Many years ago, as the luncheon speaker at a meeting of the John Randolph Club in Rockford, Illinois, Tom Sheeley gave a thought-provoking lecture interspersed with a splendid performance of classical guitar. His main theme was the need for form in art; and all these years later, one line stands out in my memory: “What...
George H. Ryan, Illinois’ Republican governor and bona fide “compassionate conservative,” has borrowed one from the Clinton playbook: He seems to think that a vast right-wing conspiracy has been out to get him since he took office, forcing him to decline to run for a second term. The real reason, of course, is that—due to...
Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. The ongoing enthusiasm of the Western elites for Islam, in general, and for the misnamed Arab Spring, in particular, is a case in point. The bitter fruits of the latter—simultaneously visible but differently manifested in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Syria—are rooted in the character of the...
Pro-lifers upset with Trump mistake their situation. They're not missing an opportunity to declare a universal right to life; they're rather in a pitched battle to stop the other side from reestablishing a universal right to abortion.
Beach Blanket Bankruptcy would be a great name for a 1960’s-style surf movie about California’s state and local finances. Alas, although Frankie Avalon still is with us, the beauteous Annette has gone the way of fiscal solvency. Already in recent years, four Golden State cities have declared bankruptcy: Vallejo in 2008, and Stockton, San Bernardino,...
In 2006, lawmakers in the Lone Star State were horrified that a large percentage of Texas high-school graduates required remedial courses to gain the skills needed to succeed in college. So they directed the commissioner of higher education and the commissioner of education to assemble teams of college and high-school faculty to recommend changes to...
The Germans have a word for it: Schadenfreude. It means, literally, harm-joy, and refers to the nasty but common human tendency to rejoice when harm comes to someone else. In English, we don’t have the word, but we certainly have the phenomenon. Think of the nationwide jubilation over what happened to Richard Nixon (and, incidentally,...
Are the Dixie Chicks traitors? Lead singer Natalie Maines boldly announced at a concert in London, just before the beginning of our recent armed incursion into Iraq, “Just so you know, we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.” The firestorm that ensued involved coordinated radio boycotts of the Chicks’ music...
Peaceful Valley is a bucolic residential neighborhood in Clemson, South Carolina. The middle-class homeowners who live there are not land speculators hoping to turn a profit. Many are like Kathleen Dickel, a 50-year-old high-school German teacher, who owns a two-story contemporary house with a deck surrounded on two sides by deep woods. Kathleen stained the...
As the Air Croatia plane began its descent into Zagreb, it came to me that I had no idea where I was going. The Chesterton Society conference was to be held downtown at Europski Dom, but the participants were being put up at a Jesuit seminary. In a city of nearly a million, the Jesuits...
But I don’t understand: Why the government spends billions on welfare but people keep saying hunger is a big problem. Why the government spends billions on education and the population gets dumber and dumber. Why the government spends billions on “intelligence” and defense but could not prevent September 11. Why pointless filthy language ...
The U.S. Constitution has few friends on the right or the left. During the first eight years of the 21st century, the Republicans mercilessly assaulted civil liberties. The brownshirt Bush regime ignored the protections provided by habeas corpus. They spied on American citizens without warrants. They violated the First Amendment. They elevated decisions of the...
Sixty-five years after the last guns ceased firing on the last Pacific atoll, Britons of all political persuasions are still wallowing in tepid World War II nostalgia. For Atlanticists, neoconservatives, and classical liberals, the war was a great Anglosphere achievement, a landmark en route to social mobility plus mercantilism. For nationalists and romantics, there is...
Forbearance is a moral principle from which General Robert E. Lee rarely if ever wavered, and his unflinching practice of that virtue is the primary reason that he should be remembered today.
It is a truism to note that H.L. Mencken, like his great vitriolic predecessor Jonathan Swift, was a thoroughgoing misanthrope. So perverse was Mencken’s vision of human existence that he preferred to read King Lear as farce rather than as tragedy—since nothing, he was fond of saying, could be more farcical than death. But if...
An interesting debate on the right concerning the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution neglects to consider that the founder’s Constitution may no longer be our framework of government.
