A truly startling, topsy-turvy race is being run for governor of Illinois. U.S. Representative Glenn Poshard, the Democrat, is embracing more conservative positions on culture and social policy; Illinois Secretary of State George Ryan, the Republican, is running away with much of the Democratic base, including gay-rights supporters. On trade, Poshard has supported a Buchananite...
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When Enough Isn’t Enough: Carter’s True Legacy
The embarrassing fawning over Carter’s legacy from establishment conservatives reveals their abiding desire for social respectability at the expense of truth.
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Gelded Europeans
From 1979 to 1982, I was a Russian linguist stationed in Frankfurt, West Germany, with the 533rd Combat Electronic Warfare Intelligence (CEWI) Battalion, part of the 3rd Armored Division. If a war had come, assuming we hadn’t been nuked right away, we would have deployed within hours northeast to the Fulda Gap to listen to...
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The Present Age and the State of Community
From the June 1988 issue of Chronicles. The Present Age begins with the First World War, the Great War as it is deservedly still known. No war ever began more jubilantly, among all classes and generations, the last including the young generation that had to fight it. It is said that when Viscount Grey, British...
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The Counterrevolution Against Globalism
On August 19, 1991, the people of the Soviet Union awoke to music from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake playing on national television. Swan Lake would play continuously that day as the “hard line” State Emergency Committee staged its coup against the first and last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, who had been arrested at his Crimea vacation...
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Will Midterms Be Biden’s Last Hurrah?
Biden's presidency is marked by multiple domestic failures. Those combined with his age and declining cognitive abilities make a second term of his presidency highly unlikely.
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The War of Mexican Aggression
” . . . As honest men it behooves us to learn the extent of our inheritance, and as brave ones not to whimper if it should prove less than we had supposed.” —John Tyndall Much in the news recently, especially in the Southwest, is the problem of illegal immigration from south of the border....
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The Road to Rome–and Back
The title is intended as a joke and not as a declaration of apostasy. The past two weeks my attention has been almost entirely absorbed, first by our Winter School program and then by an informal after-excursion to Rome with a few lingering students. I enjoy these programs, but while they are going on I...
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Biden Holds a Losing Hand
As President Joe Biden’s poll numbers sank this fall, and the presidentially ambitious in his party began to stir, the White House put out the word. Forget all that 2020 campaign chatter about Biden being a “transitional president.” He intends to run and win a second term. Well, perhaps. Yet, skepticism abounds. First, if Biden...
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Getting Somewhere
Jackson Hole is burning up. Gerry Spence had to evacuate his ranch ahead of the wildfires, and Dick Cheney could be next. Here above timberline in the Snowy Range of the Medicine Bow Mountains, 400 miles to the southeast, the breeze is cool, the grass is fresh and green, and the ponds of standing water...
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Donald Trump and Conservatism
Donald Trump has shattered the false consensus of the Republican Party, the hitherto unrecognized tautology that GOP is conservative because conservative is GOP, and vice versa. In the process, we’ve been confronted by an embarrassing reality: We really have no idea what we mean by the word conservative. There can be little doubt that Hillary...
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The Coming North American Order
Most of what we see and read from the government and its media organs are variations on a tired but persistent theme of irreversible progress toward utopia. (William Pfaff has a new book arguing that secular utopianism, even more than war profiteering or career advancement, is what drives U.S. foreign policy, making it impervious to...
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Putin’s Unsureness of Touch
President Vladimir Putin has been facing several crises that could undermine Russia’s strategic interests. His inability to respond quickly and effectively reflects lingering complacency within areas of Moscow’s sphere of influence. Azerbaijan’s offensive against the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, encouraged and abetted by Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is testing Moscow’s ability to remain neutral in...
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Vol. 1 No. 1 January 1999
Poor Augusto Pinochet! Try to imagine Fidel Castro flying to England on private business and getting arrested for alleged crimes against humanity. Within hours, every talking head on this planet would be up in arms, demanding British blood and Castro’s freedom. It hardly needs stating that Fidel would be better suited to incarceration at Her...
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Robert Frost: Social and Political Conservative
From the August 1992 issue of Chronicles. Robert Frost published 11 books of poetry, won four Pulitzer Prizes, established himself as the unofficial poet laureate of the United States, and acquired a national and international literary reputation. Despite his fame as a poet and public speaker, and because of his friendship with such liberal Democrats...
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The Glory and the Myth of John Ford
A year ago, the University of Maryland held a special screening of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), followed by a two-hour discussion of the film led by representatives of the departments of history, English, philosophy, and communications. John Ford would have been publicly contemptuous of this attention from the egghead professors. In private, he probably...
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Mexico Under New Management: Wish Them Well, and Build That Fence
Because of illegal immigration, there is no other country that affects America’s way of life as profoundly as does Mexico. Its politics should he followed, therefore, with the same attention to detail that characterized Kremlinology at the height of the Cold War. Instead, there was an air of unreality to the hundreds of American editorials...
