In the late 1980’s, I predicted that by the end of the century, which is also the end of the millennium, “The Soviet Union, or perhaps by that time, Russia, would be Christian, and the United States would be pagan.” The first, hesitant part of that prophecy, Russia, has already been fulfilled. And while Russia...
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What ‘Black’ Really Means to the Left
Kamala Harris’s ancestry matters less to the left in defining her than does Harris’s consistently woke politics which, for them, is part and parcel of black identity.
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Play It Again, Plum!
“It has been well said of Bertram Wooster that though he may sink onto rustic benches and for a while give the impression of being licked into a custard, the old spirit will come surging back sooner or later.” —P.G. Wodehouse, The Mating Season Robert McCrum demurs from critical comparisons of P.G. Wodehouse with the...
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Keeping Taxes Highest
A Stalinist show trial was held on May 21 by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. Their aim was to investigate “how individual and corporate taxpayers are shifting billions of dollars offshore to avoid U.S. taxes.” In the dock that day, Apple CEO Tim Cook found...
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Remembering Donald Davidson
Lewis P. Simpson, in his memorable preface to The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate, evoked Thomas Carlyle’s description of Robert Burns to hail Davidson’s own achievement. Burns, wrote Carlyle, was a “piece of right Saxon stuff: strong as the Harz-rock, rooted in the depths of the world;—rock, yet with wells of living...
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Don’t Mess With the Texas Constitution
The constitution of the state of Texas, my friends, is not what you carry to the beach for light summer reading. Light? Not at 90,000 words and 377 amendments. As Dr. Johnson said of Paradise Lost, “No man ever wished it longer.” Yet longer it gets, election year by election year, as the sovereign voters...
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Whither the Republic?
This month, we shall have an answer to an all-important question: Which arm of our bipartisan party state will occupy the White House for the next four years? This is an issue second in importance only to such urgent American questions as “When will Britney Spears be allowed to see her kids?” “How much weight...
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Chauvin, Houston, and Strange Racial Justice
“Justice” in America today is an arrangement where the living and dead are judged to be guilty or innocent on the basis of race.
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The Strongmen Straw Man
Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum Doubleday 224 pp., $25.00 Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present by Ruth Ben-Ghiat W. W. Norton & Company 384 pp., $28.95 For some among the chattering classes, the electoral defeat of Donald Trump in November must have been a mixed blessing, though they doubtless could...
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Are Democrats Ceding the Center to Trump?
Since the Democratic debates in June, the tide seems to have receded for the party and its presidential hopefuls. In new polls, only Joe Biden leads President Donald Trump comfortably. The other top-tier candidates—Sens. Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, and Mayor Pete Buttigieg—are running even with Trump, a measurable drop. A Washington Post-ABC...
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Pretenders
Revolutionary Road Produced and distributed by Dreamworks and BBC Films Directed by Sam Mendes Screenplay by Justin Haythe from Richard Yates’ novel The Lemon Tree Produced by Eran Riklis Productions and Heimatfilm Directed by Eran Riklis Screenplay by Suha Arraf Distributed by IFC Films British director Sam Mendes has turned Richard Yates’ 1961 novel,...
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A Modern Prophet
Last week, Catholic World Report ran an article by regular Chronicles contributor Jerry Salyer on Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The piece is well worth reading. Solzhenitsyn’s name will forever be linked to his rigorous denunciation of the evils of Communism. After Solzhenitsyn, no morally responsible person could ignore the tens of millions murdered by Communists, or pretend...
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‘Remember Us’: How to Fight Media Bombholing
A victim of media “bombholing” explains how the media drive their ratings and profits by publishing an unending series of wild, unsubstantiated stories, never stopping to correct the ones that came before.
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The Rules of Debate No Longer Work
Gun rights activist Dana Loesch recently complained that she had been denied the right to respond to her critics on Twitter, according to a story reported in the New York Post. Unlike her adversaries, who are free to swing away at her, Loesch is not allowed to use Twitter’s fact-checking platform to correct their misstatements. Loesch...
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The Heart of Darkness
When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, over 58,000 Americans had lost their lives over the course of almost 20 years. Whatever one may think of the justice or prudence of the U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, only the most callous of souls regards that loss of life with complete ...
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Reassessing the Legacy of George Wallace
There was a very odd occurrence in the “Cradle of the Confederacy” in July 1987: Presidential aspirant and civil rights activist Jesse Jackson paid a visit to the Montgomery, Alabama, home of George Corley Wallace. It had been 126 years since Jefferson Davis stood on the steps of the Alabama capitol and been sworn in...
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Imagination Deficit
Dear Mr. Romney: In spite of the Herculean labors of their spin doctors, politicians on the stump often say stupid things in the heat of the moment, and you are probably right to resent the unfairness of journalists who exaggerate the importance of such mundane stupidities. But rarely are politicians’ unconsidered remarks so remarkably unconsidered...
