Our present world feels more and more like Orwell’s dystopia but unlike in his story, we have the power to stop the party we live under.
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Suicide of the GOP—or Rebirth?
“If his poll numbers hold, Trump will be there six months from now when the Sweet 16 is cut to the Final Four, and he will likely be in the finals.” My prediction, in July of 2015, looks pretty good right now. Herewith, a second prediction. Republican wailing over his prospective nomination aside, Donald Trump...
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Remembering Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle was a bundle of intellectual and literary energy in the Victorian age, but his forceful ideas may have even more relevance to our present-day problems.
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America’s Race Paradigm
The Economist brands racism as “America’s constant curse,” and the question of race unnerves almost everybody, as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 airily outlaws discrimination in government, commerce, and schooling on grounds of race, gender, age, religion, or national origin, and the new, openly politicized White House policy on affirmative action (“mend it, don’t...
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Progressive Pilgrim
One week after the 1984 Presidential election, while Ronald Reagan was still basking in the afterglow of a victory he takes as evidence that “America is feeling good about itself again,” the National Conference of Catholic Bishops meeting in Washington finally got a look at the 136-page draft of a “Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social...
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Our Presidents in Song
Bill Clinton and George Bush, Sr., share something: They are the only presidents since George Washington who were elected without having a campaign song written for them. Perhaps as a reflection of the vacuousness of their platforms, the two candidates used popular songs for their campaigns. George Bush surely made Woody Guthrie spin in his...
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The Russo-German Symbiosis in the First and Second World Wars
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the retreat of Leninist forces within the empire, hosannas have rung out in the Western world. “The Cold War is over, the Cold War is over,” the leaders of the West have exclaimed, and demands to turn swords into knitting needles have filled the air. At every...
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The New Class Controversy
[This article first appeared in the June 1990 issue of Chronicles.] The recent successes of the American right depend, in part, on its ability to deflect lower-middle-class resentment from the rich to a parasitic “new class” of professional problem-solvers and moral relativists. In 1975, William Rusher of the National Review referred to the emergence of a “verbalist” elite,...
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Bleep You, Liberals!
Political correctness has, since the 1990’s, been a tool the left has used to silence the proponents of traditional morality, society, and culture. Under the banner of “sensitivity,” which has the veneer of a Higher Morality, p.c. has infected the university, the high school, the grade school, the media, business, public office, and public discourse. ...
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Squeaking Through
George W. Bush, as President of die United States, can be counted on in the first six months to . . . well, I should be honest here (with hand on heart). I don’t think any of us can say with much precision what my governor will accomplish in the new office whose door he...
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A Difficult Decade
James Patterson’s controlling idea is that the 60’s became the 60’s in 1965, and that this represented an “Eve of Destruction.” One struggles for about 300 pages trying to find out . . . destruction of what? The title comes from a long-forgotten song by a long-forgotten singer, Barry McGuire. “Eve of Destruction” did get...
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Free Men of a Republic
“The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself.” I first heard this wise insight into the American way of life from Sam Ervin, who was, as I have since learned, quoting John Ciardi. I should not be surprised: Poets always get to the heart of the matter a...
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Latter-Day Beggars
“He hath made us kings . . . ” —Revelation 1:6 Roman beggars, like Roman gypsies and Roman cats, not to mention Roman prostitutes warming themselves by their little winter chestnut fires, are the bearers of an ancient tradition, peculiar to the City of the Seven Hills, the caput mundi, which even her membership in...
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The Drugged War
When President-elect George Bush announced a week before his inauguration that his new “drug czar” would be former Education Secretary William Bennett, the air began to seep out of the tires of his new presidency before it even got on the road. Had Mr. Bennett ever participated in a drug arrest, had he ever worked...
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Can Biden Buy the Voters?
Biden knows what he has to do to win—but the educated whites who are the backbone of his party have little in common, culturally or economically, with the lower-class whites whose interest is in work, not woke.
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Will Bibi’s War Become America’s War?
President Donald Trump, who canceled a missile strike on Iran, after the shoot-down of a U.S. Predator drone, to avoid killing Iranians, may not want a U.S. war with Iran. But the same cannot be said of Bibi Netanyahu. Saturday, Israel launched a night attack on a village south of Damascus to abort what Israel...
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Remembering Robert A. Taft
In a dynamic time of U.S. history, Robert A. Taft was a deeply principled politician, courageously speaking out against FDR's New Deal, U.S. involvement in WWII, the Nuremberg Trials, and the formation of NATO.
