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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The Goyim Aren’t Always Wrong
A small people with a distinctive religion, the Jews throughout history have tried to avoid imitating the Gentiles (that is, everybody else), lest assimilation destroy the faith and the group that embodies it. In fact, Scripture’s passionate denunciation of idolatry led the ancient rabbis, “our sages of blessed memory,” to condemn certain practices under the...
Decline and Fall
I am very far from original in noticing similarities in the histories of Rome and America—republics that became empires. The decline and fall of the former has often been thought to foretell the fate of the latter. A Frenchman some years ago wrote a fairly convincing book called The Coming Caesars. Such analogies are interesting...
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,...
New Politics in Old Virginia
It took 114 years, but by 2000, Virginia had become a Republican state. What brought about such a great change in the Old Dominion? Let’s take a look back. Reconstruction was the low point of Virginia history. In 1865, a defeated and gutted state lost not only its cities, towns, farms, and one third of...
It’s Time to Change Our Constitution
Conservative reluctance to change the Constitution cedes ground to the left and allows the progressive drift of the nation.
Abortion’s Triple Crown
For four decades now, pro-life voters have been wedded to the national Republican Party by the vows of politicians whose actions, upon election, have proved that they had no intention ever of fulfilling them. Every two or four or six years, they would swear to defend the lives of the unborn, and then, after taking...
Uncle Sam’s Harem II
Christian Marriage Christianity, although it did not overturn the basic pagan view of marriage, strengthened and disciplined the institution. Christian marriage is as much a break with Jewish traditions as with the somewhat easy-going pagan customs of the Empire. Polygamy had been taken for granted in the OT, and even an ...
The Republicans and Abortion
Lucy just pulled the football away from Charlie Brown again. In the budget compromise that averted a government shutdown, it was the Republicans not the Democrats who blinked on the funding of Planned Parenthood, and it was the pro-lifers who look to the GOP and not the abortion supporters who look to the Democrats...
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.
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 term,...
God, Man, and Family
The first chapter of the Bible forms the basis of the Christian understanding of the nature and dignity of man—and woman: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27). The next verse contains the first command given to the...
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.
Of Death and Diapers
Our Endangered Children: Growing Up in a Changing World by Vance Packard; Little, Brown; Boston. Who Will Take the Children? A New Custody Option for Divorcing Mothers—and Fathers by Susan Meyers and Joan Lakin; Bobbs-Merrill; Indianapolis. Secular liberalism is the supreme doctrine of the sovereign self. As such, its failures are particularly obvious at the...
America: A Land of Ceaseless Conflict
When Amy Coney Barrett was nominated to a judgeship on the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2017, Sen. Dianne Feinstein was taken aback by the Notre Dame law professor’s Catholic convictions about the right to life. “Professor,” said Feinstein, “when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within...
The Supremes and the NRA
I agree entirely with Aaron Wolf both on the constitutional argument but also on the deeper political question of the centralization of power. The problem is that we are all tempted to use the court when it suits our purpose, and in this case if I lived in Chicago I'd ...
Getting Naked in the Public Square
In 1984, Richard John Neuhaus, then still a Lutheran pastor, published The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America. The book was, as they say, an “immediate sensation,” in no small part because Neuhaus’s central claim—that religious voices were being forced out of political debate by the federal courts’ mistaken emphasis on the separation...
The Pilate Option?
British statesman Enoch Powell began his most famous speech with this observation: “The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.” I thought of Powell’s cogent dictum often over the last week or so, as Rod Dreher (and others) have been loudly insisting that Trump’s moral failings prevent Christians from voting for him,...
Attacking Kamala Harris as the DEI Candidate for President is Fair Game
Suggestions that Republicans cease noting the obvious about Kamala Harris being the DEI candidate for president are rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the American electorate.
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...
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...
Remembering Robert A. Taft
In a dynamic time of U.S. history, Robert A. Taft was a deeply principled politician, courageously speaking out against FDR's New Deal, U.S. involvement in WWII, the Nuremberg Trials, and the formation of NATO.
Republicans Bet the Farm
President Trump, every Republican senator, and the GOP majority in Speaker Paul Ryan’s House just put the future of their party on the line. By enacting the largest tax cut since the Reagan administration, the heart of which is cutting the corporate rate from 35 to 21 percent, Republicans have boldly bet the farm. They...
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.
Taking Back the Culture
By the time you read this, “the most important election of our lifetime” will be headed for the history books. If the last six most important elections of our lifetime are any indication, however, we will once again have a chance to vote in the most important election of our lifetime in 2020. Or perhaps...
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,...
The Horrible Politics of “Equality for All”
Equality is a pernicious and dangerous political policy, but that’s exactly what President Obama declared in full voice in his Second Inaugural Address in January as the cause and preoccupation of his administration for the next four years. Of course equality in the abstract is meaningless. It becomes concrete only when we figure out what...
Tan, Rested, and Ready
“I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God.” The inauguration of the first black president of the United States on January...
Society Precedes Government: Two Counterrevolutions
A successful War of Independence established 13 free and independent states in North America in 1783. This was followed, unfortunately for us, by the French Revolution and then by the 19th century, preeminently a time of violent government centralization. Subsequent events, as well as nationalist emotion and propaganda, have seriously damaged our ability to see...
A Masque of State–and Its Parody
“Soft Power” is real power. The State Banquet at Buckingham Palace earlier this month showed royals and the President at their best, with an unstated but perfectly clear implication: no other country can do this. It were well to keep on good terms with the people who can put on a show like this. Everyone was at the top of their form: Trump behaved impeccably, and...
