Mr. Conor Cruise O’Brien’s “A Vindication of Edmund Burke,” (National Review, December 17, 1990), contains many long established truths about Burke’s politics—his consistency in principle, his remarkable insights and powers of prophesy, his strong critique of revolutionary ideology, and so forth. But amidst these trite truisms, which vindicate O’Brien’s subject only to the uninitiated, he...
2050 search results for: Supreme%2525252525252525252525252525252525252BCourt
Post
Getting Back to Nature
“Human rights are fictions—but fictions with highly specific properties.” —Alasdair MacIntyre In 1960 John Courtney Murray, S.J., warned of the possibility that America was slipping into a new barbarism. In his best known work, We Hold These Truths, Father Murray said that barbarism “threatens when men cease to talk together according to reasonable laws.” Argument...
Post
Democrats Are Stuck with Joe Biden as Their Presidential Nominee
Democrats have no choice but to take a deep breath, pray to the deity they probably don't believe in, and roll the dice with their impotent current ticket.
Post
An Establishment in Panic
Donald Trump “appeals to racism.” “[F]rom the beginning . . . his campaign has profited from voter prejudice and hatred” and represents an “authoritarian assault upon democracy.” If Speaker Paul Ryan wishes to be “on the right side of history . . . he must condemn Mr. Trump clearly and comprehensively. The same goes for...
Post
Greek Diary II
The Plaka was once the heart of modern Athens, first Ottoman Athens and then the Athens built largely by German kings and queens and their philhellenic architects. It was ruined by the work of brilliant American archaeologists who tore out the heart of the neighborhood in digging up the ...
Post
Dance With the Devil in the Pale Moonlight
There was a notable convergence some decades ago, one that was noticed musically as two separate and distinct phenomena, but not as a convergence—or even as a conspiracy, or a rivalry. I never heard or saw any acknowledgment that two of the foremost instrumentalists in the world were fiddling around pretty much at the same...
Post
The Twilight of the Sacred
At the center of the contemporary pagan/Christian controversy are the nature, the localization, and the psychological-mythological motivation of the sacred. The last one dominates the debate because as the transcendent God becomes less focused the sacred turns into a basically human domain. The question, no longer addressed to heaven, is not over how God communicates...
Post
Rockford Schools Controversy
The Rockford schools controversy, approaching its tenth anniversary, is taking on the mythic stature of the Little Rock, Cleveland, and Kansas City cases. While still in its infancy (as desegregation cases go) and relatively inexpensive (only $166 million through the end of the 1997-98 school year, compared to $2 billion in Kansas City), the Rockford...
Post
Pro-Life: The Political Disadvantage
Pro-life Republicans must somehow convince their opponents that opposition to abortion is a deeply held belief about human life—not an attack on women.
Post
Anarcho-Tyranny: The Perpetual Revolution—April 2005
PERSPECTIVE Synthesizing Tyrannyby Samuel Francis The last word. VIEWS The Real Fight Is Here at Homeby Roger D. McGrathFallujah, California. Global Anarcho-Tyrannyby Srdja TrifkovicA game of chess. Samuel T. Francis, R.I.P.Clyde Wilson and Thomas Fleming remembertheir fellow Tarheel conspirator. NEWS Final Solutionby B.K. EakmanThe hostile takeover of America’s schools. REVIEWS My Favorite Justiceby Stephen B....
Post
The Life of the Mind
Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life; by Zena Hitz; Princeton University Press; 240 pp., $22.95 “What do I need to know for the test?” This common refrain, repeated endlessly by high school and undergraduate students, sums up one of the great heresies of our age: the view that learning is a...
Post
The Lady From Niger
“There once was a lady from Niger Who smiled as she rode on a tiger. They returned from the ride With the lady inside And the smile on the face of the tiger.” —Ogden Nash Christopher Patten warns at the start that his engagingly written book is not a memoir. Though the core of it...
Post
Duty, Honor, Atrocity
George W. Bush Receives a Character Award at West Point In George W. Bush’s home state of Texas, if you are an ordinary citizen found guilty of capital murder, the mandatory sentence is either life in prison or the death penalty. If, however, you are a former president of the United States responsible for initiating...
Post
You Shall Be as Gods
“It’s awesome”: A young relative of mine loves the word and uses it profusely. Since she applies it to a restaurant or a vacuum cleaner she finds extraordinary, I doubt she realizes its real meaning. This is a typical instance of the degeneracy of a word caused by the search for quick superlatives, and mainly...
Post
Will the Honduras Column Intimidate America?
There is something about “column” that alerts the mind. It is not the same as “crowd,” and is active, purposive. My Chambers dictionary gives for column “a body of troops forming a long, narrow procession,” reminding us that the word is quasi-military. Napoleon’s infantry always attacked in columns. The Honduras column now commanding the news...
Post
Recovering the Dignity of Truth
We Episcopalians—we’re just so special, don’t you know? We worship in such special ways. Our churches look so special, as do we ourselves—an indication of our social gifts. And when we fight, when we commence to break the church furniture over one another’s heads—at such moments we’re just, you might say, disgustingly, regurgitatingly special; so...
