With the revelation by an intel community “whistleblower” that President Donald Trump, in a congratulatory call to the new president of Ukraine, pushed him repeatedly to investigate the Joe Biden family connection to Ukrainian corruption, the cry “Impeach!” is being heard anew in the land. But revisiting how this latest scandal came about, and how...
[This review first appeared in the December 1987 issue of Chronicles.] “A perfect democracy is… therefore the most shameless thing in the world.” —Edmund Burke More than 50 years after his death, Irving Babbitt continues to evoke a sympathetic response from minds and temperaments attuned to the ethical worldview fostered by classical and Christian thought....
President Donald Trump does not want war with Iran. America does not want war with Iran. Even the Senate Republicans are advising against military action in response to that attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities. “All of us (should) get together and exchange ideas, respectfully, and come to a consensus–and that should be bipartisan,” says...
President Donald Trump does not want to be goaded into war with Iran, which is wise. He does not want to appear weak in the aftermath of the attacks on the Saudi oil installations–for which Iran has been blamed by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (“an act of war”), and others–which is understandable. By inviting the...
Just in case you were wondering: a war with Iran would be a disaster for the United States. If the Saudis believe that Iran attacked their refinery, let the Saudis do something about it. America First. No more Americans killed in pointless wars in the wretched Middle East. [Image via: OSeveno, created with works by...
A belated note: Robert Mugabe’s death at 95 (September 6) was some six decades overdue. He was a thoroughly nasty piece of work. His dictum that “the only white man you can trust is a dead white man” has cost his people dearly, arguably even more so than the dispossessed and racially cleansed white farmers...
The citizens of metroland like to think of themselves as dwelling in a global hub. They may regard London as a city-state, like Renaissance Venice, or as a company town whose HQ is Westminster. It has yet to reach the corporate consciousness that, as Coriolanus put it, “There is a world elsewhere,” beyond the boundaries...
The sudden and bitter departure of John Bolton from the White House was baked in the cake from the day he arrived there. For Bolton’s worldview, formed and fixed in a Cold War that ended in 1991, was irreconcilable with the policies Donald Trump promised in his 2016 campaign. Indeed, Trump was elected because he...
Scene: the House of Commons. Speaker Bercow announces that he will stand down on October 31. Labour benches applaud wildly—the convention that members do not clap is so retro—and the Conservative benches are grimly silent, other than two or three malcontents who are headed out of the party anyway. Bercow, first elected as a Conservative,...
Only by firing John Bolton, I wrote in this blog three months ago, President Donald Trump may demonstrate “that he is still ready, even belatedly, to stop the ongoing kidnapping of his foreign policy by the enemy within the gates.” He has done so, thus reducing the danger of America’s entanglement in yet another Middle Eastern...
I was in the air when the first tower was hit; I watched the two towers fall, stupefied and enraged, alone in my hotel room in Norfolk. After my business was done, I went to the eerily quiet Norfolk airport to begin the drive home. I remember watching contrails in the sky driving across Virginia,...
We the People… The world, my friends, is going to… and that’s just the point: We don’t know where in the world the world is going. Only that it’s moving at a high speed, in ways likely to upset existing orders. And the People are driving this show–the People, yes, as Carl Sandburg entitled his...
Boris Johnson will not go to Canossa, unlike Theresa May who could not stay away from the place. For her, the Castle of Canossa was the Europa Building in Brussels, the seat of imperial power where the EU potentates hold their quinquennial Durbar and where the feudatory princes from as far as Bulgaria and Romania...
Walmart—the world’s largest retailer—has announced it’s taking a side in the gun debate. The company will no longer sell handgun ammunition at its stores, nor will it sell rifle rounds that can be “also used in large capacity clips on military-style weapons.” Then, Doug McMillon, Walmart’s CEO, issued a statement calling on Congress to ban...
Thursday, Sept. 14, looks to be a fateful day in the half-century-long political career of Joe Biden. That night, a three-hour debate will be held, a marathon in politics. Biden will be on stage, taking incoming missiles for 180 minutes from nine rivals, each of whom is hungry for the Democratic nomination and has a...
[This review first appeared in the July 1988 issue of Chronicles.] Hatred of the past ill becomes a historian. Yet it is hard not to detect this disfiguring animus—paired with an overweening love of contemporaneity—in the works of many modern historians of family life. In recent decades, men such as Philippe Aries, Edward Shorter, and...
“The name is Pride. Colonel Pride.” Out of the mists of English history a figure emerges whom we can recognize today. We would call him an “enforcer,” a man ordered to carry out a harsh policy determined by his superiors. In December 1648 Colonel Pride rid the Long Parliament of members unwanted by the Army...
