The debate over gays in the military has highlighted the progressive impulse to look anywhere but to America for cultural truth. On talk shows and in editorials, Americans are urged to emulate “other industrialized nations” (read “increasingly decadent Western Europe”) that permit openly homosexual soldiers and sailors. Often praised is Holland, whose ponytailed, hairnet-coiffed legions...
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What the Editors Are Reading
When the review copy of A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, by Alistair Horne, hit my desk at National Review in 1977, I found a reviewer immediately and waited for a second copy to follow from the publisher (as is so often the case in the publishing business). When it failed to arrive, I...
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The Abolition of Learning
In 1997, the headmaster of the English secondary school in which I was teaching ordered a bibliocaust. The inspectors were coming, and he wanted our library to look up-to-date. All the old stuff had to go; only bright, modern volumes relevant to the contemporary curriculum were to be on the shelves. Each department was told...
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The Poodle Gets Kicked
Actually, Joe set himself up. From the moment he set foot on Israeli soil, our vice president was in full pander mode. First, he headed to Yad Vashem memorial, where he put on a yarmulke and declared Israel “a central bolt in our existence.” “For world Jewry,” Joe went on, presumably including 5 million Americans,...
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Bound by History
Most of us objected to The New York Times’ notorious “1619 Project” because it trashes the great achievements of Americans (creating free institutions and conquering a continental wilderness), substituting a story of supposed victimization as the core of our history. Alas, Professor Hall, in his speculations in the March issue (“Slavery and the American Founding”)...
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Their Third World Problem—And Ours
Procrastinating readers can pat themselves on the back if they waited to pick up David Rieff’s Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World until it came out in paperback. For one thing, the Los Angeles riots, which so captivated television-transfixed Americans for a couple of days last year until the weekend arrived and the networks...
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We Ought to Like Ike
As a second-year West Point cadet in March 1969, I was returning to my room after chemistry class midafternoon on a Friday. As I stepped inside Pershing Barracks, I saw a number of cadets huddled around a note posted on the stairway railing. In neat penmanship were the words: “General Eisenhower died this morning.” Neither...
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Will NFL Demand Respect for Old Glory?
“America refuses to address the pervasive evil of white cops killing black men, and I will not stand during a national anthem that honors the flag of such a country!” That is the message Colin Kaepernick sent by “taking a knee” during the singing of “The Star Spangled Banner” before San Francisco ’49s games in...
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Charity Begins at Church
December can be a difficult month for American Christians, forced to look on passively as their sacred holy days are turned into a generic “holiday season.” The First Sunday in Advent has been replaced by “Black Friday,” the day on which retailers begin to turn a profit on holiday sales; and the end of the...
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Rejecting ‘Systemic Racism’
The latest election cycle did not deliver happy results for the political right. Our dismay is compounded by the strong impression of an unfair result. Whatever you think of the integrity of last November’s elections, it cannot be denied that in the months prior a great many very big thumbs—Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the...
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Education to the Rescue
In the early 1900’s, Reconstruction studies (excluding the work of W.E.B. DuBois) approved quick restoration of states, Andrew Johnson’s strict constitutionalism, and white Southerners’ revolt against military and Republican rule (which consisted of carpetbaggers, scalawags, and freedmen). These studies—named the “Dunning School” for historian William A. Dunning, whose students applied his interpretation to individual Southern...
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The Press: Hidden Persuasion or Sign of the Times?
Modern Western societies are commonly called industrial or democratic societies. They might just as well be named mass-communication societies, for the average citizen is supposed to be informed about what goes on in and around the city whose welfare and leadership he is supposed to assume. As the medium through which comes the data about...
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Myths of Terrorism
It’s been a bad year for terrorism in the United States. Not bad, fortunately, in the number of actual attacks (at least at the time of this writing), but in the continuing debasement of the word terrorism, so that it ceases to be a useful characterization of behavior and becomes merely a propaganda slogan for...
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Pire qu’un Crime . . .
“Arts, Culture, Reverence, Honour, all things fade. Save Treason and the dagger of her trade . . . “ —Oscar Wilde, “Libertatis Sacra Fames” The Pollard treason case is so unusual that I want to start my review of this book with a review of the reviews. I do this because the first-hand story by...
