Absolute control of women over fertility has been the unparalleled dream of radical feminists for decades. Millions of women now view this aspiration as their sacrosanct right and have, with the advent of anti-fertility and other reproductive technologies, exercised this new right vigorously. This feminist dream, however, is fraught with irony. Many of the very...
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Overturning Roe: A Conservative Legal Triumph and Return to Common Sense
The overruling of Roe v. Wade is a momentous achievement of the conservative legal movement and an act of great courage. The blowback will be fierce, but America is beginning to see a rebirth of the rule of law.
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The Body’s Vest
Casting the body’s vest aside, My soul into the boughs does glide. —Andrew Marvell (1621-78), “The Garden” Browsing through the poetry section at Borders, I came upon a sole copy of a new book of poems by Fred Chappell, Shadow Box. I have been an admirer of Chappell’s fiction for years, especially his novel I...
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Paul Ehrlich, the Real Founder of Environmentalism
It’s become an accepted opinion that marine biologist Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring (1962), was the founder of the modern environmentalist movement. But this may very well be a myth. Recent historical scholarship suggests that this title more likely applies to controversial Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 best seller...
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Guns, Matrimony, and Jihad in San Bernardino
The December 2, 2015, killings of 14 people in San Bernardino, California, by Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, is the sort of story that garners the label “only in America,” with plot twists that include arranged marriage, Facebook jihad, and irrelevant gun laws. It also includes Enrique Marquez, Jr., an Hispanic-American. Farook...
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Schizophrenic Citizens
The very idea of dual citizenship is downright absurd. It’s a contradiction that cannot be resolved. The concept of citizenship is based on the expectation of loyalty to the country, and this, in turn, means that citizens owe their exclusive allegiance to the community in which they live. So how is it possible to have...
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Origins and Outcome
From the December 1991 issue of Chronicles. To the degree that it is remembered at all, the America First Committee (AFC) has gone down in history as an organization most suspect, at best composed of good people serving a bad cause, at worst riddled with conscious agents of a Nazi transmission belt. During its heyday...
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The Intersectional Constitution Comes Alive
The death of the sainted George Floyd has proven to be the ideal pretext for the left to accelerate its campaign of dismantling the markers of American historical identity. With lavish corporate and philanthropic support, radical activists are “resetting” America. This means mandating the instruction of Critical Race Theory in public schools; replacing the American...
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Utopia and Dystopia on the Saint Lawrence
A quarter of Canada’s 30 million people live in the province of Quebec. About five million are French Canadians, largely descended from hardy Norman peasants who came here 300 years ago. A quarter of the five million want to secede from Canada. A larger (but indeterminate) proportion favor as much autonomy as possible without risking...
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Avoiding Democracy
Does America exist anymore, or is the nation only a fantasy concocted out of old Frank Capra movies, civics classes, and pamphlets from the Department of Education? The weight of the evidence suggests the latter. Twenty years ago—ancient history by the standards of the press—a considerable number of young men who refused to fight in...
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Ireland’s Anti-Christian Revolution
Secular anti-Catholicism can fairly be described as the ruling ideology of the modern Republic of Ireland. In no other country do politicians and the media so openly, persistently, and savagely attack the Catholic Church. In no other country do leading politicians seek to score political points by launching virulent attacks on the Church and all...
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Zora’s World v. Brown
The 60th anniversary of the Brown v. the Board of Education is being celebrated today with far more pomp than has accompanied Independence Day celebrations in recent years. Not surprisingly, Michelle Obama took the occasion to condemn not just the growing trend of resegregation in public schools—a nasty term for neighborhood-based schools—but also the persistence...
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Signs of Hope in the East
In the United States, the forces of the cultural left have been particularly aggressive in seeking to diminish the influence of our Christian heritage on American society. The Obama administration has led the campaign for the complete separation of religion from the public square. It has used executive orders, regulatory rule-making authority, and the bully...
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The League Against the South
York, Alabama, is a sad little Southern town. Though it is small, it lacks the typical charm of the South. Not much happens there, but what does happen happens in the typically Southern way. The wheels of justice grind not with something as tacky as money, but with the more genteel means of connections: It’s...
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The New Nationalism
During her short imprisonment for contempt of court, Kim Davis, the Rowan County, Kentucky, clerk who refused on religious grounds to issue marriage licenses to homosexual couples, was compared with (among others) Martin Luther King, Jr., Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John C. Calhoun, Saint Paul, and even Jesus Christ Himself. Setting aside the propriety of...
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A Hero for Our Times?
Lord Louis Mountbatten died in 1979, a victim of IRA assassins. Since then, no fewer than three biographies on the man have appeared (if one includes The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten, the book on Mountbatten’s self-orchestrated television documentary, shown in this country as Mountbatten: A Man for the Century). The latest, by Philip...
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A Besieged Trump Presidency Ahead
After a week managing the transition, vice president-elect Mike Pence took his family out to the Broadway musical “Hamilton.” As Pence entered the theater, a wave of boos swept over the audience. And at the play’s end, the Aaron Burr character, speaking for the cast and the producers, read a statement directed at Pence: “(W)e...
