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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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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Playing the Trump Card
In August, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) published a report documenting a startling increase in immigration over the past year. The study indicated that America’s immigrant population had grown by 1.7 million and that 44 percent of the new immigrants were from Mexico, with illegal immigration increasing during a “protracted period of legal immigration...
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The Re-Possessed
“In the end I shall have to renounce optimism.” —Voltaire Among other, more profound things, Dostoevski’s anti-revolutionary novel, The Possessed, is a withering dissection of liberal intellectuals. In its pages, liberals parade as hostile and irresponsible critics of a society that affords most of them a life of comfort and status. They are the “fathers”...
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Come, Ye Thankful People
A “progressive” rap on “social conservatives”: All they crave is power to tell you whom to sleep with, and how, and what god (if any) to worship. This contrasts, naturally, with broad-minded types of the progressive persuasion, who don’t care what you do, morally speaking, so long as you don’t say or do anything insensitive...
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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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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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The Coming Republican Donkey
The end is near for our Golden Age of Republican Party rule. The first blow came in 2006, when horrified voters kicked the GOP back to minority status in Congress. And, come November, Republicans may emerge from elections without a veto-proof Senate and without one of their own demagogues occupying the White House. If the...
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The Great Schism
In August 1994, I was happy to be one of the many Latin clerics who over the years, in divisa or in borghese, have made a pilgrimage to the Holy Mountain of Athos, the Garden of the Mother of God. On the Feast of the Lord’s Transfiguration, I was able to set foot on that...
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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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John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark Cases Defy the Rule of Law
The rule of law is the American answer to despotism and totalitarianism. It is under attack today by the very people meant to uphold it.
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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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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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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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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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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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Jack Bauer, Agent of Anarcho-Tyranny, U.S.A.
Jack Bauer is an American hero—of sorts. He tortures suspects. And executes them. And decapitates them. “I’m gonna need a hacksaw,” he famously declared after dispatching a pervert who knew the men behind a planned nuclear attack on Los Angeles. If you have never watched the television program 24, you should try it for two...
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Fundamentalism on the Left
Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us by Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro Princeton University Press 336 pp., $29.95 Fundamentalism has long been considered a religious phenomenon, a narrowmindedness that only afflicts Bible-thumping extremists. Yet fundamentalist thinking is everywhere today, and leads naturally to the authoritarian mind and the one-party state....
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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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The Pike
The French wordsmith Romain Rolland, himself no slouch at being derivative as a thinker, likened his Italian contemporary Gabriele d’Annunzio to a pike, the freshwater predator famous for lying still and snapping at whatever comes. What stood for prey in this simile were the ideas of d’Annunzio’s immediate literary predecessors or near coevals, which made...
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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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Ding, Dong! The Public School Is Dead
Cara Fitzpatrick chose fear over facts in her account of American public schools. The title, itself, fails living up to reality.
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The Convenient Religion
Everyone in America today—right, left, or middle, if there still is one—can agree that the explosive political response to Donald Trump’s presidency is unprecedented in American political history. Liberals’ clinically hysterical reaction to the President’s plans for The Wall, to the travel ban, to his response to the Charlottesville affair, and to his cancellation of...
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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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Christopher Hitchens and the Days of Rage
On March 23, the Associated Press published a story dealing with sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Church to little fanfare. It noted that allegations of sexual abuse involving the Catholic Church in the United States dropped in 2009, and that most of the alleged offenders “are dead, no longer in the priesthood, removed from...
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Remembering Robert Nisbet
It is hard to imagine anyone today having a career like Robert Nisbet’s: professor at Berkeley, Arizona, and Columbia; dean and vice-chancellor at the University of California, Riverside; author of widely used sociology textbooks; and co-founder, along with his friend Russell Kirk and a few others, of postwar intellectual American conservatism. Nisbet greatly admired Edmund...
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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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Thinking About Internment
I am going to ask what Churchill would have called some naughty questions, and offer some impertinent answers. I apologize in advance for the extreme political incorrectness of what follows. In the hope of persuading the reader that I raise these issues with no pleasure at all, I shall preface them with some personal notes....
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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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Solzhenitsyn and Democracy
The name of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has fallen on hard times. My many public lectures on this author convince me that his sympathetic admirers are legion, but even these admirers are troubled that the press commentary on him seems to be fairly consistently negative. While almost all of his Western critics allow that Solzhenitsyn is a...
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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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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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Remembering Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston mocked the professional victims and race hustlers of her day and advocated for a positive, noncombative black identity. She was a woman of the right.
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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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Stopping the Long March Through the University
“A Leninist cannot simply be a specialist in his favorite branch of science. . . . He must be an active participant in the political leadership of his country.” —Slogan of Moscow University Substitute “professor” for “Leninist” and the quotation would appear almost a cliche to many American academicians. Yet such corollary Leninist themes and...
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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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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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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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The Way We Are Now and Where We Are Going
“Nothing doth more hurt a state than that cunning men pass for wise.” —Francis Bacon I finally figured out why so many people admire Obama and his family. They remind TV watchers of the Heathcliffe Huxtables. I have been practicing “Kumbaya” lately. I want to be ready for Real Change. Of course, Obama owes a...
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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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Brothers: Donald John Trump and Cassius Marcellus Clay
Both Ali and Trump, kindred spirits in so many ways, shook up the world.
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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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Never See His Kind Again
My father, Sefton Sandford, died last November 11, which somehow appropriately was Veterans Day. He was 87. Any child’s judgment is apt to be subjective on these occasions, but I remain stubbornly of the opinion that he was a great man, and certainly one who answered Wordsworth’s question, “Who is the happy warrior? Who is...
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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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Pro-Choice Christians: Shattering Nature’s Glass Ceiling
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...
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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...
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Who Owns the Future? Dems or GOP?
For Republicans, the returns were mixed on Nov. 3. Though he carried burdens unrivaled by a president since Herbert Hoover—a plague that has killed 230,000 Americans in eight months and crashed the economy to depths not seen since the ’30s—Donald J. Trump amassed 72 million votes, the largest total in Republican Party history. And while...
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The Maastricht Mystique
Even an expert must be mystified by the legal structures of the European Union Parliament and the European Commission. The EU Parliament has roughly 620 deputies, elected every five years from 15 Western European states. Voters from ElU countries have no decision over the election of other countries’ deputies to the EU Parliament. The president...
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Reinventing America
“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...