We Episcopalians—we’re just so special, don’t you know? We worship in such special ways. Our churches look so special, as do we ourselves—an indication of our social gifts. And when we fight, when we commence to break the church furniture over one another’s heads—at such moments we’re just, you might say, disgustingly, regurgitatingly special; so...
Another of those alarming clashes between solid democratic values has arisen, as the Supreme Court has agreed to rehear arguments relating to Citizens United v.Federal Election Committee. In the weeks before the 2008 Democratic primaries, Citizens United, a conservative nonprofit group and creator of an uncomplimentary documentary called Hillary: The Movie, had wished to broadcast...
The welfare state was born in Otto von Bismarck’s Germany, a ploy of the famed Iron Chancellor designed to counter the electoral appeal of the rival Social Democrats. Thus, social security was created in 1889 and eventually spread, under several guises, to many nations. Here, the Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program (Social Security)...
In 1976, when the separatist Parti Québécois (PQ) won the majority of seats in Quebec’s National Assembly, giving it control of the provincial government, many thought that the party’s goal was to save French culture and the French language in Canada. It is, however, much more complicated than that. The PQ was founded in 1967...
He had finally done it. He had mastered the physics of time. He was ready to visit the past. He had made his first fortune in U.S. Treasury bond futures in the early 1980’s. Wall Street had thought that the Reagan tax cuts would drive up interest rates because of budget deficits. But he knew...
Today, many Americans presume that the debate over slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries turned on the question of race. Though race was an ingredient in the Great Debate, it was no more than a pinch of salt. Both proponents and opponents of slavery tended to hold the same view of blacks. The superiority...
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...
During the early days of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the White House frequently trotted out Laura Bush to laud our soldiers’ heroic efforts to “liberate” women. These were not wars of aggression or conquest. They were wars for “education,” the former schoolteacher averred: “The United States government is wholeheartedly committed to the full...
The Tea Partiers and the Town Hallers are clearly angry that the Obama administration so quickly began to pursue policies that run contrary to traditional conservative values—values that are based on skepticism of, if not hostility toward, the role of government in the management of human affairs. Indeed, if there was one thing that used...
I have a picture pinned over my desk here in Brussels, a 1929 photograph—“obtained under great difficulty,” the caption says—of a man being executed by guillotine at 5 a.m. on an open street in France. The title of the picture is “Legacy of the French Revolution.” I keep it because it is a modern link with...
The trial was fixed. The judge knew it. The rancher had the town buffaloed. The jury would deliver the verdict the rancher wanted. The judge was concerned that the rancher’s rowdies would use the verdict for a lynching. The rancher didn’t want any more nesters around. The nester’s wife was a good-looking woman, and the...
According to an increasingly popular and influential narrative, the Founding Fathers were mostly crypto-atheistic deists who, as Christopher Hitchens is fond of pointing out, did not mention God in the Constitution, and gave us a First Amendment because they were, at best, suspicious of Christianity and wished to limit its influence. And it’s a good...
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has come under ferocious attack for his alleged relationships with several women, including a teenage girl. These stories are surfacing exactly when one aspect of his policy—the fight against illegal immigration, which was part of the government program endorsed by the majority of voters in the last general election—is starting...
It seems that bipolarity is a significant element of human nature, mental as well as emotional. Human beings tend toward extremes in both thought and feeling, never more than when the subject of either is the animal kingdom with which we share our world. Most of mankind differentiates among animals as ferocious beasts, objects of...
“We feel bound to disagree with these prophets of doom.” —John XXIII Nestled in the foothills below Saddleback Mountain in “the O.C.” there is an abbey of priests and a small boarding school. There is nothing there that would remind one of the lubricious television program that made the initials of Orange County, California, proverbial;...
College-football season has begun again in the South. Here in Alabama, football is more like a religion than a sport. Having both attended and taught at The University of Alabama from the 1970’s through the 1990’s, I was at ground zero of college-football fanaticism, and I must confess that I still like the excitement. But...
“Rawhide” Andrews was a Texas Ranger. He came to the force after it was reconstituted in 1874, the Rangers having been discredited in the years following the War of Yankee Aggression as an enforcement unit for carpetbaggers. Comanches were in decline from smallpox and cholera and from the near extinction of buffalo by hide hunters. ...
