Nobody’s Bagboy
Something curious happened in South Carolina on June 10. While Sen. Lindsay Graham easily prevailed over his challenger, Buddy Witherspoon, garnering two thirds of the vote in the Republican U.S Senate primary, the Democrats (voting on the same day) chose a candidate who everyone admits is well to the right of Graham himself. Of course,...
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Forever 1965
In Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court struck down the coverage formula of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA). Under the formula, states or their political subdivisions are “covered jurisdictions” if they maintained in the 1960’s and early 70’s tests or devices (e.g., a literacy test or moral character requirement) as a prerequisite...
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Latest Rallying Cry
“Remember Jonesboro” is the latest rallying cry of the “If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere” crowd. In one sense, of course, they’re obviously correct: no town is immune to the evil influences that convince an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old to shoot and kill their fellow students. But the Jonesboro groupies are disingenuous:...
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Dead Weight
“A conservative government is an organized hypocrisy.” —Benjamin Disraeli It may speak volumes about American conservatives that David Frum’s critique of “big government conservatism” permitted William Buckley—or so Buckley claims on the dust jacket—to enjoy “the most refreshing ideological experience in a generation.” To a conservative movement led by advocates of national uplift allied with...
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A Tale of Two Withdrawals
It’s difficult to characterize President Biden’s precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan as anything but a shameful debacle. It’s also difficult to determine who was responsible for the lack of a strategic withdrawal plan. Can the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff be that incompetent or feckless if an immediate and unconditional...
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The Case Against Reparations: Part 2
With reparations, there is the issue of who pays. Do African countries owe reparations to Black Americans? After all, Harvard’s director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Henry Louis Gates, wrote that 90 percent of those enslaved and shipped to the New World were sold by Africans to European slavers. All...
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Visions of Disorder
Richard Weaver once wrote that it was difficult to perceive the decline of civilization because one of the characteristics of decline was a dulling of the perception of value, and thus of the capacity to judge the comparative worth of times. Weaver, I think, did not have us common folk in mind, for whom it...
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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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Borderlines, Part 2
Tanks make good pictures—the idea of an invasion of Ukraine sends shivers down the spines of most of Europe—and keeping the tanks at bay is what the political class is expected, indeed offers, to do. The price, however, will be for nations to surrender just about everything else. And that price is now about to...
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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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Playing Pretend With the Founding Fathers
In a remarkably disjointed, bombastic defense of “the liberal order,” C. Bradley Thompson writes in American Mind about the dangers posed by “Pajama-Boy Nietzscheans” and the supposedly surging “neo-reactionary movement on the Right.” According to Thompson, “radical Left and Right have now merged” in a virulent form of anti-Americanism—the essence of which consists of not agreeing with...
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The God With Feet of Clay
Liberty: The God That Failed is Christopher Ferrara’s second 90-caliber salvo against liberalism, left and right. His first, The Church and the Libertarian: A Defense of the Catholic Church’s Teaching on Man, Economy, and State, smashed the anti-Christian dogma of Austrian economics. This 699-page tome goes further. It will send the neocons into the corner...
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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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Nixon and Trump, Then and Now
For two years, this writer has been consumed by two subjects. First, the presidency of Richard Nixon, in whose White House I served from its first day to its last, covered in my new book, Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever. The second has been...
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Mystery and (Polack) Manners
In “The Shadow Players,” one of 12 stories in Anthony Bukoski’s most recent collection, Lance Corporal Pete Dziedzic returns to his childhood home in Superior, Wisconsin, after a four-year tour of duty in Vietnam. The year is 1967. Physically unscathed by the war, he finds himself adrift. His old girlfriend, tired of waiting for him,...
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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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More Maxims of American Life
Silence is unhealthy and un-American. Everybody has a right to talk and play their media as much as they want to, anywhere any time. Every child has the right to a quality education. A college education is the key to a well-paying job. Same-sex couples have the same right to government benefits as everybody else....
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Lincoln, Diplomacy, and War
In the tumultuous six months between his election in November 1860 and the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861, Abraham Lincoln rejected all diplomatic efforts to resolve the deepening crisis peacefully. In the political dispute with the newly constituted, but militarily weak, Confederate States of America, there would ...
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The Reluctant Candidate
As a conservative undergraduate student during the early 1960’s, I spent many a long night engaged in animated political argument with a close friend whose supercharged IQ was exceeded only by his condescending manner. The fellow never tired of reminding me that, yes, there were a few responsible Republican public officials. He would always tick...
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Cannibal Statistics
In debate, it is always possible to be right for the wrong reason. For instance, in supporting the proposition that cannibalism is immoral, I might argue that, historically, cannibalism encouraged the killing of human beings who might otherwise have been kidnapped by Arabs or rival African tribesmen and sold into slavery in the southern United...
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Anatomy of a Murder
The November murder of a missionary Orthodox priest in Moscow highlighted the threats to Russia’s stability from extremist groups, including Muslim terrorists and the far right. The priest, Daniil Sysoyev, and his aide, Vladimir Strelbitsky, were shot down in a church in Moscow’s Southern Administrative Okrug on November 19. The gunman, whom some sources described...
