One long-standing hallmark of Western conservative thought is the emphasis on the rule of law.  Earlier generations of conservatives understood that, without such constraints, liberty would be imperiled and a free society would ultimately descend into tyranny.  As Lord Acton observed, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  Even during the 20th century,...

PERSPECTIVE Print the Legend by Thomas Fleming VIEWS The Great American Outlaw by Roger D. McGrath On Dueling, Divorce, and Red Indians by Hugh Barbour, O.Praem. NEWS Conservative Leninists and the War on Terror by Ted Galen Carpenter REVIEWS A Huge and Healthy Pessimism by Jack Trotter John Derbyshire, We Are Doomed: Reclaiming
Conservative Pessimism plus Clark Stooksbury on Chris Hedges' ...

The Commandant of the Marine Corps, General James Conway, has courageously defied the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and his Commander-in-Chief with public testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee opposing lifting the ban on homosexuals serving in the Armed Forces.  “Ban,” of course, hardly describes the current policy.  Homosexuals who keep their inclinations relatively...

With publication of “On the Origin of Species” in 1859, the hunt was on for the “missing link.” Fame and fortune awaited the scientist who found the link proving Darwin right: that man evolved from a monkey. In 1912, success! In a gravel pit near Piltdown in East Sussex, there was found the cranium of...

You there! Congressman! Come out from behind that tree! The speaker of the House has wonderful plans for you, involving the very sharp sword she says you’re going to fall on for the greater glory of . . . whatever. Wondrous to behold are the leadership instincts of a Democratic establishment conflicted when it comes...

perspective Divide and Conquerby Thomas Fleming views The Soviet Intervention in Afghanistanby Srdja Trifkovic From Good War to Bad Social Engineeringby Doug Bandow news The Graveyard of Empiresby Janek C. Kazmierski reviews On the Quai at Smyrnaby Srdja Trifkovic [Giles Milton, Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922—The Destruction of a Christian City in the Islamic World] One For...

For several decades

Jury selection began yesterday in the murder trial of Harlan Drake, the man who has confessed to killing pro-life activist James Pouillon, but the Associated Press reports that Shiawassee County, Michigan, prosecutors

Five years ago, I wrote of the horror that Aaron Wolf and I experienced as we spent a morning photographing the old Turner School here in Rockford.  Built in 1898, the massive brick-and-stone structure was closed 80 years later by a school board attempting in vain to avoid a lawsuit ...

One of the great interests of Anglo-Saxon poems is the heroic code of the warriors.  They fight for their own glory, of course, but also to protect and avenge their lord, to preserve their religion, and defend the liberties of their people.  Unlike the Vikings, they are neither savages nor merely predators. Before going on...

A decade ago, Oldsmobile went. Last year, Pontiac. Saturn, Saab and Hummer were discontinued. A thousand GM dealerships shut down. To those who grew up in a

It’s moments like this one—our Health Care Moment, we could call it—that make numerous friends of democracy and good government want to pull the covers over their heads and leave a wake-up call for next month. The health care charade has gone on for a year. Polls suggest most Americans don’t want the measures now...

Walter Block is a libertarian without guile, a theorist who refuses to confine his classical-liberal analysis to strictly economic questions.  Liberty is liberty, he would argue, and value is value, whether we are deciding a ...

My good friends at Catholic Answers in San Diego invited me to be a guest on their excellent radio program last Monday to discuss the tensions between being a “good” American and “good” Catholic.  You can listen to the show at their website, although in one short hour, ...

Ron Unz, the neoliberal publisher of The American Conservative since the departure of Patrick J. Buchanan and Taki Theodoracopulos, penned an article for the March 1 issue of TAC entitled, like Geraldo Rivera’s recent pro-immigration book, “His-Panic,” where he argues that the notion of widespread Hispanic crime is largely a myth.  He writes that conservatives...

Cause can’t you see You’re torturing me Torturing me. —“Torture” by Kris Jensen, 1962 While reading “His-Panic” by Ron Unz in the March issue of The American Conservative, Kris Jensen’s moderately successful 1962 recording of “Torture” kept running through my brain.  Please, Ron, you’re torturing me with the most convoluted arguments imaginable; ...

