My curriculum vitae still includes a paragraph describing my activities as an “educational consultant,” though it has been some years since I went to Washington to read grants or evaluate schools for the Department of Education. It was all time wasted, less profitable than time wasted on politics. Politicians, to their credit, know that it...
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Pro-Lifers and the Psalmist’s Curses
On one bright, cold January day in the early 80’s I stood with a group of college students from North Carolina after the annual March for Life in Washington as we were received by Sen. Jesse Helms. He greeted us kindly and then regaled us with a few stories with that combination of gentility and...
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Russell Kirk and the Negation of Ideology
“The magnificent cause of being, / The imagination, the one reality / In this imagined world . . . ” —Wallace Stevens Though ten years have passed since his death on April 29, 1994, Russell Kirk has yet to be the subject of a definitive intellectual biography. In his own posthumously published autobiography, The Sword...
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Immigration Restriction Then and Now
A new book offers some important insights on the enduring and legitimate reasons for immigration restriction even as it proposes some less compelling ones.
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The Closing of the Conservative Mind
Why do we call it liberal education? When an eighteen-year-old graduates from high school and goes off to college to pick up a smattering of history and literature, why should we describe his course of study as the liberal arts? Educators once knew the answers to these questions, but it has been many years since...
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Here, on the Other Side of the Ring of Fire
Americans read the increasingly panic-stricken reports of deepening catastrophe at Fukushima 1, speed to the pharmacy to buy iodine and ask, “It’s happened there; can it happen here?” Along much of California’s coastline runs the “ring of fire,” which stretches round the Pacific plate, from Australia, north past Japan, to Russia, round to Alaska,...
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A Tale of Two Disasters: The Balkans and the Middle East
Yesterday and today (October 14-15) I’ve been taking part in an interesting conference at the Patriarchate of Pec, in the occupied Serbian province of Kosovo. Organized by Bishop Jovan (Culibrk), an old friend of Dr. Fleming’s and mine, The Balkans and the Middle East Mirroring Each Other marks the centenary of the First Balkan War and...
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Guns of Delusion
Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware partake in academia's mass handwringing over the indigenous “right-wing terror threat”—allegedly represented by the Jan. 6 riot.
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The Present Age and the State of Community
The Present Age begins with the First World War, the Great War as it is deservedly still known. No war ever began more jubilantly, among all classes and generations, the last including the young generation that had to fight it. It is said that when Viscount Grey, British Foreign Minister, uttered his epitaph of the...
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“Trifkovic on Europe’s crisis and the threat of migration” – Nya Tider
On February 9 Sweden’s right-leaning newspaper Nya Tider (“New Times”) published an interview with Srdja Trifkovic which focused on the deepening crisis within the European Union and the ongoing migrant invasion of Europe. Here is the English translation. NT: How do you assess the problems of Europe and the impact of the migrant crisis, terrorism,...
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From Nonsense to Understanding
Who Were The Fascists: Social Roots of European Fascism; Edited by Stein Ugelvik Larsen, Bernt Hagtvet, and Jan Petter Myklebust; Distributed by Columbia University Press; New York. Richard F. Hamilton: Who Voted for Hitler?; Princeton University Press; Princeton, NJ. Who Were The Fascists consists of more than 800 pages of papers (replete with notes) which...
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FARC Meets the Junior League
Saturday afternoon, my sister-in-law, Carolina, called from Bogotá. She asked me how we were doing—repeatedly, the way her mother does—then she asked to speak to my wife. My wife wasn’t home, so Carolina asked me to have her call, since “we have a little problem.” Carolina sounded fine, so I didn’t understand why my wife...
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Film Rose, Film Rouge, Film Noir
“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...
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Our Blessed Plot
As if we needed more proof of the threat to national sovereignty, there comes John Gardner’s latest “James Bond novel,” SeaFire. Gone is Ian Fleming’s wonderful cast of characters. The drab but lovable Q has been replaced by a woman nicknamed Q’ute; the admiral M has been replaced by a committee of bureaucrats; a primping...
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The New Yorker Under the Glass
The first issue of The New Yorker (February 21, 1925) showed on its cover a dandy in top hat, high collar, and morning suit gazing through his monocle at a butterfly. The drawing is reproduced yearly, and butterflies became a cover motif. Whatever tastes, affectations, or snobbery the artist, Rea Irvin, wanted to suggest, it...
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The Republican Party’s Welfare Queens
Republicans routinely portray themselves as fiscal guardians. In truth, they, like the Democrats, are irresponsible wastrels. Outlays are up by one third under President George W. Bush, making him the biggest spender since Lyndon B. Johnson. As the Cato Institute’s Stephen Slivinski observes, “Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still...
