Lehi, Utah, is somewhat familiar to those who have seen the movie Footloose. The small Mormon community provided Hollywood with the perfect setting for a tale of adolescent rebellion against parental and religious authority. Yet shortly after the movie’s release Lehi’s pious image was ruptured by a child abuse scandal. One morning in the summer...
“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...
As fall turned into winter, there were unmistakable signs of paleoconservative dissatisfaction with President Trump. In various forums, several paleoconservatives expressed displeasure that Trump had surrounded himself with unrepentant Bush Republicans and neoconservatives; that he was listening too much to his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, who may be even further to the...
The sacred American heritage of consent requires exercise if we want it to be meaningful and to preserve our ability to govern ourselves.
Judicial tyranny is a familiar phenomenon as judges routinely take charge of school systems and strike down state laws on abortion, pornography, and murder. Recently, one federal judge has even changed the property taxes in Kansas City, MO, while a federal district judge in Des Moines upheld the right of convicts in Iowa to read...
“Political words of all others are the most indefinite, on account of the constant struggle of power to enlarge itself by tortured construction of terms.”—John Taylor of Caroline To have spent the better part of a working life as a historian studying Americans of earlier times has been a privilege. It is also a sorrowful...
After 12 years under federal rule, Rockfordians are looking forward to the end of the People Who Care school-desegregation lawsuit on June 30, 2002. If the district administration and the school board have their way, however, the fat lady may not actually begin singing for another ten years. One of the many elements that has...
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...
Thirteen of the British colonies in North America declared their independence in 1776 as the only means of preserving the life, liberty, and property of what was then declared to be the American people. It was generally understood, in light of John Locke’s 1690 Second Treatise on Civil Government (widely recognized in the late-18th century...
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...
If Donald Trump’s legion of enemies had the same grace they decry him for lacking, they would have had to admit that his re-election campaign was a bravura performance. Facing the combined opposition of the media, academy, entertainment industry, permanent bureaucracy, tech monopolists, and big money generally, Donald Trump crisscrossed the country in the final few...
Every month, some corner of the United States becomes the scene of a brutal and bizarre murder: in Jasper, Texas, where rednecks dragged a man to death behind their truck; in Las Vegas, where a high-school student assaulted and killed a little girl as his friend and fellow student looked on without lifting a finger...
Four years ago, when I made a trip to Naumburg to attend a philological symposium devoted to Nietzsche, I was told by one of the participants that, until recently, West Germans traveling from Frankfurt on the main west-east railway line had been forced to dismount when the train reached the “frontier town” where the Federal...
It has been amazing to see the number of very smart people who stumble over explaining exactly what Trump was convicted of doing.
Philip Jenkins’ essay about McCarthyism (“Goodbye, Senator McCarthy,” Breaking Glass, May) was an exercise in retailing received opinions about the Wisconsin senator and his countersubversion efforts. Without offering specific illustrations, Professor Jenkins execrated Senator McCarthy as “a liar and a jerk of the first order” who conducted a “campaign of name-calling, accusations, and smears ....
“Racism” and its derivative, “racist,” are oft-used words, and so we ought to know what they mean. But often we don’t, and we just fling them at each other, hoping they will wound, if not kill, the offensive person. One of my dictionaries (Standard College Dictionary, 1963) defines racism this way: ” 1. An excessive...
I have raised up a chosen man from my people, with my holy oil I have anointed him so that my hand is always with him and my arm strengthens him. A year ago, on the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Bishop Thomas G. Doran of the diocese of Rockford elevated...
Homeschooling is one of the many fronts in the state’s war against the citizen. Despite the efforts of organizations such as the Home School Legal Defense Association, the Rutherford Institute, and Eagle Forum, as well as longstanding laws that protect family autonomy, homeschooling parents are still viewed as neglectful if not downright abusive. With methods...
Trump has triumphed. Now what? A theme is reverberating on this, the Day After, and it goes like this: The media are buffoons who so obviously got everything wrong. How could anyone trust them ever again? All of the Network Gurus (save FOX’s) staved off the Trumpocalypse for as long as they could on Tuesday...
[This article first appeared in the January 1992 issue of Chronicles.] The Case Against the Boy Scouts The Boy Scouts of America have recently been accused of sins against Democracy, in the form of discrimination against atheists, homosexuals, and women. Four recent lawsuits have challenged the organizational prerogatives of the Scouts. The families of nine-year-old...
A.D. Sertillanges’ advice to anyone who wishes to accomplish intellectual work includes the following admonition: As to newspapers, defend yourself against them with the energy that the continuity and the indiscretion of their assault make indispensable. You must know what the papers contain, but they contain so little; and it would be easy to learn...
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...
The nine states that ratified the Constitution on June 21, 1788, created an entirely new government. This government was not patterned after the one established under the Articles of Confederation, which was created by the 13 states just seven years before. The Articles actually transferred very little power to the agent they called the “central,”...
Democrats are desperate to make the election a referendum on Dobbs. Trump is right to refuse to resist that.
If we cannot expect the peace people to listen to reason, it is because theirs is a movement springing from the decadence of Christian life and from the moral paralysis of those whose lives have been robbed of any transcendental dimension. The curious belief of the peace people that the specter of nuclear annihilation can...
