“Remember, it’s a rigged system. It’s a rigged election,” said Donald Trump in New Hampshire on Saturday. The stunned recoil in this city suggests this bunker buster went right down the chimney. As the French put it, “Il n’y a que la verite qui blesse.” It is only the truth that hurts. In what sense...
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Homeless People Do Not Have a ‘Right’ to Camp in Squalor and Invade Our Neighborhoods
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.
The Other Pasternak
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...
Catholics in America: An Uneasy Alliance
At first, it may seem Catholicism contributed little to the American founding. The Founding Fathers were Protestants or deists and had themselves mostly arrived from the formerly Catholic kingdoms of England and Scotland, many as dissenters from the initial dissent of King Henry VIII. They had little obvious sympathy for Catholic doctrine or political thought. Among...
Dua Lipa, like Pope Benedict, Strives to Give Eros Dignity
The artist’s new album is panned by critics who miss the point of her commentary on real and lasting love.
Comment
Democracy, its failures, weaknesses, and sins not withstanding, is the only political system in which the entire social body is to decide on who should conduct its affairs in its name. By the electoral process the majority’s opinion is consecrated as a source of legitimate political power. Annals record many variations of democratic societies in...
The Hell With Spinach!
In the early years of the Republic Americans focused their efforts on democratic government, geographic expansion and settlement, and a program of national improvements intended to promote them. In the decades immediately following the War Between the States they concentrated on industrializing and amassing national wealth. Then, in the 1880’s and 90’s, they began to...
The War Over America’s Past
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” That was the slogan of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s “1984,” where Winston Smith worked ceaselessly revising the past to conform to the latest party line of Big Brother. And so we come to the battle over history books...
Opera: Grand and Not So Grand
People sometimes seem to be prejudiced against opera for reasons that are arbitrarily unconvincing. These reasons turn out to be an antipathy based on class (opera is the province of the privileged), or antipathy resulting from sheer musical ignorance. (Trained voices don’t appeal to the contemporary ear.) These two specious reasons are important because the...
Myths to Kill For
“I’ve got a little list, I’ve got a little list,” twitters the Lord High Executioner in a famous line of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, and indeed these days who doesn’t have one? Abortion protester Paul Hill seems to have had a little list of his own, and early in the morning on July 28 of...
Marines on Okinawa
Okinawa’s Governor Masahide Ota has learned what it means to be governor of a Japanese prefecture; precious little. When Mr. Ota stood up for Okinawans who no longer wish to lease their land to the American military, he was asserting an ancient Okinawan belief in private property: “It’s yours, do with it as you see...
Trump’s SCOTUS Nominee: Don’t Trust, Just Verify
As I wrote on the Day After the Election, it is incumbent upon America’s Deplorables not to sit idly by, content with a mere victory in a presidential contest, as if suddenly all of our problems are solved. The rabid mainstream media, still licking its wounds, is working 24/7 to undermine any agenda item that...
The Sepulcher as Political Symbol
Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy; by Guy P. Raffa; Harvard University Press; 384 pp., $35.00 The bones and dust of the Roman poet Virgil were jealously guarded by the people of Naples. In the Middle Ages they refused the request of an English scholar to allow the poet’s bones and dust to leave their resting place. The...
China: Xi in Charge
In the aftermath of last week’s finale of the Communist Party of China’s (CCP) 19th congress, many commentators have opined that President Xi Jinping is now the country’s most powerful leader since Deng Xiaoping. This is incorrect. Xi is the most powerful leader since Mao Zedong at home, and arguably the most influential Chinese player...
A Representative Man
“A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.” —Thomas Carlyle Even in these dreariest of days in academia, when American history has largely become a plaything for canting ideologues, the Old South continues to attract outstanding talent. Fine books and articles continue to appear, as Clyde Wilson’s Carolina Cavalier attests, notwithstanding the...
Civil Unions
Civil unions, which offer same-sex couples the privileges that presently accrue to those who have been united in normal marriages, have been discussed by several legislators since the MassachusettsSupreme Judiciary Court ordered the state legislature to establish “homosexual marriage.” The Massachusetts high court, under the dynamic (demonic?) leadership of Chief Justice Margaret Marshall, decreed that...
Copperhead Road
I grew up in Alden, New York, a small town about 20 miles east of Buffalo. My parents still live there, and they (especially my mother) are very active in the town historical society and its museum. In that museum is a worn old wooden desk, unremarkable except for the sign that explains that it...