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Getting to Know the General
The rise to political prominence of former Airborne Forces General Aleksandr Lebed, and especially his emphasis on law and order as the only real basis for proceeding with reforms, has raised the specter in the Russian mind of the proverbial Man on a White Horse, the military savior whose iron-fisted rule puts the national house...
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Can We All Get Along?
Nobody ever called the late Rodney King a model citizen of Los Angeles. But he gave the world what was likely the most plaintive, plangent query of our time. He wanted to know, in the aftermath of the LA burning, “Can we all get along?” Can we—huh—rather than wallop each other and turn the air...
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On ‘Judicial Activism’
Samuel Francis (“A Perpetual Censor,” July 1993) carefully criticizes the dubious “substantive due process” doctrine. But he errs repeatedly in his facts and analysis, not least in counting me among the doctrine’s adherents. Francis correctly criticizes judicial activism of the sort that creates constitutional rights out of thin air. But he ignores the even more...
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The Future of the Christian Right
Like a cold front, you could feel the defeat coming; and you did not need Dan Rather or George Gallup to prepare you. You knew it in your bones as you listened to the sound bites on the evening news: Clinton saying nothing and saying it well; Dole saying nothing and saying it poorly. It...
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Living the Jacobin Dream
In 1793, the Jacobins, surfing the wave of Parisian mob violence, intimidated their less resolute colleagues into eliminating both the principle of monarchy and the existence of its politically superfluous incarnation, Louis XVI. Not content with killing a living king and pronouncing a death sentence in absentia on all the princes of the blood who...
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La Virgen de Guadalupe: Sent Back to Mexico?
Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign has spilled the beans: She intends to “liberate” Christians, which means Latinos, from their self-imposed delusion—which, surely, is Christianity and belief in God. Mrs. Clinton’s strategy not only calls for undermining Christian-inspired organizations and businesses but aims to “privatize” religion entirely. The best way to achieve these objectives, as revealed in...
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The GOP’s Clinton
During the Republican presidential debate on May 15, Ron Paul, the constitutionalist from Texas, flatly stated that the terrorist attacks on September 11 were retaliation for U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Rudy Giuliani shot back a mendacious rejoinder: “That’s an ...
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A Free-Minded
Douglas Young was a tall man, six feet six inches; with his beard he looked like a Calvinist Jehovah. At St. Andrews, he acquired the nickname “God” by eavesdropping on a political discussion about the Balkans. (In the 1930’s, the Balkans were full of angry ethnic factions, fighting and killing one another.) The group was...
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The Supremes and the NRA
I agree entirely with Aaron Wolf both on the constitutional argument but also on the deeper political question of the centralization of power. The problem is that we are all tempted to use the court when it suits our purpose, and in this case if I lived in Chicago I'd ...
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The Cataclysm That Was Roe
The pro-life movement today almost completely identifies with the Republican Party, despite its support by a few Democrats such as Pennsylvania Sen. Robert Casey (sometimes). It wasn’t always so. In 1972, at the age of 17, I worked against Michigan’s Measure B, which would have legalized abortion in the state. It lost, with 61 percent...
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The Evil Party Rides Again
There are many reasons to criticize the the Republicans as the Stupid Party, and I have often done so. But we need to remember that, in Sam Francis’ dichotomy, the other major party is the Evil Party. And some of what the leader of the Evil Party is doing has no real precedent in American...
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Rending the Seamless Garment
People often ask me, “What is wrong with our priests?” or “Why don’t our bishops say more about abortion? They seem to have no trouble whatsoever speaking out quite freely when it comes to war or capital punishment.” On the surface, this is disturbing. I find it even more disturbing, however, that I, a layman,...
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On Hard Cases
Thomas Fleming’s reflections on the Schiavo case (“New Wine in Old Bottles,” Perspective, May) disappointed but did not surprise me, since, a few years back, he defended our government when it handed over Elian Gonzalez to the tender mercies of a totalitarian government. In both cases, the crux of his argument seems to be the...
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“The One”
Barack Obama has risen to the highest office in the land on a thin résumé—a pair of Ivy League degrees, some time spent as a “community organizer,” and short periods in the Illinois legislature and the U.S. Senate. And then there are the books. The President is the author of the best-selling Audacity of Hope...
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On the Electoral Process
“The Impotent American Voter” by Richard Winger and some related essays in the November 1994 issue—such as Jeffrey Tucker’s on the third-party option—are seriously wrong. I would hate to see Chronicles get a reputation for political kookiness based on a poor understanding of American politics. Winger confuses political openness with openness to third parties. One...
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Moonstruck Morality Versus the Cosmos
“Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon . . . terrible as an army with banners?” —Song of Songs 6:10 “Si direbbe che persino la luna si è affrettata stasera—osservatelo in alto—a guardare a questo spettacolo.” (“One might almost think that the moon—just look at him up there—hurried...
