Dear Mr. Romney: In spite of the Herculean labors of their spin doctors, politicians on the stump often say stupid things in the heat of the moment, and you are probably right to resent the unfairness of journalists who exaggerate the importance of such mundane stupidities. But rarely are politicians’ unconsidered remarks so remarkably unconsidered...
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Loyal Opposition
In the two years since Muslim terrorists murdered over 3,000 of our citizens on September 11, Americans have been taking one side or the other in the debate between the partisans of security and public order, led by Attorney General John Ash-croft, and the partisans of free speech, championed by the ACLU and other groups...
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Un Hombre, Un Voto
“Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.” This line from Section 2 of the 14th Amendment must have seemed fairly straightforward to its authors. In light of the first section’s elevation of blacks to full citizenship...
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Twelve Westerners?
“The Sahara of the Bozart,” more than anything else Mencken wrote about the South, won him the undying hatred of the former Confederacy and its spokesmen. The essay, which first appeared in 1917 as a newspaper column and was subsequently expanded for inclusion in the next volume of the Prejudices series, was attacked at the...
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What’s Good for Rockford Acromatics
Dean Olson, the chairman of Rockford Acromatic Products, an after-market auto-parts manufacturer, is a longtime supporter of Republican candidates. Still, he is not optimistic about the November election: “Even though the Democrats are in full rout, we’re not able to mount an effective challenge. I don’t see the leadership there.” While Rockford voters lean Democratic,...
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Nado alert! Nado alert!
“Nado alert! Nado alert!” people were screaming about 1 am outside my room at Michaels Barracks in Hoechst, West Germany, a couple of days after I was posted there on Sept. 12, 1979. My roommate said it likely was just a drill, sending us out in our jeeps and trucks into the Fulda Gap to...
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The Republican Party’s Welfare Queens
Republicans routinely portray themselves as fiscal guardians. In truth, they, like the Democrats, are irresponsible wastrels. Outlays are up by one third under President George W. Bush, making him the biggest spender since Lyndon B. Johnson. As the Cato Institute’s Stephen Slivinski observes, “Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still...
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Joe Sobran’s Timeless Lesson on America’s Role in the World
I met Joe Sobran in early 1997 at a conference near Chicago on the American intervention in the Balkans. It was not his area of primary interest, but he understood all of the key issues because he understood U.S. foreign policy and its domestic roots. His diagnosis, which applied then, in Bill Clinton’s second...
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Options for Syria
Addressing the annual Jamestown Foundation conference of terror experts on December 12, former CIA chief Michael Hayden outlined three possible outcomes of the ongoing conflict in Syria. The first would be further escalation of violence between ever more extreme Sunni and Shiite factions. The second possible outcome—which Hayden described as the most likely but also the...
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Baudelaire in Russia
I have known since adolescence—though in Soviet Russia it was all a bit hard to believe, these United States of ours being, after all, the Manichaean pole of Light—that Edgar Allan Poe was completely unknown in America and would have perished in obscurity had he not found a literary agent in Charles Baudelaire and a...
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Exporting Political Correctness
During the early days of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the White House frequently trotted out Laura Bush to laud our soldiers’ heroic efforts to “liberate” women. These were not wars of aggression or conquest. They were wars for “education,” the former schoolteacher averred: “The United States government is wholeheartedly committed to the full...
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Turning Bad Into Good
In 1983 I noted in Just and Painful: A Case for the Corporal Punishment of Criminals that there were approximately 315,000 individuals incarcerated in federal and state prisons, plus some 158,000 persons in jails of various kinds. The annual cost of this incarceration was estimated then to be $20,000 per inmate, amounting to an annual...
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Democrats Demand Justice Alito Control His Wife
There’s a delicious irony in the leftist media’s calls for Justice Samuel Alito to control his wife’s political expression.
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The Chinese Exclusion Act
In 1882 Congress took steps to control Chinese immigration with the passage of “An Act to execute certain treaty stipulations relating to Chinese.” The act later became known misleadingly as the Chinese Exclusion Act. In high schools and colleges it’s taught that the act was simply another example of American racism. The real story is more...
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Carry On
From the August 2014 issue of Chronicles. The modern world abounds in modern heresies. One might say that modernity itself is a heresy—modernity understood in the broadest possible terms as the antithesis of the traditional: the fundamental distinction, as Claude Polin recently argued in this magazine, overlying all subordinate political and cultural oppositions, beginning with...
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Washing Onto the Pages
A new word, “hazing,” has washed onto the pages of the Soviet press with the wave of glasnost. It denotes the harassment, oppression, and humiliation suffered by new conscripts, “greenhorns,” at the hands of “grandfathers”—the Soviet term for soldiers who are nearing the end of their conscription term. The subject was broached by Yuri Polyakov...
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Bring on the GOP!
