Of the making of Civil War books there shall be no end. There are so many, most of which cover the same bloody ground in much the same slogging way, without any new insight or contribution. To make matters worse, American historians have rewritten the war as a simplistic moral melodrama between the forces of...
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The Democratic Religion
A half-century ago, a politically ambitious intellectual celebrity named Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., defined liberalism’s role as that of offering solutions to problems and solving them. Even in the heyday of the Vital Center, that was far from a complete representation of liberalism’s self-perceived task. Today, when “advanced liberalism” (the phrase is James Kalb’s) is...
A Mighty Long Fall: An Interview With Eugene McCarthy
Senator Eugene McCarthy is America’s senior statesman without a party. An Irish-German Minnesota Catholic who left the seminary for academe, McCarthy was elected to the House of Representatives in 1948 and the Senate in 1958. He was the link between the Old Progressives of the Upper Midwest and the postwar liberals; as time goes by,...
Dodging A Bullet
The U.S. Supreme Court, late in January, dodged a bullet by refusing to decide whether Maryland’s decision to close its public schools on Good Friday violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. State and local Good Friday closing laws have been with us for many generations, but recently they have been challenged in the federal courts....
A Walk on the Dark Side
“Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity.” —Thomas Adams Conspiracy theories have found a ready audience in many countries in many different times. When cataclysmic events shock a country to its foundations, when people feel impotent before history’s tidal wave, when war or economic collapse or political disintegration mark the end of a historical era and, having...
Evil Lessers
If you had bet me six months ago that the grassroots disaffection in the Republican Party, as demonstrated by the “Tea Party” movement, would guarantee a responsive nominee for president, you would have lost. I am no prophet, just an observer with some historical perspective. I would have bet on Romney against all comers. The...
Hungary’s Stand Against the European Union
Western elites recently heaped scorn on the Hungarian government for passing child-protection legislation. The Land of the Magyars outlawed the portrayal of homosexuality and “sex reassignment” surgeries in school education material and television programs aimed at minors. Hungarians view the law as protecting children from radical ideologies about sex and gender, while European Commission President...
Crime, Punishment, and Civility
In 1777, upon the execution of the preacher Dr. William Dodd, Samuel Johnson produced one of his most memorable aphorisms: “Depend upon it. Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Six years later, he deplored the abolition of public executions at Tyburn, echoing St....
Can American Legal Education Be Fixed?
Something has gone radically awry with legal education and maybe even legal practice. For about a decade now, the loudest wailing over the state of affairs has come from Chief Judge Harry Edwards of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, who wrote a landmark article in the Michigan Law Review...
Wagging the Dog
In the popular film Wag the Dog, an American President caught molesting a young girl seeks to divert attention away from the sex scandal; a mock “invasion” of Albania is staged, Hollywood-style, complete with faked film footage and bogus carnage, L’affaire Lewinsky debuted the same week, and federal officials—threatening military action against Iraq as news...
Weasel Words
Dr. Fleming, Mr. Cadfael, and now Mr. Navrozov in recent posts have opened a fruitful discussion of the American tendency to debase the language with prettified terms in order to disguise reality and enforce conformity of thought. Actually this is nothing new and is in part a product of what our two most penetrating foreign...
The Equality Shell Game
“For there is no longer Jew nor Greek, neither free man nor slave, neither man nor woman,” says Pseudo-Paul, the apostle to the Americans, “but all are equal in Christ Jesus.” He has been studying his Pseudo-John, wherein the risen Lord says to Peter, “I have been praying for you, Simon, that you might strengthen...
A Good Communitarian Is Hard to Find
“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...
Thirst for Empire
Tacitus, writing about Caesar Augustus and the beginnings of the Roman Empire, says, “How few were left who had seen the republic!” How few are left. Tacitus also mourns that the “State had been revolutionized, and there was not a vestige left of the old morality.” John Dickinson, who, like many of the founders of...
The Stuff of Nightmares
Military involvement in Haiti is the stuff of nightmares. In comparison, the oil and arms blockade, reinforcements in the Dominican Republic, and sanctions against commercial airline traffic from Port-au-Prince occasion mere despair. President Clinton’s prodemocracy broadcasts delivered via helicopter-borne bullhorn and Quebec-trained Haitian police (fresh from human rights seminars) are but passing comic moments. No...
Lighting Out for the Territory
Restless Nation is an enjoyable exploration of the American national character. The book presents a plausible hypothesis, supported by the author’s broad knowledge of the nation’s history and social trends and illustrated throughout by aptly chosen literary references that reflect admirably wide reading. The problem is that, despite all these positives, I just don’t buy...
