As an economic concept, distributism refers to a broad, voluntary distribution of wealth in land, labor, and capital. The idea has its origins in Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 social encyclical Rerum novarum, which rejected Marxism and capitalism’s laissez-faire variant, and in the works of Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton. Belloc’s Servile State (1912) recognizes that...
From the October 1986 issue of Chronicles. “The obscurest epoch is today.” —Robert Louis Stevenson Taken together, these three books serve nicely as a kind of group portrait of Clio and her several faces. In reverse order we have the historian as diarist and memoirist, as documentarian, and as reflective sage. As one of the...
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...
“We are divided in the face of a Mohammedan world, divided in every way—divided by separate independent national rivalries, by the warring interests of possessors and dispossessed—and that division cannot be remedied because the cement which once held our civilization together, the Christian cement, has crumbled.” —Hilaire Belloc Neither Christians nor Jews can claim that...
In Our Interest Another Chronicles read cover to cover, with great delight. Srdja Trifkovic’s essay “Travel Ban, and Beyond” (The American Interest, August) was a thoughtful and excellent argument for a closer examination of immigrants and visitors to our great land. Thank you for another excellent issue. —Mayor David Theiss Ellaville,...
Is there anyone who has not weighed in on the Saturday night, Sept. 11, bonfire of the Qurans at the Rev. Terry Jones' Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Fla.? Gen. David Petraeus warns the Quran burnings could inflame the Muslim world and imperil U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Hillary Clinton declares ...
She’s embarrassing and unpredictable, known as a “gadfly” and a “maverick” (among other names). She admits she’s never been a joiner. She has alienated both political parties and the Minnesota media. There are no topics on which she doesn’t have a strong opinion and no circumstances under which she would stifle any opinion. One cringes...
How could this be? In a Catholic school? Here? This is what they’re teaching our kids? I stopped, transfixed. I had parked my car and sauntered into the Catholic middle school in search of my son. I was about to turn down the hall that led to his math class when I was struck by...
When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, over 58,000 Americans had lost their lives over the course of almost 20 years. Whatever one may think of the justice or prudence of the U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, only the most callous of souls regards that loss of life with complete indifference. When the Northern Illinois...
Donald Trump is president today because he was seen as a doer not a talker. Among the most common compliments paid him in 2016 was, “At least he gets things done!” And it was exasperation with a dithering GOP Congress, which had failed to enact his or its own agenda, that caused Trump to pull...
Did you hear the one about Bruce Jenner? No? You missed it? Well, then, it’s probably too late. A grown man says he’s a woman, shaves off his Adam’s apple (for starters), and shows a former network anchor his little black dress. You’d think the late-night comedians would have enough material to get them through...
Browsing at a local newsstand the other day, I spied a startling comic book, issue #11 of Captain Confederacy. Its $1.95 price was even more startling (the last comic book I bought, back about aught-56, cost something like 15 cents), but I had to take this one home, and did. Let me tell you about...
To paraphrase one observer of Albanians, “Mexico is not a society with corruption; Mexico is a corrupt society.” Mexico has been undergoing a social crisis since the end of the Partido Revolutionario Institucional’s 71-year monopoly on political power. Gone is the state’s patronage of competing interests, populism that succeeded by co-opting all opponents. The coffers...
It’s been a bad year for terrorism in the United States. Not bad, fortunately, in the number of actual attacks (at least at the time of this writing), but in the continuing debasement of the word terrorism, so that it ceases to be a useful characterization of behavior and becomes merely a propaganda slogan for...
The true nature of the New Deal was revealed in one of those brilliant ironies that flash lightning-like in a midnight storm. It happened September 13, 1933, the Nativity of a new secular holiday: NRA Day. An interminable parade up New York’s Fifth Avenue celebrated the National Recovery Administration, which was to set prices, fix...
The year 1975, for those of us old enough to remember, was a calm and quiet time in the United States. The Vietnam War and Watergate were both over, the riots and protests had ceased, and everybody liked our presiding nonpartisan president, who shared the name of America’s most iconic car company. The music was...
The abortion question seems to have reached an unfortunate standoff. Just as the federal judiciary has seen fit to allow more scope for pro-life legislation, it would appear that public opinion, registered in the election returns (as interpreted), has turned against the pro-life position. If it is true that Americans are more pro-abortion now than...
