“Here in North Dakota, people vote Republican for president or for local offices because they’re seen as the white party,” North Dakota State University political science professor David Danbom told me. “But they’ll vote for the Democrats for Congress and some local offices to look after their economic interests in Washington or here at home.”...
Every few months the gentlemen of the press discover a new threat to humanity that requires decisive government action. Not so long ago the United States Senate, alarmed by reports of a comet striking the planet Jupiter, actually took up the question of protecting the earth against a similar calamity. Conservatives smile, but in the...
It took 114 years, but by 2000, Virginia had become a Republican state. What brought about such a great change in the Old Dominion? Let’s take a look back. Reconstruction was the low point of Virginia history. In 1865, a defeated and gutted state lost not only its cities, towns, farms, and one third of...
Houthi attacks on Israeli allied vessels in the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait are disrupting the world economy and prompting the U.S. to intervene. Known as "The Gate of Tears," this strait is the gateway for much of the world's commerce.
Chronicles readers may recall my “Old Route 66” (September 2013) and “Keep the Water on Your Right” (February 2015) motorcycle travelogues, in which I rode through small towns and rural areas to reconnect with the land and people of America. A road trip can do this like no other kind of journey, and doing one...
“May not a man have several voices . . . as well as two complexions?” —Nathaniel Hawthorne In George Garrett’s stories the conflict often arises between a wild lone Outsider and a generally conscientious but insecure Establishment figure; in Peter Taylor’s stories the conflict is likely to take place between generations, the revolt of the...
Native American resistance, resilience, and perseverance remain prevalent. The limits of Native American sovereignty remain mysterious.
Mark Peterson’s new book traces the development of Boston from its founding in 1630 to the end of the American Civil War. In large part the book is a biography of the city, but from the unique perspective of Boston as a city-state and a commonwealth Peterson calls “remarkable for its autonomy, including an independent...
The Supreme Court’s recent decision to review a Missouri abortion case has raised the spirits of the pro-life movement. In his appeal, Missouri’s attorney general asked the Court to reconsider Roe v. Wade, the landmark civil rights decision that made pregnant women and their physicians sole arbiters over who is born and who is not...
In a classic book of humor entitled The Experts Speak, we find an impressive collection of failed prophecies and wildly inaccurate predictions: Television would never catch on, nobody needs a personal computer, and so on. I occasionally think there might be a place for a parallel volume of religious forecasts gone stunningly wrong. Such an...
The Last Samurai is the latest movie to treat us to the spectacle of the U.S. Army slaughtering American Indian women and children. Playing a disillusioned captain, Tom Cruise suffers from nightmares for his role in the dastardly deed. He finds honor and redemption as a Great White Samurai in Japan. Many movie reviewers have...
“Politics stops at the water’s edge” was a tradition that, not so long ago, was observed by both parties, particularly when a president was abroad, speaking for the nation. The tradition was enunciated by Sen. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan in 1947, as many of the Republicans in the 80th Congress moved to back Truman’s leadership...
This remarkable editorial by Chronicles’ longest-serving editor offered one of the first and best analyses of America’s immigration problem.
In his engaging biography of John C. Calhoun, Irving H. Bartlett reminds us that American political culture and the men who made it were not always as decadent and corrupt as they are today. Yet Bartlett’s book is not a partisan manifesto. He is respectful of Calhoun but not always sympathetic to his views, aspirations,...
“The trouble with people is not their ignorance. It is the number of things they know that ain’t so.” —Mark Twain During 1986, the fury of the left’s outrage with human rights in Chile abated globally and was redirected against South Africa. The reasons given were the vestiges of the apartheid system and an alleged...
“The land of the heart is the land of the West.” Catholic readers of American literature have always recognized that the difference between Eastern and Western fiction is the difference between New Canaan, Connecticut, and Tuba City, Arizona. A. Carl Bredahl’s book is a comprehensive as well as original attempt at defining the nature, of...
The day after Christmas this family took off for the National Cheerleaders Association’s High School Cheerleaders National Championship in Orlando, Florida. The National Cheerleaders Association’s High School Cheerleaders National Championship is not the kind of event a parent—this parent, anyway—ever anticipates attending. It is the kind of event a parent discovers herself at because of...