Few things in life are as clear as the futility of a real debate on the clarity of America’s religious origins. “Debate,” I said? Lay a finger, unsuspectingly, on The New York Times Magazine‘s inspection of the attempt by so-called Christian fundamentalists to overhaul history textbooks, and you require treatment for first-degree burns. I refer...

Did Robert Gibbs let the cat out of the bag? Last week, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the world that Iran, unable to get fuel rods from the West for its U.S.-built reactor, which makes medical isotopes, had begun to enrich its own uranium to 20 percent. From his perch in the West Wing, Gibbs scoffed: “He...

Heavy weekend snowfall closed down the capital of the United States. Not that many outside the Washington Beltway were sorry about it. Possibly—by their reasoning—the blizzard was God’s gift to decent government, a holiday from the ceaseless commotion, braggadocio and show-offing that have become the capital’s principle pastimes. Did Sarah Palin bring down the house...

They are called the PIGS—Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain. What they have in common is that all are facing deficits and debts that could bring on national defaults and break up the European Union. What brought the PIGS to the edge of the abyss? All are neo-socialist states that provide welfare for poor people, generous unemployment,...

We had a big but quite mediocre lunch near the Agora, at Attalos, and by the time we got to the entrance, we found out they had changed the schedule for visiting the Agora.  Returning the next day, we took our time getting lost on the site, which is impossible ...

It’s always nice to have one’s beliefs confirmed.  I was traveling this week, and wasn’t able to follow current events closely, but as the bad news around Toyota continued to mount, I figured that someone at NRO would be flacking for the Japanese and suggesting that it was all part of a government plot to...

A month after Germany surrendered in May 1945, America's eyes turned to the Far East, where the bloodiest battle of the Pacific war was joined on the island of Okinawa. Twelve thousand U.S. soldiers and Marines would die—twice as many dead in 82 days of fighting as have died in all ...

Anyone who sees health policy as a trackless jungle for policymakers should take a gander at education policy as mediated by the federal government. Anyone who thinks U.S. public schools are better overall than when the federal government muscled its way into a policy jurisdiction reserved generally to the states—careful about jostling sleepwalkers. Oh, well,...

The Plaka was once the heart of modern Athens, first Ottoman Athens and then the Athens built largely by German kings and queens and their philhellenic architects.  It was ruined by the work of brilliant American archaeologists who tore out the heart of the neighborhood in digging up the ...

Greece is an ancient land but a young country, younger even than the United States, whose citizens have grown old, generation after generation, bragging about the youthfulness of their democracy.   Here in Greece, as Toynbee pointed out in one of his last books, the multiple burdens of the ...

President Obama is in a dilemma from which there appears to be no easy or early escape. Democrats are the Party of Government. They feed it, and it feeds them. The larger government grows, the more agencies that are created, the more bureaucrats who are hired, the more people who become beneficiaries, the more deeply...

You can see how seriously Obama is taking the hot populist temper of the American people and their eagerness to strangle every banker with the entrails of every insurance executive. In an altogether welcome departure from past presidential form in State of the Union addresses at least since 1973 (the ...

I got into it recently—in cordial fashion—with the editors of an editorial page for which I used to labor. One of their columnists had used a word . . . well, let’s say we wouldn’t have printed it in Ye Olden Tyme. The editors took exception to the exception I took to the word’s appearance...

It’s jobs, jobs, jobs now for the Obama team, rather than health care, health care, health care. You have to call it progress, particularly if you’re jobless, or fearful of becoming so at a time when 17 million Americans are either non- or underemployed. We’re about done, in other words, with the free-floating pretense that...

Next let us turn to Woods’ comments on my discussion of scarcity as an economic concept.  I again quoted Paul Samuelson who introduces the topic as fundamental to economic analysis and concludes by saying:  “If you add up all the wants, you quickly find that there are simply not enough goods and services to satisfy...

