A successful national leader (“good” or “bad”) is able to redefine the terms of what is politically possible in accordance with his values, and to produce durable desired outcomes. Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan come to mind at home, and Churchill, De Gaulle, and Deng Xiaoping abroad. Very few are able to effect a profound, long-lasting...
As a general rule, democracy does not grow with time. It usually comes into being as the result of some general uprising, and it is supported by the broader and more general popular will. But, with time, and because the larger population docs not usually continually watch for the encroachment of smaller groups, the course...
Parents, some say, are people who use the rhythm method of family planning. One might better say that parents are optimists, people who think that the present is good and the future probably better. People who look forward with confidence often have an extra child; those who think that their situation may worsen are cautious...
“Studying” philanthropy is a new academic enterprise, and one riven by various interests. Though a growing camp of scholars is following grant money, their studies, even when critical, generally confirm the conventional wisdom of foundation leaders. As a permanent supplicant, the academy approaches organized philanthropy with either a tugged forelock or an upraised list. Ellen...
The late Jean-François Revel wrote a once-famous book with the title Comment les démocraties finissent. Revel was not a stupid man, and I thoroughly enjoyed the afternoon “we tired the sun with talking,” but as a political philosopher, he was a prisoner of the leftist ideology that treats terms like equality and democracy as substantial...
When the king of Poland, Jan Sobieski, defeated the Ottoman army at the Siege of Vienna in 1683, that army of 23,000 soldiers did not have scores or hundreds of thousands of hungry and desperate civilians at its back, hoping to find a new life in Europe. The Ottomans were attempting a military invasion of...
[McCain and Soros: The Most Dangerous Man in America, Bankrolled By the Most Evil Man in the World] “While the natural instincts of democracy lead the people to banish distinguished men from power,” Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, “an instinct no less powerful leads distinguished men to shun careers in politics, in which it...
These two volumes shed considerable light on the fateful events of 1945-46, events determinative of much that followed in American foreign relations. The first argues that, had Franklin Roosevelt lived, even if for only another year, postwar history would have been altogether different. The second, by an experienced “realist” foreign-service officer, views the postwar developments...
It has happened. Whites have been reduced to a minority in California. By whites, I mean, of course, “non-Hispanic whites,” because most of the illegal aliens who have poured across the border from Mexico during the last 30 years to change dramatically the composition of California’s population are mestizo, a mixture of Spanish and American...
Any government, foreign or domestic, which tampers with our freedoms and attempts to impose “political servitude,” demands our fierce and unceasing opposition.
The campaign to overturn the 2016 election and bring down President Trump shifted into high gear this week. Inspiration came Saturday morning from the altar of the National Cathedral where our establishment came to pay homage to John McCain. Gathered there were all the presidents from 1993 to 2017, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and...
Fifteen years after I arrived in the West, I can no longer recall how I first became aware of Edward Abbey, though I do know that I had been the book editor of a national magazine for nearly four years before the name penetrated my consciousness. (The parochialism of the New York literati.) But I...
There ain’t no shame in a job well done, from driving a nail to driving a truck. As a matter of fact, I’d like to set things straight, A few more people should be pulling their weight. If you want a cram course in reality, You get yourself a working man’s Ph.D. —Aaron Tippin, “Working...
“Man at his best” is both the slogan and promise of Esquire magazine. “Best,” in this context, turns out to mean all that money can buy in the way of automobiles, wristwatches, adoring women, and clothes. Fernando Lamas’ paradoxical aphorism (taken seriously by a dull-witted comic who parlayed it into a career) sums it up:...
Two thousand fifteen was the year that we Americans broke history. By “breaking history,” I do not mean something like “breaking news,” or “breaking records,” or even “breaking the Internet” (though the Internet certainly played a role). Yes, the “historic moments” of the Summer of #LoveWins and #HateLoses—the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v....
The incoming Trump administration already knows how to fix our border crisis. What it requires is the strength and support of the American people.