Jack Tawil proposed a daring solution to balance campaign finance reform against the constitutional right to free speech: disconnect campaign contributions from sordid influence.
In one of the most extraordinary passages of his most extraordinary book, C.S. Lewis, the 20th century’s greatest Christian apologist, wrote of Jesus Christ, that he was either the son of God, as he claimed, or a madman. In the Christmas season, believers take comfort in their faith and joyfully embrace the first alternative. The...
Hillary Rodham Clinton wasn’t the only politician at the annual Gay and Lesbian Pride March in Manhattan last June, but she got the most notice. The police had trouble controlling the crowd as she walked behind the Radical Faeries, which featured a man on roller skates who was wearing a silver cape, a tiara, a...
Lenin may or may not have said that the capitalists would sell him the rope by which he would hang them, but the proverb is assigned to him for good reason. Any revolutionary who dreams of destroying the free-enterprise system can count on a valuable ally within the system itself, in the form of the...
“How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg?” asked President Abraham Lincoln, who answered his own question: “Four. Saying that a tail is a leg doesn’t make it a leg.” And Congress’ saying that D.C. is a state would equally contradict truth and reality, as our nation’s capital lacks...
The U.S. occupation and reconstruction of Japan began nearly 80 years ago and is considered by many to be an unqualified success. But Japan's national character was hollowed out in the process; what remains is a shell of a country still obedient to its conquerors.
A recent full-page advertisement in the Chicago Tribune, which no longer calls itself “The World’s Greatest Newspaper,” listed four documents that supposedly are foundational: the Magna Carta, the Treaty of Versailles, the Declaration of Independence, and the Infiniti Retailer Pledge. These four, according to the advertiser, Infiniti, are totally trustworthy, because: “A promise is a...
Before publishing his essay “The Lonely Superpower” (Foreign Affairs, 1999), Samuel Huntington had spoken more candidly in an address to the American Enterprise Institute in May 1998. On that occasion, he had identified himself as an old-fashioned Burkean conservative. Huntington’s central thesis is that “global politics has now moved from a brief unipolar moment at...
When family and culture are under constant attack, there sometimes seems to be no greater enemy than the American Civil Liberties Union. Yet, when Washington is busy expanding the welfare/warfare state, sometimes only the ACLU seems willing to confront Leviathan. What is someone who loves both liberty and community to do? There is no reason...
The United States Commission on Civil Rights has degenerated into an appendage of the Clinton reelection campaign through its attempt to stop, through intimidation, the petition drive in Florida to clamp down on illegal immigration; at stake are 25 electoral votes for the Democratic incumbent. The commission was established under the Civil Rights Act of...
When Lorena Bobbitt startled her hubby one evening with a knife through his privates—vigorously severing an intimate part of their relationship—a lot of women apparently admired the, uh, statement Lorena made that night. I own the conversation radio station for Lancaster & York counties in Pennsylvania, and the other morning Lorena Bobbitt talk poured from...
When President Bush signed an executive order on November 13 that authorized the trial of non-U.S. citizens on charges of terrorism before special military tribunals, the response from the political right was almost—though not quite—unanimously supportive. Not only did the attorney general himself enthusiastically defend the tribunals, so did such luminaries as the conservative movement’s...
Lew Rockwell (“Flies in the Ointment,” September) and I have the same ultimate objective: “an educational market in which parents are responsible for paying for their own children’s education.” We agree also on the “twin evils of public education: involuntary funding and compulsory attendance.” In our ideal (libertarian) world, government would play no role in...
The “Defense of Marriage Act” was making its way through Congress as these lines were being written. Having passed the House, the debate was turned, by the “good” offices of Senator Edward Kennedy, into a joint defense of marriage and homosexual rights bill. Gay activists were exultant that their concerns were getting a hearing in...
In the early months of 1985, national headlines recounted lurid tales of an impending right-wing bloodbath in the United States. In New York City Bernhard Goetz admitted to the shooting of four Blacks who he believed were about to assault him on a subway car, and he promptly became a national hero. In the Washington...
Conservative reluctance to change the Constitution cedes ground to the left and allows the progressive drift of the nation.
