When family and culture are under constant attack, there sometimes seems to be no greater enemy than the American Civil Liberties Union. Yet, when Washington is busy expanding the welfare/warfare state, sometimes only the ACLU seems willing to confront Leviathan. What is someone who loves both liberty and community to do? There is no reason...
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Uncivil Liberties
The United States Commission on Civil Rights has degenerated into an appendage of the Clinton reelection campaign through its attempt to stop, through intimidation, the petition drive in Florida to clamp down on illegal immigration; at stake are 25 electoral votes for the Democratic incumbent. The commission was established under the Civil Rights Act of...
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From Cincinnatus to Caesar
Dr. Clyde Wilson’s new gathering will be of particular interest to readers of this journal, as some parts of it have appeared in these pages and as he has for years maintained a special relationship with Chronicles. Yet I hasten to add that the compelling quality of these essays speaks broadly to the most vital...
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Guantanamo Bay
Guantanamo Bay is the subject of continuous debate. Can the United States detain indefinitely members of the Taliban captured in Afghanistan, or Al Qaeda insurgents captured in Iraq, at our military base in Cuba? What sort of interrogation measures are permissible by international law in order to obtain information to protect Americans from the continuing...
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I Remember
For some years I have lived in Québec as a friendly alien from the United States, traveling from time to time back to my native Minnesota and other states to practice law in my fields of interest. I am married to a French-Canadian wife who is a member of the bar and mairesse of our...
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Slicing and Twisting
No matter how many curses should be heaped on the head of Thurgood Marshall, recently retired from some 24 years of slicing and twisting the raw meat of the Constitution into whatever ideological pastry suited his appetite of the moment, even his shrillest foes have to acknowledge Mr. Marshall’s eminence in the legal and judicial...
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The Inevitability of National Politics
Many conservatives have become disenchanted with national politics. This disenchantment is understandable. Strong support for Republicans seeking the White House and seats in Congress has done little to conserve the type of society most of those voting Republican wanted to conserve. By almost any measure, American society has moved steadily leftward in recent decades. Social...
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Fighting Words: Abortion and Civility
Austrian sociologist Hans Millendorfer claims to have discovered, at least in his native Austria, a perplexing correspondence: his statistics show a rise in abortions paralleled by a rise in civility. To those of us who consider abortion a violent and evil act, it seems strange that such violence should be accompanied by an increase in...
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An Obscene Carnival
The obscene carnival of digging up an American hero who died 141 years ago has come to an end. No arsenic was found in Zachary Taylor’s remains, proving that he was not poisoned, which any competent and sensible historian could have told you without this grotesque and impious exercise. (Even if significant traces of arsenic...
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“If I May Interrupt”: Live From the Senate Floor
As any connoisseur of the manifest absurdities that daily emanate from Inside the Beltway is well aware, what we read in the venerable Congressional Record is not necessarily a verbatim account of what was stated, on any given day, by our lawmakers on the floors of the House or Senate. It is common practice to...
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Federalism vs. Secession
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively or to the people.” —The Tenth Amendment Following the passage of the national gun ban wrapped in pork, Representatives Gingrich and Gephardt congratulated each other for their bipartisan cooperation and remarked...
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Reproductive Tyranny
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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Will There Always Be an England?
In his op-ed in the Washington Post, Chris Grayling, leader of the House of Commons, made the case for British withdrawal from the European Union—in terms Americans can understand. Would you accept, Grayling asks, an American Union of North and South America, its parliament sitting in Panama, with power to impose laws on the United...
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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 State as Rabble-Rouser
Michael Mann has long been the most interesting exponent of what might be called British post-Marxist sociology. In his essays in the Archives européennes de sociologie, his Sources of Social Power (two volumes), and other writings, Mann has applied a four-power model (ideological, political, military, and economic) to historical studies, seeking thereby to overcome Marxist...
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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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The Crash of the Greed Machine
“Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money.” —Acts, 20 The Big Board’s 508-point market meltdown was investigated by presidential commission, Congress, the SEC, and the major stock exchanges. Each of these bodies concluded that stocks fell because they were already much too high....
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Sailing to Urbino
William Butler Yeats was not talking about literally sailing to a literal Byzantium in his famous poem, and I know that Urbino is a mountain fastness, not a port. Even so, sailing to Urbino is necessary, and it does not matter how you do it—only that you do. One way to approach Urbino is through...