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The Hispanic Strategy
The question that has smoldered in the Republican mind for the last couple of years is not who will be the presidential nominee of the party in 2000, but rather, will George W. Bush win the Hispanic vote? Since some time in 1998, it has been an unquestioned assumption of many, if not most. Republicans—at...
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Election Explained
Reasons for voting Democrat: More freebies, welfare, government jobs, grants; satisfaction of leftist ideological malice; if you are a minority, the pleasure of sticking it to Whitey. Reasons for voting Republican: Unless you are a big capitalist, a defense contractor, an employer of illegal immigrants, or a politician hoping for the perks of office,...
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A Desert Idyll
For Héctor, Las Vegas was the American city. The Strip at night suggested, Héctor thought, an explosion in a fireworks factory—all the flashing, soaring, running, bursting lights in every color of the universe; the gaudy hotels, like upended cruise ships; the fancy stores, luxurious casinos, and romantic cocktail lounges; his compatriots crowding everywhere and jabbering...
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Republic of War
For a pacific, commercial republic protected by two giant oceans and two peaceful neighbors with small militaries, America sure has fought a lot of wars. Michael Beschloss’s Presidents of War details eight American leaders beginning in 1807 who took us to war and just one, Jefferson, who didn’t. The text wraps up after the Vietnam...
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Eating With Sinners
And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me. Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you. —Luke 22:19-20 These familiar...
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The President’s Painted Corner
A prudent power will always seek to keep open as many options as possible in its foreign-policy making. An increasingly rigid system of alliances, coupled with mobilization blueprints and railway timetables, reduced the European powers’ scope for maneuver in the summer of 1914 and contributed to the ensuing catastrophe. The United States, by contrast, entered...
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Does America Have a Future?
On Monday, Oct. 5, our occasional contributor James G. Jatras gave a lecture at the Institute of European Studies in Belgrade entitled “Does America Have a Future? Options Before a Declining Hegemon.” He presented a complex and rather bleak picture of America’s condition to an audience of some 30 scholars and analysts from Serbia’s leading research...
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Kamala Harris is a Bad Bet for Democrats
Harris has no excuses, no substance, and nothing recommending her other than convenience and enthusiasm for her race and gender among people who insisted until only a short time ago that Biden was perfectly fine. He wasn’t, and neither is she.
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Robert Frost: Social and Political Conservative
Robert Frost published 11 books of poetry, won four Pulitzer Prizes, established himself as the unofficial poet laureate of the United States, and acquired a national and international literary reputation. Despite his fame as a poet and public speaker, and because of his friendship with such liberal Democrats as Vice-President Henry Wallace and President John...
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In Search of Absolutes
Caveat lector—shortly after glancing through the early pages of James J. Thompson, Jr.’s accurately but flamboyantly titled Fleeing the Whore of Babylon, I wondered how in this vale of tears I could complete the job assigned to me by Chronicles. How dreadful to contemplate yet another conversion-to-the-One-True-Faith story, this conversion, moreover, from Seventh-Day Adventism. I...
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Bring Back the Iron Duke
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...
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Picking Up Buchanan’s Torch on Immigration
As the Trump administration begins, its immigration policy sounds a lot like the one advocated by Pat Buchanan.
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The Left’s Convenient Epiphany on Border Security
The anti-borders left will never truly abandon its plan to bring America to its knees through unsustainable levels of illegal immigration. It will only change its spots temporarily, repackaging itself as the solution to the problem it created.
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Terminators, Inc.
“Hieronymo’s mad againe.” The cover of the August issue of The Atlantic Monthly, titled “Drone Warrior,” features a picture of President Obama and the question, “Has It Become Too Easy for a President to Kill?” I should have thought “Stop me before I kill again” or, perhaps, “I’ll be back” would...
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The Economic Impact of Immigration: Paying for the Privilege
I stopped paying attention to Time many years ago. My twin brother and I, already plotting our emigration to the United States, subscribed as college students in England in the 1960’s to get some sense of this world-straddling “indispensable nation”—as Clinton administration Secretary of State Madeleine Albright later called it, possibly ...
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One City, Three Faiths
Simon Sebag Montefiore’s latest book is an ambitious yet incomplete survey of Jerusalem’s history. It begins with the Exodus from Egypt and concludes with the reunification of the Holy City under Israeli rule in 1967. Unlike the author’s magisterial biographies of Stalin, which demonstrated an excellent knowledge of the relevant material and brought to light...
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The Enduring Face of the Fake Right
It is hard to understand the continued presence of Jonah Goldberg as a conservative icon. Goldberg has the right to criticize Trump, yet he has turned himself into a nonstop Trump-hating machine, who manages to condemn anyone who still defends the president as a lunatic or criminal. Nietzsche once said mischievously that a good war...