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Debating the “Gentile Vice”
At its annual “Ministers Week” lectures last year, the theological school of Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas provided a revealing window into the contemporary debate within mainline church circles over homosexuality. Taking a pro-homosexuality approach was Victor Furnish, a professor at SMU’s Perkins School of Theology. Defending the traditional Christian stance was Richard Hays...
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SPLC
So the Southern Poverty Law Center finally lost one. And a big one at that. The FBI has dropped the SPLC from its list of “partners” on the agency’s hate crimes page, The Daily Caller revealed last week. The agency dropped SPLC, an FBI spokesman told TheDC, because,“the Civil Rights program only provides links to...
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The Destruction of Lebanon
Much of the Western commentary on the violence in Lebanon has not been about the events themselves but about the commentators’ feelings about the warring parties. Israel’s staunch friends and apologists would not admit that the IDF has done anything wrong, or that it could do anything wrong, even if the whole of southern Lebanon...
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Finally, A Black “Hater”
The Southern Poverty Law Center, or the $PLC, as they call it at VDare.com, has finally found a black murder suspect they dislike. Indeed, such was their distaste, the “hate-watchers” published his mugshot on their website. Normally, SPLC covers only white “haters” collared by the long arm of the law. They include crackpot supremacists, separatists...
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A Liberal Policy
In regard to the recent controversy over illegal immigration, allow me to offer a few liberal proposals. The problem could be easily and immediately solved by putting all illegal aliens to work constructing a wall across the entire southern border. (They make up 25 percent of the construction industry, anyway.) And, at below minimum wages,...
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On Frugal Conservatism
I was glad to see Chronicles dedicate its November 2005 issue (“Reviving the American Dream”) to the Southern Agrarians. Thomas Fleming correctly pointed out that the Agrarians were not simply idle romantics. Their vision was political, defending organic communities against the ravages of communism and capitalism. Unfortunately, most of the Agrarians later abandoned this vision...
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The Decline and Fall of the Midwest
Even more than Vachel Lindsay, who liked to say that the Mason-Dixon line ran straight through his heart, Booth Tarkington embodied the regional conflict that defined the Midwest. Born in Indianapolis only five years after the end of the war between the regions, Newton Booth Tarkington was descended on his father’s side from Southern Democrats...
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Bundy: Not Quite A Terrorist
The Southern Poverty Law Center has weighed in again on Cliven Bundy, the rancher in Nevada at odds with the federal government over grazing rights, fees and endangered turtles on federal land. Having restrained itself from calling Bundy a “terrorist lawbreaker,” as the Daily Kos did, SPLC may be reconsidering. Apparently upset that Daily Kos...
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Looking Backwards
Gil Santana had it all: He was the model conservative for the new millennium. Gil was born and reared in Southern California, naturally, and his given name evoked the rich diversity of the state that had once symbolized the American dream: Kim Kwame Kaplan Santana, each part representing one fourth of his Korean, African, Jewish,...
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Stray Nuts & Bolts
Using the backdrop of a small Southern town slowly awakening to the cultural and social rumblings of the mid and late 20th century, Jayne Anne Phillips is attempting in this novel to weave the lives, dreams, and remembrances of the Hampson clan of Bellington, West Virginia, into a mythic mosaic of the sort found in...
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Kosovo Gets Interesting
The problem of Kosovo, an already complex equation with many unknowns, is getting more vexing by the day. On February 2, U.N. special envoy Martti Ahtisaari unveiled his much-anticipated plan for the final status of the southern Serbian province, which has been under NATO-U.N. occupation since Bill Clinton’s war against the Serbs in 1999. While...
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The Lunacy Spreads
The hatewatch business has grown in recent years from a large but solo operation known as the Southern Poverty Law Center into a major industry that includes an array of outlets that also retail gratuitous contumely, scurrilous innuendo and naked lies. Say something the left doesn’t like, and any number of disreputable websites will declare...
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Miller and Lennon
Sixty-six years ago, a small plane took off from southern England for Paris. It never made it. On board was a 40 year old Army Air Force major, who before the war had been the most popular musician in America. His music is still listened to and enjoyed today, even though popular music has since...
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Tom Landess, R.I.P.
Chronicles is very sad to report that our friend and longtime contributor Tom Landess has passed away of a sudden illness. A true man of letters, Dr. Landess wrote (and ghostwrote) hundreds of books and articles, as well as poetry. He was a student and friend of many of the Twelve Southerners and a brilliant...
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Knights of the Invisible Empire
Back in the days when Southern merchants had to take the Ku Klux Klan seriously, the knights of the Invisible Empire liked to play a neat little trick on a store owner who had strayed too far from the path of racial rectitude the secret society demanded of him. Several Klansmen in plain clothes would...
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Miller and Lennon
Sixty-six years ago, a small plane took off from southern England for Paris. It never made it. On board was a 40 year old Army Air Force major, who before the war had been the most popular musician in America. His music is still listened to and enjoyed today, even though popular music has...
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What Makes Us Human
Myths are part of what makes us human; all peoples live by myths, some healthy, some destructive. Among the unhealthy beliefs that have been propagated amongst Americans are that the Constitution came from the gods; that the conquest and destruction of the Southern states was noble; that the Americans who fought and died in World...