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 the most quotable sentences as space allows. ...
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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...
From High Noon to Django Unchained
Our new issue of Chronicles contains several essays that assess films that can be classified in some sense as “conservative,” or at least dealing with themes of interest to the political right. Several of those who participated in making these movies and whom we discuss in this issue, such as Russian filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov, American...
JUST SAY NO!—April 2004
PERSPECTIVE Tax Slavery by Thomas Fleming For a conquered people. VIEWS Revolting Taxation by David Hartman How federal taxation usurped federalism. Tax-and-Spend Politics, Bush-style by Doug Bandow Outgunning the Democrats. NEWS High Marginal Tax Rates on Saving Hurt Us All by Stephen J. Entin Bush's incremental reform. The Naked Truth of Tax Policy by ...
Antics at the Bar
Robert Pack: Edward Bennet Williams for the Defense; Harper & Row; New York. The Burger Court: The Counter-Revolution That Wasn’t; Edited by Vincent Blasi; Yale University Press; New Haven, CT. In the late l 950’s conservatives came to understand the importance of the liberal’s commitment to methodology. Although the right had already launched a telling...
The Quest for Community
“A sense of the past is far more basic to the maintenance of freedom than hope for the future. The former is concrete and real; the latter is necessarily amorphous and more easily guided by those who can manipulate human actions and beliefs. —Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community The trouble with labels—whether adopted voluntarily...
Obiter Dictum
After leading Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture for over 30 years, Dr. Thomas Fleming is retiring. His last issue as editor is the June number. “Dr. Fleming is an intellectual giant, and American conservatism’s unsung hero,” said Rockford Institute Board Chairman Raymond Welder. “The proof is in his consistently excellent work: 30 years of...
Dilution of Heroes
Napoleon and de Gaulle: Heroes and History; By Patrice Gueniffey; Belknap Press; 416 pp., $35.00 Both Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles de Gaulle rose in a time of turmoil and war to restore order. Napoleon’s service to France lay in ending revolutionary violence, while de Gaulle led free France in the struggle to overcome Nazi dominated Europe. The demerits...
WANTED! ENEMIES OF THE PLANET
PERSPECTIVE Wiccan Warming by Thomas Fleming Planet-worshiping environmentalists. VIEWS Agrarians, Greenies, and Goreites by Tom Landess To the next generation. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles by Tobias Lanz The high environmental cost of too much freedom. Edward Abbey by Gregory McNamee Conservative conservationist—and controversialist. NEWS Reflections on Immigration Reform by David A. Hartman The battle for...
Four Questions: Freddy Gray
The revolt against globalism is itself a worldwide phenomenon. Reporting for Chronicles from the United Kingdom is Freddy Gray, who also serves as the deputy editor of The Spectator, Britain’s premier political magazine. As an observer who has worked in the United States and has family connections to France as well, Freddy is attentive not...
What Still Unites Us?
Decades ago, a debate over what kind of nation America is roiled the conservative movement. Neocons claimed America was an “ideological nation” a “creedal nation,” dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.” Expropriating the biblical mandate, “Go forth and teach all nations!” they divinized democracy and made the conversion of mankind to...
Confirmation and Indoctrination
Institutions survive because the old teach the young. The Quakers who founded Haverford and Swarthmore colleges in Pennsylvania had to admit that the Holy Spirit could use the help of explicit teaching to back up His direct conversation with the human heart. For ages the Church has asked the young to memorize its basic teachings...
Do We Need Economic Reform at All?
If there is anything that we should have learned from the 20th century, it is that socialism turned out to be a colossal failure. That was not, however, obvious to large numbers of Americans at the time. Though they might not have bought into full-blown socialism, many 20th-century American intellectuals, economists, and politicians insisted that...
The Wellesley Zarathustra
“Laws [concerning ‘reproductive health’] have to be backed up with resources and political will and deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs, and structural biases have to be changed.” Thus spake Zarathustra at the Women in the World Summit in New York City last April, an annual celebration of the Transvaluation of All Values. “Religious beliefs ....
Middle American Helots
Rodney King is back, and his trial is center stage in the freak show of American television. The fact that these legal burlesques are called “the Rodney King trial” is worth pondering, because, the truth is, Rodney King now has immunity from prosecution for his reckless driving, for his violent attack on the officers who...
Your Future as a Terrorist
The Homeland Security apparatus has garnered quite a bit of attention lately for a paper that identified anti-abortionists, anti-immigrationists, and war veterans as terrorist suspects. (I thought “profiling” was forbidden, but in that matter, as so often these days, it would seem that some people are more equal than others.) Some Republican politicians are playing...
To the Pretoria Station
Governments, Lenin once wrote, never fall unless they are first pushed. Whatever his faults, the old Bolshevik must have known something about how to get rid of unwanted regimes. In the Revolution of 1917, it was the Imperial German government that helped to push over what was left of the Russian state by dispatching Lenin...