The awful Obama is pushing terrible things on our country like socialised medicine, big spending, corporate bailouts, affirmative action, and amnesty for illegal aliens. He must be defeated so the Republicans can get in and push socialised medicine, big spending, corporate bailouts, affirmative action, and amnesty for illegal aliens. Obama ...
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On Tearing Down the Wall
In “Freedom of Conscience” (Perspective, December), Thomas Fleming states that Thomas Jefferson’s “‘Wall of Separation’ existed only in his mind.” This phrase, of course, was included in Jefferson’s 1802 letter to a group of Baptists from Danbury, Connecticut, as Dr. Fleming has pointed out in previous Perspectives. Rather than implying exclusionary intent, the “Wall of...
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The Kindness of Strangers
“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” —Blanche DuBois, A Streetcar Named Desire Sometimes, enlightenment, like confusion, can come from an unexpected source. Take the comedian, George Carlin, for example. I think that his broadcasting of dirty words is a bit less than profound, as is his hostility toward most civilized conventions; some...
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America Through the Looking Glass
Not so long ago anticommunist conservatives used to rail against the mirror fallacy, the leftist assumption that the Soviet Union could be studied in Western terms. If only we could strengthen the hand of the doves and “responsible” elements, we could keep the country from falling into the hands of the hard-liners and hawks—the Soviet...
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Blue Christmas
The November election results were all about the war, the chattering classes told us; and in this case, there’s probably more truth to popular opinion than not. For those of us who have opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning (and even before), this seems a rather strange moment. After all, what really changed...
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Release the Manifesto
There's reason to believe the recent mass shooting in Nashville was an ideologically motivated anti-Christian hate crime, an act of domestic terrorism.
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How Berkeley Birthed the Right
In December 1964, a Silver Age of American liberalism, to rival the Golden Age of FDR and the New Deal, seemed to be upon us. Barry Goldwater had been crushed in a 44-state landslide and the GOP reduced to half the size of the Democratic Party, with but 140 seats in the House and 32...
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Ignoble Savages, Part 3
Toxic is the combination of equality and evolution, of Rousseau and Darwin. Blended together and served upon the paps of public schools, television, and social media, they are the essential ingredients of the gall-milk of the postmodern world. They ensure that every infant will grow into a fully mature Ignoble Savage. Rousseau gave the West...
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Character and Nuclear Anxiety
American society is widely recognized as youth-oriented, but it has been a long time since any authoritative source has given us really good news about the young. Recent reports from the American Medical Association, the National Research Council, and the Council of Physical Fitness have been especially discouraging: the young exercise too little, eat too...
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After Lee: Charlottesville and Beyond
Was it for this That on that April day we stacked our arms Obedient to a soldier’s trust? To lie Ground by the heels of little men, Forever maimed, defeated, impugned? —Donald Davidson, “Lee in the Mountains” There are times when I feel as though I’ve awoken in a madhouse, a madhouse that cannot possibly...
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Letter From South Africa
I spent March 1985 in South Africa as a guest of several South African universities. I lectured to academic audiences, traveled in the rural areas of Transvaal and the Cape Province, spent a day in Soweto, visited the Crossroads slum in Cape Town and the Black township of Alexandra in Johannesburg. I talked to Black ser vants and Black leaders,...
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Why Democracy Doesn’t Work
Critical stands against democracy, when not simply ignored or mechanically rejected as mere fascist outbursts, are usually met with a supposedly wise objection: You may be right, except that you’re targeting an imperfect form of democracy. Thus, Tocqueville never addressed the principle; he decreed democracy would perfect itself as it matured. This is why I...
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Covert Policing in Modern America
When the former communist bloc disintegrated, the opening of secret police files in several European countries demonstrated the incredibly thorough hold that the clandestine state had possessed over ordinary citizens. In East Germany, for example, State Security (Stasi) files revealed the existence of vast networks of control and surveillance in any area of life that...
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The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
In medias res: Loud, booming, clanging in an industrial factory. Bottles and other loose articles shake and nearly crash to the floor with each successive pounding, rattle of the building. A figure falls to a low crouch holding a drawn pistol while glancing about like a cornered animal. Two calm men enter the room and...
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Why Johnny Shouldn’t Vouch
For some time now, the panacea offered by conservatives and libertarians for improving the education of American youth has been vouchers. There is no question that government schools are failing miserably. There is plenty of teaching about the wonders of diversity and multiculturalism, but not enough instruction in the basic skills required for work or...
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What in Heaven’s Name Goes On?
At its best, Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke’s high-octane assault on religious freedom calls for brandy and an extended lie-down in a dark room. That’s the best that can be said of it. Its worst has to do with the disdain a midlevel presidential candidate exhibits for supernatural religion. That’s if he really meant what he...
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The American (Not Christian) Century
In the late 1980’s, I predicted that by the end of the century, which is also the end of the millennium, “The Soviet Union, or perhaps by that time, Russia, would be Christian, and the United States would be pagan.” The first, hesitant part of that prophecy, Russia, has already been fulfilled. And while Russia...