Storms and other phenomena of nature have their own distinct sounds. Those who have survived a tornado often say that it sounded “like a train.” A volley of cannon fire accompanies every thunderstorm. The gale-force winds of a hurricane howl at nearly 200 miles per hour, as the rain strikes objects with the velocity of...
Descent from a Founding Father is a matter for celebration to thousands of sons and daughters of the American Revolution and members of the Cincinnati Society, Colonial Wars, First Families, and other sufficiently remote or proud groups. Americans are eager to claim, when they can, ancestry made noble by history if not by “blood.” The...
Article IV of the Constitution addresses the obligations of the federal government to the state governments that were being asked to surrender aspects of their sovereignty to form our new Union. “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government,” reads Article IV, “and shall protect each of...
California has been living off its legacy of water projects for the last several decades like a lazy, self-indulgent, trust-fund recipient.
We Americans like to think of our country as the most religious, the most Christian nation on the face of the earth. In an irritating article I wrote for the Spectator (“America: Not A Christian Country,” August 27, 2005), I demonstrated the hollowness of this claim. Whatever Americans may say they believe, they do not...
When my daughter, Katie, was in the fifth grade, her grammar school conducted a week-long series of tests inspired by the White House to promote physical fitness for schoolchildren. Children who completed the tests with passing marks—the standards for passing were not high—received a certificate from the President. The kids ran, jumped, and stretched, and...
After two years and tens of millions of dollars, the Mueller investigation ended in a shattering anticlimax for Democrats. On March 22, Special Counsel Robert Mueller sent Attorney General William Barr his report, and Barr promptly informed Congress that Mueller found no collusion between Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. Mueller recommended no prosecutions—though Barr’s...
Just two days after the alleged April 9 chemical attack in Douma, Syria, TV host Tucker Carlson asked Mississippi Republican Sen. Roger Wicker, “What is the American national security interest that would be served by regime change in Syria?” Wicker responded, “Well, if you care about Israel you have to be interested at least in...
“Death must be distinguished from dying, with which it is often confused. “ —Rev. Sydney Smith The rarest entity in American writing is the novelist with ideas—that is to say, one who is capable of writing the ideological novel. Of course, the term is enough to put a chill on what is in fact the...
“Justice has been done,” chortles President Obama and his spokespeople. ”Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, good bye,” chanted the proles on the streets of New York. There are already T-shirts on sale saying “Obama got Osama.” I am surprised not to have heard of a procession of little people in...
Artur Schnabel . . . once said of Beethoven’s sonatas that “this music is greater than it can ever be played.” . . . The stories of American history are better than they can ever be told. —from David Hackett Fischer, “Telling Stories in the New Age,” March 1997 In my...
I’ve been sent on a fool’s errand: to explain Italian politics. As those of you who have spent extended periods of time in the “Mediterranean boot” know, this is a challenging task. Understanding it requires doggedness—and a bit of masochism, too—given the internecine struggles for power and influence, the political divisions, intrigue, and tensions that...
Because spectator sports play a dominant role in American culture, many have tried to use them to change our society. Such social engineering happens in America’s inner cities, which would come as no surprise to most people. But it also happens in such unlikely places as the Arrowhead Region of northeastern Minnesota and, specifically, in...
From before the time of Homer until the middle of the 19th century, almost all poets in the Western literary tradition wrote measured verse—that is, poems with a regular repeated rhythmical pattern. Then, in a little over a hundred years, from Walt Whitman through the 1960’s, a new form of writing (free verse) fully emerged...
According to family records, ten of Great-Grandma’s twelve sons died in the Civil War. Thus it was that Allie Johnson Puett, the girl who became my Grandma Evetts, learned the lessons of self reliance, the duty of the defiance of illegitimate authority, the comforts of firearms, and the necessity of knowing how to shoot—wherein...
It is time we looked at the world from a new perspective, one of enlightened nationalism. Cliches about a “new” global economy aside, there has always been an international economy—ever since Columbus stumbled onto the Western Hemisphere while seeking new trade routes to the East, in the hire of a nation-state, Spain. The Dutch East...
“A steady Patriot of the World alone, The friend of every country — but his own.” -George Canning John Crewdson: The Tarnished Door: The New Immigrants and the Transformation of America; Times Books; New York. Victor Ripp: Moscow to Main Street: Among the Russian Emigres; Little, Brown; Boston. Lewis A. Coser:...
