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pages-0420.indd 2 4/2/20 4:56 PM ChroniclesMagazine.org • Vol. 44, No. 4 • April/May 2020

VIEW SOCIETY & CULTURE 10 | Coins of the Realm 31 | Loveline: Stealth Conservative Talk Radio by Anthony Esolen by Mark Bauerlein America’s historical specie reveal times 35 | Faux Originalism of change. by Mark Pulliam

REMEMBERING THE RIGHT CORRESPONDENCE 14 | Remembering William F. Buckley, Jr. Letter From England Dangerous Charm 38 | Letter from Twickenham: In Deepest Remainland by Jack Trotter by Piers Shepherd 19 | Remembering Willmoore Kendall The Unsettled Conservative COLUMNS The American Interest by David Frisk 41 | The Geopolitics of Coronavirus by Srdja Trifkovic REVIEWS 24 | Traditionalism Redux Sins of Omission 44 | by Derek Turner Epidemic for the Record Books by Roger D. McGrath War for Eternity: Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers Ivory Tower Iconoclast by Benjamin R. Teitelbaum 46 | Deep North Privilege by Mark G. Brennan 26 | Fatal Amendments by Betsy Clarke In the Dark 48 | Family Finances The Cult of the Constitution by George McCartney by Mary Anne Franks Under the Black Flag 28 | Hitler vs. the Anglo-Americans 50 | #MeToo for Me, But Not for Thee by Srdja Trifkovic by Taki Theodoracopulos Hitler: A Global Biography by Brendan Simms POETRY 9 | That Sinking Sunday Feeling 5 | Polemics and Exchanges by Pete Beurskens 6 | Editorials 23 | What the Editors Are Reading 22 | My Penelope: Ten Moments 30 | Books in Brief by Pete Beurskens

PUBLISHER Devin Foley EDITOR IN CHIEF Paul Gottfried EXECUTIVE EDITOR Edward Welsch CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Anthony Esolen, James Kalb, Tom Piatak, Taki Theodoracopulos CORRESPONDING EDITORS Wayne Allensworth, Donald Livingston, Roger D. McGrath, William Mills, William Murchison FOREIGN AFFAIRS EDITOR Srdja Trifkovic BOOKS EDITOR Mark G. Brennan LEGAL AFFAIRS EDITOR Stephen B. Presser POETRY EDITOR Catharine Savage Brosman FILM EDITOR George McCartney GRAPHIC ARTIST John Koch EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Lorrie Wolf INTERIOR ARTIST George McCartney, Jr. CIRCULATION MANAGER Cindy Link PUBLISHED BY Charlemagne Institute

April/May 2020 cover photo: the Standing Liberty quarter, which was struck by the United States Mint from 1916 to 1930 and designed by 3 sculptor Hermon Atkins MacNeil

pages-0420.indd 3 4/2/20 4:56 PM

In This Number

If you had told me at Christmas rewards have long suppressed the maga- You’re going to be seeing a lot more of that by March the whole office would be zine's ideas and analysis. It was a threat to Chronicles as its influence and reach con- working remotely due to a state emergen- their power and comfort, and they wield- tinues to spread! As our esteemed editor- cy order to combat a global pandemic, I ed their weapons well. in-chief, Paul Gottfried put it recently: wouldn’t have believed you. But here we are. All of that ended when the Black Without a doubt, this is a situation 99.9 Swan Corona flew onto the scene. In We intend to continue our activi- percent of Americans have never experi- one fell swoop, that ebony bird revealed ties to the best of our abilities. We enced. Many cities appear abandoned, the to Americans that a financialized, glob- look upon the present challenge economy is rapidly shedding jobs, people al economy isn’t as strong as it pretends not as an occasion for despair but are stockpiling food and masks, gun stores to be. Economic dependency on China, as an opportunity to redouble our are sold out, and the government is print- it seems, is a very bad idea. The Federal efforts. Fueled by our mission, our ing money even more than it did in 2008! Reserve’s only solution is easy money, but work will go on. A lot of Americans are justifiably anxious there are more fundamental changes that about the future. need to take place. Borders and sovereignty This issue is proof of our continued As a nonprofit, we’re facing a tough are critical; domestic manufacturing needs work. We overcame some challenges cre- fight ahead—financially, culturally, and to be rebuilt; family and local communities ated by the pandemic and decided that we politically. But we also see an incredible need empowerment while the managerial needed to do an April/May issue followed opportunity before us as conservatives, state needs to be disempowered. later in the year with a "Remembering the and we hope you will continue to join us Our job now is to explain the causes Right" special issue, which we aim to dis- in this fight for the good, the true, and behind what Americans have just expe- tribute as widely as possible, with the help the beautiful. rienced and to show them a better way of our readers. For 44 years, Chronicles has stood as a forward. To do that, we are proud to an- Thank you for your support and read- beacon to America, illuminating the West’s nounce that we just launched a new web- ership of Chronicles. We were created for best ideas and principles. Deeply rooted, site platform for Chronicles, Charlemagne this very time. the magazine has consistently stayed true Institute, and Intellectual Takeout. By bring- to its moorings and helped its readers both ing the websites together, we are now able Devin C. Foley is co-founder and chief see and understand the growing dysfunc- to share the wit and wisdom of Chronicles executive of Charlemagne Institute, tion all around us. Alas, those who em- with over 10 million digital readers, the publisher of Chronicles. braced the imperial state and enjoyed its majority of whom are under the age of 45.

Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture (ISSN 0887-5731) is published Editorial and Advertising Office: 8011 34th Ave S, Ste. C-11, Bloomington, The views expressed in Chronicles are the authors’ alone and do not necessarily monthly, at an annual subscription price of $49.95 (foreign subscriptions add MN 55425 reflect the views of Charlemagne Institute or of its directors. $15 for surface delivery, $48 for Air Mail) per year by Charlemagne Institute, Phone: (952) 388-0840 Advertising e-mail: [email protected] 8011 34th Ave S, Ste. C-11, Bloomington, MN 55425. Preferred periodical post- Unsolicited manuscripts cannot be returned unless accompanied by a age paid at Rockford, IL and additional mailing offices. Letters to the Editor: [email protected] self-addressed stamped envelope. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Chronicles, P.O. Box 3247, Northbrook, IL Subscription Department: P.O. Box 3247, Northbrook, IL 60065-3247 Copyright © 2020 by Charlemagne Institute. All rights reserved. 60065-3247. Phone: (800) 877-5459 E-mail: [email protected] Printed in the United States of America.

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pages-0420.indd 4 4/2/20 4:56 PM POLEMICS & EXCHANGES

Founding Virtue none would have suggested that the cen- tral government was anything other than To the list of those labeled as Prof. McClanahan replies: the “white man’s government” or that “social justice conservatives” by Brion Mc- blacks should be granted universal citi- Clanahan ("Reinventing Reconstruction," My piece on “Reconsidering Reconstruc- zenship. There was no difference between February 2020) you can add the names of tion” seemed to touch a nerve with the the Confederate Constitution of 1861 and the Founding Fathers. Referring to them, “social justice conservative” population. the United States Constitution of 1787 on Alexander Stephens (Vice-President of the Good. Mr. Burtner’s letter exemplifies the this issue. Confederacy and author of the infamous growing intellectual disconnect between We can consider these positions abhor- "Cornerstone Speech") wrote, “The pre- modern American conservatism and its rent today, but let us not engage in the same vailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and ancient roots and the symbiotic relation- righteous cause the myth-making Lincoln most of the leading statesmen at the time ship between these modern “conservatives” codified in the Gettysburg Address. of the formation of the old Constitution and their radical leftist cohorts. And what about those Reconstruction were that the enslavement of the African I should emphasize that Mr. Burtner Amendments Mr. Burtner champions? I was in violation of the laws of nature; that should be pitied rather than ridiculed. He never mentioned them in my Chronicles it was wrong in principle, socially, moral- has been duped by a cadre of pseudo-intel- piece so this is a bit of a straw man ar- ly and politically. It was an evil they knew lectual talking heads on Fox News, bom- gument. No one would argue the 13th not well how to deal with.” barded with worthless drivel from neocon- Amendment wasn’t beneficial for the U.S. Lincoln and the Republicans stood with servative writers infatuated with proving Even most Southerners conceded this point the Founders. Stephens went on to describe that the Republican Party has always stood after the War. Mr. Burtner also praises the what the Confederacy stood for. “Our new on the right side of the social justice cru- 14th Amendment, the same amendment Government is founded upon exactly the sade, and conned by conservative “histori- the communist historian Eric Foner has opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its ans” who attempt to show that the found- suggested fundamentally transformed cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that ing generation would have all been good America. What is “conservative” about that the negro is not equal to the white man; Lincoln-loving Republicans had they lived amendment? Nothing. It has been used as that slavery, subordination to the superior until 1861. the legal gateway for every centralized so- race, is his natural and moral condition.” Mr. Burtner seems to believe that the cial engineering project in the U.S., from No appeal to Burke’s “ancient consti- Founding Fathers would have supported same-sex marriage to transgender bath- tutions” can mask the inherent evil of this the same level of political machinations and room “equality.” particular “traditional order” and this pe- revolutionary policies the 1860s Republican The feminist leader Elizabeth Cady culiar “well-constructed institution.” Party used during Reconstruction. These Stanton gushed over the Reconstruction Was Reconstruction perfect? Of course are the Founding Fathers who left slavery Amendments because they led to a “re- not, but by adopting the Reconstruction intact in every state in the Union when consideration of the principles of our gov- Amendments the “radical” Republicans drafting and ratifying both the Articles of ernment and the natural rights of man.” reformed both the Constitution and the Confederation and the Constitution, who In other words, they recreated America. nation—and thank God for it! Who today chafed at federal involvement in election By using the words and deeds of the would object to the abolishment of slavery, laws and suffrage requirements, who to a Radical Republicans of the 1860s to defend would deny citizenship and equal protec- man considered blacks to be an inferior what passes for American conservatism to- tion of the law to the freedmen, or deny population, and who despised abolitionist day, would-be conservatives concede the them the right to vote on account of their agitation (even John Adams thought im- field to Bernie Sanders and Alexandria race or color? The unalienable human right mediate abolition would “produce greater Ocasio-Cortez. Both would agree with of liberty and the basic civil rights of equal violations of Justice and Humanity, than the Radical Republican Henry Wilson that justice under the law and the franchise, re- the continuance of the practice” of slav- government should seek “equality in the gardless of one’s color, are principles that ery). The idea that they would have ap- broadest and most comprehensive dem- any true conservative can support. proved of the Radical Republican agenda ocratic sense.” during Reconstruction would be laugh- That might be Republican, but it sure —Keith Burtner able, were it not so sad. isn’t conservative. Dallas, Texas Did some members of the founding generation oppose slavery? Certainly, but

