One of the great ironies of our present age is that democracy's would-be eponymous outfit, the Democratic Party, has become an enemy of democracy itself.
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Imagining the West
“The curious have observed that the progress of humane literature (like the sun) is from the East to the West. . .” —Nathaniel Ames As both a reality and an interpretive problem, the American West has retained its long-established hold on the attention of our scholars. And the same is true of Western American literature:...
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Israel Rules
On Christmas Eve, when Christians were celebrating the Prince of Peace, THE New York Times delivered forth a call for war. “There’s only one way to stop Iran,” declared Alan J. Kuperman, and that is “military air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.” Kuperman is described as the “director of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Program at...
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Mexico Way
Back in the 70’s when the publicity stunt called Hands Across America was in the planning stage Kenny Rogers announced his intention to assume a position on the western boundary of Texas in order to be able to hold hands with the state of Arizona. I was reminded of the story last summer when a...
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Lincoln, Diplomacy, and War
In the tumultuous six months between his election in November 1860 and the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861, Abraham Lincoln rejected all diplomatic efforts to resolve the deepening crisis peacefully. In the political dispute with the newly constituted, but militarily weak, Confederate States of America, there would be no meaningful negotiations. No...
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Caring More for Palestine than East Palestine
Even in Ohio, it seems the activists motivated to get out in the streets are more concerned for people in faraway destinations than those in their own backyards.
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Six Midterm Reflections
As the Midterm Election returns came in, one thing became clear: There would be no “blue wave.” The Democrats secured the House of Representatives, though not by a wide margin, and the Republicans held the Senate, gaining a few seats. The House Democrats and their GOP “NeverTrump” allies still skulking about the Beltway bubble will...
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The State of Union
“I grew up a few miles from the X county this book deals with,” anthropologist Jane Adams writes in her account of rural Union County, Illinois. “My family’s farm, although dating only to the early 1940’s, is now essentially abandoned, the community emptied.” Her book describes this loss, serving both as indirect autobiography and scholarly...
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Hanging With Our Friends
A year and a half ago, Umberto Bossi delivered a brilliant speech in t:he Italian parliament. Describing Italy’s political system as organized corruption, the leader of the Lega Nord declared that left and right showed two faces but were joined into one body. A new Italian regime had to be born, but this two-headed monster,...
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Greatheart!
“The ‘Tycoon.'” —J.G. Nicolay and John Hay (Secretarial nickname for President A. Lincoln) In the foreword to Brother to Dragons , Robert Penn Warren writes “historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth...
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Taking the Kwannukah Out of Christmas
A Christ-free Christmas, which has been the goal of the American ruling elite since before World War II, has finally, at the dawn of the new millennium, been reached. At corporate “holiday parties,” references to ...
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Why Tell It Straight?
Matewan written and directed by John Sayles Cinecom Entertainment Group In 1920 Matewan was a little town on the western edge of Mingo County, West Virginia, right on the Kentucky border. It was a town owned and run by the Stone Mountain Coal Company, and when the miners tried to bring in the union, the...
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Poets and the Art of Interior Design
“I too dislike it” —Marianne Moore The sculptress Malvina Hoffman found the poetry of her friend Marianne Moore hard to understand and would sometimes ask her to read a poem aloud. “Then I would say, ‘I really don’t know what that’s all about, because of my own ignorance, I’m sure, but just possibly you might...
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The Honorable Gentleman From New York
It shouldn’t be news to anyone that conservative middle-aged professors are rare birds. Until recently, right-wing academics have been almost as rare as black ones, and for pretty much the same reason: bright conservatives could generally do better elsewhere. So it didn’t go to my head a few years ago when I learned that the...
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“Nothin’ Could Be Finah Than to Be in Carolina”
Memory’s Keep by James Everett Kibler Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Co.; 221 pp., $22.00 A first-rate scholar is as rare as, or rarer than, a first-rate creative writer. Believe me, having hung out with professors for 45 years, I know whereof I speak. When a first-rate scholar is also a creative artist of merit, you have...
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Marse Robert and the Lynch Mob
From across my small office I winked at Marse Robert. He winked back—so his 7-by-6-inch portrait seemed to suggest—white-bearded, gray-uniformed, arms folded serenely and confidently. When the nation whose future military leaders you trained at West Point mauls and mutilates the cause in which you trusted, serenity comes hard. Only a Robert Edward Lee type...
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The Cold War Never Ended: U.S.-Russian Relations Since September 11
The recent invasion of South Ossetia by the U.S.-trained and -equipped Georgian army turned into a debacle for both Tbilisi and Washington. It also demonstrated that, for the U.S. government, the fall of the Soviet Union on December 8, 1991, did not mean the Cold War had ended. Washington simply shifted focus to the newly...
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Trump’s Public Opinion Coup on Immigration
Kamala Harris’s contrived photo-op visit to the border demonstrates how Trump’s immigration nationalism has become the norm.