Sunday, the 80th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland, Vice President Mike Pence spoke in Warsaw’s Pilsudski Square of “five decades of untold suffering and death that followed” the invasion. Five decades! What Pence was saying was that, for Poland, World War II did not end in victory but defeat and occupation by an...
Back in Barcelona after almost three years, and an obvious novelty is that there are fewer Estelada flags fluttering from the city’s balconies and windows. Some are still out there, tired and pale, but Catalonia’s separatists seem to have run out of steam. Spain has weathered the storm of 2017-18, and it’s all for the...
[above, Seth Moulton] This week, we were served some less-than-breaking news. Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., dropped out of the race for the Democratic nomination. If you’ve never heard of him, that’s OK. Few Democrats have. He served in the Marine Corps for four tours in Iraq, but other than that, he hasn’t done much. What’s...
Facing a Parliamentary majority opposed to a hard Brexit–a crashing out of the EU if Britain is not offered a deal she can live with–Boris Johnson took matters into his own hands. He went to the Queen at Balmoral and got Parliament “prorogued,” suspended, from Sept. 12 to Oct. 14. That’s two weeks before the...
What winter quarters were to the soldier, summer vacations are to the politician of today. The fall campaign has now opened with a surprise Government offensive. Boris Johnson has made the brusque announcement that Parliament will be prorogued for most of September and the first part of October. That will limit to a few days...
[This view first appeared in the October 1986 issue of Chronicles.] The obscurest epoch is today. —Robert Louis Stevenson Taken together, these three books serve nicely as a kind of group portrait of Clio and her several faces. In reverse order we have the historian as diarist and memoirist, as documentarian, and as reflective sage....
President Donald Trump, who canceled a missile strike on Iran, after the shoot-down of a U.S. Predator drone, to avoid killing Iranians, may not want a U.S. war with Iran. But the same cannot be said of Bibi Netanyahu. Saturday, Israel launched a night attack on a village south of Damascus to abort what Israel...
“Wir schaffen das”: I admire the cool cheek of Boris Johnson. He spoke those loaded words to Angela Merkel, who had famously spoken them in defence of her open invitation to a million migrants. The massed ranks of the German Press corps were slow to take it in, and there was a brief pause. Then...
To those of us of who learned our U.S. history from texts in the 1940s and ’50s, President Donald Trump’s brainstorm of acquiring Greenland fits into a venerable tradition of American expansionism. The story begins with colonial officer George Washington’s march out toward Fort Duquesne in 1754 and crushing defeat and near death at Fort...
“How Much Damage Have Republicans Done in the States?” Gosh! Worlds of damage, you’d imagine, if you’re a typical client of The New York Times nursery school system, where more and more government is good and less and less government is very, very bad—evidencing a failure on your part to appreciate the joys of governance...
An anti-Brexit Government of National Unity falls at the first hurdle: its acronym. The political classes had found the dodo useful, as a widely accepted symbol for Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement. Now Theresa has gone the way of the dodo herself. Unlike the dodo, the gnu continues exist. It is an African antelope, often known...
An important foreign story consistently underreported in the U.S. is the remarkable rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the eastern states of the Federal Republic. Regional elections will be held on September 1 in two of them, Brandenburg and Saxony. Angela Merkel’s “center-right” Christian Democratic Union (CSU) and her “center-left” coalition partners (Sozialdemokratische...
The near future of British politics is unnervingly poised. The law as it stands is that Britain must leave the European Union on October 31st. This law can only be changed by another law, which requires a Parliamentary majority. Can this be accomplished by the Government’s many enemies? If the Conservative Party in the Commons...
President Donald Trump’s reelection hopes hinge on two things: the state of the economy in 2020 and the identity of the Democratic nominee. The further left the Democrats go to select their candidate, the greater the probability Trump wins a second term. Thus Trump got good news this week. The verbal flubs of Joe...
One thing about tragedies: They reveal people for who they really are. In the past two weeks, we’ve learned a lot about our media and political class. Our country endured two separate and horrifying mass shootings, one in El Paso, Texas, and the other in Dayton, Ohio. Between them, at least 31 people were murdered....
[This review first appeared in the June 1991 issue of Chronicles.] Red Love is “third generation Leninist” porno star Suzie Sizzle’s yet-unmade dream project, the love story of her aunt and uncle, the Rosenberg-like spies Dolly and Solly Rubell. Until Suzie’s industry develops a revolutionary consciousness, we’ll have to settle for David Evanier’s novel of...