Few realize that the largest Protestant school system in the United States is operated by the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod. With 1,018 elementary schools and 102 high schools sharing a combined enrollment of 149,201 students, it is an impressive educational endeavor. Beyond the United States, Lutheran schools in Canada, South America, Africa, Australia, and even such...
To American readers the name A.A. Gill may mean nothing, but in England the restaurant and television critic of the Sunday Times is a cultural force to be reckoned with. A witty autodidact, with plenty of disdain for the pieties of the moment, to easily deafened ears he is a Jeremiah of the petit-four and...
The Russian government has established a presidential commission charged with countering “attempts to harm Russian interests by falsifying history.” The history it refers to is that of the 20th century, in which domestic and international crimes committed by the former Soviet Union played a salient and notorious role. The Kremlin insists that the sacrifices made...
It’s Friday evening, and you have arrived at your local multiplex with your ten- and twelve-year-old boys and two of their very closest friends. You’ve come to see the best movie $150 million can make. You cannot remember just when, but it seems you idly mentioned to your wife earlier in the week that you...
Well, of course you’re reading my compelling exposition because of its lapel-grabbing title, but did you notice that my title is in quotes? Oh, yes indeedy. That’s because I got the title from Motoko Rich’s article in the New York Times of May 20, and I didn’t want to plagiarize, or rather I should say...
In 1939, the year I was born, gasoline was ten cents per gallon. A new car cost $700. A new house cost $3,850, and the average rent was $28 per month. Harvard tuition was $420 annually. A loaf of bread from the bakery was eight cents. Hamburger was 14¢ per pound, eggs were 19¢ per...
“Another Crisis like this one and the West will be wiped out,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel on June 1. “Once we have overcome this Crisis, the question will be how can we return to a path of virtue as far as public debts are concerned.” Of course, the first question is whether the West...
As an economic concept, distributism refers to a broad, voluntary distribution of wealth in land, labor, and capital. The idea has its origins in Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 social encyclical Rerum novarum, which rejected Marxism and capitalism’s laissez-faire variant, and in the works of Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton. Belloc’s Servile State (1912) recognizes that...
It was a sizzling June afternoon in 2003 when the Pentagon’s top Iran analyst, Lawrence Franklin, walked in off the hot pavement into the cool recesses of the Tivoli restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, and offered to commit espionage against the United States—and the FBI recorded every word. It wasn’t just serendipity that caught this traitor...
Andrew Lytle’s “The Hind Tit” is the best essay in I’ll Take My Stand (1930), not only because it focuses on the small, independent farmer, the class the Agrarians most admired, but also because Lytle nails the volume’s primary thesis to the church door, the dilemma his region and nation faced in 1930—the choice between...
“We are exceptional people; we are among those nations that . . . exist only to give the world some terrible lesson.” —Pyotr Chaadayev Chaadayev’s words came to mind in the aftermath of a blizzard in Vladivostok, snowy peaks ringing the port city, the sky still obscured by thick clouds. It was November 1992. The...
The proverbial visitor from Mars—or perhaps I should say Neptune, since the only intelligent life known to exist on Mars today is robotic, crawling in and out of craters as it frenziedly snaps digital photographs like an ordinary terrestrial tourist—anyhow, the proverbial visitor from outer space would never guess from visiting Earth’s Western and Westernizing...
“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-a, wipeout.” —The Surfaris Maybe we just had it too great out here in California. Perfect weather. World-class universities. High-paying middle-class jobs. Reasonably priced housing. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. The Beach Boys. California girls. Hollywood. Disneyland. Now the state is crumbling fast into the ocean. Still can’t beat the weather—until unemployment forces you to move to...
I stopped paying attention to Time many years ago. My twin brother and I, already plotting our emigration to the United States, subscribed as college students in England in the 1960’s to get some sense of this world-straddling “indispensable nation”—as Clinton administration Secretary of State Madeleine Albright later called it, possibly not for our reasons—and also...
California was imagined and named before it was discovered. In 1510 in Seville there appeared a novel that would have Fabio on the cover today. Written by Garcia Ordóñez de Montalvo, Las sergas de Esplandián is a romance of chivalry that vividly describes the adventures of a fictitious Christian knight, Esplandián. In defending Constantinople against...
Since September 2008 an awful lot of Americans have lost 40 to 50 percent of their net worth. According to Bloomberg News, the federal government, during the same period, has committed $11.3 trillion in loans, guarantees, and investments to bail out the financial system. The Obama administration believes this effort will help the overall economy...
