The Retreat of Western Liberalism, by Edward Luce (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press; 240 pp., $24.00). Almost by the author’s admission, the title of this book is a falsehood. Liberalism is not retreating. It is being pushed back by “populists,” which is what liberals call people who are against liberalism because they are, for 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...
A congressional proponent of the nation’s first federal income tax law, enacted in 1894, was, to say the least, beside himself over the wonders he and his colleagues had wrought. “The passage of this bill,” burbled Congressman David Albaugh DeArmond, “will mark the dawn of a brighter day, with more of sunshine, more of the...
Garry Wills identifies himself as a Christian. He says he accepts the creeds, along with prayer, divine providence, the Gospels, the Eucharist, and the Mystical Body of Christ as the body of all believers. He thinks it a bad thing that “article by article, parts of the Creed are fading from some churches.” He also...
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...
The West’s failed Ukraine project has forced us to confront a bewildering array of what look like instances of stupidity, verging even on psychosis.
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...
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...
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...
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...
Just after 1 a.m. on July 22, 2019, Tyler Wingate, a 24-year-old white male, was driving on Livernois in Detroit when Lawrence Davis, a 24-year-old black male, bumped into him. The two pulled into a gas station to resolve the minor fender bender. Both got out of their cars. Wingate took one step when Davis...
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...
A hundred years from now historians, if they are still permitted to research and write, will argue about when the United States started down the slippery slope to totalitarianism. Many Southern historians believe it began with the erosion of the U.S. Constitution occasioned by President Lincoln’s disregard of that document and by the Reconstruction Era....
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...
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...
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 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...
One hundred and seventy miles southwest of Tucson, hard by the Mexico line, stands a weathered mountain range called the Cabeza Prieta. It is a place of weird landforms and scarce but formidable vegetation, a graduate school for desert rats that only the best prepared dares enter. The geography of the place says, Stay away. ...
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”)...
Peter Hitchens, writing in The Spectator last March, asked why we should be concerned with stopping several thousand homosexuals from getting married when heterosexual marriage is so threatened by dysfunction and divorce. The social conservatives’ obsession with the subject is, he argued, simply “a stupid distraction from the main war,” like the battle of Stalingrad. ...
What nobody is going to listen to during inauguration week is cynicism, or anything that savors thereof: the sound of pins pricking happy balloons, the minimizing tone of voice that says, “Ummm, HMMM, just you wait … ” When it comes to Barack Obama, we’re not into that. We’re into—no cynicism intended—a Lincoln moment. Really,...
Pierre Trudeau’s death at the age of 80 unleashed an outpouring of public emotion and grief that has not been seen in Canada since the death of the country’s founder, Sir John A. MacDonald. Dignitaries from all over the world, including close friends Jimmy Carter and Fidel Castro (who was greeted by a large crowd...
“America refuses to address the pervasive evil of white cops killing black men, and I will not stand during a national anthem that honors the flag of such a country!” That is the message Colin Kaepernick sent by “taking a knee” during the singing of “The Star Spangled Banner” before San Francisco ’49s games in...
On April 15, U.S. taxpayers will pay the last installment on their duty to government for 2003. The bill for federal, state, and local government totaled a staggering $3.3 trillion, of which one out of every seven dollars was in the form of “buy now, pay later” deficits, principally the federal one. Federal spending accounted...
Virginia Woolf once wrote that human nature suddenly changed in the year 1912. Such things tend to be at the whim of later generations of critics, but there’s no doubt that the idea of an acceptable form of public entertainment underwent a rude shock in the years just before the outbreak of World War I. ...
In the early 1900’s, Reconstruction studies (excluding the work of W.E.B. DuBois) approved quick restoration of states, Andrew Johnson’s strict constitutionalism, and white Southerners’ revolt against military and Republican rule (which consisted of carpetbaggers, scalawags, and freedmen). These studies—named the “Dunning School” for historian William A. Dunning, whose students applied his interpretation to individual Southern...
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...
I. OTHER GODS AND IMAGES The Ten Commandments, and many other biblical texts, used to be for me pious, nondescript, and rather gratuitous statements. That was youth. With maturity and age, they began to reveal (the right word) an immeasurable depth of wisdom, whose exploration occupied the life of a Pascal and a Chesterton. Our...
To prepare for a pandemic, start by curbing the government's power over your decisions.
One New Age guru still on a roll is Rabbi Sherwin Wine. Twenty-three years ago, before his rise, he was an unbelieving rabbi without a congregation. Known for his willingness to violate Talmudic law by marrying Jews to gentiles, this fall Wine became co-chairperson of the International Federation of Secular Humanistic Jews. At the Birmingham...
“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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
People don’t like it when you mess with their heritage. The Bolsheviks tried to destroy Russian nationalism, in particular massacring Russian Orthodox bishops, priests and nuns. But when Hitler invaded, not enough Russians fought for Marx, Lenin and dialectical materialism. So Stalin allowed Metropolitan Bishop Sergius to be elected patriarch, brought some of the surviving...
Poll after poll shows that the vast majority of Americans want stricter controls on immigration. Yet it should be clear that our ruling class is not going to impose stricter controls or even enforce its own laws. What does this mean? The first thing to note is that immigrants, as such, are not the problem....
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...
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...
Whenever the president of the Rockford Institute and I chat about movies, the conversation always runs into the brick wall of the Japanese cinema. I especially like the films of one of its acknowledged masters, Yasujiro Ozu, whose later movies are his best-known in the West, especially Tokyo Story (1953) and Floating Weeds (1959). “Ach,...
“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...
There’s a delicious irony in the leftist media’s calls for Justice Samuel Alito to control his wife’s political expression.
Among the many haunting and piteous images from the Inferno of Dante is this one. The travelers, in Canto XIII, enter a pathless wood. Dante, on Virgil’s coaching, snaps a twig from a thorn tree. The tree yelps in pain, and no wonder. The tree is the transmuted personage of a formerly great Florentine, Pier...
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...
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 ...
“Apologize for what? Cory should apologize. He knows better. There’s not a racist bone in my body.” Thus did a stung Joe Biden answer rival Cory Booker’s demand he apologize for telling contributors, in a southern drawl, “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland, He never called me ‘boy.’ He always called me...
I have often complained that the self-styled progressive of our time never tells us where he wants to go. Progress implies a destination, and rest—sweet and blessed rest—once you have arrived. But that would imply a natural human order to return to, or to attain. And then what? Then what? The progressive sweats. He...
There's reason to believe the recent mass shooting in Nashville was an ideologically motivated anti-Christian hate crime, an act of domestic terrorism.