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Secession and American Republicanism
When the American colonists seceded from Britain in 1776, Europe was shared out among great monarchies. Only Switzerland was republican, but Americans were determined to enjoy a republican style of government in the New World. The republican tradition went back over 2,000 years to the ancient Greeks and consistently taught that a republic must satisfy...
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Arizona’s Got Sand
On October 26, 1881, a gunfight erupted in a vacant lot on Fremont Street in Tombstone, Arizona, that would go down in history as the Shootout at the OK Corral. Virgil, Wyatt, and Morgan Earp and Doc Holliday stood on one side, and Tom and Frank McLaury and Ike and Billy Clanton on the other. ...
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Books in Brief
August 1914: France, the Great War, and a Month That Changed the World Forever, by Bruno Cabanes; translated by Stephanie O’Hara (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; 230 pp., $27.50). This superb and marvelously readable work of social and political history, drawn from a wide variety of personal and official documents and records, recounts the...
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Are the Forever Wars Really Ending?
“There is no… sound reason for the United States to continue sacrificing precious lives and treasure in a conflict not directly connected to our safety or other vital national interests.” So said William Ruger about Afghanistan, our longest war. What makes this statement significant is that President Donald Trump has ordered a drawdown by mid-October...
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Millennial Nostalgia and the Analog Universe
These days, you don't have to leave your house to do much of anything—and fewer people do. That’s probably why so many Millennials are pining for a simpler time.
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Prophet Sustained
When National Review published a special obituary issue on James Burnham soon after his death in 1987, perhaps the most remarkable contribution came from the pen of John Kenneth Galbraith. The Harvard economist reminisced about the eager welcome with which he and fellow New Dealers in the Roosevelt administration had received Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution:...
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Anniversary Celebration
High Country News, the environmentalist newspaper founded by Tom Bell, a former rancher, in Lander, Wyoming, in 1970 turned 25 this year, and since the weekend of September 8 was forecast to be a fine one I decided to attend the anniversary celebration. HCN has been based for about a decade or so in Paonia,...
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Sympathy for the Spartan
History—be it that of 1619, or 1776, or some other significant year or event—is often abused in this day and age. One of the latest victims of such historical misrepresentation are the Spartans, whom Lee Smith in a column for Tablet treats rather unfairly. Smith describes the blood-curdling behavior of the antidemocratic Spartans at the end of...
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Surviving in the New World Order
George Bush chose a risky moment for launching his New World Order. World stock markets have reacted to the vicissitudes of war with all the stability of a manic-depressive who won’t take his medicine when he’s feeling up and doesn’t see the point of taking it when he’s down. The mere rumors of war were...
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To the Lighthouse
When Camilla, the elderly spinster daughter of the infamous Captain Jack Fennel and matriarch of the Fennel family, sees her house guest holding an antique spyglass, she comments, “My father’s glass. Dr. Danvers. Are you planning a voyage?” Actually, the voyage is already underway for the young history professor who shows symptoms of seasickness the...
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In Praise of Geopolitics
The noun geopolitics and the adjective geopolitical are increasingly present in media discourse on world affairs. In principle, this is a good thing. Relating political power to the immutable imperatives of space and resources is essential to an analysis of world affairs that is free from the ideological baggage of American exceptionalism, whether Wilsonian or...
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Is Demographics Destiny, or Destruction?
Our elite political class has manipulated illegal immigration to entrench themselves in power and disenfranchise Americans.
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Just East of the Indian’s Nose
Eleven years ago, I moved to Northwest Wisconsin, a region called the Wisconsin Indianhead because it is shaped like the profile of an Indian chief I live just east of the nose. After a career of publishing magazines and editing newspapers in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, I decided to take a...
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The Left Conspires to Keep Election Fraud Quiet. Wonder Why?
Emails released by the House Judiciary Committee should outrage Americans. The federal government devised a scheme to covertly stamp out public debate over election fraud.
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Religious Discrimination, Real and Imagined
As I was scrolling the news one August day, my attention was drawn to an article recounting the story of a woman wearing a niqab who was ejected from a bus in the Netherlands, a country that enacted a partial ban on the full veil. The prohibition mitigates security fears in places where concealed identity...
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Time for an Immigration Moratorium
The Center for Immigration Studies reports this morning that the number of immigrants, both legal and illegal, in the United States is now 41.3 million, the highest it has ever been. Even as the American economy continues to sputter and many Americans face unemployment or underemployment, an additional 1.4 million immigrants entered the country between...
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Clandestine Groups
Terrorism in France has usually come—in recent years—from clandestine Muslim groups engaged in a perpetual jihad against the West. But recent attacks attributed to Corsican separatists provide another example of a violent nationalism rearing its head at precisely the time when Europe’s policy elite is proclaiming a new era of unity and cooperation. The immediate...
