“Nature, which is the time-vesture of God and reveals Him to the wise, hides Him from the foolish.” —Thomas Carlyle I don’t believe I realized, until I began reading up on the subject of Deep Ecology, how far the rot of despair and self-loathing has penetrated the Western world. Multiculturalism as an expression of the...
“Demography is destiny,” sociologists and demographers tell us. No. Morality is destiny. Demography stems from that, as does economics. Americans now are learning that lesson the hard way. Tax rates, debt, deficits, trade policy, monetary policy, government spending, and other factors all affect economic growth and prosperity. But they’re all trumped by demographics—and above that,...
“San Pietro si fece la barba prima per sé e poi per gli altri.” (“Saint Peter shaved himself first and then other people.”) —A proverb from Lazio, near Rome Americans believe that they are unusual. They use the word “unique” as a term of praise so often that it has lost its status as a...
Sometimes I have to pinch myself to remember that Europe was the cradle of democracy. For today Europe seems to be sliding inexorably into a culture of control that would have made Stalin proud. Carol Thatcher, the daughter of the great Lady T, was recently banned from the BBC for referring to an unnamed tennis...
If the war with Iraq was largely the work of the Likudnik faction that has commandeered the Bush administration’s Middle East policies, the liberation of Liberia on which the President suddenly embarked the nation last summer seems to have originated at least in part with yet another lobby of questionable loyalties. On July 7, as...
If in political and social terms the diminishing role of the aristocracy in Europe was, in the historian’s view, inevitable, in cultural terms its dissipation was not really felt until the turn of the century. Indeed, the intellectual history of our time is a record of careless exploitation and ruthless expropriation of what had once...
Traveling to Philadelphia Tuesday, President Joe Biden laid out in apocalyptic terms the gravity of the “threat” to American democracy from Republican efforts to reform and rewrite state election laws. We are facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War. That’s not hyperbole. Since the Civil War. The Confederates back then...
Only Americans would take seriously the idea that a foreign politician who presided over the demise of a once-dominant political party should serve as the model for a major U.S. presidential candidate. If a German proposed that the ruling Social Democratic Party should follow former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, or an Italian suggested that the...
There have been, in recent decades, two focal points around which radical, utopian ideologies could concentrate. As a result, these two focuses-labor unions and youth-were surrounded by a veritable cult, and they acquired power, both political and cultural, even though the second of the two focuses was not, as such, organized, let alone structured. Power...
Freedom now hangs in the balance in America. Staying alert and knowing what’s at stake are key in this fight for liberty.
Tuesday, November 5, 2002, will be remembered as the day that the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party died. On Election Day, the Republicans swept most of the state’s constitutional offices and elected Norm Coleman to the U.S. Senate, Tim Pawlenty to the governorship, and John Klein to the U.S. Congress. The GOP also gained seats in the...
A virtue of America’s quadrennial election cycle is its success in revealing and giving form to whatever popular malaise has set in over the past four years, whether the results of the elections themselves address the disorder or not, and occasionally in raising real issues, even if only by implication. In this respect, the presidential...
Narrow victories in the Kentucky caucuses and the Louisiana primary, the largest states decided on Saturday, have moved Donald Trump one step nearer to the nomination. Primaries in Michigan, Mississippi and Idaho on March 8, and in Florida, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina on March 15, may prove decisive. If Marco Rubio does not...
The Abortion Debate In the 20th century the most powerful and difficult transitions in human life have been turned into political war zones in which the different sides routinely invoke the power of government to establish and enforce their points of view. Few debates have been so heated as those involving the decision to terminate...
In their own quiet way, arts activities are as vigorous in the Midwest as anywhere else, a fact that few seem to realize—including Midwesterners. A year ago I was privileged to escort an emigre lecturer around my state for a week. At one evening’s talk he impetuously introduced me as “not one of your long-haired...
In failing to fact check his story on Harris’s involvement in the Kavanaugh affair, Shapiro ends up pushing the liberal narrative.
Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the famous decision of the Warren Court which held that racial segregation in the state public schools violated the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of the “equal protection” of the laws, turns 50 on May 17, 2004. The inevitable celebrations of the decision in the nation’s law reviews and popular media...
Americans who hoped that the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child would be stuffed in a drawer with its predecessor, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, got a jolt in February when Mrs. Clinton announced (at the funeral of UNICEF director James Grant) that the Convention...
