Most people think agrarianism is synonymous with farming. As a result, agrarian thinkers spend much of their time defending what they really mean—namely, that agrarianism is not so much about agriculture as it is an integrated life in which farming plays a central or at least respectable role. Eric Freyfogle wisely avoids this pitfall and...
We’ve only just begun . . . Have you ever wondered what it was like to live through a sweeping cultural revolution? If you lived in France in late 1789, for instance, and you reviewed the events of the previous 12 months, you would have shaken your head in wonderment at all that had happened. ...
Almost 80 years ago, Julien Benda published his tirade against the intellectual corruption of his time, La Trahison des Clercs. The “scribes” in question are those who traffic in words and ideas. For generations before the 20th century, Benda wrote, members of the Western intellectual elite made sure that “humanity did evil, but honored good.”...
Americans do not believe in death. At least, they live as if they will never die. This has been the case from colonial times. It is a consequence of seemingly limitless opportunity and a drive for upward mobility, denied to generations of Europeans. Indentured servants, laborers, persecuted minorities, and peasants tilling the soil of the...
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...
Presidential elections in the United States sometimes seem more like the Wars of the Roses than political contests. The resemblance to dynastic conflict goes beyond the predictable acrimony between two sets of political interests: the taxpayers of the Republican Party and the tax consumers on whom the Democrats rely. It is true, of course, that...
What are the roots of our present disorder, of the hostilities and hatreds that so divide us? When did we become this us vs. them nation? Who started the fire? Many trace the roots of our uncivil social conflict to the 1960s and the Johnson years when LBJ, victorious in a 61% landslide in 1964,...
As a conservative “anarchist” and non-interventionist with anti-vocational views on education, Albert Jay Nock (1870-1945) can seem paradoxical. His influence was lasting and he took unconventional stances on many topics. He viewed conservatism as primarily cultural, anarchism as radical decentralization, education as a non-economic activity, and foreign policy as a noninterventionist endeavor. Raised in Brooklyn...
Sin City Produced by Dimension Films Directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller Written by Frank Miller Distributed by Dimension Films and Miramax Films So you have been wondering what happened to Frodo, a.k.a. Elijah Wood, after he drifted off into that glorious sunset at the end of The Return of the King? It seems...
“Fame is a calamity.” —Turkish Proverb The face is familiar, but not the gray hair. To some few, it may be so from Our Gang shorts from the late 30’s and early 40’s, known by the moniker of Mickey Gubitosi. To others, it is the face of Bobby Blake of “Red Ryder” westerns and Humoresque...
Like Satan in Dante’s Inferno, the forces threatening the integrity of the American nation and its culture have three faces. The “global economy” and political one-world.ism jeopardize the historic character, independence, and the very sovereignty of the United States. The third threat, the mass immigration that this country has endured for the last fifteen years...
Murray Rothbard spelled out inflation’s devastating consequences before proposing his heretical solution: repudiation.
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...
Saint William? A canonization has occurred without prior beatification. A still living and breathing William F. Buckley Jr. has been elevated to sainthood. And by whom? Not by the pope and not by Buckley’s own flock, but by a man of the left. And why? Not because of Buckley’s continuing conservatism, but because he is...
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.
“And hung my head and wept at Britain’s name.” —Samuel Taylor Coleridge If there be monsters, they yawn from within. It is hard not to see justice in the story of an empire, brought low by its unwillingness to defend itself. “This book is in part a penance for unquestioningly accepting the Titoist bias shared...
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, ...
From the December 2009 issue of Chronicles. 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...
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...
In mid-February, U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen issued an injunction enjoining the Obama administration from implementing the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents program (DAPA). Under DAPA, over four million illegal aliens present in the United States would be shielded from deportation and would be eligible to receive work permits,...
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.
As war clouds loom over the political landscape and the propaganda wafts thickly from the major news media, we have to ask: Where does all of this come from? Who is behind the rush to war? Pat Buchanan has utilized a useful phrase to describe the origins of this bloodlust: the War Party. This term...
Last year I wrote about the Poppers, Frank and Deborah, the Rutgers University husband-wife duo who theorized that the Great Plains—from Texas to North Dakota and from Oklahoma to Denver—were fit to be nothing more than a “Buffalo Commons.” The couple predicted that the Great Plains, whose largest city is Lubbock, Texas, will slowly dwindle...
Thomas Fleming’s “Love the One You’re With” (Perspective, January) is the kind of writing that first attracted me to Chronicles and The Rockford Institute. It is for this caliber of discussion that I return every year to the Summer School. When I read Dr. Fleming, I can be sure that English is being properly used,...
The Presidential election campaign was well under way when the two major party candidates began crisscrossing the United States, stumping for votes at the annual meetings of Mexican-American organizations. Here in Rockford (as in other cities with significant Hispanic populations), the local Gannett paper devoted an entire Sunday commentary section to interviews with the candidates,...
Election ’88 has been so far a political flea circus in which the issues are as microscopic as the candidates. The one interesting candidate has been the Rev. Jesse Jackson. If you have seen his very effective commercials, you will remember the pictures of Jackson meeting with President Assad of Syria, and the voice-over reminding...
Michael Kazin (editor of Tikkun, son of a New York man of letters, Alfred Kazin, and professor of history at American University) has produced a book on populism which highlights his own concern: namely, that “left populism” is losing its appeal in America. For Kazin this is a lost opportunity. At the end of the...
