Most English schoolboys learn this quip: Belgium is a country invented by the British to annoy the French. Which is just about true. And if you don’t understand why and how Belgium was invented, you won’t understand the significance of the elections in Belgium earlier this summer. In 1795 the revolutionary French occupied what were...
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Counting People and People Who Count
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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The Fear of Crisis
In the November 1986 Encounter, the Princeton University economist Harold James sets out to tell us “Why We Should Learn to Love a Crisis.” His explanation is not quite what we would expect from a champion of a market economy. In that economy, he says, crises serve a necessary function; states should not try to...
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What’s in a Naomi?
'Doppelganger' centers around Naomi Klein's personal grievance: Being mistaken for Naomi Wolf.
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Election Overload
The country is near unanimous in feeling that the elections of 2016 were unique in American history. Some say for the unlikability of the two principal candidates; others, for the rhetorical violence and vitriol on all sides. Still others cite the general volatility of the political year from its beginnings, in its wide swings left...
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Who Will Be the Next ‘America First’ President?
When President Joe Biden announced he would withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the 20th anniversary of 9/11, GOP hawks like Sens. Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham responded predictably. “Grave mistake,” muttered McConnell. “Insane,” said Graham, “dumber than dirt and… dangerous.” Of more interest were the responses of conservative Republicans who commended the president....
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The Disappearing Middle Eastern Christians
Fourteen centuries of Islam have fatally undermined Christianity in the land of its birth. The decline of the Christian remnant in the Middle East has been accelerated in recent decades, and accompanied by the indifference of the post-Christian West to its impending demise. Once-thriving Christian communities are now tiny minorities, and in most countries of...
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The True Fire Within
Henry Timrod died in 1867 at the age of 39 from tuberculosis—his end aggravated and hastened by inadequate food and the rigors of eking out a living amidst the charred ruins of South Carolina’s capital city. The newspaper that had provided the only income for himself, his wife, his child, and his widowed sister’s large...
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The View From Mount Nebo
Last summer this expansive sagebrush basin at the lower end of the Wyoming Range made the annual encampment of the Rainbow Family of Living Light, spawn of a congestive civilization. Fifteen thousand strong, they organized according to their various pursuits: drinking, drugs, nudity, fornication, and—for all the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department knows—cannibalism and human sacrifice....
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How the Market Stamps Out Evil
In the year before the 1994 election, Ralph Reed announced that the Christian Coalition would broaden its focus. It would go beyond traditional social issues like abortion and school prayer and include economics. He made the case that the security of the American family, a central concern of any Christian political organization, is affected by...
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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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After Strange Gods
In Hungary last October, U.S. diplomat André Goodfriend noted that Americans’ “right to express their views would be protected under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.” Making clear that his sympathies lay not with U.S. citizens arrested in Budapest but with the Hungarian officials who had arrested them, he hastily added, “We’re glad to...
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Is Demographics Destiny, or Destruction?
Our elite political class has manipulated illegal immigration to entrench themselves in power and disenfranchise Americans.
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The Left Conspires to Keep Election Fraud Quiet. Wonder Why?
Emails released by the House Judiciary Committee should outrage Americans. The federal government devised a scheme to covertly stamp out public debate over election fraud.
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Unbaptized America
The Godless Constitution is a self-described polemic against those who believe that the United States was, is, or should be a “Christian nation.” Essentially a historical analysis of the religious influences on the Kramers of the Constitution, the book explores the superficially curious omission of God, even the simplest and most formal invocation, from that...
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Scala Jerkitudinis: The Subspecies
The Great American Jerk is a chameleon who changes colors according to circumstances, from obsequious to bullying, from pious to lewd. He may, on some occasions, display buck-waving generosity and on others check-splitting stinginess, but underneath there is always the baby boy or girl who wants what he or she wants, whether it is money,...
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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 West on the Precipice: A Warning and a Hope
Traditional Christians should unite against the satanic vision of liberal-democratic nirvana, which continually threatens the West.