Honor to Whom Honor
“Render to all what is due them,” writes Saint Paul, “Tax to whom tax is due, custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor” (Romans 13:7, NASB). When a zealous Christian offered to help Mark Twain understand the difficult things in the Bible, Twain said something like this: “It is not...
“The One”
Barack Obama has risen to the highest office in the land on a thin résumé—a pair of Ivy League degrees, some time spent as a “community organizer,” and short periods in the Illinois legislature and the U.S. Senate. And then there are the books. The President is the author of the best-selling Audacity of Hope...
On Enumerated Powers
My thanks to Stephen B. Presser for his review (“Sacred Texts ’98,” October) of my book Reclaiming the American Revolution. I certainly appreciate such a distinguished legal historian finding the work to merit his attention. One issue raised in Professor Presser’s review is the constitutionality of the Sedition Act (which made criticism of the national...
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,...
A Focused Trump Can Still Pull It Out
If Donald Trump loses the election, history will attribute his defeat to a pandemic that killed 200,000 Americans during his reelection campaign, and a historic depression deliberately induced to put the economy in a coma as the nation suffered through that pandemic. But despite the worst hand dealt a sitting president since Herbert Hoover in...
Sophistory
From the September 2015 issue of Chronicles. Two thousand fifteen was the year that we Americans broke history. By “breaking history,” I do not mean something like “breaking news,” or “breaking records,” or even “breaking the Internet” (though the Internet certainly played a role). Yes, the “historic moments” of the Summer of #LoveWins and #HateLoses—the...
Judge Roberts
As the U.S. Senate prepares to consider President George W. Bush’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts, there seems to be a certain ambiguity about Judge Roberts’ position on Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that made abortion-on-demand the “law of the land.” On the one hand, he is on record as saying...
Music, Technology, and Psychological Warfare
“No change can be made in styles of music without affecting the most important conventions of society. So Damon declares and I agree.” —Plato, Republic The late Sam Shapiro used to tell a story about two Englishmen in China who wanted to demonstrate the superiority of their culture to one of the mandarins they had...
Fueling Culture Wars
“Discrimination” is one of today’s buzzwords, and laws and regulations prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation are fueling some of the sharpest skirmishes within America’s culture wars. A New Jersey Supreme Court ruling against the Boy Scouts’ ban on homosexual Scout leaders has gained the most publicity of late. But a public feud between one...
Odysseys
O Brother, Where Art Thou? Produced by Buena Vista Pictures and Touchstone Pictures Directed by Joel Coen Screenplay by Ethan Coen with help from Homer Released by Buena Vista Pictures All the Pretty Horses Produced by Columbia Pictures and Miramax Films Directed by Billy Bob Thornton Screenplay by Ted Tally from a novel by Cormac...
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...
Dreams of My Daughters
President Barack Obama surprised even battle-hardened pro-life Americans with his official remarks on the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that has, since 1973, littered garbage dumps across America with the corpses of 50 million babies, 32 percent of them African-American. In a White House press ...
Glorified on TV
Bounty hunters with a license to kill are glorified on television every week. The reality is uglier and more terrifying than most of us imagine. In Phoenix, a group of heavily armed bounty hunters, wearing ski-masks and body armor, sledgehammered their way through the front door of a private residence, tied up a mother, and...
Gods of Inclusion
Although America remains overwhelmingly Christian in affiliation (if not necessarily in practice), the connoisseurs of multiculturalism like to pretend otherwise—often rather insistently. Public events involving religion must acknowledge Zoroaster and Zeus as much as Moses and Jesus. Multiculturalists find claims about the exclusive truth of any religion, particularly Christianity, especially offensive. They eagerly denounce as...
Tax Credits and Education Reform: No Simple Task
Over the last decade, the state of Arizona has made ground-breaking attempts at K-12 education reform. A 1997 law allowing taxpayers to steer a portion of their state income-tax liability toward a student at a private school now provides significant scholarship aid each year to 22,500 of the 54,000 students enrolled in private schools. With...
“Here Is Free Country”
During the 1930’s many Americans were enamored of the “grand and noble experiment” called the Soviet Union. Movie stars, clergymen, authors, intellectuals, columnists, and other American opinion makers traveled to the USSR and returned with glowing reports of the joys of socialism under Joseph Stalin. Many immigrants from the former Russian empire believed these stories...
John Yoo, Totalitarian
John Yoo stands outside the Anglo-American legal tradition. His views lead to self-incrimination wrung out of a victim by torture. He believes a president of the United States can initiate war, even on false pretenses, and then use the war he starts as cover for depriving U.S. citizens of habeas corpus protection. A U.S. attorney...
Hillary vs. The Donald
In a Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump race—which, the Beltway keening aside, seems the probable outcome of the primaries—what are the odds the GOP can take the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court? If Republicans can unite, not bad, not bad at all. Undeniably, Democrats open with a strong hand. There is that famed...
Why They Fought
The late Jean-François Revel wrote a once-famous book with the title Comment les démocraties finissent. Revel was not a stupid man, and I thoroughly enjoyed the afternoon “we tired the sun with talking,” but as a political philosopher, he was a prisoner of the leftist ideology that treats terms like equality and democracy as substantial...
Progressivism Versus Popular Sovereignty
Our 21st-century civilizational battles are those waged between the popular sovereigntists and the globalist progressives who cling to every would-be "crisis" or "emergency" in a desperate attempt to attain and weaponize ever-more power.