“Drain the swamp!” Donald Trump declared in every campaign speech of 2016. He meant, of course, the Swamp of Washington, D.C., home of the labyrinthine network of centralized bureaucracies that control our lives. It’s also called the Deep State and the Permanent Bureaucracy. Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as well as the two Republican...
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Of Sycophants and Soliloquies
For those of us here in Rockford, Illinois, 200 miles (give or take) northwest of South Bend, Indiana, President Barack Obama’s commencement address at the University of Notre Dame on May 17 provoked a sense of déjà vu. For it was on that same date six years ago that another commencement address on a controversial...
Defense of Gay Marriage Act
At 11:30 a.m. on October 10, the Connecticut State Supreme Court legalized “gay marriage,” making Connecticut the third state, behind Massachusetts and California, to sanction the practice. In a 4-3 ruling that cannot be appealed, because it is based on an interpretation of the state constitution, Justice Richard N. Palmer opined for the narrow majority...
Under Circe’s Spell
Love and Friendship Produced by Westerly Films Written and directed by Whit Stillman from Jane Austen’s Lady Susan Distributed by Roadside Attractions and Amazon Studios Whit Stillman’s new film, Love and Friendship, is an adaptation of Jane Austen’s epistolary novella Lady Susan, an early and somewhat unfinished work she wrote when she was all of...
Liberals Love the Minimum Wage—Though It Hurts People Liberals Love
A much-touted study on the effects of minimum wage is really a study in confirmation bias.
Literature and Freedom
Nothing has pushed forward cultural life as much as the invention of printing, nor has anything contributed more to its democratization. From Gutenberg’s time until today, the book has been the best propeller and depository of knowledge, as well as an irreplaceable source of pleasure. However, to many, its future is uncertain. I recall a...
A Close Encounter With the Enemy
In the early hours of the following morning, well after closing time, the Taberna Aztlán exploded in flames and burned to its concrete foundation in ninety minutes. Héctor learned of the disaster shortly before 6 A.M. when AveMaría shook her husband awake to give him the appalling news. (Since the attack on the machine shed...
Farewell, Professor
Prof. William J. Quirk taught at the University of South Carolina School of Law for 44 years. In that capacity, he influenced and encouraged hundreds of students. A favorite class was his survey of the Constitution. Guided by Professor Quirk, students contemplated and discussed such matters as the Articles of Confederation, the Treaty of Paris,...
Mr. Brown Goes to Washington
As I write, the pundits are all atwitter over the stunning upset pulled off by Scott Brown, the “independent” Republican who made mincemeat out of former state attorney general Martha Coakley in the race to fill the Massachusetts “Kennedy seat” in the U.S. Senate. Democrats are lashing out at each other over their loss, with...
The Reentry of Nature Ecological Restoration
Not long ago I participated in a delightful and in some ways unusual nature outing at a place called Poplar Creek, one of the forest preserves that make up an extensive system of green spaces in Chicago and its suburbs. For three or four hours some fifty of us cut and piled brush, planted seeds,...
Flannery O’Connor and Shadows of Evil
O’Connor understood the complicated relationship between tragedy and joy was related to the inevitable confrontation of good and evil. Freedom is embracing the metaphysical surrender to the knowledge that we are not the beginning or even the end of things.
What a Drag
Drag Me to Hell Produced by Buckaroo Entertainment Directed by Sam Raimi Screenplay by Sam and Ivan Raimi Distributed by Universal Pictures Some reviewers have hailed Drag Me to Hell as an hilariously ghoulish comedy. I can’t think why. Oddly enough, it takes calculating discipline to make a comedy genuinely hilarious, and that is...
Terms of Revilement
Making a Killing, which may be the most influential anti-gun book ever written, could not have been better timed to the current wave of lawsuits against gun companies, since many of the legal claims closely resemble the charges that Tom Diaz makes against the gun industry. Moreover, the book will likely help shape public opinion...
Accidents & Ignorance
A. J. P. Taylor: A Personal History; Atheneum; New York. With the exception of Edward Gibbon, there have been few great historians who have written their autobiographies. The reason for this should be fairly clear. While some historians, such as Macaulay or Mommsen, led interesting lives, and some, such as Lewis Namier, are interesting...
Our Phildickian World
Sometime during the last decade, the Philip K. Dick cult came out from underground. Those of us who spent the 1980’s trying to explain our affection for this pulp writer no one else had heard of, this author of surreal science fictions and bleak realistic novels, have watched both pop culture and the academy discover...
A Silly Kind of Holiday
Father’s Day has always seemed to me a silly kind of holiday. It’s a time to give Dad something he doesn’t need, like another splashy necktie, or, what’s worse, something he does need—like an electric staple gun that takes away his last excuse for not rescreening the porch. Until recently, at least, fathers did not...
Antecedents
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead Produced by Michael Brandman and Emanuel Azenberg Written and directed by Tom Stoppard Released by Cinecom Scenes From a Mall Produced and directed by Paul Mazursky Written by Roger L. Simon and Mr. Mazursky Released by Buena Vista Pictures It is usually a reliable rule that when moviemakers decide to...
