A candidate’s character matters, of course, but what matters most at this moment in history is which candidate proposes policies that will build a better America.
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A Balkan Tragedy
For the past two-and-a-half millennia, our civilization has cultivated tragedy as an art form that articulates some of the key problems of our existence. Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III—these works speak timeless truths in an ever-contemporary language. In the case of Serbia’s former president Slobodan Milosevic, reality has proved equal to inspired imagination. His life, which...
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Putin’s Gamble: Playing the Terrorist Card
When Russian President Vladimir Putin called President Bush shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks to express his solidarity, pundits East and West took this as a sign of what one American columnist called the coming “earthquake” in U.S.-Russia relations. Putin was aiming to shift his policy focus westward, away from his previous “Eurasianist” effort...
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What’s Behind Our World on Fire?
When the wildfires of California broke out across the Golden State, many were the causes given. Negligence by campers. Falling power lines. Arson. A dried-out land. Climate change. Failure to manage forests, prune trees, and clear debris, leaving fuel for blazes ignited. Abnormally high winds spreading the flames. Too many fires for first responders to...
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Sounding the Trump
In important ways, a revolutionary process has begun. So argues Ilana Mercer in the best extended analysis yet published of the Trump phenomenon: “Trump is getting an atrophied political system to oscillate” in “an oddly marvelous uprising.” For us revolutionaries there is still a long way to go, but we are entitled to a “modest...
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Fighting the Dragon With Solzhenitsyn
Do great men make history? Or does history make great men? One thing’s for sure: History sometimes smothers great men, as Thomas Gray suggests in his famous elegy written in a country churchyard, and as the rows of endless graves from Arlington to the Somme demonstrate with brutal candor. “Some mute inglorious Milton here may...
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Romney’s Last Chance
If we can believe most pollsters, President Obama has the election sewn up and in the bag. He is leading in most of the crucial swing states, and, insiders are saying, Governor Romney’s only chance is a knock-out blow in one of the debates. Given Romney’s rhetorical clumsiness, this is unlikely. Obama is not...
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What the Editors Are Reading
An unfortunate effect of more than two decades of war between the West and the Middle East, and the resulting terrorist campaigns launched from there, is the replacement of the charm, even the magic, the historical Persia held for Europeans—and for me—by their opposite: contempt, disgust, even fear. In the late 80’s and the 90’s...
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Keeping an Eye on Grandpa, the Terrorist
I’ve just learned I may be a terrorist. On Aug. 13, the Secretary of Homeland Security issued a statement warning about an increase in domestic and foreign terrorism. At the end of the document’s summary were these words: “Such threats are also exacerbated by impacts of the ongoing global pandemic, including grievances...
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Understand Me Completely
Ordinary people, we are told, ordinarily speak in cliches, bromides, and dotty banalities, and it is the task of the literary artist, of the playwright in particular, to give them expressive and convincing words. This is the practice of Aeschylus and Shakespeare, of Tennessee Williams and Tom Stoppard. The success of heightened language upon the...
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The Bad Theology of Our Israel Über Alles Foreign Policy
Christian dispensationalism explains the fervor with which some in the Republican Party support the interests of the nation of Israel as if they were always our own.
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Bumpy BRICS Road
Until a year ago it had seemed that BRICS, the association of five emerging economies—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—was morphing from a loose economic alliance into a geopolitical force willing and able to challenge the global order. Its members’ potential to do so appeared impressive: They account for three billion people (two fifths...
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The Left’s Delusions on Crime and Policing
The death of George Floyd and the reaction that followed have seen an explosion of hysterical accusations, breast-beating, and lying that is extreme even by the standards of the last half-century. It is no exaggeration to say that reason and common sense have largely fled the scene, and there has been an incredibly weak reaction to...
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Rolling Stone Gathered No Facts
Last month, Rolling Stone published a story entitled A Rape on Campus, which described a brutal gang rape of a woman named Jackie during a party at a University of Virginia fraternity house, the University’s failure to respond to this alleged assault—and the school’s troubling history of indifference to many other instances of alleged sexual...
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Moving Targets: The Trouble With Early Primaries
The 2008 presidential contest has dominated political news for over a year, starting almost immediately after the 2006 midterm elections. Most of the coverage has devolved, as it always does, to discussion of the “horse race” among the candidates, the competition for fundraising, and an insufferably large number of debates and fora that few actual...