“And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth,and it grieved him at his heart.”—Genesis 6:6 It doesn’t matter, since right or wrong, no one will remember, but here are my predictions for 2008 and after. Clinton and Obama will be the Democratic nominees for President and V-P, and will be...
[The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era: An Intellectual History by Carli N. Conklin; University of Missouri Press; 254 pp., $40.00] The intellectual roots of the American founding and in particular the Declaration of Independence have long been a matter of debate. Over the years, several major interpretations emerged. The first and most venerable...
“You mean,” said Marina, “you mean that we’re sitting here over Hell?” “Over a hell, conceivably. There are many hells, and the same place may be Hell or Purgatory, depending upon the situation. Most of them are private.” Those words echo in my thoughts as we approach the building. Turner School, built in 1898, is...
Noncompliance with the 1990 census was massive: the Wall Street Journal reported on May 21 that only 75 percent of the forms had been filled out and sent in, “down from 90 percent a decade ago.” That’s good. Passive resistance against such intrusions is the least we should expect of ourselves as citizens. Thirty years...
Monday’s decision was a movement in support of the rule of law over and against lawfare and the rule of unhinged partisan power.
There is no pleasing Duke University law professor Brandon L. Garrett, author of the death-penalty-abolishment screed End of Its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice, though much about the current state of criminal justice should please him. Nationwide, death sentences and executions are at historic lows, yet he claims that the...
The search for and, when it cannot be found, the construction of a usable past remains the overriding task of our official historians, who believe that we are forever on the cusp of a new age. The opposite could be said of Thucydides, who sought “an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to...
One of the most amazing and alarming features of the managerial system in the United States is its capacity to alter the meaning of things without changing their external appearance. This property is essentially what the Old Right political analyst Garet Garrett observed in his insight about “revolution within the form,” a concept he drew...
How did the Texas Republican Party, which was in the forefront of the battles to win the Republican presidential nomination for Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Ronald Reagan in 1976 and 1980, become a wholly owned subsidiary of Karl Rove and George W. Bush? Today, the Republicans in Texas control every statewide elected office, yet...
Unraveling modern confusion about the decision to drop the atomic bomb. There is still a remarkable amount of confusion about one of the last acts of World War II: the use of the atomic bomb. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was horrible, but not more so than many other episodes of the war. To keep...
California continues its essential role as the proving ground for bad ideas. The latest is the demolition of “popular” initiatives to decide important issues. Of the 11 initiatives on the ballot last November in the Golden State, 8 were funded primarily by multimillionaires, according to MapLight, which tracks election funding. And Proposition 30, Gov. Jerry...
Some acute scholar of future times, should there ever be such, will perhaps ponder over the very strange career of the United States Constitution—how it came, without changing a word, to be understood almost universally to mean things it did not mean and to be used for purposes other than, and sometimes the opposite of,...
Many Americans probably think that the Pledge of Allegiance dates to the time of the American Revolution, but it was written more than a century later, in 1892. They might be shocked to learn that it was written by a Christian socialist, and the sanctifying words “under God” were not added until 1954. But they...
Declining test scores. Illiterate, spiritless, and passive graduates who have little motivation to find a job or succeed. Youngsters with no skills to compete in the marketplace. This is the tragic record of American public education, after billions of dollars and 127 years of direct federal funding. The results seem more appropriate for a rebellious...
We are sailing into a new world of public policy—a world as strange and new as Columbus discovered. It is a world where infinite government demands have run straight into finite resources. It is an America made up increasingly of diverse people. At current immigration patterns, by 2040, there will not be a dominant ethnic...
Lucy just pulled the football away from Charlie Brown again. In the budget compromise that averted a government shutdown, it was the Republicans not the Democrats who blinked on the funding of Planned Parenthood, and it was the pro-lifers who look to the GOP and not the abortion supporters who look to the Democrats...
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 in the years 1940-1941, some of the...
On November 2, Oklahomans amended their constitution to prohibit their state courts from “look[ing] to the precepts of other nations or cultures” when adjudicating a case. The amendment specifically prohibits consideration of “international law or Sharia Law.” State Question 755, as the amendment is known, garnered the support of 70 percent of the citizenry. A...
Canadians often try to explain the fundamental nature of Canada, both to themselves and to visitors, by comparing it with other countries. The United States most obviously comes to mind, especially since television has increasingly obliterated any differences in American and Canadian popular taste. But there are other analogies that are more instructive. Surface manners...
The mystery novel, to borrow a line from Original Sin, has all the virtues of its defects. “The mystery,” Baroness James explained in a recent Washington Post interview, “deals with the planned murder” and is thus confined to a certain formulaic structure in which a detective protagonist confronts an often unsavory lot of suspects, all...
From the October 2011 issue of Chronicles. Many Americans probably think that the Pledge of Allegiance dates to the time of the American Revolution, but it was written more than a century later, in 1892. They might be shocked to learn that it was written by a Christian socialist, and the sanctifying words “under God”...
“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 up tonight to...
Earnest readers want to know what the difference is between the two major political parties. I have tried to provide some helpful guidance. Democrat. Someone who believes that when people who have enjoyed a wealthy life but behaved badly get into trouble they should be rescued by non-wealthy people who have worked hard and played...
America’s political leaders are obligated to enforce all the laws on the menu, whether they like them or not.
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...