Post
Honor to Whom Honor
“Render to all what is due them,” writes Saint Paul, “Tax to whom tax is due, custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor” (Romans 13:7, NASB). When a zealous Christian offered to help Mark Twain understand the difficult things in the Bible, Twain said something like this: “It is not...
Post
The Five Good Reasons
Atheists have no god to worship. This is by no means a tautology. Belief in god is ingrained in our nature, and Anselm’s proof is the nearest thing to an effective rebuttal of atheism. Put in simple terms, Anselm’s argument is that we know that god exists because we have the category god in our...
Post
New England Against America
“The fiction of Mr. Simms gave indication, we repeat, of genius, and that of no common order. Had he been even a Yankee, this genius would have been rendered immediately manifest to his countrymen, but unhappily (perhaps) he was a Southerner…. His book, therefore, depended entirely upon its own intrinsic value and...
Post
Knights of the Invisible Empire
Back in the days when Southern merchants had to take the Ku Klux Klan seriously, the knights of the Invisible Empire liked to play a neat little trick on a store owner who had strayed too far from the path of racial rectitude the secret society demanded of him. Several Klansmen in plain clothes would...
Post
Will JFK’s Party Become Sanders’ Party?
Sen. Bernie Sanders may be on the cusp of both capturing the Democratic nomination and transforming his party as dramatically as President Donald Trump captured and remade the Republican Party. After his sweep of the Nevada caucuses, following popular vote victories in Iowa and New Hampshire, Sanders has the enthusiasm and the momentum, as the...
Post
Rockefeller Republicans
Is the Republican establishment losing it? Is the party leadership capable of uniting a governing coalition as Richard Nixon did before Watergate and Ronald Reagan resurrected in the 1980s? Observing the hysteria and nastiness of Karl Rove and the GOP establishment at the stunning triumph of Tea Party Princess Christine O’Donnell, the answer is no....
Post
Pico Della Mirandola’s Oration On the Dignity Of Man
I once read that Abdala the Muslim, when asked what was most worthy of awe and wonder in this theater of the world, answered, “There is nothing to see more wonderful than man!” Hermes Trismegistus concurs with this opinion: “A great miracle, Asclepius, is man!” However, when I began to consider the reasons for these opinions,...
Post
Nil and Void: Beckett’s Last Gasp
During the ongoing, international celebration of Samuel Beckett’s 80th birthday, which commenced last spring, much is being said, written, and done to reiterate unequivocally his position as the preeminent playwright of our century. There is no debate, really, so much as an affirmation and an exploration of his unquestioned significance. The irony, of course, is...
Post
MODI ANTE PORTAS
Two important recent events – Narendra Modi’s landslide victory in India last week and the massive energy and trade agreement which Russia and China signed in Beijing on Wednesday – have the potential to alter Asia’s strategic landscape. Modi is an assertive politician unafraid to take risks, a market-oriented reformer, but also a Hindu nationalist....
Post
The Satan Club
At last, the Tacoma Public Schools’ board has recognized the obvious educational potential of the Prince of Darkness. For years, this hopelessly hidebound and reactionary institution has restricted itself to providing what it calls “a welcoming, nurturing environment [to] . . . provide the knowledge and skills for students to become respectful, responsible life-long learners...
Post
A Man of Inaction
In 1912, at dusk walking home, Henry Adams spotted something he thought to be a hippopotamus in the nation’s capital. As he drew nearer he saw it was President Taft. He gave me a shock. He looks bigger and more tumble to pieces than ever . . . but what struck me most was the...
Post
Conservatism at Midwinter Spring
[What follows is a meditation on T.S. Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding.” All indented quotations, with apologies to their author, are taken from Eliot.] What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from . . . The first step,...
Post
In Georgia, a Reminder of a Halcyon West
Even in the beginnings of winter, Georgia’s capitol Tbilisi emits a warmth. One should expect this from a city known for its many hot springs, but the warmth experienced goes much beyond the sulfur baths popular with tourists and locals alike. Tbilisi, with its 1.4 million residents, is inviting in a way that few cities...
Post
Crime and Punishment Among the Last Englishmen
England abolished capital punishment in the mid-1960’s when few capital crimes were committed there, and corporal punishment was abolished long before that. Sometimes when I am in Manhattan, reading of the constant homicides there, I recall the four “Mayfair Playboys” of my not-so-distant youth who were sentenced to the “cat” in two doses of eight...
Post
More Maxims of American Life
Silence is unhealthy and un-American. Everybody has a right to talk and play their media as much as they want to, anywhere any time. Every child has the right to a quality education. A college education is the key to a well-paying job. Same-sex couples have the same right to government benefits as everybody else....
Post
Soviet Nuclear War Policies
Americans are perennially tempted to believe that Soviet armament is a reaction to American armament, and therefore reversible by American disarmament. For years we allowed that hope to guide our military policy: beginning in the late 1960’s, the United States exercised unilateral restraint in nuclear construction for more than a decade. American-produced IGBM warheads were...