It was a cold, blustery day in Washington, D.C., when the spies met their mark. The place: Union Station. The mark: one Lawrence Franklin, then a 56-year-old Iran specialist who worked as a top official at the Pentagon. Franklin was convinced that Israel was being shortchanged by the United States, and that Iran posed a...
All things at Rome are for sale. —Juvenal Thomas Jefferson has left us an account of a supper-table conversation in the very earliest days of the U.S. government. Vice President John Adams (who was intended by nature for a preacher) declaimed at length about the virtues of the British government, which, he said, if purged...
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) just reported that U.S. banks lost money at a $100 billion annualized rate during the fourth quarter of 2008. Sounds grim, but it only describes the visible part of the iceberg our financial Titanic has hit. AIG, a giant insurance company, alone has been covered by the Federal Reserve...
The U.S. automotive industry operates in a highly regulated environment, a fact largely overlooked in recent congressional hearings over federal loan guarantees to domestic firms. These regulations affect more than three million American blue- and white-collar workers employed in the industry, along with shareholders and other investors, including retirees (and their spouses) vested in pension...
When NATO marks its 60th birthday on April 4, there will be much celebration. Proponents will hail not only the alliance’s longevity and past successes but its goals in the coming decades. Their optimism is based, in part, on statements by the new government in NATO’s leading power, the United States. While the administration of...
Want to learn how the economy really works? Don’t go into academia. Get a job. I spent six years of school filling my head with fancy theories and complicated mathematics, practiced under assumptions that often don’t work in the real world. I earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in economics, but where I...
America’s educational landscape is being transformed under the cover of “health.” This transformation began with sex education, which once was relegated to a subunit of physiology that addressed the science of human reproduction. But sex education suddenly required its own graphic, stand-alone how-to course, then morphed into a “nonjudgmental” monstrosity designed to transmit knowledge of...
“Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon . . . terrible as an army with banners?” —Song of Songs 6:10 “Si direbbe che persino la luna si è affrettata stasera—osservatelo in alto—a guardare a questo spettacolo.” (“One might almost think that the moon—just look at him up there—hurried...
Listening to the news media, you’d think that Americans simply don’t understand marriage. One in two marriages fails. Public schools peddle theories about “alternative families” with such textbooks as Heather Has Two Mommies. Single women run hither and yon looking for Mr. Goodbar, who turns out to be a white-frocked fertility guru equipped with a...
We know the stereotype, do we not? Eyes like marbles, jaw clinched tight as a bear trap; icy baritone voice; accusatory finger slashing the air. Yea, brothers and sisters, hear the word of the Lord, Who condemns . . . For some wacko reason, popular culture (you know what I mean—talk shows, movies, plain old...
“O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us!” —Robert Burns A few years ago, a well-known conservative historian lamented that the American public was not morally engaged to undergo sacrifice after the September 11 attacks, unlike it was in its heroic response to Fort Sumter and Pearl Harbor....
In the Anglo-American experience, the partisans of concentrated wealth and advocates for political centralization have long been connected. Over the last three centuries, that connection has grown stronger, and in the United States this process accelerated dramatically during and after the Lincoln administration. Lincolnism, the idea that the central state can and should use its...
Ron English, the self-styled “Robin Hood of Madison Avenue” who specializes in “liberating” commercial billboards and defacing them (albeit artistically) with his anticapitalist messages, has painted a portrait of Obama as Lincoln: The President’s thick lips, crinkled brow, and eyes sparkling with a preternatural intelligence are seamlessly merged with the high forehead, biblical beard, and...
Now when Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he went into his house; and his windows being open in his chamber toward Jerusalem, he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime. —Daniel 6:10 With the election of Democrat Barack Obama as...
When the late Tony Snow stepped down from his position as President George W. Bush’s press secretary, he explained that he simply could not “make it on $168,000 a year.” The comment didn’t play well in Peoria. The media downplays the enormous wealth enjoyed by disgraced chief executive officers of bankrupted companies, special-interest moguls, lobbying...
The baseball is cracking into Tom Hopps’ glove as he plays catch on the sidewalk. Terri Reader is playing next door in her backyard, and Mr. Coyle, one of the millworkers in our neighborhood, is walking out front to inspect his freshly mowed lawn. There is a continuity to these childhood memories that becomes more...