Is anyone really surprised by New York governor Andrew Cuomo saying, “We’re not going to make America great again. It was never that great.” The Left has been saying that, if not quite so bluntly, for decades. The only difference is that many more Americans now hold that view, including a disconcerting number of putative...
From the December 2009 issue of Chronicles. William Murchison gets right to the point in his eloquent account of mainline Protestantism’s near-terminal degeneration, written poignantly from an Anglican’s perspective: Whenever traditional Christianity clashed with late-twentieth-century culture, the Episcopal Church normally weighed in on the side of the culture: for enhanced choice in life, for more...
From the June 2010 issue of Chronicles. Two politicians get conservative fundraisers’ juices flowing like no others. One, the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, was surely mourned as much by ambitious Richard Viguerie imitators as by teary-eyed, Camelot-addled liberals. The other, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, they hope will be a gift that keeps on...
Why does the South adore Stonewall Jackson? He was not a particularly lovable man. And he was certainly not a romantic, dashing cavalier, like Jeb Stewart; a stainless aristocrat calmly daring all the odds, like Robert E. Lee; or even a wizard of the saddle, like Bedford Forrest. Yet at Stone Mountain, Georgia—the Confederacy’s Mount...
Southerners have a special feeling for the pathos of history. They know what it is like to have a lost cause, a history that might be gone with the wind but is still resonant and noble for all that. The Southern Confederacy’s almost-allies, the British, also have a sense of the pathos of history. But...
Richard Harding Davis exemplified the all-American ideal of Anglo-Saxon manhood—a chivalrous adventurer of spotless character and intentions, sporting, always in favor of the underdog, not too intellectual, and never without a clean starched shirt and a portable bathtub, no matter where his career as an intrepid reporter and war correspondent might take him. At the...
The United States was founded by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants and became the political, economic, and military leader of the free world under their guidance. The conscience, industry, practicality, antisensualism, and sense of civic responsibility that characterizes the classic WASP became definably American characteristics. When immigrants entered the melting pot, they were to come out looking...
Colonel David Hackworth’s highest accolade is to call a man a “stud.” He is certainly deserving of the moniker himself. An Army volunteer at the age of 15, the recipient of a battlefield commission at 20, four times wounded before he was 21, a hands-on battlefield expert on counterinsurgency, an expert leader of men whose...
Paul Fussell’s enemies are “habitual euphemizers, professional dissimulators,” and the “Disneyfiers of life.” He is in favor of cojones, which is why he ends up in one of his essays liking the Indy 500 in spite of himself, comparing it favorably to the violence of the Falklands War, which is going on while he watches...