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Why Are the Nutjobs Trying to Kill Political Opponents All Left-Wingers?
The Left has had a violent streak going back at least as far as Karl Marx's calls for a global revolution of the proletariat—and the French Revolution even before that.
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Empire of the West
A critique of the destinarian political philosophy of Francis Parker Yockey.
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Social Security’s War on Families: A Current Crisis and a Coming Disaster
The war in Iraq has left many casualties; Social Security reform is one of them. For so long, Democrats surrounded the issue with demagoguery. And now that the Democrats control Capitol Hill, Republicans seem unwilling to acknowledge, let alone confront, Social Security’s impending financial collapse. And yet the need to confront the problem has never...
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Nado alert! Nado alert!
“Nado alert! Nado alert!” people were screaming about 1 am outside my room at Michaels Barracks in Hoechst, West Germany, a couple of days after I was posted there on Sept. 12, 1979. My roommate said it likely was just a drill, sending us out in our jeeps and trucks into the Fulda Gap to...
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Images, images, ima…
The Work of Atget: The Ancient Re gime; The Museum of Modern Art; New York. Bill Harris: New York at Night; Stewart, Tabori & Chang; New York. Robert Freson: The Taste of France; Stewart, Tabori & Chang; New York. Ansel Adams: Examples; New York Graphic Society/Little, Brown; Boston. William Manchester: One Brief Shining Moment: Remembering...
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The Republican Party’s Welfare Queens
Republicans routinely portray themselves as fiscal guardians. In truth, they, like the Democrats, are irresponsible wastrels. Outlays are up by one third under President George W. Bush, making him the biggest spender since Lyndon B. Johnson. As the Cato Institute’s Stephen Slivinski observes, “Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still...
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On Liberal Education
My definition of liberal education as the education of liberals no longer sounds provocative. Liberalism, having failed and failed disastrously in all its political experiments from church disestablishment to women’s suffrage to food stamps, still reigns triumphant, with hardly a rival, in the empty corridors of the Western mind. How failed? The church is disestablished,...
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What We Are Reading: February 2024
Short reviews of The Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell, and How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, by Batya Ungar-Sargon.
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Their America, and Ours.
“Meet you at Peace Cross.” In northwest D.C. in the 1950s, that was an often-heard comment among high schoolers headed for Ocean City. The Peace Cross, in Bladensburg, Maryland, was a 40-feet concrete memorial to the 49 sons of Prince George’s County lost in the Great War. Paid for by county families and the American...
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Turning Bad Into Good
In 1983 I noted in Just and Painful: A Case for the Corporal Punishment of Criminals that there were approximately 315,000 individuals incarcerated in federal and state prisons, plus some 158,000 persons in jails of various kinds. The annual cost of this incarceration was estimated then to be $20,000 per inmate, amounting to an annual...
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Kennedy v. Kennedy
On the last day of August, Judge Richard J. Leon of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia found for March for Life in its suit against the Department of Health and Human Services, among other agencies. March for Life is a secular, nonprofit organization, founded after Roe v. Wade, that opposes abortion...
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Remembering the Twenty-Teens
Decades provide a useful, if not infallible, structure for organizing and understanding our historical experience. However frayed and disputed their limits, terms like “the twenties,” or “the eighties” each conjure their particular images and memories. Whatever we call the decade we have just completed—the twenty-teens?—it is one with landmarks arguably as important as any in...
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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 ...
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It’s a Wonderful Racket
Q magazine once regularly asked rock musicians the question, “How do you react when you see a nun?” Bryan Adams replied that he had the highest respect for nuns and thus reacted accordingly. He added that he had recently learned that nuns no longer wore their traditional habits, and that he was distressed by this change. ...
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The Kindness of Strangers
“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” —Blanche DuBois, A Streetcar Named Desire Sometimes, enlightenment, like confusion, can come from an unexpected source. Take the comedian, George Carlin, for example. I think that his broadcasting of dirty words is a bit less than profound, as is his hostility toward most civilized conventions; some...
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Busing and Its Consequences
Ten years ago, federal district judge Leonard B. Sand ordered the city of Yonkers, New York, to integrate its public schools. Sand accused the city of 40 years of discrimination by concentrating public housing projects in southwest Yonkers. To comply with Sand’s ruling, many neighborhood schools closed their doors as busing became de rigueur. Parents...
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The Wolf Week in Review: The Great Political Christian Contest
Another week has come and gone, and here are some highlights and cultural trends. Celebrity Apprentices Here’s a lede you didn’t imagine five years ago: The Pope and Donald Trump are engaged in a public feud over illegal immigration. Trump is “not Christian,” says the pontiff. This latest brouhaha comes with Pope Francis’s visit to...
