“The opponents (of same-sex marriage) have no case other than ignorance and misconception and prejudice.” So writes Richard Cohen in his celebratory column about Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s role in legalizing gay marriage in New York state. Now, given that no nation in 20 centuries of Christendom legalized homosexual marriage, and, in this century, majorities in...
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A Maturing Europe?
While many Asians have welcomed the election of George W. Bush, leading Europeans are nervous. In particular, they fear that President Bush will reduce their continent’s free defense ride, especially as the Balkans begins to explode vet again. But it is time to expect Europeans to behave like adults in securing their own interests. The...
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1865: The True American Revolution
The standard opinion has it that, ever since they set foot on the new continent, the English settlers felt they were one people, Englishmen united by their common language, common origins, common enemies, so that it was only natural that their independence, once achieved, should lead them to the framing of one new national body,...
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The Many Reinventions of Jeffrey Sachs
“Jeff Sachs is like the March Hare in Alice in Wonderland, moving from cup to cup. He can never return to any country that he advised, since they all hate him. It happened in Latin America, in Slovenia, in Poland, a few of the Baltic States, and it was the same in Russia. They maintain...
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The Virtues of Property
Somewhere deep in their bones, Americans recognize that property is the paramount civil right—perhaps the paramount human right. Anyone who seriously studies American history, particularly that of the late 18th century, will discover that property, along with virtue, provided the foundation for American government. Indeed, the preservation of properly is arguably the chief reason we...
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Mixed Signals
Rudolph Giuliani in one of his first actions as mayor of New York City, eliminated a controversial set-aside program that had been instituted in 1991 by the Dinkins administration. Considering the extent to which the use of quotas now permeates American society, any victory for the merit system is reason for celebration. The policy in...
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From the Family of the Lion
“There is a kind of revolution of so general a character that it changes the tastes as well as the fortunes of the world.” —La Rochefoucauld There is a popular myth of Abraham Lincoln, our 16th President, that is known to most Americans. According to the orthodox version of this highly sympathetic...
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Carry On
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 liberalism and conservatism, right and left. Modern...
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Calling Dr. Johnson
The Dear Leader of the United States reminds me of Robert Frost’s quip that a liberal is a man who won’t take his own side in a fight. More precisely, his own country’s side. Barack Obama seems to hate calling anyone our enemy. It isn’t nice. It’s not Christian, as he understands Christianity. Well, Christ...
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The One Civilization
Popular culture in the West, and especially in North America, is an illusion, mostly electronic, that does not feed the soul. Indeed, it claims to do nothing but feed the senses, and as such it tends toward universal barbarism, fostering ignorance and encouraging violence. Beneath the illusion there is, however, one great civilization, and it...
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Regime Change—American Style
The campaign to overturn the 2016 election and bring down President Trump shifted into high gear this week. Inspiration came Saturday morning from the altar of the National Cathedral where our establishment came to pay homage to John McCain. Gathered there were all the presidents from 1993 to 2017, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and...
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Welcome to Dodge City
On the American frontier of previous centuries, the possession of a firearm was often a key to survival. In this regard, the frontier of 20th-century America, although different geographically, is very much like earlier frontiers. As different waves of Europeans arrived in North America, each took a distinct approach to trading guns with the Indians....
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Ask Jeeves
Some of the best-loved characters in English literature are observed only dimly through the eyes of an unreliable first-person narrator; like fish seen through the glass of a tank, they swim toward us, momentarily dazzling in their colors, before receding again into the murk. Such is surely the case with P.G. Wodehouse’s immortal creation Reginald...
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The Justification for War
During the Cold War, occasional resorts to war or threats of war by the United States were justified by the need to keep communism in check. This justification had the advantage of being based on a real threat—notably in Berlin in 1949, in Korea in 1950, and during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The...
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Trivializing Rape
Last spring I picked up our student newspaper to read this sentence in a front-page story: “Statistics show that one out of every four UNC females will be sexually assaulted while in college.” Wow. The University of North Carolina has roughly 15,000 undergraduates (leave the graduate students out of it), something over half of them...
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Early Form
The Yale Lit. has returned, but not in the form that some Chronicles readers may remember from the early 80’s, when Andrei Navrozov was editor. The undergraduate magazine (est. 1836) he turned into a national quarterly of arts, letters, and politics finished its run through the courts in 1986 and has now returned to the...
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Come Home, America
Greetings from New York, where a new hate crime is taking shape: It is called “place-ism,” and it will be defined in the criminal code as the belief that a particular place, be it a neighborhood, village, city, or state, is superior to any other place, and that the residents of this place have a...
