Bill Clinton and George Bush, Sr., share something: They are the only presidents since George Washington who were elected without having a campaign song written for them. Perhaps as a reflection of the vacuousness of their platforms, the two candidates used popular songs for their campaigns. George Bush surely made Woody Guthrie spin in his...
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Unconstitutionally Vague
The Univ. of Michigan has not given up. Federal District Court Judge Avern Cohn’s August 1989 ruling that Michigan’s anti-discrimination and discriminatory harassment policy (inaugurated in April 1988) was unconstitutionally vague and overbroad merely sent administrators back to their drawing boards. After implementing an interim policy last September, University President James Duderstadt assembled three committees...
Ignoble Savages, Part 2
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images . . . —T.S. Eliot, “The Burial of the Dead,” The Waste Land The body of the hapless American missionary John Chau has...
Nixon—Before Watergate
It has been a summer of remembrance. The centennial of the Great War that began with the Guns of August 1914. The 75th anniversary of the Danzig crisis that led to Hitler’s invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. The 70th anniversary of D-Day. In America, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights...
A Difficult Decade
James Patterson’s controlling idea is that the 60’s became the 60’s in 1965, and that this represented an “Eve of Destruction.” One struggles for about 300 pages trying to find out . . . destruction of what? The title comes from a long-forgotten song by a long-forgotten singer, Barry McGuire. “Eve of Destruction” did get...
Latter-Day Beggars
“He hath made us kings . . . ” —Revelation 1:6 Roman beggars, like Roman gypsies and Roman cats, not to mention Roman prostitutes warming themselves by their little winter chestnut fires, are the bearers of an ancient tradition, peculiar to the City of the Seven Hills, the caput mundi, which even her membership in...
Christian Democracy? No Such Thing
Everyone hails democracy as the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but very few realize—or dare realize—that democracy actually represents one of the most perfect forms of tyranny, because it is one the average citizen is loath to acknowledge as such. It is indeed very simply a matter of taking...
Welfare and Illegal Immigration
Two San Diego police officers, responding in the early morning darkness to a call that a school was being burglarized, arrived just as two suspects were fleeing into a nearby canyon. As the San Diego Union reported, the officers did not plunge into the canyon in pursuit—the terrain was dangerous, night visibility almost zero, and...
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...
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...
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.
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.
“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...
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...
Conservatives and the Free Market
When everyone “hastens through by-paths to private profit,” Samuel Johnson remarked confidently in 1756, “no great change can suddenly be made.” So the market can be conservative in its effects. The notion is startling, especially from the pen of an 18th-century Tory, and it hardly matters for the moment whether the market Johnson had in...
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...
Forgetting Colin Kaepernick
Colin Kaepernick, the former star quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, made the decision during the 2016 NFL preseason to kneel during the playing of the National Anthem. Other athletes quickly followed suit, some by kneeling, others by raising a fist to protest “racial injustice” in America. Outrage predictably followed, with opinion polls suggesting that...
“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...
Low-End Education
Not too far from my house in Phoenix, Arizona, stands a Christian school that may just say everything about the educational reform debate in this country—and why it is so often impossible to make any sense of it, in particular. One assumes that what this school has to offer is back-to-basics education, superior teachers, a...
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...
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,...
Arguments Against Global Free Trade
Sir James Goldsmith’s The Trap (New York, 1994) is the clearest introduction to the arguments against global free trade and its consequences for the nation. The English translation adds helpful notes and bibliography to the French original, Le Piège (Paris, 1993). In some places, however, rearrangement and omission change Goldsmith’s message. The last chapter of...
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...
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...
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...
Democracy and Declarations of War
The winter Balkan lull has let Congress off the hook for rolling over and playing dead in response to President Clinton’s dispatch of troops to Bosnia. It is cruel irony that the fewer casualties American troops sustain, the more likely we are to continue permitting further such devaluations of democracy. That will accentuate the eternal...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
Let Us Now Praise Famous G-Men
Over the past few years, the United States federal government attempted a coup d’état against its own chief executive. Working from “opposition research” paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, the Deep State and its partners in the media came within a hair’s breadth of taking down a sitting president. This was the...
Manifesto of a Paleo Fellow Traveller
The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return by Michael Anton Regnery Publishing 500 pp., $32.99 Michael Anton attracted widespread public notice in Sept. 2016 as the author of a pseudonymous article in the Claremont Review called “The Flight 93 Election.” It became one of the most widely debated and disseminated articles of the...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
“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...
Christianity and Slavery in the Old South
“Slavery is as ancient as war, and war as human nature.” —Voltaire Americans, with their strong tendency to externalize the evil within them and to project it onto others, have been waging crusades to extirpate or crush one kind of evil or another for almost 200 years now. The Pelagian belief...
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”...
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...
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...
Books in Brief: April/May 2021
The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech, by William Deresiewicz (Henry Holt; 368 pp., $27.99). Members of a book club at my highly selective undergraduate business school were stung by William Deresiewicz’s portrait of careerist, grade-grubbing college students in his scathing 2015 book,...
Sam Francis Was Right
It has been seven years since Sam Francis died. But the years since his untimely death merely show the accuracy of his insights. Francis’s writing was marked not only by loyalty to the people from whom he came but by an unswerving devotion to telling the truth about the way the world really is, not...
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...
Swiss Minarets
Swiss voters approved a constitutional amendment banning the construction of new minarets last November, to the howls of bien-pensant rage at home and abroad. The proposal was supported by 57.5 percent of the participating voters and 22 of the 26 Swiss cantons. It was originally drafted in May 2007 by a group of conservative politicians,...
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...
A Wilson for Our Times
John Lukacs has observed that our century’s two most significant revolutionaries were Lenin and Wilson. Of the two, according to Lukacs, the internationalist Lenin had less destructive influence in the long run than the democratic moralist but fervent nationalist Wilson; today it may be said that the Wilsonians have outlasted the Commies. Democracy and national...