Article Archive
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Addicted to Guilt
A Fourth of July Washington Post-syndicated column by W’s former speechwriter and the author of his Second Inaugural, Michael Gerson, struck so many Republican, neoconservative, and not least of all Evangelical themes that his words should be archived as illustrating self-induced illusion. The column is decorated (or at least it was in the New York Post) with a picture of Martin Luther King, who is quoted to the effect that the US stands for a “universal right” to equality. According to Gerson, who cites the left-liberal journalist Nicholas Lemann, our government reneged on its founding purpose not only by protecting racial slavery but also by not pushing on the South Reconstruction hard enough after the Civil War. But we can apparently redeem ourselves, by making democracy available to the entire planet. [Read More]
Confederates and Catholics, Unite!
As Walker Percy, Margaret Mitchell and Flannery O’Connor perceived, in the current struggle between the “Modernity” foisted on us by our elites and those who hold to the traditions they brought to this country--religious and cultural--Protestant Southerners and Catholic Midwesterners and Yankees are natural allies. Both sides must realize this. [Read More]
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea
The civilisations that rose and fell on the lands bordering the Mediterranean Sea were the makers of the history I’m interested in. Screw Tahiti or the Straits of Malacca. The two great countries of the Med are Greece and Italy, and without those two countries you’d have squat today. And, I suppose, I have to bring in Egypt. Which brings me to the last point. Jihad. Post-Christian European secular elites are avoiding the M-word, as in Muslim. [Read More]
Neocons and the Left: Know Your Enemies
To whatever extent there is an establishment conservative voice in the United States and in much of Western Europe, it sounds unmistakably neoconservative. Whether the topic is spreading “human rights,” favoring a “democratic capitalist welfare state,” opposing xenophobia and anti-immigrationists from the standpoint of “universal democratic values,” the side represented by the media that is not officially leftist can be characterized as “neoconservative.” Those on the right of this allowable opposition are targeted as “extremists.” [Read More]
The Kirk Wars Continue
The New Republic is about the last place anyone would look for a fair reading of traditionalist conservatism. The magazine’s review pages are often outstanding, with such contributors as American historian Gordon S. Wood and classicist Peter Green, and its exposes of Republican crooks can provide almost as much satisfaction to principles conservatives as to liberals. But let’s be clear: The New Republic started out as Herbert Croly’s vessel for evangelizing the gospel of foreign interventionism and modern liberalism, and in the 93 years since then it has changed very little. The political environment has changed considerably, however, and Croly’s then-newfangled liberalism is nowadays hardly distinguishable from what’s called neoconservatism. The difference is that The New Republic continues to court the center-left, while the neocons have occupied the center-right. Lately TNR’s approach hasn’t been working out so well, as hard Leftists have decided that they’ve had enough of these hawkish liberals and have canceled their subscriptions in droves, resulting in a dizzying decline in the magazine’s readership. [Read More]
The Last Time I Saw Paris
Even in some of my saner moments, however, I can detect within myself a tendency of character that transforms me into a kind of Taki of the Gutter. Thus I may be the only writer you will ever read who has met both Paris Hilton and David Frum, a fact I adduce here with neither pride nor shame, merely as evidence of my indiscriminate, some would say alcoholically induced, gregariousness. Miss Hilton I met in Cannes, at a drinks party on a big tugboat by the name of Octopus, which I distinctly remember some people calling a yacht because it belonged to somebody who could afford one. Her journalistic counterpart I knew at university, where Mr Frum already stood out among his peers as a conspicuous toady, a superior liar, and a remarkably naff dresser. [Read More]
The Real Bastille Day
The French Revolution was really a digestive eruption of all the basest instincts in the lowest elements of society, led by power-drunk ideologues of the radical Left. It was utterly unlike the American rebellion against the English colonial officials – which amounted to a regional secession, led by the responsible members of the upper middle class. And for that fact we should be forever grateful, as should other countries which emulated the American model of political reform, rather than the French, as Hannah Arendt and Wilhelm Röpke have written. Of course, apologists for the Revolution will point to the inequalities and injustices of the Ancien Regime as justification for the bloodbath. [Read More]
A Greek in the Temple of Venus
The extravaganza was made possible by the city which turned over some of its most historic sights to Valentino and the Oscar winning film designer Dante Ferretti, who proceeded to put up 40 classical columns illuminated from within in the ruins of the Temple of Venus, adjacent to the Coliseum. We were driven up by electric carts and then walked on red carpets into this vast space, where more than two thousand years ago Aphrodite ruled supreme. [Read More]
The German Disease
As the former German Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, has stated multiple times, “Auschwitz is the founding myth of our German democracy.” And in line with this morbid obsession, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who in the international press is deceptively characterized as a “conservative,” wants to use Germany’s succession to the EU’s presidency to impose on its members the speech controls that are the proud accomplishment of her country’s managed democracy. (Pleading their nation’s shame as an aggressor people, German politicians will not allow their countrymen to vote on the EU Constitution that would surrender what remains of German national sovereignty to the Union.) In Merkel’s peculiar understanding of “democracy” as a way of life, any European “trivializing” the Holocaust will have to face criminal charges before an international tribunal. For those who celebrate our success in bringing the defeated Germans a “democratic political culture,” it may be necessary to point out the difference between citizens of a republic and PC laboratory mice. [Read More]
Ron Paul: The Conscience of Conservatism
He’s the conscience of the Republican party, or, at least, of its conservative wing – a reminder of the good old days, when being a right-wing GOPer meant never having to say you voted to raise taxes, or to increase the size of Big Government. When it meant a prudential foreign policy, rather than a Jacobin one rooted in recklessness. Rep. Paul remembers those days, and his campaign for the White House is based in large part on a conscious effort to revive this nearly-forgotten conservative tradition. [Read More]