The American Revolution made democracy the preferred government for the modern age. The only trouble with American democracy is the constant redefinition of the word.
5280 search results for: The+Old+Right
POSTMODERN STALINISM
In his latest Sputnik Radio International interview Srdja Trifkovic discusses the Czech Republic government’s establishment of an information unit to counter what it says is pro-Russian, anti-Western and anti-NATO propaganda. “We want to get into every smartphone,” said Milan Chovanec, the Czech interior minister. Audio (unedited verbatim transcript) ST: It is strangely reminiscent of the...
The Bismarck Bypass
In their own quiet way, arts activities are as vigorous in the Midwest as anywhere else, a fact that few seem to realize—including Midwesterners. A year ago I was privileged to escort an emigre lecturer around my state for a week. At one evening’s talk he impetuously introduced me as “not one of your long-haired...
Put Money in Thy Purse
In 1967, The American Challenge by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber predicted that by the 1980’s American multinationals would have virtually bought up European industry. A decade later, there was another big scare—the Arabs were going to buy up all the US farmland (some farmers now wish this had been true, since the price of farmland subsequently collapsed)....
The Cold War Never Ended: U.S.-Russian Relations Since September 11
The recent invasion of South Ossetia by the U.S.-trained and -equipped Georgian army turned into a debacle for both Tbilisi and Washington. It also demonstrated that, for the U.S. government, the fall of the Soviet Union on December 8, 1991, did not mean the Cold War had ended. Washington simply shifted focus to the newly...
Exorcisms
“Truth rests with God alone, and a little bit with me.” —Yiddish Proverb Moshe Leshem ends Balaam’s Curse with a warning against the growing political power of the Israeli Orthodox rabbinate. By yielding to Orthodox authorities on educational and cultural matters, he says, Israelis are sacrificing their democratic patrimony. For the sake of Israeli democracy...
Clap & Trap
John Lukacs dissects the self-important claim that after the fall of the Soviet Union, world history would culminate in the inevitable acceptance of the American “liberal democratic” model worldwide.
La Plus Belle France
“If I were God and had two sons, the eldest would have to be God after me, but I’d make the second King of France.” —Ascribed to Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor The subtitle of this handsome illustrated volume, “A Historical Geography From the Revolution to the First World War,” usefully indicates the book’s historical dimension,...
Chief of Men
Of the making of books about Churchill there is no end. The latest is the best to date. Andrew Roberts reduces Churchill’s epic life to some 1,100 pages, offering a précis of the great events in which he was involved while drawing on 40 new sources. These include the private diaries of King George VI...
Free Trade and the Sacrificialists
Mainstream economics “experts” constantly attempt to lull the fears of anybody worried at seeing our manufacturing sector relocated abroad and our factories turned into ghost towns. They invoke Adam Smith’s arguments against mercantilism, arguing that it is a matter of free trade, that free trade always is the best policy, and insist that “protectionism” is...
The Aesthetics of Ruins
Archaeology is an academic discipline different from most others in that it attracts tourists. Most laboratories and library carrels don’t get busloads of vacationers dropping by in season, hoping for something entertaining to do between visits to the beach and forays into the bazaar. But the ruins of ancient temples—or stadia or theaters or whole...
God Bless America
Every president since Ronald Reagan has employed this invocation to punctuate the conclusion of a major speech. Coming from Reagan, it was sort of a tip of the hat to the official pieties of the World War II generation. In the mouth of Bill Clinton it was a blasphemy. Now, the phrase is on the...
A Silver Lining in the Election Debacle
In the eyes of much of the world the United States is now reduced to the status of a banana republic. The sordid spectacle of the past week—with the Democratic Party machine, the mainstream media, and social media barons forming a joint criminal enterprise to steal the presidential election—is reminiscent of similar ploys in the...
Trucking Upward
A Most Violent Year Produced by Before The Door Pictures and Washington Square Films Directed and written by J.C. Candor Distributed by A24 I went to J.C. Chandor’s new film A Most Violent Year with high expectations. His first, Margin Call, was simply the best cinematic examination of the 2008 banking crisis we’ve had to...
The American Criminal Injustice System
Ronald Cotton spent 11 years in prison because Jennifer Thompson provided eyewitness testimony that he was the person who raped her. On March 9, National Public Radio revisited the story. It turned out that Thompson was completely wrong. DNA evidence indicated that it was not Cotton but another man who had bragged about the rape....
The Oligarchy is Losing Its Grip, But Its Death Throes May Prove Fatal – to Us
“How American Media Serves as a Transmission Belt for Wars of Choice” Several weeks ago the mainstream media (MSM) gave saturation coverage to a picture of a little boy pulled from the rubble of Aleppo after his home and family were crushed in what was dubiously reported as a Russian airstrike. Promptly dubbed “Aleppo Boy,”...
A Charmless Conman
Con men are just not as classy as they used to be.
Barack Obama’s Fake Life Story, 20 Years Later
Twenty years ago this month, Barack Obama debuted before the Democratic National Convention with a fake life story that catapulted him to the presidency.