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The Hollywood Ten(nessean)
Fifty years have passed since the orgy of squealing and sanctimony, of perfidy and posturing, that begat the Hollywood blacklist. What a cast of characters paraded before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC): at this table, communist screenwriters making $2,000 a week scribbling claptrap and convincing themselves that it was revolution; and at that table,...
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The Way It Was?
“The nation must be grateful that millions of Americans . . . are being taught night after night lessons that may help them live more amicably with their fellow citizens.” That’s Walter Goodman, writing in the New York Times. “Goaded by minority groups,” he says, “commercial television has become a leader in the movement to...
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The Dictatorship of Victims Strikes Back
One can almost hear an audible sigh of relief from the rogues’ gallery of criminal conspirators behind the phony Russiagate collusion story cooked up in the bowels of the US-UK Deep State with the aim of overturning the 2016 election. Now, after two years of the GOP’s dithering in the area of investigations and hearings...
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Kosovo Crisis Becomes Global
The unilateral declaration of independence by the Albanian leadership in Kosovo on February 17, and the subsequent recognition of the new entity by the United States and most E.U. countries, crowned a decade and a half of iniquitous U.S. policy in the former Yugoslavia. By recognizing “Kosova,” the White House has made a great leap...
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True Tar-Heel Tales
Great Granddaddy Honeycutt and Teddy Roosevelt Children, I haven’t ever been on what you might call speakin’ terms with any presidents. But I have seen four or five of them from pretty near, and I want to tell you that they ain’t nothing special. They have to get out of bed in the mornin’ and...
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Cleaning Our Stables
In the mindless babble that passes for political debate in the United States, nothing means what it appears to mean, particularly those key words “liberal” and “conservative.” For political purposes the latter seems to have demonized the former. But has this really happened? Americans tend to be divided by race, religion, and class. The idea...
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Death Before Dishonor
The 46-year-old veteran frontiersman lay in bed, desperately ill. He was suffering from the effects of a gunshot wound that he had received in a fight. But duty called. The state legislature asked him if he would lead an army of volunteers to engage the rampaging Red Stick Creeks. Though scarcely able to sit up...
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Disinherit the Wind
As a displaced Southerner sojourning in Kansas, I’ll never forget the time I wandered into the statehouse and encountered John Steuart Curry’s mural. One section features John Brown, girded with sword and pistol, mouth and eyes agape. Mosaic beard jutting off at a right angle, brandishing a rifle in one hand and the Good Book...
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State’s Wrongs
Chilton Williamson, Jr.’s column “Pragmatic Destruction” (What’s Wrong With the World, December 2011) attacks American democracy with a vengeance. He seems to be bothered by the fact that Southern blacks were “freed” (his quotation marks) by civil-rights laws through the negation of “states’ rights” (my quotation marks). I don’t see how restricting a certain class...
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“Tech Totalitarians” vs. the Right
The “tech totalitarians” of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Google have been joined by financial services corporations like Paypal in not only “de-platforming” and censoring alternative voices on the Right but “de-financing” them by blocking access to their services. Paypal is teaming up with the leftist, anti-Christian Southern Poverty Law Center to determine who to ban...
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High Times: The Late 60’s in New York
As 1969 rolled around and the decade was ending, I was six years old and living in a temperate Southern city a thousand miles from New York. Conflict came from wanting to stretch my feet into my brother’s half of the backest-back of our fake wood-sided turquoise station wagon; Vietnam had no meaning for me....
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Genes & Jingo
Popular journalists have begun writing off the sociobiology revolution. “Can Sociobiology Be Saved? and quote the learned opinions of Stephen J. Gould and Ashley Montagu (would they lie?). They indulge in vaguely worded smears: Konrad Lorenz was a nazi, E. O. Wilson is a Southerner, and sociobiology is a code word for racism among members...
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Mal de Mer
This novel inevitably invites comparison with Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints (1973), published in France, as the English equivalent of Raspail’s famous book. The comparison is apt, so far as subject and politics go. But that, really, is the end of it. The Camp of the Saints describes the invasion of southern France...
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You Had One Job
Our southern border is being overwhelmed by waves of “migrants” and interior immigration enforcement has collapsed, as the president continues to threaten closing the border. Trump has made plenty of threats before, threats about halting the “caravans,” making Mexico pay for a border wall, forcing “migrants” to wait in Mexico, and refusing to sign any...
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An Academic Remnant
As a rule I don’t use this letter for academic shoptalk. Most of you aren’t college professors, and few things are more tedious than another profession’s gossip. Besides, there’s no regional angle to this stuff, except that the trendy foolishness currently plaguing American campuses may afflict Southern schools (Duke University aside) marginally less than those...
