President Donald Trump, who canceled a missile strike on Iran, after the shoot-down of a U.S. Predator drone, to avoid killing Iranians, may not want a U.S. war with Iran. But the same cannot be said of Bibi Netanyahu. Saturday, Israel launched a night attack on a village south of Damascus to abort what Israel...
After eight years of George W. Bush’s “culture of life,” which included well over 4,000 U.S. military deaths in Iraq and an estimated 1.25 million Iraqi deaths, abortion is back on the front burner, thanks to the presence of Sarah Palin on national television. Few were “energized” about John McCain before she entered stage right...
The Ides of March Produced by Smoke House Directed by George Clooney Written by Grant Heslov, George Clooney, and Beau Willimon from Willimon’s play, Farragut North Distributed by Columbia Pictures George Clooney’s film The Ides of March is a behind-the-scenes look at a presidential primary race in contemporary Ohio. The behavior of the candidates...
The really important news from Egypt is not the “martyrdom” of some hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood supporters and underage human shields set up for sacrifice by their leaders. It is not the brutality of the security forces fighting the emergence of a Khalifate within the state. It is the targeting of dozens of Christian churches, institutions and...
“Fox populi.” —Anonymous No public figure in American history is more inscrutable than Abraham Lincoln. While this is in some measure due to his extraordinary deftness as a politician, it is primarily the result of his astounding success in refounding the Republic in his own image. So thoroughly did Lincoln reform our collective historical and...
When novelist Zora Neale Hurston died penniless in a Florida nursing home in 1960, she was buried in a charity cemetery in an unmarked grave, an ironic resting place for a talented American writer and folklorist who, by all accounts, was a dazzling and memorable personality. Though her success had never been more than modest,...
In any discussion of the Old Federalism—at least among that minority whose substantive knowledge of American principles and ideals precedes the beginning of the Kennedy dynasty—the name of John C. Calhoun and his idea of the concurrent majority is likely to come up. Calhoun’s reputation as a political thinker has had its ups and downs. Widely praised in his...
Self-described Christian nationalists should be focused on repairing the disastrous mistake of liberalism and returning to objective moral foundations.
PERSPECTIVE Bush's Whips, McCain's Scorpions by Thomas Fleming VIEWS John McCain on Foreign Policy by Ted Galen Carpenter Even worse than Bush. Neo-McCainism by Leon Hadar The highest stage of neoconservatism? The Dream Ticket by Srdja Trifkovic The most dangerous man in America, bankrolled by the most evil man in the world. A ...
Eerdmans justly enjoys a reputation as one of America’s leading Christian publishers; however, as modern Christianity itself becomes increasingly fragmented and secularized, publishing books that try to represent the whole of it, as these two volumes do, becomes increasingly problematic. Though the United States has never been united by a single communion or creed, until...
It wasn’t supposed to end like this. We were all going to “get along” in a diverse, multicultural paradise, led by our brilliant universities. But in a pattern sure to spread across America, the ethnic strife in California is increasing, not decreasing, as the state becomes even more diverse. And public universities are at the...
The welfare state was born in Otto von Bismarck’s Germany, a ploy of the famed Iron Chancellor designed to counter the electoral appeal of the rival Social Democrats. Thus, social security was created in 1889 and eventually spread, under several guises, to many nations. Here, the Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program (Social Security)...
In 1984, Richard John Neuhaus, then still a Lutheran pastor, published The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America. The book was, as they say, an “immediate sensation,” in no small part because Neuhaus’s central claim—that religious voices were being forced out of political debate by the federal courts’ mistaken emphasis on the separation...
John Taylor of Caroline was a man of the American Revolution in whom the “Spirit of ’76” informed a conservative approach to understanding the powers of government.
As tens of thousands marched in the streets of Tehran on Wednesday in support of the regime, the head of the Revolutionary Guard Corps assured Iranians the “sedition” had been defeated. Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari is whistling past the graveyard. The protests that broke out a week ago and spread and became riots are...
The most important thing to know about this volume is that its authors were the principal formulators of the infamous National History Standards of 1995. The United States Senate was so dismayed by the History Standards that it voted 99 to I to reject the efforts of this trio of historians from UCLA. History on...