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Will Bishops Deny Biden Communion?
Last week, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops voted 168-55, more than 3-1, to provide new guidance for receiving Holy Communion. Behind the decision? Bishops’ alarm that the public religious practice of President Joe Biden is conveying a heretical message to the faithful and the nation. At Sunday Mass, Biden regularly receives Communion. Yet he...
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Character and Nuclear Anxiety
American society is widely recognized as youth-oriented, but it has been a long time since any authoritative source has given us really good news about the young. Recent reports from the American Medical Association, the National Research Council, and the Council of Physical Fitness have been especially discouraging: the young exercise too little, eat too...
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The Ideological Temptation of the Media
There have been, in recent decades, two focal points around which radical, utopian ideologies could concentrate. As a result, these two focuses-labor unions and youth-were surrounded by a veritable cult, and they acquired power, both political and cultural, even though the second of the two focuses was not, as such, organized, let alone structured. Power...
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Bait and Switch
According to pious American folklore, there was in 1787 a “Miracle at Philadelphia” in which demigod Founding Fathers gathered and gave the world the “U.S. Constitution”; thereby, as chanted by former Chief Justice Burger in a juvenile bicentennial panegyric, they changed human history forever—and got rid of the awful Articles of Confederation, which stood in...
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DFL, R.I.P.
Tuesday, November 5, 2002, will be remembered as the day that the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party died. On Election Day, the Republicans swept most of the state’s constitutional offices and elected Norm Coleman to the U.S. Senate, Tim Pawlenty to the governorship, and John Klein to the U.S. Congress. The GOP also gained seats in the...
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The Politics of Rape
When an acquitted William Kennedy Smith emerged from the Florida courtroom last December declaring his faith in the system, a viewer could only query, “Why?” There stood a young man who was indicted for rape and forced to spend over one million dollars defending himself on the basis of the word of one person, the...
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Will the Oligarchs Kill Trump?
Narrow victories in the Kentucky caucuses and the Louisiana primary, the largest states decided on Saturday, have moved Donald Trump one step nearer to the nomination. Primaries in Michigan, Mississippi and Idaho on March 8, and in Florida, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina on March 15, may prove decisive. If Marco Rubio does not...
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Emerging Majority?
It is reported that when British General Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown, thus effectively ending the War of Independence, his regimental band played a tune called “The World Turned Upside Down.” As we approach the end of the second Christian millennium, one begins to wonder if the band was not just a bit...
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Erosion of Democracy
Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the famous decision of the Warren Court which held that racial segregation in the state public schools violated the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of the “equal protection” of the laws, turns 50 on May 17, 2004. The inevitable celebrations of the decision in the nation’s law reviews and popular media...
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The Whiskey Boys and Their Fight
My grandfather spent most of his days underground, as a cutter in his cousin’s coal mine in Imperial, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh. At night, he would arrive home looking like he had been through an explosion. Outside the kitchen door, my grandmother kept a large metal tub full of water to soak the coal dust off...
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The I-Word
Your Excellency: This past May, I attended commencement ceremonies at Christendom College, where James, the oldest son of my oldest friend, was graduating with a degree in philosophy. Some of our fellow countrymen would declare such a degree about as useful as the dresses once modeled by Twiggy. (Do you remember Twiggy, Bishop? She was...
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Color Me Kweisi
For a quick fix on how a particular organization sees itself and its purposes, inspect its official name, especially if the organization dates from a more forthright and transparent time, when assorted reformers wore their hearts on their letterheads. The purpose, the raison d’être, of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded...
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Breaking the Antaean Bond
Corn planting season has arrived again, and the soil is moving. Hot spring winds that have foresters on red alert are picking up the earth, clay fractions first, and sending it off. This gale mocks the fine print don’ts on the 50-pound sacks of rootworm pesticide. It too is blowing in the wind. No way...
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Il Whig in Italia
Some years ago I was interviewed by a reporter for Corriere della Sera, Italy’s most prestigious newspaper. He had heard that I was a follower of Umberto Bossi, leader of the secessionist Lega Nord, and he wanted to know what plans I had for breaking up the United States. After disclaiming any secessionist political agenda,...
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The Paleoconservative Imagination
In January 1996, Norman Podhoretz delivered a self-congratulatory eulogy for neoconservatism in a lecture before the American Enterprise Institute. In addition to giving himself and his cohorts credit for the recent successes of the American right, Podhoretz boasted that “thanks to the influence of neoconservatism on the conservative movement in general, the philistine indifference to...
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Who’s In Charge Here?
America, in case you haven’t noticed, is lost in the throes of celebrating the writing of its Constitution, which is now two centuries old. The somewhat labored efforts to fix public attention on the historic document are largely the work of former Chief Justice Warren Burger and his own private bureaucracy in the Commission on...