Exploiting Massacres to Raise Poll Ratings
It was two days of contrast that tell us about America 2019. In El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, following the mass murders of Saturday and Sunday morning, the local folks on camera—police, prosecutors, mayors, FBI and city officials—were nonpartisan, patient, polite and dignified in the unity and solemnity of their grief for their dead...
Return of the Kings
In a television appearance on January 7, President Emmanuel Macron of France, rather than addressing his compatriots exclusively, directed his remarks to his “fellow citizens of the E.U.,” saying, “2018 is a very special year, and I will need you this year.” Macron, a former investment banker and cabinet minister in the Socialist government of...
Jerks, The Individualist, Part II
Self-made millionaires set the tone for this class, and any scholar or man of letters who has had to raise money among men of wealth and influence will see himself in Eliot’s Prufrock. These poor fools have to listen, hour after hour, to Dives’ tales of victories on the golf course and of his...
Averting War With China
No foreign-policy issue facing the United States is more important than our longterm relationship with China, the most populous nation and the fourth-largest country on Earth. If we think in terms of uninterrupted statehood, China is the oldest nation-state, accustomed to taking the long view in foreign affairs. More significantly, if its present rate of...
Is the West Disintegrating?
On Jan. 1, 2002, the day that euro coins and banknotes entered into circulation, my column, “Say Goodbye to the Mother Continent,” contained this pessimistic prognosis: “This European superstate will not endure, but break apart on the barrier reef of nationalism. For when the hard times come, patriots will recapture control of their national destinies...
The Legacy of Sandra Dee
A first-wave Baby Boomer, I grew up the 1950’s and early 60’s. We teenage girls yearned to look like Sandra Dee (a.k.a. Alexandra Zuck), who passed away on February 20, 2005. If we couldn’t remake ourselves into the image of “Gidget,” then Mouseketeer-turned-beach-babe Annette Funicello, Carol Lynley (Blue Denim), Tuesday Weld (Rally Round the Flag, Boys!),...
Arguing With Apes
It was all the way back in 1860, when Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, participated in an open debate with T.H. Huxley, Darwin’s leading supporter, that at least for England the evolutionary debate was effectively decided once and for all. The bishop was judged to have lost the argument by virtue of his memorably snide...
Christopher Hitchens and the Days of Rage
On March 23, the Associated Press published a story dealing with sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Church to little fanfare. It noted that allegations of sexual abuse involving the Catholic Church in the United States dropped in 2009, and that most of the alleged offenders “are dead, no longer in the priesthood, removed from...
Common App Letter Showcases Politics as Educational Endgame
I taught seminars in Latin, history, composition, and literature to homeschool students in Asheville, North Carolina for more than 15 years, including Advanced Placement courses. As a result, students often asked me to write college recommendation letters for them, such as letters for the Common Application, or Common App as it is known. Though I...
Italy’s “Populist” Government
In Italy’s general election on March 4, two parties routinely derided by the corporate media as “populist” won almost 70 percent of the votes cast. A coalition led by Matteo Salvini’s League (Lega, formerly known as Lega Nord, LN) won 37 percent of the vote and a plurality of seats both in the Chamber of...
Pedestaled Power
Post-Christian beliefs permeate the culture. A stroll across the majority of university campuses, five minutes of channel surfing, the U.S. Supreme Court’s First Amendment case law, popular behavior and that of the American elite—these are proof positive that Christianity in the 21st century bears little resemblance to the Christianity of America’s not too distant past. ...
Light at the End of the Pandemic
When the COVID-19 pandemic began in March, most people never imagined the government-imposed restrictions would be as harsh and arbitrary as they have been, nor that the entire affair would drag on into the new year. Yet glimpses of hope are arriving this week, small pieces of good news we can joyfully carry throughout Advent...
Cupidity
A review of The Informant! (produced and distributed by Warner Brothers; directed by Steven Soderbergh; screenplay by Scott Z. Burns based on Kirt Eichenwald’s book) “Radix omnium malorum est cupiditas,” Chaucer’s pardoner warned his guilt-ridden audiences: The root of all evil is greed. Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! serves as a latter-day illustration of this admonition....
One Law for the Left…
For many weeks the press in Britain have been obsessed with the Jimmy Savile sex scandal, and it has many months to run. Savile, who died in 2011, aged 84, was a superstar entertainer for the BBC, and his programs attracted millions of viewers. The BBC needed Savile and his huge audiences to justify the...
Does the Pope Believe in Hell?
“Pope Declares No Hell?” So ran the riveting headline on the Drudge Report of Holy Thursday. Drudge quoted this exchange, published in La Repubblica, between Pope Francis and his atheist friend, journalist Eugenio Scalfari. Scalfari: “What about bad souls? Where are they punished?” Bad souls “are not punished,” Pope Francis is quoted, “those who do...
All That Jazz
Extraordinary writing about music doesn’t come along very often, as I have been forced to notice by my own experience—as have my own put-upon readers! But in the realm of classical music, I would suggest that Donald F. Tovey’s Essays in Musical Analysis is an imposing composition, a stunt of writing—the freight of its assertions...
