Is Marxism Dead? If the average citizen of a Western society were asked that question, it seems to me he would readily answer that Marxism is indeed a very dead idea surviving only in improbable boondocks like North Korea or Cuba, and even there losing ground, as has been happening in the last great country...

How do you make sense of New York? There’s lots of intelligence, talent, and ambition here. There’s also a lot of insanity. When Barack Obama won his first presidential election people in my neighborhood partied in the streets all night. The world had evidently been made new. When Donald Trump won there were public meetings in...

Some of the greatest events in human history simply fail to register in popular consciousness. Last year, we rightly heard a terrific amount about the Reformation, or at least, about its early Lutheran phase. But the spring of 2018 actually marks the 400th anniversary of the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War, another critical event...

Why are so many Western Christians either silent about, or actually complicit in, the Muslim hegira to the West?  One would think Christians would be at the forefront of opposition.  Some are, but most are not, and these latter include Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, mainline “Protestants,” and evangelicals in America.  These churches have made four...

The multilayered story surrounding Uranium One—the former South African, then Canadian, and now Russian company, of which both Bill and Hillary Clinton and their family foundation are the enriched beneficiaries—has all the usual elements of a typical Clinton scandal. A talented con man, Bill Clinton perfected his game in Arkansas.  Through his control over state...

President Donald Trump has made the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) a cornerstone of his economic policy.  Signed into law by Democrat Bill Clinton in 1993 with Republican support, NAFTA created a managed trade zone among Canada, Mexico, and the United States.  The multilateral agreement remains highly controversial among blue-collar voters...

Facts were fuzzy in the ancient world.  From Homer to Herodotus, from Thales to Plotinus, from the Old Testament to the New, myth, science, and history met and mingled, merging into amalgams that were almost invariably greater than the sum of their parts and yet less than what might pass our modern-day tests of peer...

I am told President Trump has said that “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.”  In the September issue of Chronicles, several authors, such as Aaron Wolf, either directly or indirectly dealt with this same crucial question.  What follows is a mere snippet of additional reflection. What...

Earlier this year, Melinda Byerley, CEO of the TimeShareCMO marketing company in San Francisco, wrote a Facebook post in which she offered her fellow Americans some helpful advice for improvement: “One thing middle america [sic] could do,” Byerley suggested, is to realize that no educated person wants to live in a shithole with stupid people....

No historian worth his honoraria ascribes major social change to a single factor.  That is ideology, not history.  Nonetheless, an ideology has been and remains a large cause of America’s cultural and moral decline over the past half century.  It is an ideology whose origins, history, and goals are known only to a few academics,...

“High on a throne of royal state . . .  Satan exalted sat, by merit raised  To that bad eminence.” —Paradise Lost Hell is a meritocracy.  Yet in America the meritocratic ideal is universally applauded.  Everyone agrees—or pretends to agree—that the angel of justice smiles upon the triumph of merit.  Indeed, the hopes enshrined in...

Donald Trump campaigned on an “America First” foreign policy.  But he hasn’t been immune to the vapors of the Swamp.  Not even three months after his inauguration, administration officials were praising NATO; affirming commitments to Japan and South Korea; discussing troop surges for Afghanistan; talking about permanently stationing forces in Iraq, increasing aid for Saudi...

By the time of Donald Trump’s inauguration, George Orwell was at the top of Amazon.com’s best-seller list.  Readers had developed a sudden passion for antitotalitarian literature, it seemed—not only for Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four but for Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism as well.  And with the surge of interest in Orwell came a sales revival for...

“I have prayed for you,” said Jesus to the apostles on the night before he died, “that you would be several, even as the Father and I are two.”  For the Son, we are told, sees what the Father does, and then goes and does something else.  And Saint Paul praised the church at Corinth,...

A little over 30 years ago, I was attending a conference in a faraway place when disaster struck.  I became sick, really sick—the sort of illness where one can barely crawl out of bed, let alone attend conference sessions.  Lacking care of any sort, I lay in bed for two days, waiting for some semblance...

“Jeff Sachs is like the March Hare in Alice in Wonderland, moving from cup to cup.  He can never return to any country that he advised, since they all hate him.  It happened in Latin America, in Slovenia, in Poland, a few of the Baltic States, and it was the same in Russia.  They maintain...