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In Focus – Embattled Preacher
Dinesh D’Souza: Falwell, Before the Millennium; Regnery Gateway; Chicago. The Rev. Jerry Falwell is one of the most frequently pilloried men in America today. Journalists and liberal politicians are fond of comparing him to Hitler, Khomeini, and Jim Jones and brand him a “racist,” “fascist,” and “intolerant bigot.” Ultrafundamentalists like Bob Jones denounce him as...
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“You Have To Commit!”
We were on the practice field preparing for a team that ran the option. Our scout team was running the upcoming opponent’s offense. To our surprise, the scouts executed the option perfectly, which left our outside linebacker frozen halfway between the quarterback, cutting off the block of a tight end, and a trailing halfback arcing...
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Unto the Least of These …
A few years ago Oral Roberts made national headlines when he confessed to having seen a 900-foot-tall Jesus in the heavens urging the faithful to donate to the “City of Faith,” as he called the medical school he was building at his university. Those who believed him, his “partners,” were asked to send monthly donations...
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Dos mojitos, por favor
A mojito is a Cuban mint julep, mixed with rum rather than bourbon. It was Ernest Hemingway’s second-favorite drink. The shot of gin first thing in the morning from the bottle beneath the bed took top honors. Somewhere just on the dark side of dawn in an Eivissa nightclub, I was trying to convince the...
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Trump & the Hillarycons
In 1964, Phyllis Schlafly of Alton, Illinois, mother of six, wrote and published a slim volume entitled A Choice Not an Echo. Backing the candidacy of Sen. Barry Goldwater, the book was a polemic against the stranglehold the eastern liberal establishment had held on the Republican nomination for decades. A Choice sold 3 million copies....
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What Civilization Remains
We once had a book about Eastern Europe at home, in between the encyclopedias and Robinson Crusoe. I do not remember its title nor the author’s name, but it contained highly atmospheric black and white photographs of Rumanian scenes. There were baroque chateaux, sturgeons, eagles, wolves, bears, wild boar, bends in the Danube, flowered meads...
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Living in Interesting Times
The public discourse in both hemispheres seems to be legitimizing the coming of World War III. These are interesting—if not terrifying—times.
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The Human Element
Intolerable Cruelty Produced by Alphaville Films and Imagine Entertainment Written and Directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen Distributed by Universal Pictures Lost in Translation Produced by American Zoetrope and Elemental Films Written and Directed by Sofia Coppola Distributed by Focus Features Intolerable Cruelty should by prosecuted for intolerable smugness, the besetting sin of...
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The Making of a Banana Republic
Now that the Rubicon has been crossed and we have entered a world in which politicians attempt to not merely defeat their opposition at the ballot box but also prosecute and incarcerate them, there is no going back.
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The Left’s True Target
Arguments, as Malcolm Muggeridge astutely observed, are never about what they’re about. As when “You’re never on time anymore” turns out really to mean, “When are you going to quit sitting around and get a real job?” And so on. The national argument over Confederate symbols and monuments—assuming you want to call it an argument...
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Tending the Abused Garden
Max Hayward: Writers in Russia: 1917-1978; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego, CA. by Charles A. Moser At the time of his premature death in 1979, Max Hayward was among the finest Western interpreters of contemporary Russian literature in the Soviet Union. As one of Britain’s most accomplished Slavists, he had obtained a research position at...
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Gay Times on the Right
Hardly a day goes by that someone does not email or telephone me with the news that some allegedly conservative writer has finally endorsed “Gay Marriage.” I’d rather not name names, but the most amusing so far has been an online screed declaring Andrew Sullivan the “most important political writer of his generation.” All...
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Hate Speech Makes a Comeback
Well, it sure didn’t take long for the Tucson Truce to collapse. After Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot on Jan. 8 by a berserker who killed six others, including a federal judge and a 9-year-old girl, and wounded 13, the media were aflame with charges the right had created the climate of hate in which...
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History Returning at a Gallop
Five months ago, in its January 1 issue, Time magazine chose to honor Mikhail Gorbachev as the “Man of the Decade.” Although several prominent Frenchmen have suggested that Pope John Paul II has had an equal influence on the tumultuous events in Europe (notably because of his powerful support of the Solidarity movement in Poland),...
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On ‘The Re-Possessed’
In response to Lee Congdon’s review of The Pied Piper: Allard K. Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream (Chronicles, July 1986), I would like to make the following points. Allard Lowenstein’s affiliation with the CIA is well-documented in the book. My sources in military intelligence and the CIA, while wishing to remain anonymous, are well-in formed....
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Obama, the Death Camps, and Polish Anger
It is no exaggeration to say that the entire Polish nation was outraged and insulted by President Obama’s clumsy reference in a May 28 speech to “Polish death camps.” Not only did the Poles play no part in setting up and running the Nazi camps where millions of Jews were murdered, but when the killings...