Chilton Williamson’s study of the sources of American conservative thought presupposes certain assumptions about his subject that may not be universally shared but are defensible nonetheless. Williamson suggests that American conservatism is essentially paleoconservative, and both his choice of current conservative authors and his comments on Joe Scotchie’s Revolt From the Heartland underline this association. ...
The following article by Charles G. Mills appeared originally at the website of FGFBooks.com and is reprinted with permission. Christian morality requires that the victors in war show mercy to the losers. Mercy is a form of charity, the greatest of the virtues. If we do not show mercy, we should not necessarily expect it...
My father told me about his combat experience in World War II just once when I was a boy. I must have been under ten, and we were in a car at night. My clearest memory of what he told me is the story of the deer his unit killed with their carbines, and of...
Here’s how you’ll know the conservative movement means something again: when the Conservative Political Action Conference moves its annual meeting from Washington, D.C., to Rockford. Or Dubuque. Or Peoria. Or Helena. Or San Antonio. Or Bakersfield. Or Murfreesboro. Anywhere but the District of Corruption. Conservatives flock from around the country to CPAC, expecting to advance...
The recent Brown Revolution in Ukraine, which saw the overthrow of the legitimate (if corrupt and bumbling) Yanukovych government, is a triumph of Western Ukrainian nationalism—an ideology characterized by a violent Russophobia and antisemitism. The rabid neo-Nazis of Oleh Tyahnybok’s Svoboda (“Freedom”) party and Dmytro Yarosh’s militant Right Sector are just the latest manifestation of...
Public commentary on recent murders and acts of violence against African Americans has been universally explained as evidence of ingrained racism of American society, the racism of police, and implicit racism of the Republican Party. The result has been wholesale rejection of the display of symbols associated with the Confederate States of America. Even Sen....
William F. Buckley, for all his strengths, left behind a deeply flawed magazine and movement, which was very much to his demerit.
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...
The American School Counselor Association trains counselors to be "master manipulators" of children, but whistle blowers are exposing them.
I grew up in the Volunteer State of Tennessee, so called because of its citizens’ enthusiastic response to the First Mexican War. Maybe growing up there colors my view that wars ought to be fought by folks who want to fight them-and it certainly in creases my estimate of the number of young men who...
Chronicles falls short of its usual high standards by giving so much space to “Faulkner in Japan: The ‘American Century’” in the August issue (Society & Culture). As far as I can tell amidst all the unanchored theorizing, the author wants to make America’s greatest writer out to be a clueless dupe of postwar “American...
The first four Republican contests—Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada—produced record turnouts. While the prospect of routing Hillary Clinton and recapturing the White House brought out the true believers, it was Donald Trump’s name on the ballot and his calls for economic patriotism, border security, and an end to imperial wars that brought out...
The truth is that the vitriolic reaction to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis this week says everything about the foreign blob’s personal and vocational insecurities, and nothing about DeSantis’ call for measured prudence in Eastern Europe.
The events in Gaza since July 7 have shown, not for the first time, Israel’s difficulty in coping with the challenges of asymmetric warfare. The problem first became apparent in Lebanon exactly eight years ago (July-August 2006), when Hezbollah – the weaker party by several orders of magnitude – was able to exploit Israeli political...
Since the days when Tom Paine set himself up as chief propagandist for the emerging American colonies the United States has been subject to invasion by British journalists. They come for a variety of reasons. Tired of tax collecting in England, Tom Paine came to start anew, and if doing so involved the common sense...
When I hear of the books in the history of publishing that were self-published, I react like Lenin, who, on hearing of the 5,000 print run of Mayakovsky’s poem 150,000,000, scoffed that it was “a colossal waste of paper.” E.E. Cummings, for instance, published The Enormous Room at his own expense, petulantly dedicating it to...
According to an article in Forbes (November 16, 2016), “Mexico aside, [Latin America] barely featured at all in the presidential campaign. This overall situation will largely remain the same under the Trump administration.” The first sentence is a truism (when has Latin America, as such, ever “featured” in a U.S. presidential election?), and the second...