All About Trump
Today, all books by liberals really are about President Trump. Such is Playing With Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics, by MSNBC far-left fake-news host Lawrence O’Donnell. This book’s proxy is Richard Nixon and his 1968 victory for president against Aunt Blabby, a.k.a. Hubert Horatio Humphrey. For Nixon, Humphrey, South Vietnam,...
Manufacturing Our Future
Last month, I discussed what the future of manufacturing in the United States will have to be, if manufacturing in the United States is to have a future; this month, I can say with some certainty that I have seen the future of manufacturing, and it is here in Rockford. Before you laugh and turn...
Sex Scandal du Jour
Remember Gwen Dreyer? No, of course not. She was the poor, unfortunate midshipman who was “chained to a urinal” at the United States Naval Academy in the winter of 1990. The incident came at the end of a long day of snowball fights and practical jokes, in which Ms. Dreyer had willingly taken part. Sometime...
Su Rancho Es Mi Rancho
Reading the newspapers, I wonder which straw will break the camel’s back when it comes to illegal immigration. What will finally cause Americans to rise up and take back their country? The tenth family killed by an illegal-alien drunk driver? The 100th housewife butchered by an illegal-alien murderer? Or the next lawsuit that awards damages...
Tyranny in Our Time
From the December 2013 issue of Chronicles. There is a saying among jurists that hard cases make bad law. Similarly, every book critic knows that the best books make for hard reviewing. Faced with a truly fine work, the reviewer is tempted simply to reproduce the author’s thesis in abbreviation, while scattering as many of...
James Burnham, R.I.P.
He was a controversialist. As a literary critic he argued with T.S. Eliot, and as a Trotskyist he quarreled with Trotsky himself. Almost alone among the ex-Communists, he made the full journey to a conservative world view, and before his death he returned to the Catholic faith. He wrote many books, some of which will...
Who Wants to Be House Speaker?
Weakening House committees had the paradoxical effect of concentrating power in leadership and making the speaker more important in setting the majority’s policy direction—which only turned the speaker into the focus of every member’s discontent and created stronger opposition to him within the party.
Beyond the “Strategic Partnership”
The E.U.-Russia Centre Conference, Munich, September 15, 2011 The “Strategic Partnership” between Berlin and Moscow is usually understood in the English-speaking world in somewhat simplified terms: Russian energy meets German technology with a lot of high-minded political rhetoric on top. In the meantime, the received wisdom goes, Germany remains firmly anchored in the Euro-Atlantic framework...
Waste of Money
An Empty Shell Game A.P. Foulkes: Literature and Propaganda; Methuen; New York. The cover of Literature and Propaganda, the proverbial warning notwithstanding is very telling about the book’s contents and about how perverse the image of America is in the offices of Methuen. Indeed, the cover makes an impression with such a magnitude of force...
Out With the Old
My grandfather has congestive heart failure. I hate to say it, but I probably won’t see him this time next year. “Gramp,” as I’ve called him since I can remember, taught me how to shoot and hunt, taught me how to change the oil, taught me how to drive a truck, taught me how to...
NATO, R.I.P.
At the European Union summit in Nice last December France initiated plans for a new European military structure. While the stated purpose of the emerging 15-member alliance is to complement NATO rather than replace it, there is growing concern in Washington that the ultimate objective of French and German strategic planners is to sever the...
Election Suspense
Where then shall Hope and Fear their Objects find? Must dull Suspence corrupt the stagnant Mind? —Samuel Johnson, “The Vanity of Human Wishes” At the time of writing in late August, the coming U.S. election is hard to call, so that dull Suspence must indeed prevail for a few more weeks. One need not let...
Michelle Obama Isn’t Running for President
Dropping Michelle Obama into the presidential race as the ultimate Hail Mary pass may be a fun gossip item, but the important thing to remember is that there’s nothing in it for her.
Crowned With Thorns and Glory
[Jefferson Davis: Unconquerable Heart, by Felicity Allen (Columbia: University of Missouri Press) 808 pp., $34.95] “As the tug bore him away from the ship, he stood with bared head between the files of undersized German and other foreign soldiers on either side of him, and as we looked, as we thought, our last upon his...
Boozing With Papa
Fifty-four years ago this month, dizzy with happiness at having been freed from the jail that was boarding school, I ventured down New York’s 5th Avenue looking for fun and adventure. I knew a place called El Borracho, Spanish for “the drunkard,” where my parents used to dine. The owner was an agreeable Catalan who...
On Beslan
Srdja Trifkovic’s conclusion to his piece on the Beslan tragedy (“After Beslan,” The American Interest, November) hits the mark precisely. Orthodox Christians have had it proved to them over and over again that the West will prefer the friendship of the Mohammedan to ours, unless we volunteer to forsake our convictions and identity to become...
Been There, Done That
It is a beautiful April evening in Hico, Texas. My wife and I are having dinner with my in-laws, and I am eyeballing a statue of Billy the Kid across the street from Lilly’s Restaurant. Hico, you see, was the home of “Brushy Bill” Roberts, widely believed around these parts to have been the notorious...
Of Opposite Minds: Maistre and Mill
Joseph de Maistre, a brilliant wordsmith, was an elegant defender of the old order, while John Stuart Mill, in his plodding prose, helped to usher in welfare democracy and the modern administrative state.