In the spring of 1981, conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives cried. They cried because, in the first flush of the Reagan Revolution that was supposed to bring drastic cuts in taxes and government spending, as well as a balanced budget, they were being asked by the White House and their own leadership to...
When speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai, Jehovah gave explicit instructions on the Year of Jubilee. Once the people came into the Promised Land, every 50 years they were to observe the Jubilee. Loans were to be written off, slaves freed, and land that had been sold returned to the original owner. Those who had...
Paradoxically, Westerners of every faith and political opinion seem perennially unhappy with Western society, despite the West’s assurance that it is the best, most fair, most free, most enlightened, and most humane way of life in human history. The left faults Western institutions because they seem to it insufficiently fair and progressive, too much influenced...
Last May, Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, two Muslim converts, both Christian apostates, deliberately ran down an off-duty British soldier, Lee Rigby, in their automobile on a main street in the London suburb of Woolwich. In front of eyewitnesses, they then repeatedly stabbed him and tried to behead him with a machete. Their trial and...
When I was growing up in England 50 years ago, the newspapers still periodically caused a certain amount of mirth by “outing” a national figure as not some impeccably Eton-reared patrician, as his public image seemed to imply, but a horny-handed son of the soil who had gone to the local state school and taken...
I’ve no more desire than the next Anglophile with a framed colored engraving of the queen-empress on his office wall to pull down the aristocracy; to take away their estates and paintings and seats in the Lords and ancient Rollses resting on blocks in stables where the racing stud used to breed. And yet I...
The elegant duplex maisonette at 73 East 73rd Street in Manhattan, formerly the residence of the late Mr. and Mrs. William F. Buckley, Jr., was recently bought by Mr. and Mrs. Mark Rockefeller, son and daughter-in-law of the late Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. A writer for the New York Times, describing the architectural and decorative renovations...
Fifty years ago James Burnham warned Westerners: Trying to come to terms with communism instead of resolutely fighting it amounts to committing suicide. Whether the communist ideology is dead or still alive under a new guise remains, in spite of current opinion, an open question, but in any case only the blind or the deceitful...
“Today is the beginning of the liberation from the European elite, the monster in Brussels.” These are strong words. But they are not surprising coming from Geert Wilders, the leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom and a man known for his rhetorical flourishes. He was speaking at a joint press conference with Marine Le...
“[W]e may expect,” Sigmund Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents, first published in 1930, “that one day someone will venture upon . . . research into the pathology of civilized communities.” This statement directly follows Freud’s suggestion that, if it is true that the evolution of a civilization proceeds similarly to that of an...
“It’s awesome”: A young relative of mine loves the word and uses it profusely. Since she applies it to a restaurant or a vacuum cleaner she finds extraordinary, I doubt she realizes its real meaning. This is a typical instance of the degeneracy of a word caused by the search for quick superlatives, and mainly...
“And the next speaker is . . . ,” the chairman pauses as she runs her eyes down a long handwritten list, “the Anti-Defamation League for Yoga and Spiritual Movements followed by ‘Istiqbolli Avlod’ Youth Information-Enlightening Center, Tashkent Branch.” Sitting around a vast table, representatives of 57 states listen to a lady with bottle-blonde hair...
“Hell,” as Thomas Hobbes astutely noted several centuries ago, “is truth glimpsed too late.” As in the case of Barack H. Obama, self-anointed messiah? I should certainly imagine so. By the end of the first year of Obama’s second term, a majority of Americans had pretty much caught on to their President’s unmatched gift for...
[What follows is a meditation on T.S. Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding.” All indented quotations, with apologies to their author, are taken from Eliot.] What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from . . . The first step,...
And Jesus answering said unto them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost . . . On February 28, as Pope Benedict...
“Even if you don’t have the authorities—and frankly I didn’t have the authorities for anything—if you take charge people will follow.” So said Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Jr., former CEO of Goldman Sachs, to the Washington Post on November 19, 2008, just about two months after TARP (the Troubled Asset Relief Program) passed through...
A reader not of the Faith who happened, since the installation of Pope Francis, to glance through almost any issue of L’Osservatore Romano, Vatican City’s official newspaper, might well conclude that the conclave that met in the Sistine Chapel last spring elected a social worker instead of a cardinal as the successor to Benedict XVI. ...
“Teachers who teach Western education? We will kill them! We will kill them in front of their students and tell the students to henceforth [sic] study the Koran,” declared Abubakar Shekau, leader of the Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram, which killed 46 students in a boarding school on July 6 (Time, July 19). Willingly or...
