“The only thing that keeps the ruling coalition together is the loathing of Berlusconi,” Sylvia Poggioli, NPR’s veteran Rome correspondent, told me over the morning coffee last week, “and the fear that after the next election they’d no longer be in power.” In other ...
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Downriver Blues
The paint is peeling on the exterior wall of the United Steelworkers Hall in Southgate, Michigan, a symbolic reminder of the dangerous times faced by America’s 700,000 steelworkers. Workforce downsizing; the emergence of mini-mills to complement the old integrated, hot- and cold-roll production process; and price deflation and multilateral trade agreements like NAITA have combined...
The Cajuns of Louisiana
In the 1980’s, “Cajun” suddenly became “cool.” From rotund Chef Paul Prudhomme and high-rolling Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards to the music of Beausoleil and “blackened” redfish, anyone and anything associated with the remnants of French culture along the Gulf Coast was “in.” The nation eagerly embraced the battle-cry of the Cajun: “Let the good times...
Are China’s Threats to Taiwan a Bluff?
Monday, four dozen Chinese military aircraft flew into Taiwan’s air defense zone, climaxing a weekend of provocations that saw nearly 150 sorties of China-based fighters and bombers. The U.S. State Department countered by issuing a stern statement warning Beijing about the adverse effect on regional “stability” of such “provocative military activity.” Yet even as the...
Mexico’s Supreme Court Changes Provide a Warning for America
There seems to be a new trend that when a new leftist government is elected it attempts to change or undermine its country’s court system to remove it as a barrier to consolidating power. During the U.S. election cycle, there was much talk of how an incoming Democratic administration might reshape the Supreme Court. Thus...
Essentials for a Lasting Peace in the Middle East
No solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is possible unless we clearly define the obstacles that can and must be surmounted. This conflict, which culminated in open warfare in 1948, is rooted in the incompatible claims of two distinct groups regarding the same territory and resources. In 1947, the United Nations partitioned...
A Legendary Failure of Liberalism
When Brown v. Board of Education, the 9-0 Warren Court ruling came down 60 years ago, desegregating America’s public schools, this writer was a sophomore at Gonzaga in Washington, D.C. In the shadow of the Capitol, Gonzaga was deep inside the city. And hitchhiking to school every day, one could see the “for sale” signs...
Occupying Iraq
Beirut’s occupation in 1983 by U.S. Marines may provide a small-scale sample of what a prolonged U.S. occupation of Iraq could be like, should the Pollyannaish postwar scenarios of some members of the War Party fail to materialize. Of course, the two situations are, in some ways, very different. Beirut, for instance, is just a...
LA’s Cult of the Dead
One of the many hearses that ply Hollywood Boulevard is different from all the others. The long gray Cadillac sports a sunroof, air-conditioning, and a cargo of live bodies, not dead ones. The vehicle is the flagship of Grave Line Tours, and every day its driver leads his seven passengers, each with a window seat,...
On Bursting Bubbles
Greg Kaza (“Economic Liberty and American Manufacturing,” Views, January) is to be congratulated for seizing hold of two important realities: that the late 1990’s saw a financial bubble of historic proportions, the origins and implications of which are poorly understood; and that incomes for the median- and lower-wage earner, when adjusted for inflation, have seen...
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.
Don’t Have a ‘Merry Little Christmas’
I was sitting in my local coffee shop when “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” began playing over the café’s speaker. Perhaps because this Christmas is so fraught with fear and uncertainty, this song caught my attention. I pushed aside my other thoughts and gave my full attention to the music, hunting down the lyrics...
The True ‘White Privilege’
The left talks often about so-called white privilege. Being “white” is a privilege, in that it is a privilege to be a biological, spiritual, and moral heir of the best civilization the world has known, from the Old Testament and Homer via Rome and Constantinople, via the leftward turn of the Renaissance and the heresy...
Missed Manners and Creeping Laws
From the August 2001 issue of Chronicles. All societies regulate personal behavior: That is part of what makes them societies, instead of mere aggregations of isolated individuals. Societies differ enormously, though, in just how they perform this regulation, how much they rely on law and the state, rather than informal or private means. If I...
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...
Trivializing Rape
Last spring I picked up our student newspaper to read this sentence in a front-page story: “Statistics show that one out of every four UNC females will be sexually assaulted while in college.” Wow. The University of North Carolina has roughly 15,000 undergraduates (leave the graduate students out of it), something over half of them...