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Caravan Puts Trump Legacy on the Line
Our mainstream media remain consumed with the grisly killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, and how President Donald Trump will deal with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Understandably so, for this is the most riveting murder story since O.J. Simpson and has strategic implications across the Middle East....
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Border Math: A Study in Priorities
A rare crack in the fortified wall of the Bush administration’s diplomatic obstinacy seemed to appear as U.S. diplomats sat down in March with their Iranian and Syrian counterparts to discuss stability in Iraq. Foreign-policy realists of both parties hailed the move as a potential breakthrough: Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE) offered a characteristically self-righteous lecture,...
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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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Give Me That Old-Time Religion
In my 1950’s childhood, boys and men, hair slicked down with tonic, girls and ladies in mantillas and hats primly veiled with mesh worshiped at small country churches against which lapped the green and white fields of late-summer tobacco. On Easter Sundays, prissy and full of ourselves on such a special occasion, my sister and...
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Oyster Supper
As a nonnative from a cold-weather climate, I have observed that there are four seasons in Arkansas’ Delta: warm, hot, scorching, and malarial. Another way to understand the weather in this part of the South is through the eyes of a ubiquitous inhabitant: the mosquito. They bite in February; aerial insecticide spraying commences in May;...
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Andrew Lytle, R.I.P.
Andrew Lytle died on his couch at his log cabin home on December 12, 1995. Such a passing was and will be known as it can only be known by family and friends who shared with him a wealth of love. The intimacies of privacy were qualified as they must be by the ritual of...
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Later, Not Better
The work of a longtime author on social problems, on the deteriorating relations between blacks and Jews, and on Philadelphia civic life who also served as a Reagan appointee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, Murray Friedman’s history of the neoconservative ascent to power is neither scholarly nor balanced. Nor is it a book I...
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The Unmeaning of Unmeaning
A computer was the victor on a popular television game show, easily defeating its human competitors; an arms race is under way involving militarized robots that can take the battlefield in the place of inferior humans; in Japan, artificial-intelligence software has outperformed college applicants on a standardized college-entrance examination. Our machines are becoming a part...
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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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Mencken and the World Warmonger
As World War I is remembered in this year of its hundredth anniversary, one rivalry continues to resonate across America. It isn’t between the Allies and the Central Powers, or between two houses of European royalty, but between two countrymen: President Woodrow Wilson and H.L. Mencken, the Bad Boy of Baltimore. Despite a couple of...
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All Honorable Means
The political culture of the United States is cramped and stunted by the narrow range of acceptable viewpoints and the utterly banal, subliterate tone of our political campaigns—to compare American elections to the marketing of soap is an insult to the people who sell soap. If, as Sean Scallon notes in Beating the Powers That...
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The Heart’s Own Instinct
Presbyterians have a particular reputation. We are a rather staid bunch, more comfortable in the environs of the country club than those of the chicken farm, more atuned to the hoity-toity, less to hoi polloi. We’re called the frozen chosen, more for accuracy’s sake than for endearment. We read old and dusty books about doctrines...
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Gimme That Ol’Time Education
” . . . Form and Limit belong to the Good.” —C.S. Lewis Liberals in the United States have lately gathered around the standard of pluralism in the hope of stalling the movement toward private Christian education. Yet Americans, historically indifferent to such objections, have been the last to censure a church—especially a reformed or...
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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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The Black Nationalism of George S. Schuyler
Decisions, decisions. Such is the life of a black man in America today. Whether to be a black nationalist, a black Muslim, an Afrocentrist, or simply a color-blind Christian—a.k.a. an “Oreo,” a traitor to the black race. Such choices are not new; they were made by black Americans in earlier generations, dramatically in the ease...