Moments in the Sun
One can no better describe the subject of this book than by quoting the publisher’s press release: Once there was a group of liberals and Leftists. They were Democrats, they were radicals, they were freedom riders. But they became disillusioned by the Left. They moved toward the Right, they opposed the anti-war movement, they made...
Where Is the Right’s Marc Elias?
The right has no moral stomach for a ruthless fight, but in politics, that is what it takes to win.
American Empire
Developed nations should assist poorer states by doing no harm. Washington should end government-to-government assistance, which has so often buttressed regimes dedicated to little more than maintaining power and has eased the economic pressure for needed reforms. The United States should stop meddling in foreign affairs which matter little to America; the result is usually...
S&L to L.A.
If you’re white in the United States, you, says Professor Andrew Hacker, have at least that much going for you. “No matter how degraded their lives, white people are still allowed to believe that they possess the blood, the genes, the patrimony of superiority,” Hacker, a political scientist, writes of white Americans. “No matter what happens, they...
A (Re)Movable Feast
“A morality which has within it no room for truth is no morality at all” —Flaubert ” . . . But the thing is, you know, let’s face it, there’s a whole enormous world out there that I don’t ever think about, and I certainly don’t take responsibility for how I’ve lived in that world....
A Nation without Community Is a Nation without Value
Communal Americanism needs to make a return for the nation to survive. There is no other remedy.
Every Man a Victim
“Mankind is tired of liberty.” —Benito Mussolini An acquaintance of mine, who is not particularly conservative, once heard a television newsman quack about how bad the 1950’s were. Disgusted, he burst out, “What was wrong with the 1950’s? People were norma/then!” People certainly seem a lot less “normal” nowadays. Charles J. Sykes has written a...
A Heated Topic
The Confederate Flag has become a heated topic this election year. As George W. Bush and John McCain battled in South Carolina for the Republican presidential nomination, the New York Young Republican Club invited Richard Lowry, the editor of National Review, to discuss the Republican Party’s prospects for November. In the question-and-answer session that followed,...
Sons of Jacob
“I pray you think you question with the Jew.” —William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice The Jews Under Roman and Byzantine Rule has already appeared in German and Hebrew editions by the same polyglot author who has now produced the English translation. Avi-Yonah has mined Greek, Hebrew, and Latin sources and puts into his footnotes...
Slender Threads of Liberty
Although Paul Craig Roberts, a nationally syndicated columnist and Hoover Institution fellow, and Lawrence M. Stratton, a fellow of the Institute for Political Economy, are trained in economic and legal analysis, they have written a book that seeks to appeal to civic virtue at the popular level. They do so mainly by weaving together dozens...
The American Muse
[I]n populous Egypt they fatten up many bookish pedants who quarrel unceasingly in the Muses’ birdcage.” —Timon of Phlius, 230 B.C. For almost as long as there have been literary works, there have been literary canons, largely established by bookish pedants who do, indeed, “quarrel unceasingly.” The quarreling began early in the third century B.C....
Progressivism Versus Popular Sovereignty
Our 21st-century civilizational battles are those waged between the popular sovereigntists and the globalist progressives who cling to every would-be "crisis" or "emergency" in a desperate attempt to attain and weaponize ever-more power.
The Supreme Court v. the American Dream—March 2006
PERSPECTIVE The Royal Prerogativeby Thomas FlemingIndispensable means. VIEWS Does the Federal Government Protect Private Property?by Stephen B. PresserLife, liberty, and takings. Latter-Day Beggarsby Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.A lesson in apocalyptic economics from the City on Seven Hills. Unjust Compensationby Scott P. RichertWhat’s not to love? NEWS Property Rights Redefinedby Steven GreenhutA new kind of blight. REVIEWS...
On Enumerated Powers
My thanks to Stephen B. Presser for his review (“Sacred Texts ’98,” October) of my book Reclaiming the American Revolution. I certainly appreciate such a distinguished legal historian finding the work to merit his attention. One issue raised in Professor Presser’s review is the constitutionality of the Sedition Act (which made criticism of the national...
Bleeding Red, Feeling Blue
When I started this column back in January 2001 (as a “Letter From Rockford”), the United States had just emerged from a presidential election that made this country look anything but united. Red and Blue, until then simply convenient colors used by the television networks to designate which party’s candidate had captured the electoral votes...