Images of those traumatized by the election of Donald Trump are indelible.  I mean specifically the sight of empaneled experts, red-eyed, choking, and stuttering as they said things like “CNN is now prepared to call the state of Wisconsin for Donald Trump.”  Or of rainbow mobs of sign-wavers in urban centers declaring (absurdly and solipsistically)...

In October, Yevgeny Kiselyov, Moscow’s TV propaganda hitman in chief, attacked U.S. policy over Syria, warning his audience that American “impudence” could take on what he called “nuclear dimensions.”  Russian warships were on their way to the Syrian coast, Kiselyov noted, to counter potential U.S. air strikes against the Syrian military.  He pointedly reminded his...

Twenty-five years is a long time to get back to where you started, but two-and-a-half decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is the United States, not the Russian Federation, that has succeeded in restoring the threat of nuclear annihilation to the global conversation.  And, by means of economic sanctions, energy-infrastructure intrusions, and...

Business Insider recently reported “a mind-blowing demographic shift” that is about to occur.  Considering the globe’s whole human population, the number of adults age 65 and older will in a few years be greater than the number of children under the age of 5.  This unprecedented change should then accelerate: By 2050, old people are...

Every time a bomb explodes in the West it is a boon for journalists.  They photograph weeping people, tell us how implacable the government will be, and, without breaking stride, warn us that more is likely to come.  But so far I have never come across any serious reflection on the rationale for the bombings,...

“To be an American,” George Santayana said, “is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.” For Americans and non-Americans alike, the American people has seemed a recognizable and describable breed from the earliest years of the Republic down to the 21st century, despite America’s reputation as a nation hospitable to immigration...

For nearly 200 years the United States and Mexico coexisted as a series of antonyms separated by a desert.  The United States was prosperous and free.  Mexico was poor and despotic.  For a time, the United States was the preeminent middle-class society.  Mexico has been a society of extremes.  For most Americans, Mexico was a...

About 20 years ago, there was an interesting left-handed pitcher for the Duluth-Superior Dukes, a very bad team in a league beneath the status of “minor”—minuscule, I might call it, though I am glad to know that there are still a few small-town baseball teams not in serfdom to the majors.  The pitcher’s name was...

Who is to decide?  This question animated Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, who died of natural causes in mid-February.  He was the longest-serving member of the current Supreme Court.  Nominated by Ronald Reagan in 1986, Scalia was known for his acerbic wit and fidelity to the text of the Constitution, as understood by those who ratified...

        —“If a temple is to be erected, a temple must be destroyed.” —Friedrich Nietzsche When the Cold War ended in 1991, American conservatives rejoiced over the triumph of democratic capitalism, which had struggled for over half a century, first against the rise of fascism, and then against the Soviet bloc and...

European history since the fall of the Roman Empire may be regarded as the slow forging, as if by a hidden hand as well as by human passions, of these particular forms of human collectivities called nations.  After several failed attempts to reconstitute the Roman Empire, Europe emerged out of the Middle Ages as a...

Allah (ta’ala) said, {They thought that their fortresses would protect them from Allah but Allah came upon them from where they had not expected, and He cast terror into their hearts so they destroyed their houses by their own hands and the hands of the believers.  So take warning, O people of vision} [Al-Hashr:2]. In...

Early one evening in the mid-1980’s, jazz pianist Walter Bishop, Jr., who in 1951-52 had performed and recorded with star bebop alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, was having a bad first set at Bradley’s, New York City’s premier jazz piano bar.  Bishop’s sense of time was off, he was missing notes, and he even seemed disoriented...

In 1970’s London, things were a bit more rudimentary than they are today: You considered yourself lucky to get through 24 hours without losing your electricity thanks to the latest “industrial action” (strike, to you and me), the trains were invariably late, and my memory is that most people didn’t exactly overdo it when it...

It’s summer in your neighborhood.  School is out in suburban America.  Trees line ponds stocked with fish available for “catch and release,” the “natural” areas abounding with turtles, ducks, geese, cotton-tailed rabbits, and squirrels.  Shady parks are equipped with playgrounds with swings and what used to be called monkey bars.  Look around you.  It doesn’t...