Gore Vidal’s “American chronicle” is a roman fleuve that looks beyond Powell’s The Music of Time to Roger Martin du Card’s Les Thibaults series of the 1920’s and 30’s, and what it demonstrates is that our assumptions about popular culture are incomplete, if not actually wrong. The notion that commercial success varies inversely with quality...
Here it is 2008, and everything else is old news. The provisional and absentee ballots, recounts, scores, and statistics of 2000-2007 are all in the history books, along with Afghan and Iraqi elections and constitutions, insurgencies, hurricanes, disgraced mayors and governors, and Supreme Court, lobbying, earmark, wiretapping, and energy and cartoon ruckuses. Since Barack Obama...
In the 1950s grammar schools of the Golden State we kids substituted “Oh, California!” for Stephen Foster’s “Oh, Susanna!” The tune was the same, but the lyrics came from the pen of John Nichols just before he climbed aboard the bark Eliza in December 1848 at Salem, Massachusetts, for the voyage to California. I come...
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...
Country music has never been shirked in the pages of Chronicles, as any faithful reader knows. John Reed’s June column concerning the Far East’s fascination with country music, however, left out one pertinent mention: the story of Torn Mitsui. Mr. Mitsui is a fifty-year-old professor of English at Kanazawa University; he is also Japan’s foremost...
For centuries up to and including the 20th, Europe seemed the central pivot of world history. Then came the Great Civil War of the West, our Thirty Years’ War (1914-1945), where all of the great European powers—Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia—along with almost all of the rest, fought some of history’s greatest battles. Result: Europe’s...
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...
London: It should feel like a good time for Britain to leave the European Union. The euro crisis continues to tear the Continent apart. The charming-yet-feckless Greeks must soon be on their way out, in spite of the latest bailout-for-austerity swap between the European Central Bank and Athens. Germany, so long the driving force behind...
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.
Half a century ago, American children were schooled in Aesop’s fables. Among the more famous of these were “The Fox and the Grapes” and “The Tortoise and the Hare.” Particularly appropriate this Christmas season, and every Christmas lately, is Aesop’s fable of “The Dog in the Manger.” The tale is about a dog who...
The contrast between the importance of the subject of Richard Buel’s new book—New England’s defiance of federal authority during the years of commercial embargo and war with England—and the dullness and conventionality of the narrative reminds us that history is too important to be left to the current occupants of the academy. To enter the...
The message of the thoughtful and beautifully written articles in Chronicles (December 1990) on “good news” seems to be this: things are very bad and bound to get worse, but if you resign yourself to the inevitable and concentrate on family and friends you may, with God’s help, get through it. If this is “good...
On January 27 Dr. Trifkovic presented a paper on the geostrategic significance of the Russo-Chinese partnership at the Dado Center for Interdisciplinary Military Studies of the Israel Defense Forces in Glilot, north of Tel Aviv. We bring you his remarks in a slightly abbreviated form. Almost exactly 116 years ago, in January 1904, Sir Halford Mackinder gave a...
Forget the “culture wars” and the assault on Christianity. The real conflict in America is thoroughly secular—between environmental and ecological “religions”—or so says Robert Nelson. He makes the argument, long known to conservatives, that religion never really goes away. Modern secular religions, like these two, borrow heavily from the Christian tradition. As such, they inherit...
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared on October 26 that “Israel must be wiped off the map.” Invoking the words of Ayatollah Khomeini, he told an audience of 4,000 cheering students that a new conflict in Palestine would soon remove “this disgraceful blot from the face of the Islamic world.” The statement, made in the midst...
If we can believe most pollsters, President Obama has the election sewn up and in the bag. He is leading in most of the crucial swing states, and, insiders are saying, Governor Romney’s only chance is a knock-out blow in one of the debates. Given Romney’s rhetorical clumsiness, this is unlikely. Obama is not...
When the wildfires of California broke out across the Golden State, many were the causes given. Negligence by campers. Falling power lines. Arson. A dried-out land. Climate change. Failure to manage forests, prune trees, and clear debris, leaving fuel for blazes ignited. Abnormally high winds spreading the flames. Too many fires for first responders to...
As Israel enters its 61st year, Israelis may look back with pride. Yet, the realists among them must also look forward with foreboding. Israel is a modern democracy with the highest standard of living in the Middle East. In the high-tech industries of the future, she ...
Do great men make history? Or does history make great men? One thing’s for sure: History sometimes smothers great men, as Thomas Gray suggests in his famous elegy written in a country churchyard, and as the rows of endless graves from Arlington to the Somme demonstrate with brutal candor. “Some mute inglorious Milton here may...
The once-docile German people no longer trust their political establishment to deal rationally with immigration and crime. A growing people’s revolt in Europe may be a sign of things to come in America.
On August 24, 1992, shortly after 3 A.M.. Hurricane Andrew hit the coast at Miami, in South Dade County, Florida. A “Category Four” hurricane on the Saper-Simpson Hurricane Scale, Andrew struck with 145 m.p.h. winds, making it the worst hurricane to hit Miami since 1926. In fact, this was the worst hurricane to hit a...
Until a year ago it had seemed that BRICS, the association of five emerging economies—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—was morphing from a loose economic alliance into a geopolitical force willing and able to challenge the global order. Its members’ potential to do so appeared impressive: They account for three billion people (two fifths...
To begin on a positive note: anyone who shuddered at the prospect of a barely thirty-something Edward Kennedy in the U.S. Senate cannot be wholly without redeeming social value. The year was 1962, and H. Stuart Hughes, grandson of the 1916 Republican presidential nominee of the same surname and devotee of a SANE foreign policy,...