Great Expectations
Foreign aid, like other forms of aid, is a subsidy that distorts choice. The distortion takes many forms; for example, aid is sometimes put to uses unintended by the giver; it also lets the recipient pursue activities below their real cost. Since President Harry Truman launched the foreign-aid crusade, U.S. economic aid to developing nations...
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...
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...
Tom Fleming’s Complainte
George Garrett used to tell the story of a young writer who visited him in York Harbor, Maine. The writer, who had worked in a prison, wore a cap emblazoned with the letters SCUP, which stood for something like South Carolina Union of Prisons. Sharing some of George’s sense of humor—which bordered on the wicked—he...
Impeachment: The Left’s Ultimate Weapon
In 1868, President Andrew Johnson was impeached for violating the Tenure of Office Act that had been enacted by Congress over his veto in 1867. Defying the law, Johnson fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, without getting Senate approval, as the act required him to do. In his 1956 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, John F. Kennedy...
Conspiratorial Illusions
The Atlanta air is clear and sultry, yet there’s a different air in the Democratic Convention’s Women’s Caucus in the Hyatt Regency—an air of conspiratorial illusions which stifle zealotry with their cold, hard calculations, but promise victory and the triumph of total human rights. In the hallway adjacent to the meeting room I’m the recipient...
Letter From Egypt: The Battle for the Nile (Pt. 1)
My annual Middle Eastern tour this winter is limited to Egypt, mainly due to the less rigid Corona-related restrictions there than elsewhere in the region. An additional motive is the fact that this country of over a hundred million souls faces an unprecedented geopolitical crisis that is not sufficiently known in the outside world yet...
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...
A Bad Moon on the Rise
There’s a bad moon on the rise, and as 1990 drew to a close, the American ruling class began to huddle in its tents to meet the coming storm. When ex-Klansman David Duke seized 44 percent of the vote in Louisiana’s senatorial election last October, the howling of the political cyclone could be heard even...
What’s in a Naomi?
'Doppelganger' centers around Naomi Klein's personal grievance: Being mistaken for Naomi Wolf.
Immigration: The Greatest Government Failure of Our Times
Migration is a reality that concerns no more than 200 million people on earth now living outside their country of origin—that is, only three percent of the world’s population. Why should we even talk about it? The reason is simple: Global statistics are worthless; the whole phenomenon is concentrated in Europe and the United States. ...
Transplanted Texan
Our literary establishment seems designed to ensure that a writer’s first novel is his best. Norman Mailer, James Jones, William Styron and J.D. Salinger are only a few of the better-known novelists whose first work defined the acme of their creative careers. (In the case of John Barth, the second novel, The End of the...
Election Overload
The country is near unanimous in feeling that the elections of 2016 were unique in American history. Some say for the unlikability of the two principal candidates; others, for the rhetorical violence and vitriol on all sides. Still others cite the general volatility of the political year from its beginnings, in its wide swings left...
A Man for Our Century
Wilhelm Roepke (1899-1966) is one of the most original, yet least recognized, economic thinkers of the 20th century. One of the reasons for his relative obscurity is that he does not fit well into the prevailing capitalist/socialist dichotomy. Roepke borrows from both capitalism and socialism, yet he goes beyond defining economics in abstract terms and...
Out of Africa
But for the death and suffering it has caused to thousands of innocents, the Liberian imbroglio would have an almost farcical quality—Graham Greene meets Lehar. On one side, there was the LURD (Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy), a ragtag army of heavily armed but poorly trained and undisciplined rebels. They nevertheless have the upper...
UVA: Facts Versus the Left’s Narrative
For a news professional, it is hard to say which is more discouraging: that Rolling Stone published an imaginary tale of gang rape from a crazy college girl without double-checking her story, or that no one at Rolling Stone was fired after the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism issued a report that revealed top-to-bottom...
The True Fire Within
Henry Timrod died in 1867 at the age of 39 from tuberculosis—his end aggravated and hastened by inadequate food and the rigors of eking out a living amidst the charred ruins of South Carolina’s capital city. The newspaper that had provided the only income for himself, his wife, his child, and his widowed sister’s large...
A Dirge For Bosnia
“Whom I served—by him I was buried!” —14th-Century Bosnian Inscription “For now I began to get the news from Croatia,” wrote Mrs. Ruth Mitchell, an American in Dubrovnik, in May of 1941. “I could not believe a quarter of them. Unfortunately, I was soon to know that they were a weak understatement of the truth....