My grandfather spent most of his days underground, as a cutter in his cousin’s coal mine in Imperial, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh. At night, he would arrive home looking like he had been through an explosion. Outside the kitchen door, my grandmother kept a large metal tub full of water to soak the coal dust off...
Conservatives and environmentalists generally have as much in common as the Hatfields and McCoys. Environmentalists like to point to the career of conservative James Watt and the comment of Ronald Reagan that once you’ve seen one redwood you’ve seen them all. Most conservatives, on the other hand, view environmentalists as sentimental anti-modernists who want to...
For a quick fix on how a particular organization sees itself and its purposes, inspect its official name, especially if the organization dates from a more forthright and transparent time, when assorted reformers wore their hearts on their letterheads. The purpose, the raison d’être, of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded...
In February 1861, Joseph Sadoc Alemany, the first Roman Catholic bishop of the state of California, wrote an urgent pastoral letter to his flock. This letter was published immediately in the New York Freeman’s Journal, and for this indiscretion its editor was imprisoned for a year in Fort Lafayette, and his presses were shut down. ...
Some years ago I was interviewed by a reporter for Corriere della Sera, Italy’s most prestigious newspaper. He had heard that I was a follower of Umberto Bossi, leader of the secessionist Lega Nord, and he wanted to know what plans I had for breaking up the United States. After disclaiming any secessionist political agenda,...
America, in case you haven’t noticed, is lost in the throes of celebrating the writing of its Constitution, which is now two centuries old. The somewhat labored efforts to fix public attention on the historic document are largely the work of former Chief Justice Warren Burger and his own private bureaucracy in the Commission on...
“A democracy, when put to the strain, grows weak and is supplanted by oligarchy.” —Aristotle The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln by Sean Wilentz New York: W.W. Norton; 1,004 pp., $35.00 To write a book about democracy, a word that functions today as little more than an advertising slogan, an author should first...
Suggestions that Republicans cease noting the obvious about Kamala Harris being the DEI candidate for president are rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the American electorate.
Hundreds of Turkish police officers backed by armored cars moved in on Istanbul’s Taksim Square early Tuesday morning and reclaimed the site after pulling out on June 1. By midday bulldozers had removed barricades of paving stones and corrugated iron. The crackdown surprised protesters, hundreds of whom had been sleeping in a makeshift camp...
In September, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that an illegal alien, although properly found to be a danger to the community, should not be removed from the United States because he considers himself to be a transgender woman. Finding that Mexico is not in the progressive vanguard in embracing transgender identity, the court...
The Decline of Nations: Lessons for Strengthening America at Home and in the World, by Joseph F. Johnston, Jr. (Republic; 385 pp., $30.00). How would you know your country is in mortal decline? Joseph Johnston first explains how the Roman Republic and the British Empire rose to greatness and then declined. In light of these...
There was a very odd occurrence in the “Cradle of the Confederacy” in July 1987: Presidential aspirant and civil rights activist Jesse Jackson paid a visit to the Montgomery, Alabama, home of George Corley Wallace. It had been 126 years since Jefferson Davis stood on the steps of the Alabama capitol and been sworn in...
A General’s Life by Omar N. Bradley and Clay Blair; Simon and Schuster; New York. General of the Army Omar N. Bradley’s military career spanned a half-century of dramatic change for the United States. When he entered West Point in 1911, the United States had few military interests beyond its borders; when he retired in 1953,...
Instinct Produced by Spyglass Entertainment and Touchstone Pictures Directed by Jon Turteltaub Screenplay by Gerald Di Pego and Daniel Quinn Released by Buena Vista Pictures Pushing Tin Produced by Art Linson Productions, 3 Miles Apart Productions Ltd., et al. Directed by Mike Newell Screenplay by Darcy Frey and Glen Charles Released by 20th Century Fox...
“Liberalism” is the predominant form of snobbery in our time. A child molester is more likely to be a Democrat. A closeted homosexual is more likely to be a Republican. Nothing fails like success. But the opposite is not true—unless you have affirmative action. The USPS will discontinue Saturday mail in August. I can...
President Trump, every Republican senator, and the GOP majority in Speaker Paul Ryan’s House just put the future of their party on the line. By enacting the largest tax cut since the Reagan administration, the heart of which is cutting the corporate rate from 35 to 21 percent, Republicans have boldly bet the farm. They...
