I enjoyed Samuel Francis’s lucid analysis of the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education (“Forty Years After,” May 1994), but I take exception to his argument that “the only feasible moral defense of the Brown decision today is not that it replaced force with freedom, but that it replaced one kind of...
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Outgrowing the Past
When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Kelo v. City of New London, a chill wind blew across the rural South. The Court upheld the decision of the city fathers of New London, Connecticut, to grant a private development corporation the right to condemn a middle-income residential neighborhood, evict the property owners,...
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An Undereducated Admiral
Since there are no pressing global issues that cannot wait until next week, I’ll devote my column to a book I’ve just finished reading. Its title, Sea Power: The History and Geopolitics of the World’s Oceans (Penguin, 2017), and the reputation of its author—retired admiral James George Stavridis, who ended his career as NATO Supreme...
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The Next Abortion Battle
Abortion opponents in South Dakota had a simple message for voters in the mid-term election: Vote what you know in your heart is right. More than 148,000 people heeded the call, voting to retain a state law that banned virtually all abortions in South Dakota. Their numbers, however, amounted to just 44 percent of the...
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Republicans and Real Federalism
With all the febrile ebullience of a rerun of a 1950’s sitcom, the Republican Party will descend upon San Diego determined to efface any evidence that Pat Buchanan ever existed and committed to staging the miraculous spectacle of a political convention without any politics. Yet most Republicans, whether or not they are present at the...
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Can Trump Pull a Second Rabbit Out of the Hat?
“Apres moi, la deluge,” predicted Louis XV after his army’s stunning defeat by Prussia’s Frederick the Great at the Battle of Rossbach in 1757. “La deluge,” the Revolution, came, three decades later, to wash the Bourbon monarchy away in blood and to send Louis XV’s grandson, Louis XVI, and his queen, Marie Antoinette, to the...
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Letter from Holland: The Kaiser in Exile
On a recent sunny afternoon—a wonderful rarity in Holland’s late fall—I visited Huis Doorn, the country manor 15 miles east of Utrecht where Kaiser Wilhelm II Hohenzollern spent just over two decades in exile before dying there in early June 1941. His lead coffin, draped in the Imperial flag, lies in the middle of a...
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The Doctors and the Bomb
The furor caused by the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, represented by its two leading sponsors and leaders. Dr. Bernard Lown of the United States and Dr. Yevgeny Chazov of the Soviet Union, provides a fine opportunity to review the revival of the politics of nuclear...
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The ‘Marxism’ Narrative Has Gone Too Far
Conservatives who fixate on Communism misunderstand the dynamic driving today’s left and bringing it to power. They are defending a Maginot Line around which the left has already made an end run.
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Editors’ Round Table on Sarah Palin: Energized—For What?
I will resist the temptation to steal my own thunder for next week’s John Randolph Club meeting in Philadelphia, where I intend to talk about the most important aspect of the Palin Pandemonium: the conservative Christian rejection of the natural order. There are at least two other aspects of McCain-Palin that are troubling: abortion and...
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“Family Values”: Illegal Aliens and Their Sex Crimes
Whatever President Bush says about the “family values” of the growing horde of illegal Mexican immigrants, chilling newspaper accounts and cold data tell a different tale. On April 29, 2005, an illegal alien from Guatemala, Ronald Douglas Herrera Castellanos, was power washing a deck at the Nagle home in New City, New York. In her...
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Diseconomies of Scale
“Free trade,” like “free love,” is a beguiling abstraction that hides more than it reveals. Absolute free trade would be an exchange of commodities between two people without the coercive intervention of a third party. But economic exchange is always embedded in a cultural landscape of noneconomic values, which impose restraints. Blue laws prevent trade...
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The Stone Wall Has Crumbled
Last June, the tradition of 157 years at single-sex Virginia Military Institute was changed by the vote of seven Justices in Washington. The statue of Stonewall Jackson still guarded the parade grounds, but the general who stood like a stone wall at Manassas could not prevail against those seven Justices. His slogan is still emblazoned...
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Biden’s Full Plate—Ukraine, Taiwan, Tehran
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...
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How Do You Solve A Problem Like Francis?
Pope Francis is not dumb or naive. He is a subversive determined to destroy the Roman Catholic Church.
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The Blind Ape
In the 1970’s, one hardly ever heard the word atheist. One had the impression that the impassive majority never considered the subject long enough to have made the term a part of their active vocabulary; while the typical exception would proffer, with an upraised finger and a coy smirk, something along the lines of “let’s...