Memo to Trump: ‘Action This Day!’
“In victory, magnanimity!” said Winston Churchill. Donald Trump should be magnanimous and gracious toward those whom he defeated this week, but his first duty is to keep faith with those who put their faith in him. The protests, riots and violence that have attended his triumph in city after city should only serve to steel...
No More Nonsense About Elites
A fish starts rotting from the head, it is said. That a society starts rotting from its head needs to be much better understood. Blaming the decline of Western society on a “revolt of the masses” absolves elites, who must bear the brunt of the blame. Catering to popular tastes is not the result of...
Jack and Jill, or Why I Am Not a Conservative
He who has seen the present has seen everything, said Marcus Aurelius, and this is why the floor of my study is made concave by the aggregate weight of all the newspapers and magazines I have acquired since moving to Cambridge: I simply cannot bring myself to throw away a single page of newsprint. In...
Radical Populism on the Volga
On May 8, 1995, President Boris Yeltsin addressed an auditorium filled with gray-haired war veterans, their chests bedecked with rows of ribbons and medals, and told them of the cost of victory in the Great Patriotic War. Citing new archival research, Yeltsin revealed the “terrifying figure” of 26,549,000 Soviet citizens “lost” in the war against...
A Unifier at Number Ten
This is a state-of-the-art British political biography. D.A. Thorpe has written biographies of Home, Eden, and Selwyn Lloyd, as well as shorter studies of Lord Curzon, “Rab” Butler, and Austen Chamberlain. His knowledge of the principal political actors, particularly on the Conservative side, is prodigious; he convincingly claims to have interviewed “all the prime ministers...
Trying Saddam
Robert A. Taft, in a speech delivered at Kenyon College in October 1946, expressed strong opposition to the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials that were just ending. Taft argued that the defendants, the architects of the Nazi regime who had been found guilty of waging a war of aggression and had been sentenced to death, were...
The Wasted Century
The Great War and its inevitable successor have been called Europe’s civil war, and there is some truth in this characterization. Divided by language, religion, and culture, the nations of Europe were nonetheless united in a common civilization that developed out of the ruins of the Christianized Roman Empire. Despite the strains brought on by...
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...
Victims of Blunt Force Trauma
Even before the end of the trial of Los Angeles police officer Mark Fuhrman for the crime of white racism, the percentage of black Americans who believed that Officer Fuhrman’s most celebrated victim was innocent had risen from 60 percent before the trial to a whopping 78 percent by the time the prosecution rested. It...
Rise of the Alt-Left: After This, the Deluge
Images of those traumatized by the election of Donald Trump are indelible. I mean specifically the sight of empaneled experts, red-eyed, choking, and stuttering as they said things like “CNN is now prepared to call the state of Wisconsin for Donald Trump.” Or of rainbow mobs of sign-wavers in urban centers declaring (absurdly and solipsistically)...
The Old South, the New South, and the Real South
In April 1968, the University of Dallas Literature Department hosted an Agrarian reunion. We invited John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Andrew Lytle, and Donald Davidson to come together in several private sessions to discuss the history and meaning of I’ll Take My Stand. Ransom, Warren, Tate, and Lytle accepted. Davidson was too...
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...
The Impossibility of a Lasting Arab-Israeli Peace
President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to the Holy City has been criticized on many grounds, most of them ostensibly sensible, in America and abroad. In the Western media, over the past two days, we have encountered six chief objections:...
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...
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...
Kamala Harris is a Bad Bet for Democrats
Harris has no excuses, no substance, and nothing recommending her other than convenience and enthusiasm for her race and gender among people who insisted until only a short time ago that Biden was perfectly fine. He wasn’t, and neither is she.
The Necessary Century
“He saith among the trumpets, Ha, Ha! and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.” —Job 29:25 According to the fashion current in the publishing world today, the title of a book is a bit of catchy fluff, and the subtitle a ponderous, plonking sentence fragment indicating the...
The American Proscenium
Representation Ms. Geraldine Ferraro, a Democratic party hack, a Catholic feminist (what a spiritual and spirited concoction, brewed according to the recipes of the Queens-Long Island bourbon culture!) whom the amalgamated USA womanists (the newest vocable) wished to see as the next vice president, said of late: “The only real threat to women in America...