It often happens that when a Greek or Latin word is given a new lease on life in one of the major modern languages, and especially in English, the original meaning of the word may be replaced by a rather different one. This is particularly the case when a word, which was a strongly transitive...
Twenty-sixteen was the year when American liberals confidently expected to consolidate the quiet political and cultural revolution they had been conducting for decades in the coming national elections. When the Republican Party nominated Donald J. Trump as its presidential candidate, the apparent miracle was enough (nearly) to cause the Democracy to reconsider the possibility of...
perspective Save the Childrenby Thomas Fleming views Adopting Indecencyby William Murchison For the Childrenby Scott P. Richert news How Do You Make $100 Million Per Day?by William J. Quirk reviews Soulcraft as Leechcraftby Derek Turner [A.N. Wilson, Our Times: The Age of Elizabeth II] Parallel Livesby John Lukacs [Nicholas Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove:...
Susan Sontag passed away in New York City on the Feast of the Holy Innocents at the age of 71. Dying of leukemia after a long struggle with cancer, Sontag leaves behind no image of suffering or weakness but rather one of strength and courage, idiosyncratic integrity and productivity, and a remarkably wide range of...
The greatest criminal and most profitable enterprise in the world is FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association). As I write, billions are watching obscenely overpaid footballers competing for a cup that is long overdue for a total remake. The World Cup was a very good idea long ago, but so was selective democracy and waging...
One year into his tenure as Australia's prime minister, center-left Labor PM Anthony Albanese has had a stabilizing influence on the country following the misrule of Liberal Party PM Scott Morrison.
One day after warning Russian President Vladimir Putin he would face “severe” economic sanctions, “like ones he’s never seen,” should Russia invade Ukraine, President Joe Biden assured Americans that sending U.S. combat troops to Ukraine is “not on the table.” America is not going to fight Russia over Ukraine. “The idea that the United States...
William J. Watkins’ comment on states being forced to adopt the .08 blood-alcohol standard for drunken driving (Cultural Revolutions, January) is a narrow objection to federal power. The feds are not threatening to jail the entire population of any state which does not adopt the standard; they are only threatening not to return some of...
Quebec shows its patriotism every year on June 24, one week before Canada Day—not because the French-speaking province gets a head start on the rest of the country, but because June 24 is the feast day of Jean Baptiste, the patron saint of Quebec. By no means has the holiday become void of religious significance....
The invitation to the first symposium came from my old alma mater, the Free University of Brussels, founded by liberals, freemasons, and socialists, all united in their opposition to the Catholic Church, embodied by the 15th-century University of Louvain. Nostalgia drove me to the once well-known quartiers, or rather what remains of them now that...
“A dog’s obeyed in office,” and the power of the welfare state to grab your money, property, health, and—through “no-fault” divorce—your children, too, is already bad enough. Now it is getting worse, via the usurpation of punitive court prerogatives by bureaucrats whose sole purpose is “revenue enhancement” and the growth of the state. The case...
Democracy was born as a protest against what was felt to be an oppression of man by man, a rebellion against some men having the nerve to behave as if they had a natural right to command their fellow men—whether to enslave them, to lead them, or to tell them what to think and believe. ...
I am “not isolationist, but I am ‘America First,'” Donald Trump told the New York Times last weekend. “I like the expression.” Of NATO, where the U.S. underwrites three-fourths of the cost of defending Europe, Trump calls this arrangement “unfair, economically, to us,” and adds, “We will not be ripped off anymore.” Beltway media may...
Kosta Tsipsis: Arsenal: Understanding Weapons in the Nuclear Age; Simon & Schuster; New York. Freeman Dyson: Weapons and Hope; Harper & Row; New York The peace movement has become a permanent fixture of democratic politics. The movement is most visible when its members are marching in the streets, but it is most effective when there...
“Language is the armory of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquests.” —Samuel Taylor Coleridge This remarkable French mathematician has written extensively on what he considers the fundamental spiritual problem of our day, the perversion of language, which he...
George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England was published in 1935. It is an exceptionally well-written book and became a cult classic, its haunting title suggesting a mysterious crime, as in a thriller. Dangerfield’s theme was the decay of the civilization created by the British Liberal movement in the years that led up to...