The red wave appears to be coming back. It is probable that toss-up races will break Republican. Republicans consistently lead Democrats on the generic congressional ballot.
“I don’t know if he’ll run in 2024 or not. But if he does, I’m pretty sure he will win the nomination.” So says Mitt Romney, the sole Republican senator to have voted twice to convict President Donald J. Trump of impeachable acts. But is it possible Trump could win the nomination in 2024? What...
Llewellyn Rockwell’s article “How the Market Stamps Out Evil” in the December issue was challenging. But whereas his superb philippic on the presidency in the October issue (“Down With the Presidency“) left me baying at the moon, this time I was unconvinced. Can capitalism really be set against a tyrannical government as a force for...
Our Pushover President by Patrick J. Buchanan • November 24, 2009 • Printer-friendly “This state visit is . . . a terrible mistake,” said Rep. Eliot Engel, chairman of the House Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. “He is illegitimate with his own people, and Brazil is now going to give him the air of legitimacy...
Next we must look at another rhetorical device of Woods which serves to distract the attention of the reader from the point at issue and to prejudice him against what I actually wrote. Woods mentions the interventions of bishops’ conferences into economic matters. As a matter of fact I said absolutely nothing in my article...
“Roll up the map of Europe; it will not be wanted these ten years.” —William Pitt (1806) “Nothing,” goes the Johnsonian cliché, “concentrates a man’s mind more wonderfully than the prospect of being hanged.” This very natural reaction may explain why a whole raft of intellectuals, journalists, and even politicians, none of whom was previously...
War Without War Powers (the Not-So-New American Way) On September 1, 1970, soon after President Nixon expanded the Vietnam War by invading neighboring Cambodia, Democratic Senator George McGovern, a decorated World War II veteran and future presidential candidate, took to the floor of the Senate and said, “Every Senator [here] is partly responsible for sending...
While Sen. Tuberville failed in his effort to curtail the Pentagon’s new plan to subsidize soldier abortions, his willingness to stand alone in opposition to the deep state juggernaut is inspiring.
Apocalypse Now Redux Produced by Producer Zoetrope Studios Directed by Francis Ford Coppola Screenplay by John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola Re-released by Miramax Films and United Artists I was finishing the original draft of this column early on the morning of September 11 when I received the news. My wife called me from the...
If you had bet me six months ago that the grassroots disaffection in the Republican Party, as demonstrated by the “Tea Party” movement, would guarantee a responsive nominee for president, you would have lost. I am no prophet, just an observer with some historical perspective. I would have bet on Romney against all comers. The...
So we now learn that women might be drafted into the military. The news is a fitting coda to Tom Piatak’s post about women in combat, to which I added another. When I served on the first Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces, conservative commissioners warned about this development: that...
Harassed any hirelings lately? Don’t think so? Let’s see. Do you refer to the office Christmas party as a “Christmas party”? Sing carols and say grace? Invite your employees to join you for church? Wear “precious feet” on your lapels and plead with subordinates not to abort? Lead morning prayers over the P.A. system? The...
“Beware the people weeping / When they bare the iron hand” —Herman Melville, “The Martyr” It is one of the most famous photographs of the nineteenth century: Alexander Gardner’s picture of four hooded figures dangling from a gallows in the old federal penitentiary in Washington, D.C. on July 7, 1865. On that sweltering afternoon, about...
“Madly for Adlai,” proclaimed the campaign buttons in 1952. But Adlai Ewing Stevenson II wasn’t the kind of politician who aroused mad affections, or, for that matter, hostilities. He was a Stevenson. Passion isn’t the Stevenson thing; service is—service conducted with objectivity and a certain fidelity to the public weal. Jean Baker, professor of history...
A small people with a distinctive religion, the Jews throughout history have tried to avoid imitating the Gentiles (that is, everybody else), lest assimilation destroy the faith and the group that embodies it. In fact, Scripture’s passionate denunciation of idolatry led the ancient rabbis, “our sages of blessed memory,” to condemn certain practices under the...