Vladimir Putin, at the end of February, was expected by pundits East and West to react sharply to the news of Washington’s plan to send military advisors to Georgia, aiding Tbilisi in its battle with Taliban-connected Chechen insurgents. The insurgents have long used Georgia’s Pankisi gorge as a rest camp and base for continuing their...
Last week saw two particularly grisly Islamic terror attacks of the type that have become all too common: 22 people, mostly children and teenagers, were killed after a bomb exploded at a pop concert in Manchester, England, and 28 Egyptian Copts, including young children, were massacred when ISIS ambushed their bus, which was taking them...
Moreno Religious persecution in Africa is particularly interesting since countries there go from one extreme to another in terms of religious tolerance. The growth of Islam is reconfiguring Africa’s religious landscape—at the cost of religious liberty. Frontline Fellowship, an evangelical group based in South Africa which operates in Sudan and other countries, provides these estimates:...
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...
“For who can be secure of private right, If sovereign sway may be dissolved by might?” —John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel Dryden’s question, posed more than 300 years ago, supposes a just distinction but also a connection between one kind of rights, which he calls “private,” and another, “sovereign sway,” or legitimate public order. The...
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...
“Let us eat and make merry.” —Luke 15:23 This has been a happy time: I’ve spent all day with my family, eaten a fine meal, played with my grandchildren, been to a baptism, and I went to communion.” These were the words of my uncle—with their telling rhetorical climax—on leaving his sister’s house in Eastern...
Rather than dropping out of the sky into Bulgaria at the Sophia airport as I did, travelers would be better advised to enter by other ways. Driving up from Greece through the Rhodope mountains would be one appealing way. Another fascinating approach would be to sail into the Black Sea city of Varna or the...
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....
Democracy is not on the ballot. What is on the ballot is a huge slice of the leadership and ruling class of the national Democratic Party. Democracy has not failed America, the reigning Democrats have failed America.
Greg Kaza (“Economic Liberty and American Manufacturing,” Views, January) is to be congratulated for seizing hold of two important realities: that the late 1990’s saw a financial bubble of historic proportions, the origins and implications of which are poorly understood; and that incomes for the median- and lower-wage earner, when adjusted for inflation, have seen...
The presidency must be destroyed. It is the primary evil we face, and the cause of nearly all our woes. It squanders the national wealth and starts unjust wars against foreign peoples that have never done us am harm. It wrecks our families, tramples on our rights, invades our communities, and spies on our bank...
Enthusiastic defenders of the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution are fundamentalist cultists—and women and minorities are their victims. At least, that is the thesis of University of Miami law professor Mary Anne Franks’ new book, The Cult of the Constitution, an unforgiving disparagement of the Constitution’s white male origins and the allegedly unwoke...
In reading through the works of popular historian Victor Davis Hanson, I was reminded of a parody in an episode of The Simpsons. Bart and Homer watch a clip of Rainier Wolfcastle—the show’s Arnold Schwarzenegger-esque action hero—fly a UNICEF cargo plane full of pennies to impoverished children. A villainous cadre calling themselves the “CommieNazis” chase Wolfcastle in their...
France’s ambassador to Poland Pierre Levy has said he was “surprised, even shocked,” by the Polish foreign minister, Jacek Czaputowicz, declaring that “something’s not right” with France, and that was “sad because France is the sick man of Europe, dragging Europe down.” M. Levy went on to make an astonishing statement which only confirmed that...
Foreign aid, like other forms of aid, is a subsidy that distorts choice. The distortion takes many forms; for example, aid is sometimes put to uses unintended by the giver; it also lets the recipient pursue activities below their real cost. Since President Harry Truman launched the foreign-aid crusade, U.S. economic aid to developing nations...
George Garrett used to tell the story of a young writer who visited him in York Harbor, Maine. The writer, who had worked in a prison, wore a cap emblazoned with the letters SCUP, which stood for something like South Carolina Union of Prisons. Sharing some of George’s sense of humor—which bordered on the wicked—he...