No one expects to discover in a drug dealer the character of Johnny Appleseed or Santa Claus, overflowing with compassion and the milk of human kindness, scattering sweetness and light wherever he goes. On the other hand, I suspect even the most hardened undercover cop in his local antidrug unit would be shocked to witness...
A first-grade teacher in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., concludes that while some of her pupils suffer various degrees of parental neglect, others seem to be experiencing the opposite extreme: such pampering at home that they cannot even tie their own shoes, and must have it done for them. It takes a while before she...
North Korea’s artillery attack on a South Korean island on Tuesday was the latest in a series of Pyongyang’s aggressive moves over the past year and a half. They started with ballistic missile tests in April of last year, soon followed by a nuclear test in May. Kim Jong Il, who may be mad, upped...
The news descended with crushing force: I must be getting really old. Rising from the dinner table, I had pulled back my wife’s chair, and our waiter complimented me. He complimented me for the kind of civil and reflexive action to which my generation was bred in the post-World War II years? Ah, yes; he...
I did not expect to like the Basilica of Sacré Coeur, which is why I had never bothered to go up to Montmartre. The basilica was commissioned by Catholics who had survived the Paris Commune of 1870-71, when churches were destroyed and the faithful were persecuted. Even as the revolution was sputtering out, the communists...
What we have here—not even the President has had the effrontery to deny it—is an intellectual recession. I cannot think of a year in which more; bad books received more serious attention. These weren’t just lapses but a pattern, and one need not be paranoid to look for explanations. What people do is, mostly, what...
John Kennedy and Harold Macmillan were the odd couple of the Special Relationship. Conjuring a picture of them from the cuttings files and obituaries, they seem almost comically mismatched. For much of the three years that they overlapped in their respective offices, the grouse-shooting British premier appeared ludicrously archaic next to a President who confidently...
“There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader,” is a remark attributed to a French politician during the turbulent times of 1848. Joe Biden’s Wednesday declaration that President Donald Trump should be impeached is in that tradition. Joe is scrambling to get out in front of the sentiment for impeachment...
In recent years America has seemed to lack the sort of bold churchman who is willing to put his penny-loafered foot down and say enough is enough. But according to recent press reports, the shoe has dropped. Even in these degraded times, there is a limit—a line you just can’t cross. What is that line?...
Putin’s war on "woke" had me cheering, especially when he urged nationalists, conservatives, and traditionalists to unite and reject multiculturalism. But as his army shells Ukraine, it is hard to blame anyone but him for the situation there.
It is reported that “faithful adherence to legal principle sometimes [takes] a back seat to the more compelling demands of politics.” This appears to be a pointed assessment of a little-publicized controversy surrounding the pardon of four convicts by last year’s Acting Governor of Arkansas, dentist Jerry Jewell. As president pro tempore of the state...
As I sit down to write this, on the Sunday afternoon before the second presidential debate, the media feeding frenzy over remarks made by Donald Trump 11 years ago continues unabated. The content of those remarks reminded me of one of the more interesting pieces I’ve read about the improbable rise of Trump, an article...
Mr. Holmes Produced by BBC Films and See-Saw Films Directed by Bill Condon Screenplay by Jeffrey Hatcher from Mitch Cullin’s novel, A Slight Trick of the Mind Distributed by The Weinstein Company Mr. Holmes is the film adaptation of Mitch Cullin’s curious 2005 novel A Slight Trick of the Mind. Reading the novel, I was...
Following his doomsday speech at the United Nations General Assembly on October 1—in which he warned the world that Iran’s new president should not be trusted and that Israel would attack Iran on its own unless it ends its nuclear program—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent two days in New York on an anti-Rouhani media...
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...
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...
Stephen B. Presser, Chronicles’ legal-affairs editor, identifies a crisis in American legal education. In his book Law Professors, he shows us why a newly minted graduate of an elite American law school has no clue how to handle a case or provide useful legal services. This is not a matter of just being young or...
At the heart of the Christmas story is the lowly birth of Christ, surrounded by beasts of the field and honored by Magi bearing gifts. But consider how differently the Christmas narrative might have unfolded if ancient Judea had been organized as a free-market economy of the sort trumpeted by our libertarian friends. Imagine Joseph...