The View From Mount Nebo
Last summer this expansive sagebrush basin at the lower end of the Wyoming Range made the annual encampment of the Rainbow Family of Living Light, spawn of a congestive civilization. Fifteen thousand strong, they organized according to their various pursuits: drinking, drugs, nudity, fornication, and—for all the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department knows—cannibalism and human sacrifice....
Strange Bedfellows
Last November’s “Rose Revolution” in the Caucasian republic of Georgia made political bedfellows of an unlikely couple: George W. Bush and billionaire “philanthropist” and global meddler George Soros. The apparent cooperation between the Bush administration and Soros in backing the ouster of President Eduard Shevardnadze seems all the more bizarre in light of Soros’ stated...
The Moral Minority
The word “minority” represents one of those inversions of value (that typify socialist regimes. Derived, obviously, from the Latin minor (smaller or less in respect of size, importance, age, etc.), “minority” has been used in English to express both the immature years before adulthood and the losing side of a judicial opinion. Most significantly, it...
Reclaiming Civil Rights
Making America great again will require making civil rights honest again.
Dupe or No
Chronicles falls short of its usual high standards by giving so much space to “Faulkner in Japan: The ‘American Century’” in the August issue (Society & Culture). As far as I can tell amidst all the unanchored theorizing, the author wants to make America’s greatest writer out to be a clueless dupe of postwar “American...
Father Abraham
It now appears that the safest way for scholars to treat Abraham Lincoln is in discrete segments of his life, leaving it to other, perhaps braver, souls to draw the appropriate conclusions. This means that, as in this book which focuses on the presidential years, modern Lincoln scholarship seems to miss the essence of the...
America First
In this 1996 essay, the late Congressman James Traficant illustrates the Washington establishment’s habitual subordination of America to foreign interests.
Just Another Tequila Sunrise
It may be several years before the results of Census 2000 are available in anyy usable form, but certain trends have already begun to emerge from the raw data. Most significantly, as Chilton Williamson, Jr., and Roger McGrath have pointed out earlier in this issue, the Hispanic population in the United States continues to grow...
Israel: Tactical Winner, Strategic Loser
The events in Gaza since July 7 have shown, not for the first time, Israel’s difficulty in coping with the challenges of asymmetric warfare. The problem first became apparent in Lebanon exactly eight years ago (July-August 2006), when Hezbollah – the weaker party by several orders of magnitude – was able to exploit Israeli political...
And What Isn’t . . .
In this collection of his occasional papers, David Frum once again demonstrates his worthiness to the harmless persuasion. Having agonized over his uneven prose, I finally concluded that Frum’s intellectual weaknesses are his practical strengths. His writing never offends anyone in the political mainstream, or upon whom his career as a publicist may depend. It...
Remembering Edward C. Banfield
For decades, Edward C. Banfield taught within the Ivy League environment despite being a right-winger who favored empirical investigation over theories and feelings.
Church Arsons: The Real Story?
It was one of the biggest stories of 1996: Black churches were burning all across the South, the seeming victims of a nationwide upsurge in racial hatred. Tens of thousands of horrified Americans rushed to contribute money toward the reconstruction of black churches. We now know there never was any firm evidence of a church-arson...
Sam Francis: Prophet of America’s Decline
Luminary paleoconservative, Chronicles' own Sam Francis, foresaw how the vast managerial state would increase its stranglehold over its citizen-subjects. But there are signs that Leviathan is losing its grip.
Books in Brief: November 2021
Klara and the Sun: A Novel, by Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf; 320 pp., $28.00). A conservative disposition imposes costs but limits downside surprises. If you always expect rain, you have to lug your umbrella around wherever you go. But you never get wet. Likewise, if you see life through a Menckenian lens, worstcase scenarios sometimes play...
Prudence Isn’t Fear
Last week saw two particularly grisly Islamic terror attacks of the type that have become all too common: 22 people, mostly children and teenagers, were killed after a bomb exploded at a pop concert in Manchester, England, and 28 Egyptian Copts, including young children, were massacred when ISIS ambushed their bus, which was taking them...
Sleepwalking in America
For the third time in our generation, independent voters could be the balance of power in this year’s presidential election. In 1968, Alabama Gov. George G. Wallace, standardbearer of the American Independent Party, received 13 percent of the popular vote, a sum greater than the difference between Hubert H. Humphrey and the victor, Richard M....