Vipers in Ivory
“Teaching,” said the former nun in blue jeans, as if she were instructing a room full of halfwits about something very important, “is a political act.” It was early December 1991 at Providence College, the school where I taught for 27 years, the school that I grew to love deeply, though that love, it seems, was...
The Unbearable Illegitimacy of American Law
For some time now, American law and lawyers have had a legitimacy problem. Most Americans must wonder how it is that unelected federal judges have the power to declare that no state government can punish consensual homosexual relations, prohibit abortion, or permit prayer in the schools (to mention just a few of the striking things...
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 into slavery in the southern United...
Books in Brief: April 2024
Short reviews of The Myth of Left and Right by Hyrum Lewis and Verlan Lewis, and Myth America by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer.
Saints or Stockbrokers?
“As long as virtue was dominant in the republic so long was the happiness of the people secure.” —Robert E. Lee John P. Diggins raises various, often profound, questions about the moral foundations of America as a political society. Diggins is fond of calling attention to what he considers the underlying cultural tensions in American...
The Easy Persuasion
I have read in the newspapers lately that the scholarly journals have begun to experiment with a new procedural system of editorial acceptance. For generations, article submissions have been made to the editors, who in turn sent the manuscripts out for peer review by specialists in the field. Grants of academic tenure depend heavily on...
If the Center Cannot Hold
The surprising triumph of Donald Trump has produced what can only be described as an extended temper tantrum by much of the American left, which fully expected a victory by Hillary Clinton to be followed by unending political dominance, as the white, Christian parts of America that generally vote Republican are gradually eclipsed demographically by...
Sounding the Trump
In important ways, a revolutionary process has begun. So argues Ilana Mercer in the best extended analysis yet published of the Trump phenomenon: “Trump is getting an atrophied political system to oscillate” in “an oddly marvelous uprising.” For us revolutionaries there is still a long way to go, but we are entitled to a “modest...
Exterminating Fantasies
“[Socialism is] the combination of religious sentimentality, industrial insanity, and moral obliquity.” —F.J.C. Heamshaw Some years ago, George Watson wrote two remarkable articles for Chronicles describing how the Soviets, those heroes of socialist resistance to fascism, carried on using German concentration camps for their original purposes until the early 50’s (“Buchenwald’s...
An Obsolete Congress
“Here, sir, the people govern,” said Alexander Hamilton in 1788, as he argued for the direct election of members to the proposed U.S. House of Representatives. “Here they act by their immediate representatives.” A working democratic republic was not a new idea, but what was new was putting the idea to the test. The task...
Cold War, Warm Friends
The legacies of every war include controversy regarding its origins, its prosecution, its conclusion, and its material and political results. In the case of World War II, John Lukacs argues that among its major legacies was the Cold War, whose cause was the rigid division of Europe agreed upon by Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin...
Cardinal Sins
After sharing my ill-informed impressions of California with you last month, I should probably just let it be. After all, only fools think they understand the South after a few months, and I presume the same is true for California. But expatriation here in the Spandex State seems to have dried me up on the...
Beyond Politics
Most Americans think of the terms modern and modernity as denoting something positive. A modern society is advanced in science, reason, hygiene, and human goodness. To condemn modernity is to be against progress and all of its material benefits. Even American conservatives are essentially modern in outlook, identifying modernity with material improvement. European conservatives are...
What Ails the Historical Profession?
Academic historians are too uncritically receptive to Utopian thinking. Too many believe in what Kari Mannheim described as the striving for a new world order, an order which “would shatter all existing reality.” This utopianism should not be identified too closely with historical materialism—or with Marxism, which claims to rest on a materialist foundation. Academic...
The Last Kulak in Europe
In the autumn of 1909, a troupe of Sicilian actors, led by Giovanni di Grasso, arrived in St. Petersburg to satisfy a refined craving of the Russian intelligentsia, then widely shared in fashionable circles throughout Europe, for the experience of the primitive. Still, only a hundred or so spectators turned up to savor art at...
Remembering Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
When Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn wrote his 1974 book Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse, he dedicated it to “the Noble Memory of Armand Tuffin, Marquis de la Rouërie.” Tuffin was a French aristocrat born in 1751, and one of the first Europeans to come to the aid of the American colonies—even...
Books in Brief: March 2024
Short reviews of George Kennan for Our Time by Lee Congdon, and Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War by Roger Lowenstein.
Therapeutic Democracy
It is impossible to judge what is wrong with democracy unless we first understand its changing and constant features. The democratic principle as we now encounter it is both ancient and rudely contemporary. Among the ancient aspects of our contemporary democracy are the spirit of equality and the dangers that result therefrom. Aristotle properly perceived...