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The GOP’s Clinton
During the Republican presidential debate on May 15, Ron Paul, the constitutionalist from Texas, flatly stated that the terrorist attacks on September 11 were retaliation for U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Rudy Giuliani shot back a mendacious rejoinder: “That’s an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that...
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New Politics in Old Virginia
It took 114 years, but by 2000, Virginia had become a Republican state. What brought about such a great change in the Old Dominion? Let’s take a look back. Reconstruction was the low point of Virginia history. In 1865, a defeated and gutted state lost not only its cities, towns, farms, and one third of...
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Mass Migration: Mortal Threat to Red State America
Among the reasons Donald Trump is president is that his natural political instincts are superior to those of any other current figure. As campaign 2018 entered its final week, Trump seized upon and elevated the single issue that most energizes his populist base and most convulses our media elite. Warning of an “invasion,” he pointed...
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Lilliput vs. Leviathan
There are lots of freckles, red hair, and Celtic names in Catron County, New Mexico. Though almost everyone in the county has some Indian or Mexican blood, this is home to the families and culture which David Hackett Fischer describes in Albion’s Seed as Scotch-Irish, double distilled, first by the Highland clearances and then by...
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Unjust Compensation
Twenty-five years ago, the village of Machesney Park, Illinois, did not exist. Today, it is one of the fastest-growing municipalities in the state: This spring, the village will pay $143,000 for a special census to determine how far the population has risen above its 2000 Census level of 20,759. Village officials estimate that 1,400 people...
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The Ryancare Rout—Winning by Losing?
Did the Freedom Caucus just pull the Republican Party back off the ledge, before it jumped to its death? A case can be made for that. Before the American Health Care Act, aka “Ryancare,” was pulled off the House floor Friday, it enjoyed the support—of 17 percent of Americans. Had it passed, it faced an...
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In Defeat, a Bush Opportunity
In Defeat, a Bush Opportunity by Patrick J. Buchanan • July 3, 2007 • Printer-friendly “I’ll see you at the bill signing,” said a cocky George W. Bush in Bulgaria, when he heard the Senate had just fallen 15 votes short of voting cloture on the Kennedy-Kyl immigration bill he had embraced. Bush returned home,...
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Facts Are Stubborn Things
It took only 22 years after he left the White House for conservatives to turn Ronald Reagan into a totem. The celebrations surrounding his 100th birthday on February 6 made George Washington look like a back-bench legislator. Conservatives hailed Reagan as the apotheosis of political wisdom and prudent action. Liberals conceded that he had done...
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Dirty, Dirty Dirt
“Dirt is dirtier than clean is clean,” observes one of John O’Hara’s characters—a history professor, I think—remarking on the human race’s observed partiality for darkness and grime in their news diet, rather than sweetness and light. Note the uproar over Brett Kavanaugh’s behavior—nice or nasty—at a high school party he attended at age 17, during...
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The Revolution in Civil Rights Law
It has been nearly 30 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By banning discrimination in employment and public accommodations the law was meant to minimize the role of race in the daily lives of Americans. Its result has been the opposite. The doctrine of “disparate impact” has had the astonishing...
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As American as a Stolen Election
U.S. presidential elections are routinely contested for a reason: Cheating has been a recurring part of the American electoral process.
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Voting for the Antichrist
This morning, the morning before Election Day 2016, I read a social-media post from an old friend who, over the past year, has felt the Bern and is now calling Donald Trump the Antichrist. It reminded me of another political post, which declared that a certain presidential candidate is the sort who writes aghast the...
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The Tragedy of Richard Nixon
Pat Buchanan’s new biography of Richard Nixon’s presidency is the first volume anyone looking at that tumultuous time should turn to. Having served as Nixon’s researcher and speechwriter starting in 1966, Buchanan, not yet 30, followed the victorious President into the White House in 1969. In Nixon’s White House Wars, Buchanan makes it clear that Nixon’s tragic...
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Bill Clinton and the Ground Zero Mosque: A Perfect Fit
Former President Bill Clinton declared his strong support for the Ground Zero mosque in an interview broadcast on September 12. He also suggested a clever new spin to the promoters of the project. Much or even most of the controversy, he said, “could have been avoided, and perhaps still can be, if the people who want...
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Through the Woods to Grandmother’s Charter We Go
The sacred American heritage of consent requires exercise if we want it to be meaningful and to preserve our ability to govern ourselves.
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Dead Weight
“A conservative government is an organized hypocrisy.” —Benjamin Disraeli It may speak volumes about American conservatives that David Frum’s critique of “big government conservatism” permitted William Buckley—or so Buckley claims on the dust jacket—to enjoy “the most refreshing ideological experience in a generation.” To a conservative movement led by advocates of national uplift allied with...
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Storming the Castle Doctrine
Americans have been captivated by the February incident in Sanford, Florida, that resulted in the death of Trayvon Martin and the eventual arrest and charging of George Zimmerman. If the case could be resolved today, Trayvon Martin’s family would still be without a son, George Zimmerman—even if exonerated—will never live a normal life, Sanford Police...