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Coulter Guilty Of Thoughtcrime
So the Southern Poverty Law Center has divined that Ann Coulter is a “white nationalist.” SPLC drew this conclusion because Coulter says some things with which other “white nationalists” agree, and SPLC dutifully assembled such “racist” quotes and placed them side-by-side. Examples (the italics are SPLC’s): One may assume the new majority will not be...
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Along for the Ride
I thoroughly enjoyed Roger D. McGrath’s account of the Southern California Norton Owners Club journey along Old Route 66 (Correspondence, September). He mentions that his home is near the Rock Store, which immediately brought up memories of my old stomping grounds. I grew up in the west end of the San Fernando Valley, in Woodland...
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An Unpeaceable Kingdom
It was one of those Saturday nights that spills over into Sunday morning. Invited into the home of a main-line Protestant couple in split-level northern New Jersey, the 40ish group was made up of Jews and Roman Catholics from the neighborhood and of visiting Southern Baptists from Texas. After enjoying much conversation and suffering the...
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Two Experiments
It is a commonplace among American conservatives that, at some point in the past, the way Americans understood their constitutional and cultural tradition diverged from the reality of the constitutional order established in 1787. For the Southern Agrarians and their intellectual descendants, the great change occurred with the Civil War, which elevated “union” over the...
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Trump’s Unsteady Performance
President Donald Trump has declared a national emergency to fund the wall along the nation’s southern border. Speaking in the Rose Garden, Trump said there was an emergency at the border which could only be fixed by building a wall. House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer had said before Trump’s address...
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Which Ones are the Enemy?
For Southerners, the hatred of so many of their “fellow Americans” comes so steadily and predictably that it is usually best simply to ignore it and let the heathen rage. We are an easy-going, non-ideological, and Christian people, so most of us don’t even notice. However, the Washington Times has usefully exposed a particularly egregious example, an...
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Death in the Afternoon
In the 16th century, Spain was the wonder of Europe, with her vast empire in Latin America and the Philippines and her wealthy possessions in the southern Netherlands and Italy. She came close to defeating and ruling England and Holland and, for a time, annexed Portugal with her colonial empire in Africa, Asia, and Brazil. ...
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Facing the Untoward in a Memphis Men’s Room
I guess I should have known it would be an odd trip when the pilot told us as we were approaching Memphis that we could expect “a little choppiness, but nothing untoward.” Untoward? I was going to Oxford, Mississippi, last spring to lecture at the University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture....
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You Can’t Get There From Here
The sun is shining on a typical warm day. I roll my sleeves up, let the window down, and watch the train go by. The battered Union Pacific, Southern Pacific, and Santa Fe boxcars roll past, clackity-clacking and swaying just a little on their way to “Cow Town.” Then they are gone, so I turn...
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Know Patria, Know Patriotism
With Independence Day festivities approaching, Chronicles readers may be interested in a public lecture about patriotism which I gave in Louisville this past year. It has always seemed to me that before we can begin to intelligently discuss border control, Southern heritage, kneeling NFL linebackers, or any other given controversy, there is an even more...
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Trump Should Close NATO Membership Rolls
When Donald Trump meets with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg today, the president should give him a direct message: The roster of NATO membership is closed. For good. The United States will not hand out any more war guarantees to fight Russia to secure borders deep in Eastern Europe, when our own southern border is...
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Lord Ashdown’s Balkan Fiefdom
For 200 years, the Balkan states have been manipulated by the powers of “Old Europe” to slow and control the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. They were created, enlarged, and shrunk as the need arose. During the two world wars, the territories inhabited by southern Slavs were used as bargaining chips in constructing alliances, while...
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Economics and the Catholic Ethic
Amintore Fanfani (1908-99) was an economic historian whose scholarship focused on the origins of capitalism and questions of economic and social equity. In his early career, he was part of a broader Catholic and conservative intellectual movement that was active during the interwar years and included the English Distributists and the Southern Agrarians. Like these...
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The New Gold Rush—The American Border
What U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents really think about what's happening at our southern border.
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A Conservative Case for Open Borders?
As I write this, the federal government remains “shut down” because congressional Democrats have committed themselves en masse to open borders. The Democrats know that they can secure congressional approval of President Obama’s unilateral DACA amnesty if they give President Trump funding for a wall on our southern border. But the Democrats are unwilling to...
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What is History? Part 35
You can do anything you like in London as long as you don’t do it in the street and don’t frighten the horses. —Mrs. Patrick Campbell There is nothing so stupid as a gallant British officer. —Wellington I am one Southerner who is not obsessed with the Civil War. I am too busy planning for...
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The Middle East Heats Up
The string of attacks on civilian and military targets in southern Israel by gunmen suspected to have crossed from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula was a complex, carefully coordinated operation. Israeli sources say that its intelligence services, army and police were taken by surprise by the scale and slick organization of the multiple assaults staged near Eilat. More serious than...