How can I be Me? Let Me count the ways . . . In 1976 New York published a lengthy essay, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” by the reporter and novelist Tom Wolfe, who died last year, aged 88. Wolfe argued that mass prosperity in the postwar era had erased the historical...
The March issue of Chronicles coincides with the 30th anniversary of the passing of novelist, essayist, poet, and conservationist Edward Abbey. This column appears as a chapter in The Hundredth Meridian: Seasons and Travels in the New Old West (Chronicles Press). It may or may not make sense for the living to think in arbitrary...
A book faces me across the room from a bookcase in my office. It has a blood-red and black cover. The author’s name is printed in black down the upper part of the spine and the title in white below that. The title is Io Uccido—“I Kill” in Italian. I’ve meant for some time to...
“Never lose your temper except on purpose” was a firm maxim of Dwight Eisenhower’s. Donald Trump seems generally to observe the same rule, though certainly not always. His critics failed to understand this during the primaries in 2016, and they have continued to do so since. Gleefully, they report daily—almost hourly—on the President’s latest “belittling,”...
A brief article in The Spectator (May 19) by Fredrik Erixon speculates that President Emmanuel Macron of France, generally considered a liberal centrist énarque, seems to be reconsidering his position following the anniversary of his first year in office. Faced with the continuing rise of the right in Europe, the rebellion of Chancellor Merkel’s conservatives...
Since 1892, when the original text was composed, the Pledge of Allegiance has been revised three times. Viewed chronologically, the alterations appear to have aimed at a greater specificity, but also a wider and deeper self-assurance. The current text, dating from 1954, capitalizes “Nation” and adds “under God,” as if the editors (a committee, no...
It’s likely that psephologists will discover from their postmortems on the recent primary election in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District that the barely victorious candidate, Conor Lamb, won by appealing to the “nice” Republican portion of this overwhelmingly Republican district. Nice Republicans are not necessarily the equivalent of the Republicans in Name Only despised by the...
It is a healthy and encouraging sign when politicians don’t know where they’re going because they have no idea what’s coming next, which pretty much describes the state of politics in the West today. Among the various political groupings, only liberals know where they wish to go—and that is simply where they’ve been going for...
Nearly half a year into the new administration in Washington, it remains too early to tell how many of President Trump’s unquestioned pratfalls and errors in judgment, most of them resulting from emotional indiscipline, stubbornness, and political inexperience as well as the necessary thicker skin experience would have given him, are attributable to the President...
Much of life may come down to a choice between the respective views of Lord Chesterfield, who urged his son always to excel at whatever he did, and G.K. Chesterton, who once wrote that, “If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.” The issue, of course, is what the “thing” in question is. ...
“Democracy Dies in Darkness” is the motto of the Washington Post. The editors of the Post belong to the honorable group of which Norman Podhoretz once confessed himself a member—Idolaters of Democracy. They idolize Big Government also, that implacable enemy of democracy, or so democrats believed before the 1930’s. No doubt the editors could demonstrate...
The Soviet Union and the Soviet Empire have been gone for 26 years, yet American internationalists, Democrats and Republicans alike, persist in speaking of the “Free World,” quite as if Earth continues to be divided between the liberal-democratic-capitalist and the communist camps. We have been hearing a great deal more of this Free World talk...
The agenda of the Democratic Party, of liberal politicians generally, including socialist-liberals like Bernie Sanders and Keith Ellison, and of liberal academics and “intellectuals” is pretty clear from the record of Barack Obama’s two administrations and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which ran on that record. Not nearly so clear is what the demonstrators who have been...
The mood in Washington during the weeks leading up to the inauguration of Donald J. Trump combined the bloodthirsty rage of the Reign of Terror with the wild comedy of A Night at the Opera, as the New Jesus and his holy family prepared for their ascension from the Capitol Building on January 20 immediately...
The Democrats and the rest of the left are taking the results of last November’s election no better than they predicted the Republicans and the right would do if their man lost. The street riots, lawsuits, recounts, constitutional challenges, furious denial, and refusal to accept the electoral decision in a spirit of peace, resignation, and...
My title is a bit of a stretch, as I did not travel all the way round the world, nor close to it, and the trip took 19 days, not 80. Still, it was my world, extending roughly from the American Mountain West across Western Europe, and I traveled by ship and train and motor...
Liberals are keen to sniff out and condemn “privilege,” by which they mean the superior education, the affluence, the influence, and the comfort enjoyed by well-connected, well-born people, usually imagined by them to be political conservatives. None of this has anything to do with privilege in the historical sense of the word, of course, but...
The historical controversy over who was “responsible” for the outbreak of war in 1914 will doubtless never be settled, so clearly did so many of the participants contribute to igniting the catastrophe. German rearmament and the kaiser’s determination to build a navy equal to Great Britain’s, as well as the country’s territorial ambitions on the...
Liberalism is an increasingly organized, coordinated, and aggressive assault upon human society, even the human race. Its grotesquely perverted, officially imposed, and relentlessly enforced understanding of humanity and what it means to be a human being has sundered over the past half-century the historical connections between traditional societies and contemporary ones to the extent that...
The murder of five white police officers in Dallas, immediately following the fatal shootings of a black man in Louisiana and another in Minnesota, gave President Obama the opportunity to engage in still another of the flights of soaring clichés and wafting banalities for which his admirers celebrate him; Hillary Clinton the chance to demonstrate...
Donald J. Trump is the political issue of our time. Yet Mr. Trump is, in a very real sense, peripheral to present events. He is a result, not the effective cause; a symptom, not the disease. The significant thing is not the rebel candidate but the crisis of the Republican Party, so long arriving, which...
The response of the Western European governments, and of a substantial portion of what is called the European elite—roughly speaking, the upper-middle classes—to the invasion of the Continent from the east and south must be among the most unusual and perverse spectacles in human history. For nearly a year now, the world has looked on...
In the early years of the Republic Americans focused their efforts on democratic government, geographic expansion and settlement, and a program of national improvements intended to promote them. In the decades immediately following the War Between the States they concentrated on industrializing and amassing national wealth. Then, in the 1880’s and 90’s, they began to...
Jean Raspail, the French novelist and explorer, now 90 and living in a suburb of Paris, must be experiencing the eerie feeling of living inside The Camp of the Saints, his most famous work, as he follows the contemporary news reports from across the Continent. The tens of thousands of Third World migrants are arriving...
Tocqueville was the first author to apply the adjective exceptional to America, but the compliment—if he meant it as a compliment—was a backhanded one, referring narrowly to circumstances that “concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical pursuits.” Certainly, he had nothing in mind comparable to the notion of “American exceptionalism” that...
Since the 60’s, liberals have been talking about “victimless crimes,” offenses that are prosecutable by law but that liberals claim “hurt no one.” Prominent among these were homosexual encounters, which over the next several decades were decriminalized by most states and eventually recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as acts of love, and finally conjugal...
“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 ....
The decline of once great powers, real and perceived, is a major theme of the early 21st century that is likely to become more pronounced as the century progresses and the balance of power, propelled by the shifting balance of energy and influence, shifts from West to East. On the eve of World War II,...