The Port of Aden The war in Yemen is like the drought in the Sahel or the carnage in the streets of south Chicago: an ongoing unpleasantness of which we are but vaguely aware, a regrettable but irrelevant fact of life. It is nevertheless remarkable that the capture of Aden by southern Yemeni separatists on...
“The liberal idea is obsolete,” said President Putin in a recent interview with the Financial Times (27 June 2019), “it has outlived its purpose. When the migration problem came to a head, many people admitted that the policy of multiculturalism is not effective and that the interests of the core population should be considered.” Of...
Those who believed America’s racial divide would begin to close with the civil rights acts of the 1960s and the election of a black president in this century appear to have been overly optimistic. The race divide seems deeper and wider than at any time in our lifetimes. Most of the aspiring leaders of the...
[This review first appeared in the November 2007 issue of Chronicles.] It is a cliché among Byzantinists that too few people in the world, especially in the West, know anything about Byzantium, so there is no doubt that more works of “popular synthesis” that make this Christian successor to the Roman Empire in the East...
[This article first appeared in the December 1992 issue of Chronicles.] In the second segment of the several-part BBC documentary on his life, Malcolm Muggeridge smoothed his white feathery hair away from his cherubic face, smiled cryptically, and said in his deep, rolling, gentle English voice, “There’s nothing in this world more instinctively abhorrent to...
It was two days of contrast that tell us about America 2019. In El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, following the mass murders of Saturday and Sunday morning, the local folks on camera—police, prosecutors, mayors, FBI and city officials—were nonpartisan, patient, polite and dignified in the unity and solemnity of their grief for their dead...
Brecon & Radnorshire was an encounter battle, unplanned and unwanted. This obscure border constituency has just seen a by-election whose occasion was absurd—the sitting MP was recalled after some minor expenses claims transgressions and was allowed by his Conservative party to stand again—but which, as is the way with more famous encounters, stood for much...
Last Thursday President Donald Trump announced that his administration would impose a 10 percent tariff on $300 billion of Chinese imports starting September 1, in addition to the existing 25 percent tariff on $250 billion in goods introduced last spring. Virtually everything the Chinese export to America may soon be subject to some level of...
In his opening statement at Wednesday’s Democratic debate in Detroit, Joe Biden addressed Donald Trump while pointing proudly to the racial and ethnic diversity of the nine Democrats standing beside him. “Mr. President, this is America and we are strong and great because of this diversity, not in spite of it. … We love it....
[This article first appeared in the September 1988 issue of Chronicles.] “Le reve est une seconde vie.“ —Nerval T.S. Eliot has become so thoroughly exalted, especially among conservative intellectuals, as the greatest poetic avatar of Western civilization in modern times (a role he must share, though, with Yeats and Pound) that it may shock many...
My personal experience with Jesuits has been overwhelmingly positive. I was reminded of that this past Sunday, as I attended Mass at my high school alma mater. I enjoyed my four years as a student there, and the friendships I made and the lessons I learned have continued to bless me, year in, year out....
Did President Donald Trump launch his Twitter barrage at Elijah Cummings simply because the Baltimore congressman was black? Was it just a “racist” attack on a member of the Black Caucus? Or did Trump go after Cummings after a Saturday Fox News report that his district was in far worse condition than the Mexican border...
“The washing of the spears,” was the Zulu term for victory in battle. The latest phase in the Tory civil war has seen a brutal triumph of the Brexiteers, with no quarter extended to the vanquished. Of Theresa May’s Cabinet of 23, 16 have fallen as in an Elizabethan Revenge tragedy. It turns out that...
Back in the Eternal City after three years, and there is another political scandal on the horizon. Or at least the local media machine (every bit as bad as its U.S. equivalent) would have us believe there was. The target: Matteo Salvini, Italy’s famously Euroskeptic interior minister. The accusation: corrupt dealings between his Lega party...
The Democrats who were looking to cast Robert Mueller as the star in a TV special, “The Impeachment of Donald Trump,” can probably tear up the script. They’re gonna be needing a new one. For six hours Wednesday, as three cable news networks and ABC, CBS, and NBC all carried live the hearings of the...
[This review first appeared in the June 1987 issue of Chronicles.] To 18th-century Britons and Americans who devoted any serious thought to the subject of human nature—and a great many did—the conventional starting point was the theory of the passions, or drives for self-gratification. Rousseau to the contrary, man was not naturally good but was ruled...
Farewell the plumèd troop, and the big wars, That make ambition virtue!… Farewell! Othello’s occupation’s gone! (Shakespeare 3.3.349-357) Here I intuit the thoughts of Theresa May, as she prepares to leave office. For her though the office of Prime Minister is not an “occupation,” it is the self. Take, for example, being welcomed on...