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Five Minutes With Governor Bush
Through the good offices of a friend who is a large contributor to Republican causes, Chronicles was able to secure a brief exclusive interview with George W. Bush—the likely next President of the United States. We caught up with Governor Bush in Des Monies a few minutes before he was to address the annual joint...
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Trump—Once and Future King?
“I don’t know if he’ll run in 2024 or not. But if he does, I’m pretty sure he will win the nomination.” So says Mitt Romney, the sole Republican senator to have voted twice to convict President Donald J. Trump of impeachable acts. But is it possible Trump could win the nomination in 2024? What...
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Women’s Work I
After receiving a number of kind messages, imploring me to continue this discussion, I have decided to ransack some old essays for more material on the question of women. If I do not respond to every writeback, it is because of lack of time. It is a feminist truism that women have always worked. Even...
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On the Free Market
Llewellyn Rockwell’s article “How the Market Stamps Out Evil” in the December issue was challenging. But whereas his superb philippic on the presidency in the October issue (“Down With the Presidency“) left me baying at the moon, this time I was unconvinced. Can capitalism really be set against a tyrannical government as a force for...
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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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Is Thomas Woods a Dissenter? A Further Reply, Pt. 3
Next we must look at another rhetorical device of Woods which serves to distract the attention of the reader from the point at issue and to prejudice him against what I actually wrote. Woods mentions the interventions of bishops’ conferences into economic matters. As a matter of fact I said absolutely nothing in my article...
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The Economic Realities of U.S. Immigration
Mass immigration is changing the fundamental character of America—our culture, institutions, standards, and objectives. Until recently, our society was the envy of the world, so why are these changes even necessary? In addition to the ruling class’s commitment to globalism and multiculturalism, the chief reason that is given in support of open borders is the...
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Congress’s Romance with Cowardice
War Without War Powers (the Not-So-New American Way) On September 1, 1970, soon after President Nixon expanded the Vietnam War by invading neighboring Cambodia, Democratic Senator George McGovern, a decorated World War II veteran and future presidential candidate, took to the floor of the Senate and said, “Every Senator [here] is partly responsible for sending...
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John Fetterman’s Slovenliness and the Demise of Objective Social Standards
The Senate is defining its standards down to meet the demands of a single mentally defective boor who lived off his parents until he was nearly 50 and still cannot bring himself to dress and act like an adult.
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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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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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Goodbye, Bill Quirk. Jefferson Forever.
William J. Quirk, long-time professor of law at the University of South Carolina and a writer very familiar to Chronicles readers, passed away on September 22. Bill was 80 and had been quite active until the last two years or so. Professor Quirk was a favourite of several generations of law students, who marveled at...
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A Few More Thoughts About Women In Combat
So we now learn that women might be drafted into the military. The news is a fitting coda to Tom Piatak’s post about women in combat, to which I added another. When I served on the first Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces, conservative commissioners warned about this development: that...
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Speech for Speech’s Sake Free
One of the unfortunate after-effects of the so-called “Red Scare” of the early 50’s was the triumph of the “no limits” interpretation of the First Amendment, which has poisoned American political thought ever since. It goes something like this: the McCarthyite “reign of terror” permanently discredited the idea that you can suppress speech in a...
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The Dark, Dark Wood of Suicide
Among the many haunting and piteous images from the Inferno of Dante is this one. The travelers, in Canto XIII, enter a pathless wood. Dante, on Virgil’s coaching, snaps a twig from a thorn tree. The tree yelps in pain, and no wonder. The tree is the transmuted personage of a formerly great Florentine, Pier...
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In the Beginning
If it is true that the Constitution of the United States is to be construed by its intent rather than by mysterious and highly malleable forces of “evolution,” then recovery of the intellectual context out of which it arose is of the highest priority. However, the discovery of intent is primarily a question of historical...
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Christian Nationalism—A Catholic Integralist View
Natural law, not liberalism, directs Man to his proper end.
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Will Joe Repudiate His Segregationist Friends?
“Apologize for what? Cory should apologize. He knows better. There’s not a racist bone in my body.” Thus did a stung Joe Biden answer rival Cory Booker’s demand he apologize for telling contributors, in a southern drawl, “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland, He never called me ‘boy.’ He always called me...
