My housekeeper personifies the American Dream. Her journey from rags may not have ended in riches. But she now enjoys a solid middle-class existence after decades of backbreaking labor. Born and raised in the Mexican state of Puebla, Laura married her first and only boyfriend, Daniel, in her late teens. The newlyweds moved in with...
They are called the PIGS—Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain. What they have in common is that all are facing deficits and debts that could bring on national defaults and break up the European Union. What brought the PIGS to the edge of the abyss? All are neo-socialist states that provide welfare for poor people, generous unemployment,...
On December 7, 2015—Pearl Harbor Day—candidate Donald Trump called “for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.” After applause from the large crowd at a campaign rally in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, Trump emphasized, “We have no choice. ...
President George Bush has encouraged Arabs and Israelis to “lay down the past.” “Territorial compromise is essential for peace,” he said. “We seek peace, real peace. And by real peace I mean treaties.” Israelis praised President Bush for promising not to railroad them into any agreements, while the Palestinians believed he showed support for their...
If only Roger Barnett had known the courts would lynch him for defending himself. Or maybe he did know and still decided to stand his ground. Either way, the owner of the Cross Rail Ranch in Douglas, Arizona, on the U.S. border with Mexico, may soon be $87,000 poorer. The left-wing Ninth U.S. Circuit Court...
The poor United States of America: so far from God, so close to Mexico. President Franklin Roosevelt, in his First Inaugural Address, announced what became known as the Good Neighbor Policy. “In the field of world policy,” Roosevelt said, “I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects...
Before the Reagan era, conservatives were clear about how they felt about deficits and the public debt: a balanced budget was good, and deficits and the public debt were bad, piled up by free-spending Keynesians and socialists, who absurdly proclaimed that there was nothing wrong or onerous about the public debt. In the famous words...
“The only thing that keeps the ruling coalition together is the loathing of Berlusconi,” Sylvia Poggioli, NPR’s veteran Rome correspondent, told me over the morning coffee last week, “and the fear that after the next election they’d no longer be in power.” In other ...
Twenty-eight years ago, in the summer of 1980, I moved to Guadalajara, Mexico, to take a job teaching English and journalism at a university there. The job ended just as soon as it began: On the first day of classes, the university, a private institution with connections to the country’s thriving neofascist movement and, thence,...
Winston Churchill’s backhanded praise of democracy as “the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried” is usually cited as the last word on the subject. It is a good way of closing off a dangerous topic of discussion, and it works quite well with that vast majority of people...
The United States was founded by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants and became the political, economic, and military leader of the free world under their guidance. The conscience, industry, practicality, antisensualism, and sense of civic responsibility that characterizes the classic WASP became definably American characteristics. When immigrants entered the melting pot, they were to come out looking...
From the December 1997 issue of Chronicles. 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...
I read with interest the article by Zachary Garris on Robert Lewis Dabney (“Remembering R. L. Dabney,” December 2019). Having myself graduated from Hampden-Sydney College, where he taught, and being Presbyterian, I have had some interest in his views. The article mentions hierarchal views of biblically sanctioned authority. It does not mention the extension of...
There seems to be a new trend that when a new leftist government is elected it attempts to change or undermine its country’s court system to remove it as a barrier to consolidating power. During the U.S. election cycle, there was much talk of how an incoming Democratic administration might reshape the Supreme Court. Thus...
Surprisingly enough, in many ways journalist and commentator John T. Flynn was a typical progressive. Long a figure of prominence on the American right, he was not politically active in the time of Woodrow Wilson, whose domestic policies he much admired. He did, however, first gain prominence as a muckraker denouncing the financial chicanery of...
The Saudi military intervention in Yemen was launched, according to Riyadh, to “restore the legitimate government” and protect the “Yemeni constitution and elections.” This sudden desire to fight for constitutions and elections sounds odd, coming from an absolute monarchy which is consistently combating efforts at democratization at home or in its neighborhood. As Ali Alahmed,...
“Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than malice can be in the intent.” —Halifax The correspondence of Edmund Burke, whose letters help to illuminate his published works, was not available in a complete edition until 1978. Today, however, it seems that every aspiring journalist begins saving his correspondence even...
Beirut’s occupation in 1983 by U.S. Marines may provide a small-scale sample of what a prolonged U.S. occupation of Iraq could be like, should the Pollyannaish postwar scenarios of some members of the War Party fail to materialize. Of course, the two situations are, in some ways, very different. Beirut, for instance, is just a...
The death of the sainted George Floyd has proven to be the ideal pretext for the left to accelerate its campaign of dismantling the markers of American historical identity. With lavish corporate and philanthropic support, radical activists are “resetting” America. This means mandating the instruction of Critical Race Theory in public schools; replacing the American...
The appearance of an article about American church life on the front page of the Washington Post is a rare occurrence. But the approval by the Presbyterian Church (United States) of a church law requiring celibacy of its non-married clergy gained front-page attention in the Post not just once but twice this year. Treatment of...
Not even President Trump’s most ardent admirers would claim that he is a “Great Communicator,” the title bestowed on the last resident of the White House who could plausibly be seen as governing, at least in some respects, as a conservative. But Donald Trump might just be a great clarifier: His words and actions cause...
I forced myself recently to watch Oliver Stone’s movie takedown of George W. Bush called W. I have a morbid curiosity about cataloging trends among the pseudo-intelligentsia. This film, like previous productions of the same auteur, is doubtless providing multiple thrills for the type in America and Europe. As readers here are well aware, I...
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...
Let the Buddhists have their mandalas; give the Muslims Mecca; we have The Price Is Right. Five days a week at 11:00 A.M., soaring audio and video levels, howling graphics, and dizzying camera shots herald the appearance of a ministry as fervent as any in the world. The names of the chosen few are called...
A decade after Barack Obama pioneered it, Joe Biden is tasking every agency and department of the federal government to promote voter engagement.
A Democratic Congress, discharged by the voters on Nov. 2, has as one of its last official acts, imposed its San Francisco values on the armed forces of the United States. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is to be repealed. Open homosexuals are to be welcomed with open arms in all branches of the armed...
As a first-time attendee of the Summer School (“The American Midwest,” The Rockford Institute’s Fourth Annual Summer School, 2001), I can sincerely say that I had one of the best times of my life—intellectually, spiritually, and socially. Having strong family roots in the Midwest, my regional pride and knowledge of this beautiful section of the...
“It is notgood to look too long upon these turning wheels of vicissitude, lest we become giddy.” –Sir Francis Bacon It was apt that 1984, the Orwellian Year, should see the reissue of Arthur Koestler’s two-volume autobiog raphy (first published some three dec ades ago) and that the year should also see the...
A favorite exhortation of those seeking to further restrict or remove the private possession of firearms in the United States is to “look at other countries,” where lower murder rates are supposed to be a result of gun control laws. The underlying presumption beneath these laws is that guns cause crime. Getting rid of guns,...
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...
You may have thought this country’s problems stemmed from runaway central government, but Clint Bolick is here to tell you that the real threat is down the street. “Local government in its various forms is today probably more destructive of individual liberty than even the national government,” says Bolick, chief lawyer of the Institute for...
In his weekly roundup of world events for Serbia’s Happy TV network, Dr. Trifkovic discusses the future of the Islamic State. He also looks at a viable strategy for President Donald Trump to emerge victorious from the impeachment battle. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ2EPtvxQ_c&app=desktop (Translated from Serbian, slightly abbreviated.) Q: What has changed with the killing of al-Baghdadi?...
Short reviews of The Myth of Left and Right by Hyrum Lewis and Verlan Lewis, and Myth America by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer.
Only a fool would try to foretell the course of U.S. politics a few months in advance, let alone several years in the future. The fact that Democrats are riding high after their electoral triumph last November does not necessarily mean that they will win the White House in 2008. But just suppose that January...