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A Good Communitarian Is Hard to Find
“Never say No when the world says Aye.” —E.B. Browning This thoughtful and provocative analysis of the new communitarianism can profitably be viewed as a case study in how liberalism, not unlike scheming alien forces in sci-fi movies, assumes new and attractive forms to beguile the unwary. Put otherwise, the liberalism of the New Deal...
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Who You Talkin’ To, Robert De Niro?
The actor’s self-indulgent rant in New York is the latest example of the all-too-human temptation to garner admiration through performative outrage.
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Tyranny in Our Time
From the December 2013 issue of Chronicles. There is a saying among jurists that hard cases make bad law. Similarly, every book critic knows that the best books make for hard reviewing. Faced with a truly fine work, the reviewer is tempted simply to reproduce the author’s thesis in abbreviation, while scattering as many of...
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“A Pure American Type of a Rather Rare Species”
Dean Gooderham Acheson was born in Middletown, Connecticut, on April 11, 1893, into a stable world of which Europe was the center and where America was poised to attain hemispheric dominance. That world’s certainties were shattered in the trenches of Northern France, but the shock was less profound among America’s northeastern aristocracy—to which Acheson belonged...
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A Cold and Distant Mirror
A review of The White Ribbon (produced by Canal+ and Wega Film; written and directed by Michael Haneke; distributed by Sony Pictures Classics). German director Michael Haneke loves to sneer at his middle-class patrons. In Funny Games (1997, remade in the United States in 2007) and Caché (2005), his affluent characters are shown to be...
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Whose is the Wrong Rally?
By telling people shouting “Jesus Is Lord” that they didn’t belong at her rally, Kamala Harris demonstrated the deep divide over religion between the parties.
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Buchanan at Bay
—”Imperialism is absolutely necessary to a people which desires spiritual as well as economic expansion. —Benito Mussolini America has survived, the Last and Only Superpower, while so many others have fallen by the wayside, their bones littering the road from empire: Rome, Spain, Portugal, France, Russia, and—closest to ourselves—a once-great Britain,...
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The Importance of Bahkmut
After the fall of Bakhmut, the moment of truth will come if the Ukrainian counteroffensive fizzles out, and especially if the Russians respond by starting a major advance of their own.
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Where Did Our Property Rights Go?
William Pitt the Elder, in his Speech on the Excise Bill delivered before the House of Commons, encapsulated our Founding Fathers’ view of property rights when he said, “The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may...
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The Wonderful World of Porn
So you thought writing hard-core pornography was an easy way to earn a living? You remembered your adolescence and those turgid paperbacks in which the vocabulary was strictly four-letter, the plot rambling and forgotten halfway through the book, and the characters’ names changed periodically as though some of the chapters were lifted bodily from other...
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“A Clear Voice for Freedom”
“Dr. King was a strong and clear voice for freedom,” declared President George W. Bush during a Martin Luther King, Jr., Day commemoration. His nominee for attorney general, John Ashcroft, proudly proclaimed during Senate testimony that, “By executive order, I made Missouri one of the first states to recognize Martin Luther King Day.” These are...
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Are We Still Entitled to Some Privacy?
More often than not, current events offer an opportunity for meditation. This is the case today: The friends of a politician turned international financier, now to be tried for rape, have rallied round him, claiming his privacy has been invaded. Though in this case the claim is downright preposterous, by appealing to the right to...
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For Now, the American Republic Stands
Before the November 3 election, a foundational principle of the American republic—checks and balances—was on life support. The same inaccurate pollsters who predicted a blowout win for Biden also predicted the Democrats would take control of the Senate. With one-party Democratic control, America as we know it would disappear. The results of the election didn’t match...
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Dionysus in the Trenches
In his masterly Ideas Have Consequences, Richard Weaver (who was fond of the long view) marked the decline of the West from the late 14th century with the development of William of Occam’s doctrine of nominalism. In the short view, though, it is obvious that the Great War was the watershed of modernity: what remained...
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Preaching to a Strange Nation
“Receive me, then, O Lord and lover of Mankind, even as the harlot, as the robber, as the publican, as the prodigal . . . “ —The Prayer of St. Basil the Great The Law on Religion passed this year by the Russian State Duma restricts the activities of “non-traditional” religions...
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Cannibal Statistics
In debate, it is always possible to be right for the wrong reason. For instance, in supporting the proposition that cannibalism is immoral, I might argue that, historically, cannibalism encouraged the killing of human beings who might otherwise have been kidnapped by Arabs or rival African tribesmen and sold into slavery in the southern United...
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Democrats Hold Their Noses and Certify ‘Insurrectionist’ Trump
Democrats' talk of staging an objection to the certification of an "insurrectionist" quickly evaporated, and the certification of Donald Trump's victory proceeded without a hitch.