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A Judicial Putsch
During oral argument on the cases challenging the definition of marriage upheld by the voters in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee, Justice Anthony Kennedy remarked, “I don’t know how to count the decimals when he talk about millennia. The definition [of marriage] has been with us for millennia. And it’s very difficult for the court...
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Obama’s Victory
The conventional wisdom is simple: when there is an uninspiring incumbent and a lackluster challenger, the people will opt for the incumbent. The formula is unsatisfactory in this case, however. Obama was not just any incumbent. He is the embodiment of an anti-America–culturally, spiritually and morally—that is hell-bent on destroying the surviving vestiges of...
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Archie Bunker Back Stories
Carl Reiner’s son, Rob, takes part in a grand tradition on the left of demonizing normal, religious people after being advanced, personally, by powerful relationships. On the left, it’s all relative and “all in the family.”
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Kelly Loeffler’s Missed Opportunity in the Georgia Run-off Debate
On the evening of Dec. 6, I watched the debate between Sen. Kelly Loeffler and the Reverend Raphael Warnock, who are running against each other for a U.S. Senate seat from Georgia with the runoff election scheduled for Jan. 5. As a non-leftist I am anxious to see the Georgia Senate seats now up for...
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Biting the Bullet
The flyleaf of this book sports a quote (“One finally gets the musical whole of Dostoevsky’s original”) from an enthusiastic notice in the New York Times Book Review of a new translation of The Brothers Karamazov, which the Pevear-Volokh onsky tandem unleashed upon the English-speaking world a quarter of a century ago. As the author...
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Maryland, the South’s Forgotten Cousin
As recently as the 1930’s, elderly black people in rural Maryland were still keeping headstrong children in line with the admonition that something called “pattiroll” would “get” them if they didn’t behave themselves. “Pattirolls,” or patrols, were gangs of Union Army soldiers who rode throughout the moonlit countryside enforcing curfews in occupied Maryland during the...
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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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Dirty Secrets: Race-Norming Lives On
A year after the nasty secret got out of how race-norming works on the nation’s most widely used job test, the establishment news herd suddenly discovered the story. There were spots on NBC Nightly News and the Today Show, a front-page story in the Washington Post, an editorial in the New York Times, and a...
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The Partisans Are Coming!
The Referendum that took Great Britain out of the European Union by a large popular majority occurred two years ago. President Trump was elected two years ago this coming November in something like a landslide in the Electoral College. Marine Le Pen’s Front National (since renamed the Rassemblement National) won a third of the popular...
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In Search of the New American Man
The evident purpose of Taming the Prince is to provide a respectable philosophical pedigree for the usurpations and abuses of power by American Presidents since FDR. (Professor Mansfield dedicates the book to his father, “constant advocate of a strong presidency from Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan.”) Where conservatives such as Corwin, Kendall, Burnham, and Samuel...
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On Dueling, Divorce, and Red Indians
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 ...
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Better Together
Brion McClanahan penned two able critiques of President Trump’s “1776 Report” for the April/May and July 2021 issues of this magazine. I notice that his charge (in “Stop Playing the Left’s Game,” July 2021 Chronicles) that “our allies at Claremont…give unwitting aid and comfort to the left” is mirrored by Michael Anton’s assertion (in “Americans Unite,” in the online magazine American Greatness) that Chronicles does...
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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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Don’t Tread on Us
In the closing days of 1993 two familiar specters, recently absent from our nightmares, returned to haunt the global consciousness: the Russian bear, in the person of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and the Yellow Peril, in the form of North Korea. There were, of course, other bugbears to frighten the children of democracy—the parade of new Hitlers...
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Documenting Biden
The paper chase of Biden’s stolen documents continues, but by now his profile is clear.
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The Conservative Search for Order
The terms liberal and conservative (nearly always paired in that descending order) are now so confused as to be almost entirely useless. Originally, liberal was used to denote the ideology that aimed at the liberation of human individuals from the restraints of Church establishments, aristocratic and monarchical privileges, and legal restrictions on business and international...
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War Without End, Amen
I have often complained that the self-styled progressive of our time never tells us where he wants to go. Progress implies a destination, and rest—sweet and blessed rest—once you have arrived. But that would imply a natural human order to return to, or to attain. And then what? Then what? The progressive sweats. He...