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...
During the presidential campaign Donald Trump horrified the bipartisan foreign policy mandarinate by suggesting that NATO was “obsolete” and useless against the only real threat faced by Europe: the massive influx of violent Muslims applauded by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the “EuSSR” bureaucracy in Brussels, and the Obama Administration. Trump also indicated that America’s treaty...
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...
Last Thursday the Conservative Party suffered a major blow in the general election in the United Kingdom, the third such race in as many years. It had not been due until May 2020, but Prime Minister Theresa May decided to call a snap election on April 19 and obtain a “stronger mandate.” At that time the governing party...
Hot weather is nothing new. The climate alarmists would be less alarmed if they knew history.
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...
Hillary Clinton’s visit to Africa in late March, which was billed as a “goodwill tour” to strengthen America’s ties with developing nations, combined business with pleasure. In between meetings and photo-opportunities with African heads of state, Mrs. Clinton and her daughter Chelsea did a little taxpayer-funded sightseeing in the wilds of Uganda, Tanzania, and other...
Maurice Barrès is hardly a name in the United States, even to American conservatives who could learn a great deal from his fiction and essays. A collaborator of Charles Maurras, Barrès had a deeper understanding of blood-and-soil conservatism than most Americans can grasp, and his celebration (in this book) of Metz under Yankee—I mean...
Both Witness and Alamo Bay explore the tensions that arise when dissimilar cultures meet, when people must meet the demands of an alien land. In Witness, a streetwise Philadelphia homicide detective, hardened by a climate of violence and corruption, must hide out among the peaceful Amish of rural Pennsylvania Dutch country. In Alamo Bay, a...
“It is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart,” says former first lady Laura Bush of the Trump administration policy of “zero tolerance,” under which the children of illegal migrants are being detained apart from their parents. “Disgraceful,” adds Dr. Franklin Graham. “We need to be . . . a country that governs...
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover Produced by Kees Kasander Written and directed by Peter Greenaway Released by Miramax Films The Plot Against Harry Produced by Michael Roemer and Robert Young Written and directed by Michael Roemer Released by King Screen Lust, greed, betrayal, murder, and revenge are not at all unusual...
I have showered more love on this old 1940’s farmhouse than on any person living. Certainly, I’ve spent more money on it than I care to count. But more than the house itself—an undistinguished structure made interesting only by my renovation—it’s the land I fell in love with. The way my foot sinks into the...
Rodney King is back, and his trial is center stage in the freak show of American television. The fact that these legal burlesques are called “the Rodney King trial” is worth pondering, because, the truth is, Rodney King now has immunity from prosecution for his reckless driving, for his violent attack on the officers who...
Over a decade ago, Don Livingston organized a Liberty Fund Colloquium in Charleston, South Carolina. One of the sessions examined whether any movement toward political decentralization was possible without at least the threat of secession to back it up. On that subject, most of the attendees agreed: Whether one regards secession as good in itself,...
In an extraordinary gesture of international goodwill, the Spanish Ministry of Culture this past fall selected the rarest books and manuscripts from Spanish libraries for an exhibition at the New York Public Library. Items on display ranged from a 13th-century manuscript on the game of chess to exuberant prints by Joan Miro. Libraries from all...
The horrendous murder of James Foley by the Islamic State (IS) is more than just another display of jihadist savagery, reminiscent of the death of Daniel Pearl in 2002. Its strategic purpose is to provoke a wave of indignation at home, and to get the United States directly involved in yet another unwinnable Middle Eastern...
Like the Roman cursus honorum, the ascending path of neoconservative success is carefully prescribed. Instead of the progress from aedile to consul, however, the journey leads through hackwork up to the glories of publishing with Basic Books, appearing on TV talk shows, and gracing the mastheads of neocon magazines. David Frum managed to move through...
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,But leech-like to their fainting country cling—Shelley I have finally reconciled myself to the sad truth that I will probably never get to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom. I’ll probably never get to sit next to Ruth Bader Ginsburg at dinner, shake hands with Rush Limbaugh, or tour...