Baseball and Marital Permanence
The game of baseball is centered on home: pitchers throw the ball over home plate, batters hit home runs, and fans root for the home team. Apparently, baseball’s preoccupation with home is no accident. According to a recent study by Denver psychologist Howard Markham, the average divorce rate in cities that have major league baseball...
A GOP Ultimatum to Vlad
With the party united, the odds are now at least even that the GOP will not only hold the House but also capture the Senate in November. But before traditional conservatives cheer that prospect, they might take a closer look at the foreign policy that a Republican Senate would seek to impose upon the nation....
The Blast of the Globalists
During the presidency of Barack Obama, George W. Bush generally avoided public criticism of his successor. Bush’s reticence could be read as a recognition of how calamitous his presidency had been, marked as it was by a disastrous war in Iraq that cost thousands of American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives, wasted...
Europe’s P.C. Fatwa
Sometimes I have to pinch myself to remember that Europe was the cradle of democracy. For today Europe seems to be sliding inexorably into a culture of control that would have made Stalin proud. Carol Thatcher, the daughter of the great Lady T, was recently banned from the BBC for referring to an unnamed tennis...
Drawing the Blairite Battle Lines
Speaking to a Labour Party conference in October, British Prime Minister Tony Blair made a vainglorious speech he may live to regret. His words heartened some of his more enthusiastic supporters, but shocked the shires and clarified the ideological battle lines. Even some naive neoconservatives, like Paul Johnson and Lady Thatcher, who had long maintained...
A Remembrance of Anne
Note to Readers: This is a condensed version of the eulogy delivered by Patrick Buchanan at St. Stephen Martyr in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 18. It was December of 1965 that I first looked on the friendly Irish face of Anne Volz, outside the law office of Richard M. Nixon. Anne ...
How the Historical Novel Has Changed!
Should one read Hervey Allen or Anne Rice? Why should the question be asked at all? Why might a discriminating reader today even think of picking up either Hervey Allen’s massive best-seller of 1933, Anthony Adverse, or The Feast of All Saints (1979) by Anne Rice, a hugely popular contemporary author? (Both are still available...
On the Via Descartes
I enjoyed Thomas Fleming’s article in praise of Aristotle (“Back to Reality,” Perspective, September). The best way to introduce our children to philosophy is to teach them Aristotle’s proof for the existence of God and his proof for human immortality, with some embellishment and clarification from the works of St. Thomas Aquinas, then to bring...
European Bushophobia
The announcement of President George W. Bush’s victory last November 3 was immediately followed by an outpouring of vitriol by a legion of European editorialists and op-ed columnists. The Michael Moore wannabes ranted and raved while the “analysts” whined and wailed. The tone of the former was set by a Fleet Street tabloid, the Daily...
Dirty, Dirty Dirt
“Dirt is dirtier than clean is clean,” observes one of John O’Hara’s characters—a history professor, I think—remarking on the human race’s observed partiality for darkness and grime in their news diet, rather than sweetness and light. Note the uproar over Brett Kavanaugh’s behavior—nice or nasty—at a high school party he attended at age 17, during...
Ho, Ho, Ho, and a Bottle of Fun
For the fifth time, Señor Pérez-Reverte, the Spanish novelist and international journalist, has presented “a novel of suspense” that adheres to his formula, and this may be his best yet, or at least his longest. The length of this ironic romance is significant; since the author works within a narrow scope and with a small...
Still At the Still Point
Thirty-one years ago, when I had aspirations as an up-and-coming critic in the Catholic press, I wrote an essay on T.S. Eliot that was published in the Jesuit weekly, America. I thought it daring to suggest that the major poet of our time was something less than the robust Christian figure which an effective propagation...
Rise of the Trumps
Come November, Donald Trump may go down in flames. Or he might continue to surprise and astonish us. But the Trump children, regardless of whether their father is ever again allowed in GOP polite company, are another matter. The display of warm affection for their father during the Republican National Convention was not merely for...
Alex Smith
Just after 6 p.m. on Super Bowl Sunday, February 7, 2016, a tuxedo-clad Alex Smith sat alone on stage at a grand piano near the 50-yard line in Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, set to accompany Lady Gaga as she sang the National Anthem to introduce the championship game between the Carolina Panthers and...
GooTube: Dems’ Kiddie Propaganda Arm
In case you hadn’t heard, Vice President Kamala Harris’ venture into government space propaganda for children was a galactic bust. The veep’s smarmy performance in a NASA agitprop video touting World Space Week was universally ridiculed and exposed this weekend after a local Monterey, California, TV station interviewed one of five child actors who auditioned...
The Mulberry Graveyard
Spain is a country with strong regional identities. The central government recognizes four official languages: Spanish, Galician, Basque, and Catalan. The people in the “periphery” of Spain may refer to Spanish as Castilian, to distinguish it from their own language. In the Basque country, Catalonia, and Galicia, signs in the regional language are omnipresent. At...