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Syria: Avoiding Another Quagmire
Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee last April, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warned of the potential consequences of U.S. military involvement in the Syrian conflict. It could hinder humanitarian relief operations, he said, embroil the United States in a significant, lengthy, and uncertain military commitment, and strain relationships around the world. “And finally,” he...
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In Defense of Sam Francis
Open season has been declared on the late and longtime Chronicles columnist Samuel Francis. Evidence for this can be found in, among other places, a diatribe recently published by political journalist Michael Lind in Tablet, “The Importance of James Burnham.” Lind started his essay by analyzing Burnham but then segued into unkind remarks about Burnham’s...
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Liz Truss Takes Britain’s Helm Amid Stormy Seas
Britain's new Prime Minister Liz Truss, of the Conservative Party, has her work cut out for her in a country poised to undergo a difficult winter.
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The Ranchers and the Mandatory Minimum
Two Oregon ranchers, Steven Dwight Hammond and Dwight Lincoln Hammond, Jr., have been at the center of ethical and cultural clashes for several years. Even while a standoff purportedly held in their honor between armed militia and the federal government was occurring in January, the ranchers reported to the Bureau of Prisons to serve five-year...
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Charlie Is Their Darling
On October 25, 2000, central Sydney’s traffic stood still for hours, for the first time since the Olympiad. Inside the late-Victorian Town Hall, approximately 2,000 pilgrims witnessed the Aboriginal faith’s latest canonization: the state funeral of Charles Perkins, who had died on October 18 after 29 years of daily medical dependence on the “whitefella” culture...
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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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Faces of Clio
[This view first appeared in the October 1986 issue of Chronicles.] The obscurest epoch is today. —Robert Louis Stevenson Taken together, these three books serve nicely as a kind of group portrait of Clio and her several faces. In reverse order we have the historian as diarist and memoirist, as documentarian, and as reflective sage....
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Athens and Jerusalem
The holiday season is responsible for some of modern America’s most deeply felt traditions: cheap airline tickets on Christmas day, seasonal hymns like “Jinglebell Rock” and “Blue Christmas,” ACLU suits against the school Christmas pageant, and the Andy Williams Christmas special, for which the divorced Mr. Williams (one of whose wives killed her lover, Olympic...
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Conservatives and the Free Market
When everyone “hastens through by-paths to private profit,” Samuel Johnson remarked confidently in 1756, “no great change can suddenly be made.” So the market can be conservative in its effects. The notion is startling, especially from the pen of an 18th-century Tory, and it hardly matters for the moment whether the market Johnson had in...
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Getting the Scoop
“All we want are the facts, ma’am.” —Sgt. Joe Friday Not long ago I was sorting through old papers for disposal. I came across a clipping saved for some forgotten reason. On the reverse was this headline: “NAACP Chief Says More Assistance Needed.” This headline might have appeared in my hometown paper today (though I...
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Cast-iron Man
John C. Calhoun is perhaps the most hated historical figure in modern America. There may be others who offer more succinct and intuitive criticisms of America’s institutional decay; many have led stronger movements for reform and challenged the ruling establishment in ways more forceful than he did. But in the scholarly world, where historians and...
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Low-End Education
Not too far from my house in Phoenix, Arizona, stands a Christian school that may just say everything about the educational reform debate in this country—and why it is so often impossible to make any sense of it, in particular. One assumes that what this school has to offer is back-to-basics education, superior teachers, a...
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Our Inner Mason-Dixon
About a hundred years before the Civil War, two British surveyors, Jeremiah Mason and Charles Dixon, with a crew of ax-men, marked out 270 miles of wilderness. They set a stone at every mile, and another grander one embossed with the arms of the Penn and Calvert clans every five miles. The resulting map pacified...
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What We Are Reading: March 2023
Brief reviews of Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and The Death of Punishment, by Robert Blecker.
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Kosovo and Its Impact on U.S. Foreign Policy
The struggle for Kosovo between Christian Serbs and Muslim Albanians dates back to 1389, when the Serbs were defeated by, and their lands annexed to, the Ottoman Empire. Muslim rule lasted over four centuries and resulted in several waves of forced migrations of Serbs from Kosovo. The ...
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Movie Czar
The latest school massacre has all the do-gooders crying for more gun control, yet few have touched upon the blood-splattering, shoot-’em-up electronic games that the unhinged nerd who murdered 27 people in Newtown, Connecticut, played. His favorite was Call of Duty, a first-person-shooter game where participants use assault rifles, machine guns, and other weapons to...
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Arguments Against Global Free Trade
Sir James Goldsmith’s The Trap (New York, 1994) is the clearest introduction to the arguments against global free trade and its consequences for the nation. The English translation adds helpful notes and bibliography to the French original, Le Piège (Paris, 1993). In some places, however, rearrangement and omission change Goldsmith’s message. The last chapter of...