California continues its essential role as the proving ground for bad ideas. The latest is the demolition of “popular” initiatives to decide important issues. Of the 11 initiatives on the ballot last November in the Golden State, 8 were funded primarily by multimillionaires, according to MapLight, which tracks election funding. And Proposition 30, Gov. Jerry...
It's not "big government" that waged this war on my career. It's a constellation of vindictive wrong-think police in the private sector and "conservative" swamp creatures such as Bill Kristol, Jonah Goldberg, and Ben Shapiro.
The “Common-Sense Sociology Test” made its first appearance in the mid-1960’s. The test is now a familiar fixture in introductory sociology courses and textbooks, but in the beginning its exciting novelty instantly captured the hearts and minds of graduate students and young professors facing their first lecture halls—lecture halls filled with a student skepticism that...
A nine-year-old boy in Phoenix earned a three-day suspension from the Abraham Lincoln Traditional School for committing a “hate crime,” reports the Arizona Republic. The boy reportedly used the phrase “brown people” while arguing with another student. He was then questioned by a detention-room officer—the mother of the offended “brown person”—who demanded to know “why...
For travelers drawn to the cradles of civilization, Bulgaria offers a good alternative to the crowds of Greece. One can revel in the Greek and Roman occupations that followed the Thracians. Moreover, while civilization was having a rough go later on in the western Roman empire, matters were quite different in the eastern Roman Empire,...
The Oklahoma Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision, has ordered a monument of the Ten Commandments removed from the Capitol. Calling the Commandments “religious in nature and an integral part of the Jewish and Christian faiths,” the court said the monument must go. Gov. Mary Fallin has refused. And Oklahoma lawmakers instead have filed legislation...
David Gilmour’s witty and elegant, original and useful book chronicles “Kipling’s political life, his early role as apostle of the Empire, the embodiment of imperial aspiration, and his later one as the prophet of national decline.” Sympathetic yet aware of Kipling’s faults, Gilmour shows that his ideas were more subtle than those of a crude...
I must have been 11 or 12 years old before my father put a gun into my hands and told me to shoot. By then, I had been out hunting with him several times a year but I had not ceased marveling at the efficiency and grace with which he handled a shotgun or a...
Sputnik News carried a live interview on Jan. 25 with Srdja Trifkovic on the social and political climate in the United States in the aftermath of President Joseph Biden’s inauguration. We bring you Dr. Trifkovic’s translation of some key segments of that interview. Q: [At 7 min. 55 sec.] How seriously should we take the warnings that America...
To the extent that a man may be judged by his enemies, Donald Trump is a very good man, indeed. And the more extended and successful his campaign becomes, the more it proves that everything he has ever said about the conjoined political and media establishments in America is spot on, beginning with his charge...
After decades of outward socio-cultural differences and political animosity, North America’s two United States—north and south of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo—are becoming more socially homogenous than some would care to admit. Mexico’s economic disparity has been the most extreme in all of Latin America, a social stratification described by George Baker as “equivalent to the...
Murray Rothbard spelled out inflation’s devastating consequences before proposing his heretical solution: repudiation.
When Metternich famously dismissed Italy as “a geographical expression,” the peninsula was divided into states ruled by (to name only the principals) Austrians, the Vatican, and Spanish Bourbons. Yet even 150 years after the Kingdom of Piedmont united Italy by conquest, the truth of Metternich’s description remains perceptible to anyone who travels from Torino to...
I was fortunate to grow up before the Immigration Act of 1965 began an incremental and insidious change in the ethnic composition of America. I had friends whose parents were immigrants. I thought nothing much of it because the parents had all come from countries in Northern or Western Europe and almost immediately became indistinguishable...
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has come under ferocious attack for his alleged relationships with several women, including a teenage girl. These stories are surfacing exactly when one aspect of his policy—the fight against illegal immigration, which was part of the government program endorsed by the majority of voters in the last general election—is starting...
It has been a dreadful three months for the Grand Old Party. On Nov. 3, President Donald Trump seemed to have lost the White House by narrowly losing three crucial blue states he had won in 2016—Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—and Georgia and Arizona as well. Trump immediately mounted an acrimonious two-month...