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On Might
“I chant the new empire . . . “ —Walt Whitman Walt Whitman sang what he saw—in 1860, he gave a name to Madison’s and Jefferson’s vision of the new commonwealth. “[Our success],” Jefferson had said in 1801, “furnishes a new proof of the falsehood of Montesquieu’s doctrine, that a republic can be preserved only...
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An America First Moment
Donald Trump has refused to go to war with Iran. He has refused to go to war in Syria. He has imposed tariffs to save American jobs. He is capping the number of refugees coming into America–as opposed to all the countries they have to cross to get to America–at a very manageable number. And...
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Not Even Migrants Want to Live in America’s Dying Cities
America has taken on financial and social debts it cannot pay as a result of excessive immigration, and the consequences of those decisions have adversely affected all but the wealthy elites among us.
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Jefferson’s Cousin
There are probably more judicial biographies of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall than of all the rest of the Supreme Court justices combined, so why another one? R. Kent Newmyer, historian and law professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, undertook to write a work that would not mirror the standard hagiographical...
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The Other America
Remembering, as I often have cause to do, the late Samuel Francis’s formulation “anarcho-tyranny,” I have an enhanced respect for the wonder that is our nation, for the wisdom of the government, and for the phonetic ambiguity of the word mandate, particularly as related to the blow for freedom and equality struck by the latest...
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Closing the Barn Door
Ethnic groups were reportedly highly successful in registering new voters in the months before the 1992 national election. In California, the Secretary of State’s office was deluged with requests for registration forms and, in at least two cases, countless thousands of those forms were sent to businesses like Domino’s Pizza and the 99 Cent Store,...
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Here, on the Other Side of the Ring of Fire
Americans read the increasingly panic-stricken reports of deepening catastrophe at Fukushima 1, speed to the pharmacy to buy iodine and ask,
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The Litmus Test for American Conservatism
Abraham Lincoln is thought of by many as not only the greatest American statesman but as a great conservative. He was neither. Understanding this is a necessary condition for any genuinely American conservatism. When Lincoln took office, the American polity was regarded as a compact between sovereign states which had created a central government as...
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Comey & The Saturday Night Massacre
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, said Marx. On publication day of my memoir of Richard Nixon’s White House, President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey. Instantly, the media cried “Nixonian,” comparing it to the 1973 Saturday Night Massacre. Yet, the differences are stark. The resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and...
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Death of a Propositional Nation
The mythical nation dedicated to a proposition is dying, and rioters, looters, and social justice warriors are playing Dr. Kevorkian. Because the United States has not reached their construct of the purest Platonic form of equality, it must be euthanized to make room for a new empire to rise in its place. It’s fitting that activists,...
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Jihad’s Fifth Column
No one on the planet, by now, has not heard of the violence that greeted Pope Benedict’s references to Emperor Manuel II and his reflections on Islam. Manuel, invariably (and unfairly) described as “obscure” or “forgotten,” lived in one of those interesting ages of the world that teach lessons to those who are not blind...
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At Sea Again
A perfect 360-degree horizon, occluded in the nearer distance by cloud shadow and smears and smudges of squall, is something sensed, not seen. All around lies a mottled expanse of turquoise, wine-blue, cobalt, and purple patches streaked with brilliant sunshine alternating with gray shadow and scuffed into variously textured sheets ruffled and smoothed by the...
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True Reform
The Electoral College is an archaic institution designed by men who felt that they could not trust the people at large to choose the president—or so we are told every four years by the most ignorant members of the Fourth Estate. While it may have been true (the argument continues) that the people were relatively...
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Living With the Albanians
In the current debate on the future of Kosovo, it is often overlooked that hundreds of thousands of Serbs and other non-Albanians had fled the province under Albanian pressure well before the KLA terror campaign of 1996-1998. Under Tito, the Albanians’ share of the population thus rose from 64 percent in 1953 to 77 percent...
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Honest Words
It may be an embarrassing admission for somebody who has been a book review editor for the last 14 and a half years, but the truth is I had never heard of Tony Hillerman until May 1989, when I began traveling in the Southwest in connection with a book-writing project I am working on and...
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A Balkan Travelogue
It’s been some years since Tom Fleming and I have indulged in seven-day mad dashes across the Balkans, speaking, lecturing and giving interviews, meeting interesting people over good food and drink. Last week’s tour, which took us to Belgrade and Banja Luka, had the tempo and feel of the old times, but it was...
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Comment
The Editorial Comment was presented as a speech by Dr. Carlson, Executive Vice-President of The Rockford Institute at the April 16, 1984 meeting of the Philadelphia Society. Whole forests have been sacrificed in the last two years to the latest phase of this nation’s perennial debate on education. Yet the debate swirling about us has...