When Texas Child Protective Services seized the children of mothers belonging to the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints, I wondered if the Independent Republic was turning Yankee. The seizure was an abuse of power against the fundamental institution of all human societies—the family. Fortunately, the ruling on May 23 by the state’s Third Circuit...
The indictment of Donald Trump marks the ascendancy of a progressive legal theory that argues all law is merely politics, and makes the courts into a battlefield for political campaigns.
President Donald Trump cannot want war with Iran. Such a war, no matter how long, would be fought in and around the Persian Gulf, through which a third of the world’s seaborne oil travels. It could trigger a worldwide recession and imperil Trump’s reelection. It would widen the “forever war,” which Trump said he would...
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...
“We don’t divorce our men; we bury them,” instructs Stella Bernard, played by a loony Ruth Gordon, in Lord Love a Duck (1966). That’s certainly better social policy than America has pursued since 1970, with no-fault divorce shattering families. No custody battles. No brawls over alimony and child support. No kids shuttled back and forth...
Last week, Dylann Roof walked into the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston and slaughtered nine of the innocent people he found there. Roof’s act of slaughter has rightly been greeted with universal revulsion. But the media and politicians from both parties seized the opportunity to inaugurate a self-righteous crusade against a flag he displayed in...
After ethnic Albanian guerrillas initially rejected the peace settlement fashioned by U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a friend of hers told Newsweek that “She’s angry at everyone—the Serbs, the Albanians and NATO.” Another Clinton administration official raged: “Here is the greatest nation on earth pleading with some nothing-balls to do something entirely in their...
In an election campaign dominated by domestic issues, foreign themes have appeared as isolated snippets. Questions regarding what to do about Syria or Iran, or how to manage relations with China and Russia, produce stock responses unrelated to the broad picture. These are among the most important questions facing political decisionmakers, foreign-policy practitioners, and their...
Americans prefer no consistent government, rapid-cycling anarchy, to everything the two parties offer: neither has made the sale.
Despite Pat Buchanan’s record as a Trump-supporter sans pareil, his most recent column, on why Trump’s challenges to the Biden victory are both futile and possibly harmful, is profoundly unsettling. It is also based on questionable assumptions. “It seems a certainty that not enough electoral votes could be flipped from Biden to Trump to overturn’s Joe Biden’s...
We’re only a few months beyond the turn of the calendar and already I have a candidate for the word of the year: Censorship. Examples are proliferating at such a fast rate that it seems like a game of whac-a-mole just to keep up with all of them. A few of the most recent include:...
It has become obvious that the majority of elected officials and candidates for public office are not qualified for their positions, and often stand in the way of attempts to institute the programs and diversity that are the hallmarks of modem society. Nonetheless, American voters, either because they are ignorant of what must be accomplished...
The New York Times, in a 2,128-word obituary (nearly three times the length of this article), fondly recalled Jack Kevorkian as “A Doctor Who Helped End Lives.” Kevorkian, 83, the Michigan pathologist turned assisted-suicide activist, died in a hospital, a more dignified locale than the 1960’s-era Volkswagen microbus where he uncorked the Thanatron, his suicide...
The debate over gays in the military has highlighted the progressive impulse to look anywhere but to America for cultural truth. On talk shows and in editorials, Americans are urged to emulate “other industrialized nations” (read “increasingly decadent Western Europe”) that permit openly homosexual soldiers and sailors. Often praised is Holland, whose ponytailed, hairnet-coiffed legions...
America is disintegrating alarmingly fast in a manner not seen since the final years before the War Between the States.
In 1997, the headmaster of the English secondary school in which I was teaching ordered a bibliocaust. The inspectors were coming, and he wanted our library to look up-to-date. All the old stuff had to go; only bright, modern volumes relevant to the contemporary curriculum were to be on the shelves. Each department was told...
Most of us objected to The New York Times’ notorious “1619 Project” because it trashes the great achievements of Americans (creating free institutions and conquering a continental wilderness), substituting a story of supposed victimization as the core of our history. Alas, Professor Hall, in his speculations in the March issue (“Slavery and the American Founding”)...
Does it really make much difference whether Barack Hussein Obama (or anybody else) was actually born in the United States or not? Is the conquest and permanent occupation of Iraq justified under international law and the U.S. Constitution? Is the conquest and permanent occupation of Iraq an appropriate response ...