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Thicker-Skinned
Four years at Harvard have made me much thicker-skinned than I used to be. To be sure, it was more than a little unsettling when my freshman dormitory held a mandatory sensitivity session at which each student was forced to say: “Hello, my name is . . . , and I’m gay.” But after seeing...
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Hating Babies, Hating God
When I sat down to write this article, Google reminded me that, when it comes to the issue of contraception, the stakes are very high. To check the date of publication of Dr. Charles Provan’s important work The Bible and Birth Control, I typed “Charles, Provan, Bible, Birth Control” into the mother of all search...
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Behind Democracy’s Curtain
One of the more exciting prospects for the Dole-Clinton presidential contest should have been the “presidential debate,” which, ever since the Kennedy-Nixon slugfest of 1960, has titillated the mass electorate with the delusion that the voters actually have a real choice between two different viewpoints. The only reason a Dole-Clinton debate ought to have been...
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America: A Land of Ceaseless Conflict
When Amy Coney Barrett was nominated to a judgeship on the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2017, Sen. Dianne Feinstein was taken aback by the Notre Dame law professor’s Catholic convictions about the right to life. “Professor,” said Feinstein, “when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within...
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On Serbia
Sitting comfortably in my suburban apartment, far from the trenches and shellfire where Momcilo Selic is witnessing the desperate combat between Serbs, Croats, and Muslims, I don’t know whether I can claim greater objectivity or simply greater ignorance. I am certainly grateful for Mr. Selic’s glimpse (“Letter From Bosnia,” April) into the lives of ordinary...
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H5N1 Pandemic Test Case—Biden Administration Not Ready
To prepare for a pandemic, start by curbing the government's power over your decisions.
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Trump’s Unsteady Performance
President Donald Trump has declared a national emergency to fund the wall along the nation’s southern border. Speaking in the Rose Garden, Trump said there was an emergency at the border which could only be fixed by building a wall. House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer had said before Trump’s address...
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The ‘Bottom Line’ as American Myth and Metaphor
The question, “What is the bottom line?” has entered the lexicon of business as a near metaphysical given. It is so frequently applied to events calling for tough decisionmaking that it seems advisable to take a closer look at its meaning. The phrase signals a no-nonsense approach to business thinking, where presumably decisions are made...
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The Price of Papal Popularity
Normally a synod of Catholic bishops does not provide fireworks rivaling the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where Mayor Richard Daley’s boys in blue ran up the score on the radicals in Grant Park. But, on Oct. 13, there emanated from the Synod on the Family in Rome a 12-page report from a committee...
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Steadfast Sessions
President and five-star Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower said that a man must “believe in his luck” in order to lead. Jeff Sessions is such a man. He has not only survived multiple setbacks, considered career ending by many, but has consistently come out ahead. Most recently, his early and conspicuously vocal endorsement of Donald Trump...
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Letter From Vienna: Antemurale, Once Again
The socialist-conservative coalition led by Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer, which collapsed on July 7, had been faltering for months. When I arrived in Vienna two days later, the only surprising element in what appeared to be a mundane story concerned its immediate cause. Eighteen months of endless bickering over Austria’s economic, fiscal or social policy could...
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TPP’s 5,544-page Flim-Flam
No wonder the Obama regime kept the Trans-Pacific Partnership secret as long as it could. It’s far worse than even its greatest critics imagined: 5,544 pages of bureaucratese that will help only international lawyers and big companies, while slamming small companies and middle-class workers in America. Here’s a sampling of what you’ll need to know...
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Has America Lost Its Faith?
Here we are on the eve of Christmas, that day of joy set aside for celebrating the birth of Christ who came down to earth 2,000 years ago to show mankind the way to eternal salvation. Yet, the present mood of America at Christmas 2021 seems better captured by Jimmy Carter in his “malaise speech”...
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The George Floyd Cover-Up
The public was sold the lie that a rogue, racist cop murdered George Floyd, but the shocking truth is coming to light.
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The Brazilian Cow
In the middle of the 19th century, Sydney Dobell wrote a poem that contained the following line: “Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!” This excursion into the absurd c. 1850 is readily recognized by readers of American poems or novels c. 1950 as a cry of the soul in torment. The...
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Release the Klan(s)!
Move over, Ashley Madison—there’s a new scandal in town. At least, that’s what the media is desperate to have you believe. In late October, the “hacktivist” group Anonymous, usually referred to oxymoronically as a “collective” of anarchists, announced that they had obtained the membership rolls of several Ku Klux Klan organizations. They planned to release...
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‘Civil War’ Shows American Divisions Through a Glass, Darkly
Civil War centers around an imagined conflict within America set in a disturbingly near future or an alternate present.