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SPLC Restrains Itself On Bundy … Daily Kos Smears Him
The “range war” in Sen. Harry Reid’s Nevada between hardscrabble rancher Cliven Bundy and the federal government appears to have ended. The Bureau of Land Management has retreated, having seized Bundy’s cattle and tasered and arrested his son. Bundy and the BLM are fighting over his refusing to pay fees to use federal lands for...
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Identity Politics Means Rule by Useful Idiots
Identity politics is now the term du jour and its meaning is clear enough on a superficial level—choosing people according to their physical characteristics and sexual preferences. The left wants more people of color, women, and gays in influential positions, while the right insists that these traits are secondary to competence in a given job....
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Are the Good Times Over for Joe?
“When sorrows come,” said King Claudius, “they come not single spies but in battalions.” As the king found out. So it seems with President Joe Biden, who must be asking himself the question Merle Haggard asked: “Are the good times really over for good?” Consider the critical issue with voters today: the state of the...
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Pro-migrant Dems Playing Russian Roulette with Our Safety
Allowing migrants—or anyone—to board airplanes without photo ID, and promoting ID cards that blur the lines between legal and illegal, sabotage us.
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The High Cost of Getting Started
Living at home with one’s parents and saving money is an increasingly attractive option for young, working adults facing high housing costs.
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A Province of the Republic
“Literature is an avenue to glory ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honors or of wealth.” —Isaac D’Israeli These volumes—one of letters, the other heavily dependent on correspondence—document and analyze, respectively, episodes of American literary history that feature three brilliant personalities. These volumes will surely attract readers on that basis, for...
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Nationalism, True and False
Ruling classes exercise power through combinations of coercion and manipulation—what Machiavelli called force and fraud, or the habits of the lion and the fox that he recommended to princes who wish to stay in power. Like most princes, most ruling classes tend to be better at one than the other, and depending on their talents,...
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Shattering Lincoln’s Dream
I just got a copy of a thoughtful new book, Vindicating Lincoln: Defending the Politics of Our Greatest President, by Thomas L. Krannawitter. The book mentions me a couple of times, in polite disagreement. Krannawitter, now of Hillsdale College, is a disciple of Claremont McKenna College’s Harry V. Jaffa, as ...
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Lord, I Got Those Grays Ferry Blues
When I called Mike Rafferty to arrange a meeting to discuss a possible symposium on the demise of the local community, I had to choose a different date from the one I?wanted because Mike was busy that night. He was boxing at the Spectrum. Like Rocky Balboa, Mike Rafferty lives ten minutes from the Spectrum. ...
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The Brazil of North America
To observe the decades-long paralysis of America’s political elite in controlling her borders calls to mind the insight of James Burnham in 1964—”Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide.” What the ex-Trotskyite turned Cold Warrior meant was that by faithfully following the tenets of liberalism, the West would embrace suicidal policies that would bring about...
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From Greeks to Gringos: Why Mexico Lost Texas
Among the terms of endearment applied to Americans who worry about present immigration policy is “xenophobe.” This high-toned word normally precedes lower-toned ones—”racist,” “bigot,” “neo-Nazi,” etc.—which take over as the exasperation level rises. A “xenophobe” is someone who fears foreigners. Fears them why? No dictionary is competent to say. Every xenophobe doubtless has his own...
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Stop the Migrant Invasion
The Left insists migration is a humanitarian crisis. Wrong. It’s a lawless invasion. Europeans are fighting back. Americans should, too.
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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,...
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Being Bill O’Reilly
Some celebrities seem born with a natural star power that radiates from them like an angelic halo. Alcibiades had this kind of “charisma” that made him adored even by people who disliked him. To be a celebrity, as Willy Loman would say, it is not enough to be liked: You must be well liked. Musicians...
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Love Thy Neighbor
Ben Lummis was not in a mood to write this morning. He wanted to be outdoors, and, because he was an outdoor writer, being outdoors was as legitimate a part of his job as writing about having been outdoors was after he’d been there. His work had two stages, outdoor and indoor, and in the...
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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 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...
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Hollywood and Bethlehem
Hollywood loves Christmas, or Winterfest, or whatever they’re calling it these days. This is because many Americans make it the most wonderful time of the year for the studios, offering them gifts of gold. For example, on December 25, 2015, we gave Buena Vista/Disney $49.3 million for the right to spend 2 hours and 16...