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New York State of Mind
Some 20 years ago, my friend P.J. O’Rourke came to dinner at my New York house with his new bride. She was beautiful, reserved, intelligent, and after dinner called me a male chauvinist, racist antisemite and left the house in a fury. P.J. apologized and followed his bride out. To this day I haven’t figured...
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Scala Jerkitudinis: The Subspecies
The Great American Jerk is a chameleon who changes colors according to circumstances, from obsequious to bullying, from pious to lewd. He may, on some occasions, display buck-waving generosity and on others check-splitting stinginess, but underneath there is always the baby boy or girl who wants what he or she wants, whether it is money,...
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The West on the Precipice: A Warning and a Hope
Traditional Christians should unite against the satanic vision of liberal-democratic nirvana, which continually threatens the West.
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Time to Get Over the Russophobia
Unless there is a late surge for Communist Party candidate Pavel Grudinin, who is running second with 7 percent, Vladimir Putin will be re-elected president of Russia for another six years on March 18. Then we must decide whether to continue on course into a second Cold War, or engage Russia, as every president sought...
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Border Math: A Study in Priorities
A rare crack in the fortified wall of the Bush administration’s diplomatic obstinacy seemed to appear as U.S. diplomats sat down in March with their Iranian and Syrian counterparts to discuss stability in Iraq. Foreign-policy realists of both parties hailed the move as a potential breakthrough: Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE) offered a characteristically self-righteous lecture,...
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Oyster Supper
As a nonnative from a cold-weather climate, I have observed that there are four seasons in Arkansas’ Delta: warm, hot, scorching, and malarial. Another way to understand the weather in this part of the South is through the eyes of a ubiquitous inhabitant: the mosquito. They bite in February; aerial insecticide spraying commences in May;...
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On Saving Private Ryan
Wayne Allensworth, in his poignant and beautifully written review of Saving Private Ryan (“The Face of Battle,” January), focuses on what is right with the film. However, I find much that is wrong, and, for me, the wrong outweighs the right. Nonetheless, Steven Spielberg makes an important contribution to the making of war movies by...
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Pragmatic Problems
Jacques Barzun: A Stroll With William James; Harper & Row; New York. William James is the nearest thing to a thoroughly American philosopher this nation has produced. George Santayana complained that James felt compelled to play the part of a home-spun American a role enjoyed by our intellectuals from Ben Franklin to Ezra Pound. Santayana...
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The Unmeaning of Unmeaning
A computer was the victor on a popular television game show, easily defeating its human competitors; an arms race is under way involving militarized robots that can take the battlefield in the place of inferior humans; in Japan, artificial-intelligence software has outperformed college applicants on a standardized college-entrance examination. Our machines are becoming a part...
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The Remnants of Realism
Philip Roth: The Anatomy Lesson; Farrar, Straus & Grioux; New York. Louis Auchincloss: Exit Lady Masham; Houghton Mifflin; Boston. In the opinion of Tom Wolfe, “the introduction of realism into literature… was like the introduction of electricity into machine technology. It was not just another device. It raised the state of the art to a new magnitude.”...
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September 11: Ten Years After
Ten years ago, on the morning of September 11, I was in my apartment in California getting ready for work when a friend called. “Turn on the TV,” she said. “What’s going on?” “Just turn on the TV.” I turned on the tube in time to see the second airliner crash into the south tower...
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All Honorable Means
The political culture of the United States is cramped and stunted by the narrow range of acceptable viewpoints and the utterly banal, subliterate tone of our political campaigns—to compare American elections to the marketing of soap is an insult to the people who sell soap. If, as Sean Scallon notes in Beating the Powers That...
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Gimme That Ol’Time Education
” . . . Form and Limit belong to the Good.” —C.S. Lewis Liberals in the United States have lately gathered around the standard of pluralism in the hope of stalling the movement toward private Christian education. Yet Americans, historically indifferent to such objections, have been the last to censure a church—especially a reformed or...
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In Search of the Bourgeoisie
“How beastly the bourgeois is,” sneered D.H. Lawrence, “especially the male of the species.” What courage and imagination a writer must have to revile a social class that has been under attack for over a generation! Aristocrats (and would-be aristocrats) look down their noses at the bourgeoisie’s convention-bound moralism and dismal commitment to hard work...
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Three Score and Ten: A Meditation
Well, Old Man, 70 today. Who’d have thought? And still in pretty good condition, considering how little care I have taken of the old carcass. I understand now how the accumulation of minor miseries in aging is mercifully designed to let us down slow and easy till we are ready. The children are OK....
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Conservative Education: Caveat Emptor!
Much of the blame for the deplorable state of higher education in America today must be traced back to the baneful influence of America’s most revolutionary educationist, John Dewey. In his enormously influential Democracy and Education (1915), Dewey defined education as “a freeing of individual capacity in a progressive growth directed to social aims.” In...