Polarized: Making Sense of a Divided America, by James E. Campbell (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 313 pp., $29.95). This book is probably too academic to suit the taste of the general reader. It is, however, eminently sensible and notably well written for an academic text. Campbell argues that the polarization of American politics began...
At 11:30 A.M. (CST) on Thursday, November 13, 2003, Roy Moore, chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, was removed from office, and the will of the people of the sovereign state of Alabama was thwarted by a unanimous vote of the nine-member panel of the Court of Judicial Ethics. In deciding Glassroth v. Moore,...
It should be a property owner’s dream. Thirteen acres in the heart of America’s largest city, bordered by two of its most prominent streets, Broadway and 42nd Street. Famous shopping and tourist attractions are all within walking distance. Broadway theaters, Fifth Avenue, the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, Madison Square Garden. Major transportation hubs like...
“This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper,” wrote T.S. Eliot in the closing couplet of “The Hollow Men.” Eliot’s poem was written after the Great War of 1914-1918 had carried off 9 million soldiers, wounded twice as many more, brought down the Romanov, Hohenzollern and Habsburg empires, and ushered...
“Beautiful losers” was the phrase Sam Francis borrowed from Leonard Cohen to sum up the failure of the American conservative movement. Beautiful or not, American conservatives have been losers from their movement’s inception, and the same can be said for every conservative movement since the French Revolution and going back at least to the Enlightenment,...
Whatever happened to Randolph Scott ridin’ the range alone? Whatever happened to Gene and Tex And Roy and Rex, the Durango Kid? Whatever happened to Randolph Scott His horse plain, as can be? Whatever happened to Randolph Scott Has happened to the best of me. So sang the Statler Brothers in their 1974 country hit. ...
A town without a saloon is like a woman without a heart. I made Blanding, Utah, before sundown, checked into the Best Western Motel, and rang up the front desk from my room. “Is the Elk Ridge Restaurant within walking distance from here?” “It’s just half a block away.” “Do they have a liquor license?”...
Did President Donald Trump launch his Twitter barrage at Elijah Cummings simply because the Baltimore congressman was black? Was it just a “racist” attack on a member of the Black Caucus? Or did Trump go after Cummings after a Saturday Fox News report that his district was in far worse condition than the Mexican border...
William Murchison gets right to the point in his eloquent account of mainline Protestantism’s near-terminal degeneration, written poignantly from an Anglican’s perspective: Whenever traditional Christianity clashed with late-twentieth-century culture, the Episcopal Church normally weighed in on the side of the culture: for enhanced choice in life, for more laxity and less permanence in belief. Don’t...
As federal cannon boom from the smoky ridge to the west, a rebel foot soldier darts through underbrush, scrambles over a fence and crouches warily behind a tree. Raising his rifle to fire, he takes a volley of grape-shot in the chest. Tumbling, tragically, from the coffee table, he lands on the floor among the...
The other night, while watching The Godfather on television for roughly the 50th time, I was struck by a parallel that had never occurred to me before. The movie’s sentimental musical score reminded me of “Tara’s Theme” in Gone With the Wind. My mother used to whistle that melody all the time; she loved the...
“All you need to make a film is a girl and a gun.” —Jean-Luc Godard In 1947, an executive director of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals deplored the “sizable doses of communist propaganda” in many films of the day. Leaving aside the question of whether “American ideals” could be identified—much...
Among the many questions about the new presidency of George. Bush with which the lips of Washington were afroth this spring was whether Lee Atwater is for real. The thirty-seven-year-old head of the Republican National Committee who made the name of Willie Horton as familiar to American households as the Domino’s Pizza gremlin is one...
No one is persuaded when the media describes as an Irish national an Algerian man who stabs Irish children. The gaslighting may only radicalize people in the end.
Media MIA’s Vietnam Reconsidered: Lessons from a War;Edited by Harrison E. Salisbury; Harper & Row; New York. James Dunkerley: The Long War, Dictatorship and Revou1tion in El Salvador;Junction; London. It has been a decade since America withdrew its troops from Vietnam. Unfortunately, scores of servicemen remain officially unaccounted for, their fate shrouded...