“By their fruits, ye shall know them,” our Lord once warned. Too often, however, when it comes to the promise of power or the allure of success, Christians are easily swayed to align themselves with those who cry, “Lord, Lord,” yet are, in Jesus’ words, the “workers of iniquity.” “Do men gather grapes of thorns,...
As any connoisseur of the manifest absurdities that daily emanate from Inside the Beltway is well aware, what we read in the venerable Congressional Record is not necessarily a verbatim account of what was stated, on any given day, by our lawmakers on the floors of the House or Senate. It is common practice to...
The feminist movement, it has just been learned, was actually concocted by men. Specifically, a small group of planners meeting in 1962 set in motion the developments of the next 30 years concerning men and women. These men acted in a selfish spirit of personal aggrandizement. The heretofore secret minutes of their planning group are...
You Can’t Say That! The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties From Antidiscrimination Laws by David E. Bernstein Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute; 197 pp., $20.00 A Miller Brewing Company executive is fired for retelling a racy segment of a Seinfeld episode at the watercooler. An unwed teacher successfully sues the parochial school that fired her for becoming pregnant...
Dr. Clyde Wilson’s new gathering will be of particular interest to readers of this journal, as some parts of it have appeared in these pages and as he has for years maintained a special relationship with Chronicles. Yet I hasten to add that the compelling quality of these essays speaks broadly to the most vital...
For some years I have lived in Québec as a friendly alien from the United States, traveling from time to time back to my native Minnesota and other states to practice law in my fields of interest. I am married to a French-Canadian wife who is a member of the bar and mairesse of our...
Austrian sociologist Hans Millendorfer claims to have discovered, at least in his native Austria, a perplexing correspondence: his statistics show a rise in abortions paralleled by a rise in civility. To those of us who consider abortion a violent and evil act, it seems strange that such violence should be accompanied by an increase in...
Lawfare is the manipulation of the legal system to get Donald Trump. But more broadly, it's the use of existing law, in a manner not intended by its framers, to neutralize or destroy enemies of those in power.
Michael Mann has long been the most interesting exponent of what might be called British post-Marxist sociology. In his essays in the Archives européennes de sociologie, his Sources of Social Power (two volumes), and other writings, Mann has applied a four-power model (ideological, political, military, and economic) to historical studies, seeking thereby to overcome Marxist...
The ultimate aim of the Jacobins prosecuting and disbarring lawyers who represent high-profile Republican clients is the subordination of the rule of law and cowing into submission political opposition.
The lies on display at the Democratic National Convention are too bold to believe.
The Education of John Adams; by R. B. Bernstein; Oxford University Press; 368 pp., $24.95 It is not fashionable these days to admire the Founding Fathers, and yet the flood of books, articles, and even Broadway musicals devoted to them has not ceased. Attention is usually focused on George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jeff erson,...
In its almost 60 years, much has been written about National Review, especially about those present at its creation. Most attention, of course, has been given to founder William F. Buckley, Jr., but others there at the beginning, such as James Burnham and Frank Meyer, have not been neglected. Yet no one, until now, has...
The third annual observance of the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. passed happily enough in the nation’s capital, with the local merchants unloading their assorted junk into the hands of an eager public. It is hardly surprising that “King Day,” observed as a federal legal public holiday since 1986, has already become part of...
“Look, men, there is Jackson standing like a stone wall! Let us determine to die here, and we will conquer! Follow me!” —General Bernard E. Bee, C.F.A., shortly before falling, mortally wounded, in First Manassas The era of the War for Southern Independence illuminates the present time for what it is,...
“A system-grinder hates the truth.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson During the 25 years of its existence, contemporary feminism has received a measure of gentle chiding for its excesses. Not even the most indulgent eye can completely overtook feminist comparisons of marriage to prostitution, childbirth to defecation, or the use of the pronoun “he” to Jim Crow....
If you were a patriotic “American” of Mideast origin, wouldn’t you willingly cooperate with “ethnic profiling” since it would help to save the lives of your “fellow” citizens? Want to know how many traffic deaths in my State last year were caused by aliens, mostly drunk illegals? 807. How many Americans are aware that Osama...
Once a marginal figure, Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni's success on the European stage stems partly from the rising popularity of the European right, but, above all, from what she has accomplished.