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Who Decides What Kids Should Be Taught?
Virginia is a newly blue state, with a Democratic governor and two Democratic senators, that Joe Biden won by 10 points. Hence, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe was an early and solid favorite to regain the office he vacated in 2017. But if McAuliffe loses Tuesday, the defeat will be measured on the Richter scale. For...
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Intellectual Operator
It is a distinct possibility that we leave to posterity writers and works from which the future curious will conclude that this century was the stupidest, most verbose and obscene, altogether the worst in the historical record. What else can you say of a century that elected Michel Foucault as one of its mâitres à...
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Democracy and Declarations of War
The winter Balkan lull has let Congress off the hook for rolling over and playing dead in response to President Clinton’s dispatch of troops to Bosnia. It is cruel irony that the fewer casualties American troops sustain, the more likely we are to continue permitting further such devaluations of democracy. That will accentuate the eternal...
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Last Call?
It was quiet at Drea’s Tavern on St. Patrick’s Day. It might seem unusual for an Irish bar to have so few souls stop in the third week of March, but there were reasons. “It’s tough to have it during the middle of the week,” bartender Larry Drea said. “So few people can get time...
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Culture War: Fighting On
“Transcend yourself and join in the universal struggle to bring about the self-transcendence of all men!” —Karl Marx Culture, as the term is used in America in our times, covers a vast territory with ill-defined frontiers. There is primitive culture (flint spearheads, animal and human sacrifice). There is high culture (Shakespeare, Michelangelo). There is, or...
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The Rule-or-Ruin Republicans
“Things reveal themselves passing away,” wrote W. B. Yeats. Whatever one may think of Donald Trump, his campaign has done us a service—exposing the underbelly of a decaying establishment whose repudiation by America’s silent majority is long overdue. According to the New York Times, super PACs of Trump’s GOP rivals, including PACs of candidates who...
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Crescent Moon Over Europe
Jean Raspail, the French novelist and explorer, now 90 and living in a suburb of Paris, must be experiencing the eerie feeling of living inside The Camp of the Saints, his most famous work, as he follows the contemporary news reports from across the Continent. The tens of thousands of Third World migrants are arriving...
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If I Could Turn Back Time
Here's the bottom line of today's SCOTUS decision regarding the incorporation of the Second Amendment, which amounts to an explicit rejection of traditional federalism on the part of the conservative majority. (Full disclosure: I'm of the Hestonian
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The Wonder of Academe
“The high-minded man must care more for truth than for what people think.” —Aristotle While being interviewed on William Buckley’s Firing Line, Harry Ashmore remarked that he had allowed the subject of his Unseasonable Truths: The Life of Robert Maynard Hutchins to tell the story of his life and work through the numerous quotations that...
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Let Us Now Praise Famous G-Men
Over the past few years, the United States federal government attempted a coup d’état against its own chief executive. Working from “opposition research” paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, the Deep State and its partners in the media came within a hair’s breadth of taking down a sitting president. This was the...
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Manifesto of a Paleo Fellow Traveller
The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return by Michael Anton Regnery Publishing 500 pp., $32.99 Michael Anton attracted widespread public notice in Sept. 2016 as the author of a pseudonymous article in the Claremont Review called “The Flight 93 Election.” It became one of the most widely debated and disseminated articles of the...
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Conspiring With Terror in the West
The liberal paradigm is dying before our eyes. At twelve midday on March 22, Theresa May announced at Prime Minister’s Questions that she had sent her condolences to the family of Martin McGuinness, who had been the capo di capi of the IRA. She had been preceded at the BBC by a high priest of...
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Remembering St. Thomas Aquinas
St. Thomas Aquinas is a universally admired philosopher who was able to distill the whole of human discourse. His thought even influenced America's Founding Fathers, as seen in the biblical ordering of the new American nation in the Treaty of Paris.
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Mondo Quasimodo
Last June, the 19,000 delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention voted to boycott the Walt Disney Company for its “promotion of homosexuality” and the other “anti-family” values. The convention pointed to Gay and Lesbian Days sponsored by Disney theme parks; to such twisted fare as Priest, Powder, and Kids, all films produced by Disney’s Miramax;...
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Donald Trump and Conservatism
Donald Trump has shattered the false consensus of the Republican Party, the hitherto unrecognized tautology that GOP is conservative because conservative is GOP, and vice versa. In the process, we’ve been confronted by an embarrassing reality: We really have no idea what we mean by the word conservative. There can be little doubt that Hillary...