Only a few weeks into the latest round of horrors in Syria, we are getting used to the debasement of “intelligence” to serve the crudest political ends. In September, President Hollande showed the U.N. secretary general and journalists round the French military intelligence HQ at Creil north of Paris, where the amazed visitors admired the...
Attacks on constitutional liberties, including the erosion of due-process protections for the rights to life, liberty, and property, tend to soar in wartime. The most egregious assaults have occurred during the Civil War, the two world wars, and, most recently, in the so-called War on Terror. Courageous individuals spoke out against the abuses during and...
Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s widow is no longer calling herself “Karima Tsarnaeva.” She is Katherine Russell again. Karima/Katherine is reportedly drifting away from the way of life she accepted when she converted to Islam and married the Boston Bomber, the terrorist killed by police last April following the bombings that left three dead and wounded as many...
The three pillars of liberal morality are engagement, compassion, and inclusiveness; its corresponding demons apathy, hatred, and exclusiveness. The shorthand word for the three cardinal virtues is niceness; for the three supreme vices, meanness. Nice is a word familiar among middle-middle class Americans, who have been liberalized whether they know it or not: the sort...
Contrary to the popular slogan, the September 11 attacks did not change everything. They did, however, transform how Americans, and especially American officials, think about both war and executive power. The resulting “War on Terror” has been under way for a dozen years. In a traditional war, whether formally declared or unofficially fought, the battlefield...
Mercenary (Mer-cen-ar-y): Adjective (of a person or their [sic] behavior): Primarily concerned with making money at the expense of ethics; Noun: A professional soldier hired to serve in a foreign army; Synonyms: adjective venal; noun hireling soldier of fortune Assassin (As-sas-sin): Noun 1. A murderer of an important person in a surprise attack for political...
One striking feature of the U.S. Constitution is the number of procedural rights guaranteed to individuals accused of criminal behavior before they can be deprived of life, liberty, or property. The overall guarantee of due process of law contained in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments constitutes the basic foundation, but there are many other protections. ...
The New York Times’ headline for Thursday, July 4, 2013, printed above a nearly page-wide photograph showing a spectacular eruption of fireworks in the nighttime sky above Cairo, read Egypt Army Ousts Morsi, Suspends Charter. Almost an earth’s half-turn apart, Egypt celebrated the downfall of her year-old “democracy,” while the United States of America memorialized...
The university graduation season this past spring dumped another seven million job seekers onto the sputtering economy. A June headline in the New York Times painted a dismal picture of their likelihood of finding employment: “Degrees but No Guarantees: Faltering Economy . . . Dims Prospects for Graduates.” In response, the mortarboard horde took to...
Anglo-Americans habitually disparage the “socialist” Europeans, as if it were just or fair to lump all Continental economies under one pejorative label. Rather than relying on epithets, however, would-be economic and educational reformers should take a closer look at Germany, where the combination of regulated markets and the welfare state (what the Germans call the...
“A Cinderella moment,” gushed a gay-rights advocate when the Supreme Court announced its two landmark decisions in June. California’s Proposition 8—an amendment to its constitution—went down (Hollingsworth v. Perry), as did the federal Defense of Marriage Act (United States v. Windsor). The New York Times saw a “huge and gratifying” victory for equal rights. The...
When Frank Bronkowski, my father, was alive, he’d read and reread his Polish newspapers, the Gwiazda Polarna, the Nowy Dziennik. He’d speak no English on Sundays and drink a Polish beer. His pocket watch—brought from the old country—stands in its place of honor on the dining-room table. Next to it, Ma has fresh peonies in...
Researchers report significantly increased rates of suicide among U.S. military personnel, college students, and baby boomers. Until now, suicide was most prevalent among teenagers and elderly persons. Journalists have suggested a number of explanations for the phenomenon, among the more plausible of them the structural collapse of the American family in which troubled, lonely, and...
Back in April, my old friend D.B. “Dukie” Kitchens called to inform me that I should soon expect in the mail an invitation to the inaugural Patriot Book Awards ceremony, to be held in Atlanta in late May. “What did I do to deserve this honor?” I asked. “Nothing,” Dukie replied. “I got your name...
The morning after Thanksgiving I completed the manuscript of my last book, which will be published by Harvard University Press—a short book, and I still had some work on it. But I had a sense of accomplishment and a day of relief, whence I had a couple of stiff drinks in my cozy living room...