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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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Under Cover of Darkness
For 124 years, the statue of John C. Calhoun, from high upon his perch in Marion Square, kept vigil over the city of Charleston. In life as in death Calhoun was indeed a monumental figure. Even in the flesh he seemed carved out of granite. He was, without question, the finest mind and the most dedicated...
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Three Score and Ten: A Meditation
Well, Old Man, 70 today. Who’d have thought? And still in pretty good condition, considering how little care I have taken of the old carcass. I understand now how the accumulation of minor miseries in aging is mercifully designed to let us down slow and easy till we are ready. The children are OK....
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The Third Compartment
“Truths would you teach, or save a sinking land? All fear, none aid you, and few understand.“ —Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man” Although the raw figures from Census 2000 have been in the public domain for months already, the American public’s response to the latest decennial survey is still not...
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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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Immigration: Deferred Courage
The Supreme Court, tacitly acknowledging that the great Justice Antonin Scalia is still dead, refused on October 3 to reconsider United States v. Texas. The tie remained at 4-4, same as it was in June when the Court first polled itself, but a petulant Obama Department of Justice asked for the case to be reconsidered. ...
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Delenda Est Academia
In the Winter 2015/2016 issue of the Claremont Review of Books, William Voegeli argues, Conservatives have been firing shots across the bow of higher education for years, but the Ship of Fools has never turned back, or changed course. It’s time either to surrender or to shoot a round into the engine room. While the...
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Mentor to Chesterton
Encountered in the right circumstances, Belloc’s prose can become a lifelong addiction. Fortunately, the craving can be as readily satisfied as a thirst (if that is the right word) for cocaine in Hollywood. He wrote so much that one cannot easily run out, and the best of his works (Hills and the Sea, The Cruise...
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The Sumptuous Basket
In New York City there is a room for wonder. Each year, for the past decade and more, the exhibitions held in this small room have left viewers in awe. The extraordinary quality of these shows devoted to the art of China makes a visit to China Institute worthwhile at any time of the year,...
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A Post-Riot Letter from France: A Tense Bastille Day
The targeted burning of France's public schools and libraries in its latest riots shows that the rejection of French education and culture by Muslim immigrants has become overt and systematic. France is a nation shattering into ghettos.
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Myths of Imperialism
“The day of small nations has long passed away. The day of Empires has come.” —Joseph Chamberlain In a rational world, the term “imperialism” might have been a carefully defined and useful tool of political and social analysis, part of the study of how empires come into being. But the story of “imperialism” is typical...
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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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Letter From Waco: A Visit to Mount Carmel
We are headed north on Interstate 35 from Austin to Dallas, on the tail end of an unexpected trip to Texas. The dog days of August have not been quite as unbearable as we anticipated but are still startlingly hot by our Alaskan standards. Beside the interstate, we glimpse many small Protestant churches, mostly of...
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Faux Amis in the Balkans
Roy Gutman’s Witness to Genocide raises the specter of Janet Cooke. Although the author of Witness to Genocide, the 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning “dispatches” on the “ethnic cleansing” of Bosnia, speaks American English, from the many awkward phrases in “his” book one might infer that someone other than Mr. Gutman wrote at least parts of it....
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Secession and American Republicanism
When the American colonists seceded from Britain in 1776, Europe was shared out among great monarchies. Only Switzerland was republican, but Americans were determined to enjoy a republican style of government in the New World. The republican tradition went back over 2,000 years to the ancient Greeks and consistently taught that a republic must satisfy...
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Books in Brief
August 1914: France, the Great War, and a Month That Changed the World Forever, by Bruno Cabanes; translated by Stephanie O’Hara (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; 230 pp., $27.50). This superb and marvelously readable work of social and political history, drawn from a wide variety of personal and official documents and records, recounts the...
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Is America Led Today By Anti-Americans?
How can America unite again to do great things if we are led by people who believe America suffers from a great sickness of the soul, an original sin that dates back to her birth as a nation? Consider. After his long night of prayer for “the right verdict” to be pronounced—Derek Chauvin was convicted...