In Forked Tongue, her important new public policy study-cum-expose whose proposals seem as likely to create new problems as to solve some old ones, Rosalie Pedalino Porter doesn’t get down to root causes. That is, she nowhere notes that when activist judges create new opportunities for turf-hungry bureaucrats the result is similar to what it...
As I began to contemplate the theater of the absurd that we Americans have been living through in recent days, I found the most useful place to begin was an essay by Sam Francis published in Chronicles 26 years ago, “Anarcho-Tyranny USA.” In this long, thoughtful piece, Francis contrasts the eagerness to criminalize what had...
Harding was a consummate conservative governed by humility, kindness, and charity for all: principles that guided him in both his personal life and his political career.
Disconnected is not an amusing book. The subtitle’s “digitally distracted” doesn’t hint at its grim findings. This short text—a long one might be too dispiriting—is nevertheless lengthy enough to expose the digital revolution as an outright calamity, though the author generally eschews the apocalyptic tone. Of course, there is the familiar boast that children now...
Whatever President Bush says about the âfamily valuesâ of the growing horde of illegal Mexican immigrants, chilling newspaper accounts and cold data tell a different tale. On April 29, 2005, an illegal alien from Guatemala, Ronald Douglas Herrera Castellanos, was power washing a deck at the Nagle home in New City, New York. In her...
A theory about the mafia that was advanced in these pages by the late Samuel Francis about 15 years ago explains how Walmart, Costco, and Home Depot drive out your corner grocery, the local pharmacist, and Joe’s Hardware. The national expansion of these blights isn’t free enterprise. It’s more akin to the nationwide expansion of...
“It is extremely frustrating to write history today because so much effort must go toward correcting the countless distortions that have been inserted into accounts of our heritage by militant secularists who twist facts to suit their narrow anti-religious political agendas.” So writes Benjamin Hart near the end of Faith and Freedom: The Christian Roots...
SCOTUS is expected to overturn a Ninth Circuit ruling allowing homeless encampments no later than June, freeing municipalities to restore order and safety to their streets. But cities will have the political will to do it.
It has been ten years since the death, at his home in the village of Mecosta, Michigan, of Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind and one of the main spokesmen for organized American conservatism as it was known throughout his life. While there were other architects of conservatism who were Kirk’s contemporaries, almost all...
Sir Ernst Gombrich, for one, is glad to hear the news. The eminent art historian stands in the modestly furnished drawing room of his Hampstead house, leafing through his copy of Leonid Pasternak’s memoirs, recently published in England. The book’s publication had attracted the attention of the Smithsonian Institution, and the first retrospective of the...
The California recall election turned out well for the Democrats. With Gov. Gavin Newsom sinking in the summer polls, the party had been staring starkly at the prospect of losing the nation’s largest state and seeing its governor replaced by talk-show host Larry Elder, who had vaulted into the lead among the 46 candidates seeking...
Thomas Fleming is wrong when he writes (Cultural Revolutions, April) that, by Cuban law, Elian Gonzalez belongs to his next-of-kin, his father. According to Cuban law (specifically the Codigo de Familia Ley, No. 1289), parental authority is subordinated to “inculcating” the “internationalist spirit and socialist morality.” According to Article 95, section three, of this so-called...
Detroiters have a deeply ironic way of looking at their beloved city. The irony is evident in a once-popular T-shirt that showed a muscular tough gripping a ferocious dog around the neck while holding a loaded gun to the animal’s head. “Say Nice Things About Detroit,” the T-shirt read. The T-shirt is a commentary on...
The amazing thing about the nuclear debate and the Catholic bishops’ participation in it is that the accumulated wisdom and experience of mankind, as well as the Church’s pronouncements on peace and war, are so completely ignored. This is quite a natural phenomenon on the part of so many lay debaters: it belongs also to...
Quebec’s sovreigntist movement could learn a thing or two from Liberal Party leader Jean Charest. His return to the premiership of the pro-vince should be a lesson to the sovereigntists that it is always darkest before dawn. The sovereigntists’ night, however, will last a while longer, as the provincial Liberals have smashed them to pieces...
In The Respondent, Hollywood actor Greg Ellis reveals the tyrannical horrors of the family court system, designed especially to emasculate men.