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A Niagara of Print
“It used to be one of our proudest boasts that we welcomed the downtrodden, the oppressed, the poverty-stricken, the fit and the unfit to a land of freedom, of plenty, of boundless opportunity. Our hindsight tells us that this boast was fatuous.” —George Horace Believe it or not, Chronicles was not the first magazine in...
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Are Republicans Ready for Biden’s Counterattack?
Republicans need to be wary about becoming complacent about their chances in November or adopting the Democrats' framework on rhetoric and violence lest they make a strength out of Biden’s mediocrity.
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Will Georgia Halt the Radicals’ Revolution?
“In victory, magnanimity… in defeat, defiance.” That counsel about human conflict comes from Winston Churchill. And President Donald Trump, given all he has endured for five years from those piously pleading now for a “time of healing,” cannot be faulted for his defiant resolve to unearth any and all high crimes or misdemeanors committed in the...
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Remembering Donald Davidson
Lewis P. Simpson, in his memorable preface to The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate, evoked Thomas Carlyle’s description of Robert Burns to hail Davidson’s own achievement. Burns, wrote Carlyle, was a “piece of right Saxon stuff: strong as the Harz-rock, rooted in the depths of the world;—rock, yet with wells of living...
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The Crime of History
He who writes a nation’s history also controls its future—so wrote George Orwell. During the Soviet reign over Eastern Europe, every citizen knew who was in charge of writing history, especially that dealing with the victims of World War II. Anyone professing to be a Slovak, a Croat, a Ukrainian, or a Russian nationalist was...
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Robert Mugabe: An African Career
A belated note: Robert Mugabe’s death at 95 (September 6) was some six decades overdue. He was a thoroughly nasty piece of work. His dictum that “the only white man you can trust is a dead white man” has cost his people dearly, arguably even more so than the dispossessed and racially cleansed white farmers...
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I’ve Become Anti-American
If I sound like Jane Fonda circa 1968 when talking about America these days, it's because our media and politicians have turned Uncle Sam into a monster.
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The Long Retreat in the Culture War
The Republican rout in the Battle of Indianapolis provides us with a snapshot of the correlation of forces in the culture wars. Faced with a corporate-secularist firestorm, Gov. Mike Pence said Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act would not protect Christian bakers or florists who refuse their services to same-sex weddings. And the white flag went...
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Elective Abortion
Flip-flopper. Like racist or isolationist, it’s not a word that you’d like to have attached to your name. In recent years, it has been used to whap the likes of John Kerry and Mitt Romney over the head. It means that your finger is in the wind, that you are not a Decider, that, like...
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Pretenders
Revolutionary Road Produced and distributed by Dreamworks and BBC Films Directed by Sam Mendes Screenplay by Justin Haythe from Richard Yates’ novel The Lemon Tree Produced by Eran Riklis Productions and Heimatfilm Directed by Eran Riklis Screenplay by Suha Arraf Distributed by IFC Films British director Sam Mendes has turned Richard Yates’ 1961 novel,...
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Bad Hombre Gets His
Only one thing would have been more gratifying than watching a filthy scumbag like José Ernesto Medellín wince as he felt the chilling gush of sodium thiopental run into his arm. That would have been watching him wiggle like a Mexican jumping bean as 2,000 volts of lightning fried him like an Old El Paso...
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Stop Playing the Left’s Game
When Chronicles asked me to provide a refutation of Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission report (“Rejecting the ‘Proposition Nation,’” April/May 2021), I knew it would be controversial. I was right. Michael Anton wrote a lengthy rebuttal at American Greatness (“Americans Unite,” May 1, 2021). I don’t mind Anton circling the wagons to defend his friends. That is admirable. That said, his...
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After the Deluge
“Who would call in a / foreigner—unless / an artisan with skill to / serve the realm, / a healer, or a prophet, or / a builder, / or one whose harp and song / might give us joy. / . . . but when have beggars come by / invitation?” —Homer It should be...
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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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Getting Better By Going Back
The next administration needs to get back to basics. We need to restore law and order, the colorblind meritocracy, and quality education.
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A Big Beautiful Horse
As an experiment in social reconstruction, ObamaCare was nothing compared with what’s coming down the line as a result of the Obama administration’s Friday the 13th diktat that all public schools in the United States must allow every student to use the bathroom of his/her/zis/zir choice, or risk federal civil-rights lawsuits and the withholding of...
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Left’s Latest Demand: Race-Based Reparations
Having embraced “Medicare-for-all,” free college tuition and a Green New Deal that would mandate an early end of all oil, gas and coal-fired power plants, the Democratic Party’s lurch to the left rolls on. Presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren both called last week for race-based reparations for slavery. “Centuries of slavery, Jim Crow,...