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LIBERAL ARTS
Fraud and deception among society’s heroes draw attention to contradictions and inconsistencies in its value systems. Because American culture applauds entrepreneurship, independence, and ambition, for example, scientists have been encouraged to develop independent imaginations and innovative research, to engage in intense competition, to strive for success. Ironically, Americans also want their whitecoated heroes to be...
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Friends at a Distance
Second only to prostitution, writing is the loneliest profession. Because a writer’s work is wherever he happens to be, he has no real need to be anywhere; because writing is neither a team sport nor a cooperative enterprise, and because the laborious act of composition is notoriously prone to distraction, the writer normally performs his...
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The Lure of Black Gold
January 14, 1991. As I write, more than half a million American and Allied soldiers are massed on the northeastern frontier of Saudi Arabia, arrayed against the million soldiers of Saddam Hussein. At issue is the sovereignty of Kuwait, a feudal monarchy that happens to enjoy the highest per-capita income on the planet. But, more...
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A Rapid Untergang?
The Western world in general, and Europe in particular, are threatened not only by a numerically small, overtly jihadist cadre of “radicalized” individuals engaging in terrorism. The West is in mortal peril from a demographically explosive, ideologically highly developed, yet decentralized and structurally amorphous Islamic movement. To discuss the world-historical implications of this movement—which has...
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Nursing the Nation’s Population Replacement
America has a real nursing shortage but it’s not due to a shortage of immigrant healthcare workers or any of the other reasons routinely given by the oracles of respectable opinion.
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Stage Props & Program Notes
Eugene O’Neill’s life was a purgatory, as he never ceased informing us. His final plays, those written or revised from 1939 on, leave us with a vision of him plodding at last toward the top of that inverted mountain, the man emerging from his lifelong torments and the artist from his befuddlements. O’Neill is unique...
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Remembering Walter E. Williams
Addressing a Boston anti-slavery audience in 1865, abolitionist Frederick Douglass asked, “What shall we do with the Negro?” The answer he provided was a favorite of the conservative economist Walter E. Williams, though if Douglass were to utter it today he would probably be condemned by Black Lives Matter and deplatformed from social media: ...
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A Grave Mistake
Alexander Cockburn, columnist for the Nation and author of Corruptions of Empire and The Golden Age Is In Us, has long been regarded as an enforcer of far-left orthodoxy. But in recent months, Cockburn has taken an unorthodox stance on such issues as the militia movement, the “county supremacy” movement, and federal police power. When...
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Stop the Litigation-Industrial Complex’s War Against Trump
Democracy is at stake, but the threat is from the courts.
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Moment of Unity in a Disintegrating World
“An act of pure evil,” said President Trump of the atrocity in Las Vegas, invoking our ancient faith: “Scripture teaches us the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” “Our unity cannot be shattered by evil. Our bonds cannot be broken by violence,” Trump went on in his...
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Roots of a New World Order
Though Thomas Knock draws no explicit comparisons between Woodrow Wilson’s plans for a post- Great War world and the policies George Bush tried to fashion for a post-Cold War world, his use of the term “New World Order” in the title of his book is clearly meant to steer the reader to think in parallel...
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What We Are Reading: July 2022
Short reviews of Mr. Sammler's Planet, by Saul Bellow, and Dinner at Antoine's, by Francis Parkinson Keyes.
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Obama’s Fatal Mistake
Never underestimate the stupidity of our rulers. When Judge Andrew Napolitano of Freedom Watch asked me if I thought President Obama would intervene in Libya, I said, “No, he’s too smart for that.” I attribute my misreading of events to my reading of the President’s general demeanor. Obama projects the aura of a disinterested scientist,...
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Uprooting Liberty
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...
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It’s 2028, and All Is Well: The Diary of an Aging Counterrevolutionary
Thursday, June 1—My final American Interest was published today in Chronicles. In the aftermath of the Second Revolution, the column has outlived its purpose. Pontificating on the evils of one-worldism, empire, global hegemony, propositional nationhood, jihadist infiltration, foreign interventionism, and “nation-building” was a necessary and often frustrating task, back in the awful days of George...
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Polka Can’t Die
Rockford’s annual On the Waterfront festival is just the sort of thing I should like—in theory, at least. Held every Labor Day weekend since 1985, On the Waterfront is the largest community event in Rockford and features both local and national musical acts. The entire downtown is closed to all but foot traffic for three...
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Cry, the Beloved Community
From the rave reviews in the Wall Street Journal and other vehicles of low-octane conservatism, it seems that Tamar Jacoby has produced a work for the ages. Like earlier marvels by Dinesh D’Souza, John J. Miller, and Francis Fukuyama, this study was made possible by funds flowing from neocon foundations, a gesture thoughtfully repaid by...