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American Nationalism and Western Civilization
Any exploration of American nationalism must begin with the National Question: “Is there such a thing as the American people? And if so, what is it?” Most people do not ask such questions. A Frenchman does not wonder if he is French, nor the Pole if he is Polish, nor—notoriously—the Serb if he is Serbian....
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Raoul Berger, R.I.P.
On September 23, we lost one of the great jurisprudential fighters for Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Berger, late Charles Warren Senior Fellow at Harvard University, former professor of law at the University of California’s Boalt Hall, one-time second concertmaster for the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, died at the age of 99. Berger’s career as...
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Striking Back
Fathers are striking back in the cultural war over abortion. As a slogan, “abortion rights” has translated into the woman’s absolute prerogative to abort her unborn child. It is not only the interests of the child that are brutally crushed by this “right”; the desires of fathers—even married fathers—have also been brushed aside as irrelevant...
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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 World Safe for Stalinism
Long ago, a British veteran of World War II offered this sober moral judgment on the war: It was just such a sunny, breezy Mediterranean day two years before when he read of the Russo-German alliance, when a decade of shame seemed to be ending in light and reason, when the enemy was plain in...
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Living in French in the St. Lawrence Valley
Our little house of wood, a century old, nestles in the countryside in the county of Lotbinière, somewhat to the south of the city of Quebec. There I live with my husband and our five children. Last fall, as my husband and I piled cords of wood in the cellar of our little house, I...
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Scouting and Sin
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 twins Michael and William Randall of Anaheim, California, and eight-year-old Mark Welsh of Chicago are suing to...
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Winter of Our Discontent
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...
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Guess Who’s Not Coming to Dinner
“Blacks for Gray, Whites for Fenty,” ran the nuanced headline on page one of the Washington Examiner. The story told of how black Mayor Adrian Fenty, who got rave reviews for appointing Michelle Rhee to save District of Columbia schools, was crushed six to one in black wards east of the Anacostia River, as he...
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Legal Insanity
“Knowing that religion does not furnish grosser bigots than law, I expect little from old judges.” —Thomas Jefferson A society governed by the judiciary—rather than by the will of the majority—displays odd characteristics. On July 29, 1994, a seven-year-old girl in Hamilton Township, New Jersey, was sexually assaulted and murdered. A neighbor who is a...
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Can American Legal Education Be Fixed?
Something has gone radically awry with legal education and maybe even legal practice. For about a decade now, the loudest wailing over the state of affairs has come from Chief Judge Harry Edwards of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, who wrote a landmark article in the Michigan Law Review...
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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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‘Tis The Season for Creche Suits
If it’s Christmas, then ’tis the season for creche suits, and this past December was no different. The Kentucky chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against Gov. Wallace Wilkinson because the state constructed a Nativity scene on the front lawn of the Capitol in Frankfort. Children from the Good Shepherd School (Catholic)...
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The Liberal Stampede to ‘Abolish ICE’
“No Borders! No Nations! No Deportations!” “Abolish ICE!” Before last week, these were the mindless slogans of an infantile left, seen on signs at rallies to abolish ICE, the agency that arrests and deports criminal aliens who have no right to be in our country. By last week, however, “Abolish ICE!” was no longer the...
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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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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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Law in Lehi: A Case of Abuse
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...
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Does the Federal Government Protect Private Property?
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...
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A Revolution Delayed
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...
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A Familiar Phenomenon
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...
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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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The Fixer
This new biography of one of the great “fixers” in American political life, James F. Byrnes, creates the impression of an American Ozymandias, proclaiming by example the ephemerality of human greatness. Byrnes and his political colleagues did mold the world in which we live long after the last of them died; yet the scene of...
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Robbing Paul to Pay Paul
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...
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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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The Censored History of Internment
In March 1997, Japanese-Peruvians who had been interned in the United States during World War II called upon President Clinton to issue an executive order awarding them financial compensation similar to that awarded in 1988 to Japanese-American former internees and relocatees under Public Law 100-383. Simultaneously, these Japanese-Peruvians lobbied members of Congress to enact legislation...
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Land Without Justice
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...
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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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Loving the Bitch-Goddess
Paul Johnson’s book Intellectuals, published last year, chronicles the transgressions of modern avatars of wisdom (among them Rousseau, Marx, and Sartre) who, while professing a fervent devotion to humanity, behaved inhumanly toward those most meriting their compassion—spouses, lovers, family, friends, and associates. Although the targets of Johnson’s caustic pen all were idols of the left,...
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On Joe McCarthy
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 ....
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A Nightmare on Elm Street
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...
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Scouting and Sin
[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...
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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...