A Voice From the Mass Grave
This difficult book has a long history. Zwyciestvo prowokacji was originally published by its Polish author, then a penniless exile in Munich, at his own expense in 1962. I first read the work in Russian translation some 20 years ago, thanks to the editorial heroism of Nina Karsov, who had brought out a Russian edition...
Running On Empty
All imperial projects eventually come to grief. The causes, time spans, and forms of decline differ from one great power to the next and from one century to another, but they all have in common one important feature: At some point the weakening hegemon is no longer able to bear the economic and financial burden...
A Disillusioned World
Democracy has meant so many things over the past 2,500 years that it is really impossible to make any comprehensive statement about it that applies to all of its usages. The historical record shows that what people called democratic government and democratic society existed for millennia before the birth of the Industrial Revolution in the...
New Thoughts on the French Revolution
François Mitterrand’s socialist administration has become so scandal-ridden and financially precarious that the year-long celebration of the revolution’s bicentennial is now nothing but a hypocritical farce. Yet Mitterrand’s reference to 1789 is an ideological obligation, since the “leftist myth” is the number one legitimizing factor that makes the regime credible in the eyes of a...
Classical Liberalism and Christianity
If asked to choose one word to define the basic creed and catchword of Western modernity, I would not hesitate: That word would be freedom, provided one understands that, for a modern, there can be no freedom where there is no equality. If endowed with a minimum capacity to express himself, the average citizen would...
An Interview with Matthew Tyrmand
Just returned from a trip to Europe, journalist Matthew Tyrmand sat down for an interview with Chronicles to discuss his work and thoughts about the future of America after the 2020 election. He was informed by officials on re-entry to the U.S. that the Department of Homeland Security had revoked his “Global Entry” status, which...
The Pros and Cons of Immigration: A Debate
Jacob Neusner, Graduate Research Professor of Humanities and Religious Studies, University of South Florida Martin Buber Professor of Judaic Studies, University of Frankfurt Immigration nourishes America, affirming the power of its national ideal: a society capable of remaking the entire world in the image of humanity in democracy. No country in the world other than...
Tyranny In a Good Cause
Democracy or Republic? might well be the title of the D debate between liberals and conservatives on the nature of the American political system. (In the view of some liberals, the easiest way to spot a conservative is the habit of referring to America as a republic.) Democracy, in the strict procedural sense of one...
Why Online News Isn’t Saving Journalism
Online media was never on a secure footing, dependent as it was not just on advertising—which is true for almost all media—but on the whims of Big Tech, which has its own growth worries.
An Oakeshott for Our Time
Paul Franco, a professor of government at Bowdoin College, describes his book on English political theorist Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990) as an “introduction.” That modest claim is fully justified in light of the many volumes on politics, philosophy, aesthetics, education, and religion that Franco’s subject left behind in his productive life of 89 years. Franco observes...
Beyond National Socialism
Over drinks in the hotel lounge in the course of a scholarly meeting a year or so ago, I mentioned to a professor of political science and philosophy that I was writing a book on democracy. “Can you give me an example of democracy in its perfect, most complete form?” he asked. “National socialism,” I...
Against the Horticulturalists
Dwight Macdonald died in December 1982, almost 20 years ago. I went up to New York for his funeral. There were few New York intellectuals, prominent or not, at that gathering—which, properly and decently, had something like a family atmosphere. He had been living in the very middle of New York, and, yes, he was...
Insecure Liberalism
As I was reading my monthly Bible—guess what that is—I came across an enthusiastic review of a book, written by a French political philosopher, Pierre Manent, entitled Metamorphoses of the City. I rushed to buy a copy. The book purports to be an account of the evolution of European political systems from the days of...
Out of Harm’s Way
In this factually and conceptually rich biography of French political thinker Bertrand de Jouvenel (1903-1987), Daniel J. Mahoney has at least begun the task that he sets for himself in the Preface: performing an “act of intellectual recovery” to “rectify the unwarranted neglect of one of the most thoughtful and most humane political thinkers of...
The End of (a) History
“There is significance in the end of things,” a young man, hinting at a wisdom beyond his years, once told me. For that reason alone, A Short History of the Twentieth Century, the latest book by John Lukacs, would be significant. For this is not just his most recent book but, as he announced in...
The Reduction of Certainty
One should begin a review with a summation of a book and then of its author. The reverse is warranted in this case. James Grant is an extraordinary American, a financial expert whose mind is enriched by his knowledge of history. His previous book was an excellent biography of John Adams. It did not receive...