The media mind game, whereby they ‘debunk’ a minor part of a story so they can get you to swallow the rest of their narrative, is doing real harm to Americans.
Conscience and its Enemies is a collection of Robert George’s recent writings for a general audience. In addition to the title topic, it includes chapters on the defense of natural marriage, the protection of life from conception to natural death, the nature of moral reasoning, and the need for limited government. Overall, the pieces in...
Cultural genocide is a legal term sometimes used to describe the planned destruction of an ethnic or religious identity. The English, in solidifying control over their islands, did their best to obliterate the historical memory of Scottish Highlanders and Irish Catholics, and the national socialists of Bill Clinton’s party are doing the same thing here...
One of the redeeming features of imperialism is that it makes for great adventure stories. The works of H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling and the literature of the American West from James Fenimore Cooper to Louis L’Amour would not have been possible without the empires and imperial problems that provide the setting for their...
America’s Revolutionary Mind, by C. Bradley Thompson (Encounter Books; 584 pp., $32.99). Thompson’s examination of colonial America’s natural rights political culture and the effects of the Declaration’s oft-quoted passage about unalienable rights is not likely to please members of the traditional right, and as such I consider it required reading. Thompson presents copious evidence that those...
My good friends at Catholic Answers in San Diego invited me to be a guest on their excellent radio program last Monday to discuss the tensions between being a “good” American and “good” Catholic. You can listen to the show at their website, although in one short hour, ...
In the German name for Austria, Osterreich, Reich denotes more than “empire” in the sense of territorial extension; there is also a certain spiritual content. In the Middle Ages, empire meant the Eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium, and after Christmas Day 800, when Charlemagne was crowned by Pope Leo XIII, the Sacer Imperator Romanus was...
“Friendship is like two clocks keeping time.” —Anonymous Walker Percy was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 7, 1916, the eldest son of a prosperous lawyer and a Georgia socialite. In addition to patrician lineage, Percy enjoyed a birthright of wealth and privilege. With these amenities, however, came a familial predisposition...
Spent Fireworks Allen Wier: Departing as Air; Simon & Schuster; New York. by Dennis R. Perry Critic Allen Tate once commented that the epic could not be written in a society without common values. Allen Wier’s Departing as Air unfortunately—and unintentionally—reminds us that if there is a basis for fiction in our society, it is based...
Practice free trade. Avoid government debt. Keep the government and the banking system separate from each other. These quaint and long-rejected policies were Condy Raguet’s prescription for American peace and prosperity. Now largely forgotten, Raguet (1784-1842) was one of our earliest and best political economists. Unlike some later advocates of a free economy, Raguet was...
Letter from Pergamum-on-the-Potomac Just imagine if a deranged Tea Party activist known to rant on social media against Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had gunned down a bunch of Democrats. Would Republican officials get away with saccharine expressions of “this is an attack on all of us,” “we stand united,” and similar vacuities? Hardly. They’d...
Faith in technology is one of the central tenets of the modern age. Becausetechnological development is equated with progress, the technological world-view has been adopted by virtually every ideology and political regime the world over. All technology is good; more is better. Those who criticize this orthodoxy are seen as delusional or, worse, as dangerous. ...
By the seventh month of Donald Trump’s presidency a surreal quality to U.S. foreign policy decision-making had become evident. It is at odds with both the theoretical model and historical practice. When we talk of the “behavior” of states, what we have in mind is the process of decision-makers defining objectives, selecting specific courses of...
Big Bathroom Brother is here and it's clothed in public service and public safety, sacrificing your children's autonomy, and serving its Silicon Valley masters.
“If any man hunger, let him eat at home.” —1 Corinthians 11:34 Fred Chappell’s Family Gathering, his first book of poems since 1995’s Spring Garden: New and Selected Work, is a collection of short verse portraits that allows Chappell to display his considerable gifts for miniature (a talent also on display...
To calculate where a cannonball will land, it is necessary to know its initial angle of trajectory and the amount of force that propels it. It is the persuasive thesis of W. Bruce Lincoln that the Russian Civil War was the historic explosion that ever since has determined the direction and velocity of the Soviet...