Maximus: Marcus Aurelius had a dream that was Rome, Proximo. That is not it. That is not it! Proximo: Marcus Aurelius is dead, Maximus. We mortals are but shadows and dust. Shadows and dust, Maximus! —from Ridley Scott’s Gladiator Every time I watch the above scene from Gladiator, that powerful movie about the decadence of...
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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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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...
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The Mysterious Mountain
The wind that had risen directly after sunset blew hard down-canyon, filling the rocky bowl where camp was fixed with a sound like rushing water, scouring the open fire pit, and sending red sparks in sheets among the dry cacti and bushes. Between gusts, the coals in the bottom of the pit burned dark red...
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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...
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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...
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Trump, the Deplorables, and the Aforementioned “Sh-thole”
The U.S. media are stoking the coalfires of populist nationalism with their breathless coverage of President Trump’s private and undoubtedly unwise comment that Haiti is a “sh-thole country.” The President denies using that specific language, but owns up to the substance of the comment. The New York Times has declared that Trump’s reported comment is...
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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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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...
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Trumpism Has a Future Now
Donald Trump has secured a future for Trumpism by picking J. D. Vance as his running mate. Trump has ensured that Trumpism will not only be about Trump.
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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...
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Empire’s Bloody End
In A Continent Erupts Ronald Spector analyzes the complex conflicts of East and Southeast Asia in the 10 years after the end of World War II.
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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...
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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...
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What the Editors Are Reading
Outside of my regular reading for the courses I’m teaching—this semester, this week, Livy’s History of Rome, Books 1-5, and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book 1—I have been reading mainly books and articles with some relation to nostalgia, broadly speaking. That has included what for me have been some gratifying discoveries, such as Thomas Molnar’s...
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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...
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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. ...
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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...
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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...
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The Way We Are Now—The Campaign
A strongly shared sense of right and wrong has maintained a working peace and harmony within many societies over long periods. This is probably what saw the class-ridden British through an empire and two world wars. It is what kept the South ...
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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...
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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...
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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....
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Spring, Like a Lion
The cloud was no bigger than a puff of white smoke above the western horizon at a point equidistant between the Henry Mountains and the Book Cliffs, It was a nice cloud, a point of interest in an otherwise banal sky, soft blue paling around the edges. I tamped down the cookfire I had built...
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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...
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The Critical Flaw in Critical Race Theory
Over the last 30 years, especially since the spring of 2020, Critical Race Theory (CRT) and its accompanying obsessions with “whiteness” and “white privilege” has almost overwhelmed discussion about race and racism in Western society. CRT “recognizes that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of the American society,” declares a definition from...
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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...
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Nestorius of Constaninople
In 428 AD [sic], Giusto Traina has written a brief and engaging overview of the Mediterranean and Near East in the early fifth century. Traina, an ancient historian with a strong interest in classical Armenia, chose to survey the events of that year owing to its pivotal importance for the political and cultural history of...
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Will There Always Be an England?
Recent events raise the question whether an England that has imported so many different peoples of the world is still recognizable.
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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...
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Gerald Who?
Snaking out from the Middle Atlantic states is a long distinguished line of political and literary Copperheads: Millard Fillmore, Horatio Seymour, Harold Frederic, Edmund Wilson, and the Pennsylvania duo of James Buchanan and John Updike. These men were certainly not proslavery, but they did view the Union cause with rather more skepticism than did their...
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America First
In this 1996 essay, the late Congressman James Traficant illustrates the Washington establishment’s habitual subordination of America to foreign interests.
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Paris Personified
In an established literary conceit, houses become people, and people become houses: Roderick Usher and the House of Usher, Quasimodo and Notre Dame. Similarly, people become their cities, and cities their people. Parisians is not an “important” book like Graham Robb’s magisterial work of the historians’ art, The Discovery of France. But it is indisputably...
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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...
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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...
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The Better Way
A review of Winter’s Bone: A Novel, by Daniel Woodrell. The Missouri Ozarks are the western outpost of Appalachia. The hills are not as high as their elder brothers to the east, but they plunge down into narrow, labyrinthine valleys, where streams of cool, green water run. The surrounding soil is mostly shallow and full...
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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....
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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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La Florida
In an expedition that began in 1538 and endured until 1543, Hernando de Soto and six hundred men failed to discover in what is today Florida and the Lower American South that which they craved most to find—gold. Four centuries later, a young writer, poet, and novelist native to the region trained his genius on...
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Letter From the Lower Right
Taxing Matters In a North Carolina newspaper not long ago-a North Carolina newspaper – I actually read an editorial urging Tar Heel legislators to raise the state tax on cigarettes. What is the world coming to? The state’s present tax, I gather, is the lowest in the nation. You would think North Carolinians would join...
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Bulgarian Autumn, Part I
Rather than dropping out of the sky into Bulgaria at the Sophia airport as I did, travelers would be better advised to enter by other ways. Driving up from Greece through the Rhodope mountains would be one appealing way. Another fascinating approach would be to sail into the Black Sea city of Varna or the...
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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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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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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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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...