This past May in Newark, the FBI added former Black Liberation Army mercenary Joanne Chesimard to its Most Wanted Terrorists list at a ceremony held on the 40th anniversary of New Jersey’s most infamous cop killing. Now known as Assata Shakur, the step-aunt of the late rapper Tupac Shakur became the 46th fugitive—as well as...
Like it or not, gay marriage is here to stay. The Supreme Court ruling matters little. That was the case well before oral arguments were heard, and not for legal reasons. Yes, the fact that some states had already recognized it played a part, but the real reason gay marriage is now a permanent part...
At its May 2013 meeting in San Francisco, the American Psychiatric Association released the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Among changes from the previous edition is the renaming of what was formerly termed “gender identity disorder.” (The American Medical Association uses the term “gender disorder,” classifying it as a...
In scientific culture, every subject is accepted as a legitimate one for quantifiable study, including subjects no wise man would venture to approach in such a manner. Hence academic researchers, boldly rushing in where mystics and poets fear to tread, feel encouraged to establish themselves as experts in matters to which the concept of expertise...
In March of this year over a million Frenchmen demonstrated on the streets of Paris against the legal institutionalization of gay marriage. As far as the media were concerned, this event was practically confidential. It is hard to imagine a similar scene taking place in the United States, but if it did, it would be...
During the late winter and early spring of 2013, yet another crisis involving North Korea occupied the attention of U.S. officials and much of the news media. Not only did Pyongyang conduct a nuclear test, but the government of Kim Jong-un issued shrill threats against both South Korea and the United States. South Korea’s new...
Even President Barack Obama appears to realize that Washington has a spending problem. His latest budget, delivered late and without enthusiasm, makes a nod toward restraining the growth of social programs, most notably “entitlements,” headed by Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Alas, that baby step earned a rebuke from his left-wing allies, along with a...
As New York City’s mayoral campaign kicked into overdrive earlier this spring, the New York Times saw fit to question the viability of Republican candidate Joe Lhota, former chairman of the Metropolitan Transit Authority. With all the populist fervor it could muster, the Times asked readers, “Can New Yorkers learn to love someone who increased...
No one expects to discover in a drug dealer the character of Johnny Appleseed or Santa Claus, overflowing with compassion and the milk of human kindness, scattering sweetness and light wherever he goes. On the other hand, I suspect even the most hardened undercover cop in his local antidrug unit would be shocked to witness...
For many weeks the press in Britain have been obsessed with the Jimmy Savile sex scandal, and it has many months to run. Savile, who died in 2011, aged 84, was a superstar entertainer for the BBC, and his programs attracted millions of viewers. The BBC needed Savile and his huge audiences to justify the...
I remember being taught as a student of the considerable, if not unbridgeable, gap between the polytheistic pagans and the monotheistic Christians who, though they may have borrowed from their predecessors, eventually delivered a civilization completely of their own. The roots of the West were supposed to lie in Christianity, which either invented a new...
In C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle the world of Narnia begins to dissolve and disappear. The Pevensie children are confused and frightened, but Professor Kirke, now Lord Digory, reassures them that the Narnia and the England they had known were only shadows compared to the reality they were about to experience. Then he mumbles to...
The title of the most famous book published in the 19th century is in fact a misnomer. Das Kapital should really be Die Industrie. It is true that in Volume One, Chapter 1, Karl Marx begins with a discussion of money as having originated not as capital but simply as a means of exchange. Money,...
Practice free trade. Avoid government debt. Keep the government and the banking system separate from each other. These quaint and long-rejected policies were Condy Raguet’s prescription for American peace and prosperity. Now largely forgotten, Raguet (1784-1842) was one of our earliest and best political economists. Unlike some later advocates of a free economy, Raguet was...
By a curious coincidence, bills to legalize gay marriage are passing through the British and French parliaments almost simultaneously. While other countries like Spain and Portugal legalized gay marriage years ago, London and Paris are acting together on this—rather as they have done in Libya, Syria, and now Mali. The British and French bills were...
I have never spent much time thinking about money, perhaps because I have never had enough to worry about keeping or losing it. Ignorance, however, is no serious obstacle to the hardened pontificator, who, armed only with coffee, tobacco, and access to the errors of Wikipedia, feels up to tackling any subject. The American publishing...
A naive visitor arriving in the United States from abroad might conclude from the popular emphasis on “moderation” in contemporary American political discourse that Americans live under a government that represents a moderate theory of the appropriate scope and power of the state and harbors only modest political ambitions. If he happens to be a...