Politicians and businessmen do not always see eye to eye.  In ancient Rome the political elite, the Senatorial Order, squabbled with the wealthy Knights of the Equestrian Order.  Cicero advocated a “Concord of the Orders,” where senators and knights would work together against the political ambition and military might of Crassus and Julius Caesar.  Neither...

Why would the much-married Donald Trump, billionaire, self-promoter, real-estate developer, and leading figure in the world of flashy entertainment, a man who until recently apparently accepted the views of his class on hot-button political and social issues, suddenly become the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination? The man’s been successful in a variety of...

When Donald Trump started making noise about running for president, I knew next to nothing about him.  Since I don’t watch television, I’m not sure whether I could even have identified him in a lineup.  I knew only that he was a New York-based real-estate mogul and had a series of beautiful wives.  So it...

In August, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) published a report documenting a startling increase in immigration over the past year.  The study indicated that America’s immigrant population had grown by 1.7 million and that 44 percent of the new immigrants were from Mexico, with illegal immigration increasing during a “protracted period of legal immigration...

        “The average American watches over seven hours of television daily.  Those hours open up a gateway into the private world of straights, through which a Trojan Horse might be passed.” —Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, “The Overhauling of Straight America” (1987) If one had not already been convinced that the gay-rights...

Arguments, as Malcolm Muggeridge astutely observed, are never about what they’re about.  As when “You’re never on time anymore” turns out really to mean, “When are you going to quit sitting around and get a real job?”  And so on. The national argument over Confederate symbols and monuments—assuming you want to call it an argument...

        “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” —Matthew 16:26 Our Lord taught us all about bad bargains.  To lose your own soul and to receive in exchange that mere...

When my father died, I was eight years old, the third of four children.  Mother repeatedly made it clear that if we wanted to go to college like our parents—and we must—we would have to study hard to obtain scholarships.  The notion became so ingrained that I grew up presuming excellent grades and college were...

When Henry Wadsworth Longfellow visited London in 1868, he was invited by Queen Victoria to an audience at Windsor Castle.  She complimented him on his poetry, assuring him that all her servants read it.  Though Oscar Wilde took this phrase to be a rebuke of Longfellow’s vanity, why should it not be sincere?  The claim...

Exactly 50 years ago, T.S. Eliot died.  Exactly 100 years ago, “Prufrock” appeared.  What better moment, then, to perform the long-overdue public service of identifying the single worst poem to have been published during the last century?  To name and shame?  To award the IgNobel Prize for (Nominally Versified) Literature?  A dirty job, but someone...

President Barack Obama, during a May speech in Oregon, insisted that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal is good for small-business workers, helps the middle class, and maintains U.S. trade power versus China, which is not a signatory to the 12-nation pact.  “This is not a left issue or right issue, or a business or...

“Let the Yankees Freeze in the Dark” read the bumper stickers in Texas in February 1982, the month I flew back from West Germany, mustered out of the U.S. Army at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and returned to my hometown of Wayne, Michigan.  Oil had soared from $3.60 per barrel in 1972 to $37.42 in...

The message on the downtown wall was brief, and the writer got straight to the point.  “Whitey,” it read, “Get out!  Your [sic] stupid f–ken [sic] prejudice [sic]!  Hit Eight Mile Road!”  After a couple of crude but potent illustrative doodles, it was signed, “Mad and Dangerous.” If you were looking for the authentic voice...

Two weeks before Apple began selling its new Apple Watch, Shinola Detroit took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal.  Above a large photo of its analog watch, The Runwell, was the tag, “The Watch That’s Too Smart to Try and Be a Phone.”  The Runwell starts at $550, the same price as...

For a news professional, it is hard to say which is more discouraging: that Rolling Stone published an imaginary tale of gang rape from a crazy college girl without double-checking her story, or that no one at Rolling Stone was fired after the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism issued a report that revealed top-to-bottom...

        “Exsilioque domos et dulcia limina mutant, Atque alio patriam quaerunt sub sole iacentem.” —Virgil, Georgics II.511-12 Honestly, why bother any more?  If there is any unifying theme in the scribblings of genuine, bona-fide American conservatives, it is that our country is lost, whether to whoremongers or warmongers—or both.  Drum sets in...