Next we must look at another rhetorical device of Woods which serves to distract the attention of the reader from the point at issue and to prejudice him against what I actually wrote.  Woods mentions the interventions of bishops’ conferences into economic matters.  As a matter of fact I said ...

It's a story told regularly in the conservative media. A student pleads for advice: The professors at his college or university are left-wing, and he must choose between regurgitating the leftist propaganda in class discussions, term papers, exam answers, and essays for an A, or telling the truth for a ...

Dr. Woods’ article, “Catholic Social Teaching and the Market Economy Revisited: A Reply to Thomas Storck,” is, I must admit, superficially attractive.  It appears to crush opposition under a weight of impressive learning.  But, I would suggest, when his assertions are examined, Woods’ citation of authorities, like his ...

PERSPECTIVE When the Going Gets Tough . . . by Thomas Fleming VIEWS The Mass Age Medium and Future Shlock by James O.Tate Making sense of the 60’s. How To Survive “Creative Destruction” by Greg Kaza Clarifying terms. NEWS Too Big To Fail by William J. Quirk The underlying cause. REVIEWS At the Crossroads by Justin Raimondo Anne C. Heller: Ayn ...

Would that I were not among the men of the fifth generation, but either had died before or been born afterwards. For now truly is a race of iron, and men never rest from labour and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night; and the gods shall lay sore ...

Almost five years ago I wrote for ChroniclesMagazine.org a piece attacking Thomas Woods’ views on the relationship between Catholic social teaching and the science of economics.  In brief, my complaint was against Woods’ contention that certain teachings of the popes on social matters overstep the boundaries of legitimate Church teaching because they contradict the findings...

What lies ahead politically? Look for an answer back in the ’90s. Even if the Republicans don’t take over after the midterm elections, the Democratic Party now in Congress is dominated by politicians fashioned in the Clinton era, nourished by such heirs of Aristotle as Rahm Emanuel and, before him, Tony Coelho. Their maps had...

We were blindsided. We never saw it coming. So said Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein of the financial crisis of 2008. He likened its probability to four hurricanes hitting the East Coast in a single season. Blankfein was reminded by the chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Committee, Phil Angelides, that hurricanes are “acts of...

Can’t stand to watch the English language’s losing encounter with the culture of who-cares-anyway? A new book says, get over it, fella. “Too often,” argues Jack Lynch, professor of English at Rutgers University, “the mavens and pundits are talking through their hats. They’re guilty of turning superstition into rules, and often their proclamations are nothing...

The Underwear Bomber case indicates that whoever is behind these bomb scares is laughing at our gullibility. How realistic is it that al-Qaida, an organization that allegedly pulled off the most fantastic terror attack in world history, would in these days of heightened security choose for an attack on an airliner a person who is...

“We are at war. We are at war against al-Qaida, a far-reaching network of violence and hatred that attacked us on 9/11, that killed nearly 3,000 innocent people and that is plotting to strike us again.” Thus did Barack Obama clear the air as to whether we are at war, and with whom and why....

On New Year’s Day, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki issued an ultimatum to the West: Accept a swap of part of our 2 ton stockpile of low-enriched uranium for your higher-enriched uranium for our U.S.-built reactor, or we start enriching to 20 percent ourselves. Though the White House is on the defensive for its initial...

German movies of the 1920's receive a remarkably poor press in conservative circles.  Some critics regard them as little more than obvious reflections of Weimar decadence, as some of the lesser films doubtless are.  Sometimes even the ubiquitous use of expressionist technique is presented as definitive proof that the mental ...

Some memories of auld lang syne on New Year's Day 2010. This Rockford Files first appeared in the August 2002 issue of Chronicles. Family traditions often get started by accident—especially, perhaps, those that center on food. On the second New Year’s Eve after we were married, my wife and ...

On Christmas Eve, when Christians were celebrating the Prince of Peace, THE New York Times delivered forth a call for war. “There’s only one way to stop Iran,” declared Alan J. Kuperman, and that is “military air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.” Kuperman is described as the “director of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Program at...