While Ted Galen Carpenter makes some valid points about the situation today in Afghanistan (“America’s Other War,” News, August), his attempt to blame everything on an alleged shift of focus from Afghanistan to Iraq is nonsense. This is an old, tired charge made mainly by antiwar Democrats in the last election but abandoned when it...
In the 1950’s any real American boy knew that whatever he wanted to be when he grew up, it was not an underemployed television father like Ward Cleaver or Ozzie Nelson. Our fictional heroes were from another time. They were the cowboys, frontiersmen, and pioneers who had taken risks that seemed inconceivable to a generation...
“Free trade,” like “free love,” is a beguiling abstraction that hides more than it reveals. Absolute free trade would be an exchange of commodities between two people without the coercive intervention of a third party. But economic exchange is always embedded in a cultural landscape of noneconomic values, which impose restraints. Blue laws prevent trade...
In recent years, American politics has been preoccupied with moral questions, or what are now called “social issues”: sexual immorality, sodomy, abortion, pornography, and recreational drugs. Some conservatives want the federal government to play a role in opposing these evils. Many libertarians, on the other hand, want the government, state and federal alike, to treat...
The fate of Karen Whitsett, a black Democratic representative to the Michigan House of Representatives, who was censured by her fellow black Democrats from Detroit, for developing good relations with President Trump, speaks volumes. It tells us, if any further proof were required, how deeply American blacks hate the Republican Party and any black person...
In August, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) published a report documenting a startling increase in immigration over the past year. The study indicated that America’s immigrant population had grown by 1.7 million and that 44 percent of the new immigrants were from Mexico, with illegal immigration increasing during a “protracted period of legal immigration...
A remark one often hears from the current crop of film critics is that John Wayne might indeed merit the iconographic status conferred on him by tens of millions of ordinary cinemagoers around the world, were it not for the troubling matter of his alleged evasion of military service during World War II—an issue, it...
Richard Weaver once wrote that it was difficult to perceive the decline of civilization because one of the characteristics of decline was a dulling of the perception of value, and thus of the capacity to judge the comparative worth of times. Weaver, I think, did not have us common folk in mind, for whom it...
Cormac McCarthy, 56-years-old, is the author of five published novels, which between them have sold approximately fifteen thousand copies in the original hardcover editions, published by Random House. (The Ecco Press, in New York City, is maintaining these titles in print in paperback.) Born in Rhode Island, reared in Tennessee, and traveled in Europe, McCarthy...
“Teach him he must deny himself,” said Lee. That was the general’s advice to a young mother who brought her infant to him after the War Between the States to receive his blessing. In his classic four-volume biography R.E. Lee, Douglas Southall Freeman chose this as the incident that best exemplifies Robert E. Lee’s message...
Like Richard A. Epstein’s earlier book Takings, dealing with the defense of property in the Fifth Amendment, his latest one combines legal study and economic analysis with megadoses of political and social theory. Though Epstein explores, for the most part, civil rights legislation aimed at the removal of job discrimination, he devotes the opening section...
“The corruption of man,” Emerson wrote, “is followed by X the corruption of language.” The reverse is true, and a century later Georges Bernanos had it right: “The worst, the most corrupting lies are problems wrongly stated.” How pertinent this is about so many matters present, including the use of the word culture. My conservative...
In 1882 Congress took steps to control Chinese immigration with the passage of “An Act to execute certain treaty stipulations relating to Chinese.” The act later became known misleadingly as the Chinese Exclusion Act. In high schools and colleges it’s taught that the act was simply another example of American racism. The real story is more...
In 1944, a party of German prisoners-of-war escaped from a camp in Phoenix, armed with old maps and with the intention of stealing a boat and sailing to Mexico. When they saw the “pitiful trickle” that is the modern Gila, they began to hike downstream in despair and were soon rounded up. Their leader later...
The Illinois legislature recently overrode Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s veto of what the newspapers are describing as mandatory-school-prayer legislation. Predictably, the state’s editorial pages are filled with denunciations of this arbitrary attempt to impose religion on the helpless children of Illinois, but in fact, the new law, requiring a minute of silence at the beginning of...
“The purity of a revolution can last a fortnight.” —Jean Cocteau Magisterial works of history are almost always informed by a tragic sense of life. Some recall epochal transformations that were as lamentable as they were inescapable. Still others dramatize the clash of two valid, but irreconcilable, principles. Among the latter, certainly, are the best...