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The End of the Rove Era in Republican Politics
A few weeks after the Republicans were routed in the November 2006 elections, a longtime Bush Republican from Texas told me that it was time for Karl Rove to go. That comment spoke volumes, for it came from someone who had worked closely with Rove ever since his early days as a political consultant in the...
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Cassandra’s Lament
In a previous column I expressed irritation at those numerous folks who confess to having voted for George W. Bush in 2000 (and even 2004) because they were deceived into believing he was a “conservative.” For anyone believing that Bush was a “conservative” in 2000 the only deception going on was self-deception. Here is a...
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A New Global Strategy
Over the years we have often lamented the absence of grand-strategic thinking within the U.S. foreign-policy establishment. For the past quarter-century, successive administrations have displayed a chronic inability to deploy America’s political, military, economic, and moral resources in a balanced and proportionate manner, in order to protect and enhance the country’s rationally defined security and...
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CPAC moves to Rockford?
Here’s how you’ll know the conservative movement means something again: When the Conservative Political Action Conference, which just held its annual meeting, moves from Washington, D.C. to Rockford. Or Dubuque. Or Peoria. Or Helena. Or San Antonio. Or Bakersfield. Anywhere but the District of Corruption. I attended a couple CPACs back in the mid-1980s, at...
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Whose Country Is It, Anyway?
Half a century ago, American children were schooled in Aesop’s fables. Among the more famous of these were “The Fox and the Grapes” and “The Tortoise and the Hare.” Particularly appropriate this Christmas season, and every Christmas lately, is Aesop’s fable of “The Dog in the Manger.” The tale is about a dog who...
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Fateful Choices
There are few issues more emotional than abortion. The dogmatism of the respective combatants strikes fear in the hearts of lesser mortals—which means almost every politician. Three decades after Roe v. Wade, the issue of abortion is unlikely ever to be resolved politically. The major parties have largely followed the passions of their most active...
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Yes, America Is Being Invaded
Though most of the migrants crossing the U.S. southern border are in search of economic opportunity, some are used as tools by our enemies. The invasion is deliberate.
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From El Paso to Plymouth
Last November, a delegation of citizens from the far West Texas border city of El Paso made the long journey to Plymouth, Massachusetts. The purpose of the El Pasoans’ visit was to challenge Plymouth’s long-held—and nearly universally accepted—claim that it was the site of the first Thanksgiving to be held on what is now United...
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Shakespeare, A Closet Catholic?
For the ongoing revolution against traditional authority it is often difficult to know whom to blame the most, but certainly the academic community’s skepticism, suspicion, and mockery of traditional values is one cause. Deconstructionist scholarship, ideologically “correct” teaching, and the habit of glib irony and irreverence run at flood tide on our campuses. Within the...
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Trusted Most—Men with Guns
Public confidence in Congress has plummeted to the lowest level of any institution since Gallup began asking the question in 1973. One-half of all Americans have little or no confidence in the Congress. Only 11 percent have a
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The Color of Money
In the midst of the uproar over the Confederate Battle Flag (America’s latest Two Minute Hate), an odd rumor began making the rounds on the internet. As far as I can tell, it began on InfoWars, the website of crank conspiracy theorist and talk-show host Alex Jones. As companies like eBay and Amazon began pulling...
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The World Is Plenty
The last time we heard Jess Kirkman tell stories about his father’s wondrous, humble life was in I Am One of You Forever (1985), a work of power and humor and charm. That book reminded me, however, that the word “novel” has hardly any meaning nowadays, for the work seemed a suite of stories united...
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The Rise and Fall of the Evangelical Elite
The current evangelical elite came of age at a time when secular influences tried to stay neutral toward Christianity; The faith competed as an equal in the marketplace of ideas. But those days are over. In our age of secularist hostility, evangelicals need new tactics.
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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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Planned Parenthood: Hearts and Minds, and Livers
On Tuesday, July 14, the Irvine, California-based Center for Medical Progress released the first of three videos aimed at exposing some of the horrifying practices of Planned Parenthood, including the harvesting of baby organs through elective abortion for sale to biomedical research groups. The hidden camera shows Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s Senior Director of...
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Iraq’s Collapse
The war in Iraq’s outcome was never in doubt, but the magnitude and speed of the Iraqi regime’s collapse are nevertheless puzzling and deserve closer scrutiny. In terms of numbers and available equipment, the Iraqi military was theoretically a foe worthy of respect. Its past performance was by no means abysmal. It suffered serious reverses...
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The Honorable Gentleman From New York
It shouldn’t be news to anyone that conservative middle-aged professors are rare birds. Until recently, right-wing academics have been almost as rare as black ones, and for pretty much the same reason: bright conservatives could generally do better elsewhere. So it didn’t go to my head a few years ago when I learned that the...