Post
Religious Rights and Wrongs
The Vice President was in Russia in September, trying to persuade Boris Yeltsin to amend legislation giving the Russian Orthodox Church a privileged position. Al Gore was just the man to explain religious toleration to the Russians. In the 1996 campaign, he revealed himself as an affirmative action fundraiser, willing to solicit donations from anyone,...
Post
New England Against America
“The fiction of Mr. Simms gave indication, we repeat, of genius, and that of no common order. Had he been even a Yankee, this genius would have been rendered immediately manifest to his countrymen, but unhappily (perhaps) he was a Southerner. . . . His book, therefore, depended entirely upon its own intrinsic value and...
Post
Neoenvironmentalism
The environmentalist movement, as usual, is one theoretical jump ahead of the practical results produced by its previous level of ideological development-results it now deplores and blames on the enemy. After arson destroyed three buildings and damaged four ski lifts on Vail Mountain in Colorado last October, Earth Liberation Front took the credit for destroying...
Post
Can a Pope Change Moral Truth?
That joking retort we heard as children, “Is the pope Catholic?” is starting to look like a serious question. Asked five years ago about a “gay lobby” in the Vatican, Pope Francis responded, “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?” As judgment was thought to...
Post
After the Deluge (Review: Immigration and the American Future)
It should be obvious to anyone who has taken the slightest trouble to examine the immigration question that America is faced not with an immigration “problem,” or even a “crisis,” but with a massive ...
Post
The International Criminal Court: Clinton’s Frankenstein’s Monster
For years, the Clinton-Gore administration has been in the forefront of efforts to create international judicial bodies—such as the Yugoslav war-crimes “tribunal” at The Hague—that could be used as auxiliary tools of diplomatic decisionmaking in Washington. Madeleine Albright liked the façade of legality that could be invoked to justify their policies. All along, of course,...
Post
Great American Musical Artists in their Roaring Nineties
Great musical artists approach the coda, without the recognition they deserve. As the year closes, we’d do well to remember (or discover) their work.
Post
Nothing’s Easy About Israel
Such was my pro-Israel ardor back in 1967, I actually put my name down as a volunteer soldier in the Six-Day War. I was living in Paris, and I was asked by the recruiter if I were Jewish. When I answered in the negative, he jumped up and shook my hand. As everyone knows, my...
Post
May, Macron—TRUMP
Immediately after Emmanuel Macron was elected president of France in May 2017, progressive Americans fairly swooned with envy. If only they could have a president like M. Macron: young, handsome, progressive, cosmopolitan, polished, globally minded and dedicated to the European Union’s dream of uniting all of Europe into a single state! And Mrs. May across...
Post
On Ludwig von Mises
Thomas Fleming’s criticism of Ludwig von Mises and his student, Friedrich von Hayek (“Abuse Your Illusions,” Perspective, January), overlooks or misinterprets major contributions of both. In Socialism (1922), Mises was the first economist to show the unworkability of socialist systems. He based his analysis on the impossibility of establishing a price structure for the various...
Post
Delightful Murders and Sheer Torture
While “off Broadway” is often the destination for the worst sort of stage-direction anarcho-anachronism, with Othello in spaceships and all-lesbian versions of Macbeth, it may surprise the non-New Yorker to learn that it is often the place to discover classic drama played absolutely straight (in all senses) and flawlessly acted. Such was the case recently...
Post
Dutch Euthanasia Case Serves as Harbinger
In 2002 the Netherlands became the first country in the world to legalize euthanasia, formalizing what had been tolerated by the government for several decades prior. Today, however, the Dutch practice of euthanasia is arguably less settled legally than ever before. In September, a doctor was found not guilty of breaking the law after administering...
Post
Democrats’ Open Border Trickery: Gaming the Census
The raw political interest of Democrats is at work in gaming the census numbers to increase the headcount in America’s leftist cities to maintain the political power.
Post
A Masque of State–and Its Parody
“Soft Power” is real power. The State Banquet at Buckingham Palace earlier this month showed royals and the President at their best, with an unstated but perfectly clear implication: no other country can do this. It were well to keep on good terms with the people who can put on a show like this. Everyone was at the top of their form: Trump behaved impeccably, and...
Post
Revisiting Suffrage
One hundred years have now passed since both houses of Congress passed the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting women the right to vote. For a long time, both major parties were ready to grant the suffrage, should American women clearly ask it of them. The question was never whether women were worthy of...
Post
The Perils of Greatness
The thing about Lyndon Johnson—and you may be sure I kept a close adolescent eye on him while he was one of my two U.S. senators—was that he knew what he was doing. There was more to it even than that. He knew how to get things done. The faint breezes from the ’50s...
Post
USA Today’s Shoddy Statistical Analysis and Even Shoddier Morality
In reporting an infant mortality increase in Texas in the wake of the Dobbs decision, the newspaper suggests it would have been better had these children never been born.
Post
Digital Enthusiasm
At a recent dinner party someone remarked that the two secure careers remaining in America are business and science. There are also education and academia, but since both have been for several decades now radically inhospitable to anyone to the right of Howard Dean, no one thought it necessary to mention them. I thought at...