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The Unclubbable Rich Lowry, and Jonah Goldberg, we are would-be media celebrities are not likely not members of the Club, and it’s unlike- to draw any benefit from right-wing asso- ly we’ll ever be admitted. Obviously, we’ve ciations. Instead, they can hope to move The late joe sobran used to committed some terrible faux pas that has up and increase their prestige by cultivat- refer to liberal high society as "the hive.” brought about our exclusion—perhaps by ing contacts with leftist journalists and What Joe was highlighting were certain not accepting R. J. Neuhaus’s authoritative politicians. Thus, we see on the Murdoch qualities that he associated with the fash- account of the split that occurred in 1989. channel a steady procession of leftist Fox ionable left, e.g., extreme clannishness, the I know that I’ve personally commit- News associates, but never members of the exclusion of those who deviated from au- ted many inappropriate acts over a long Old Right. We also find lavish praise be- thorized political doctrines, and a sense life that have resulted in my being banned ing bestowed on leftists like writers for The of moral superiority. Without having to for several lifetimes from Club premises. Atlantic and The New Republic’s former ed- deny that such a “hive” exists on the left, My boorish acts include, among other sins, itor Peter Beinert, by Rich Lowry, Kevin it is equally obvious that the conservative posting critical columns about the then- Williamson, and other National Review establishment is at least as guilty of the proposed Martin Luther King, Jr., nation- editors. By contrast, “conservative” editors supercilious behavior that Joe attributed al holiday and the 1965 Voting Rights Act would never acknowledge serious think- to the “hive.” and, even more shockingly, suggesting that ers on their right, because there would be But I’ll substitute a timelier image for Palestinians may have been expelled from no professional value in doing so. this apiarian one to explain my drift. The their homes (something most Israelis ad- Moreover, our present establishment subject here is a club, whose custodians mit—but not so some sponsors of the main- conservatism looks mostly like a break- determine who may apply for member- stream conservative movement). I’ve also away faction of the left. For example, what ship and who is considered socially un- written widely on American conservatism, may be called Conservatism, Inc., favors worthy. This club image popped irresistibly and I can’t think of anything positive I’ve second-wave feminism—but not yet third- into my head, as I noticed the nonresponse had to say on that topic for at least sever- wave; it supports federal anti-discrimina- to Ed Welsch’s dignified and detailed an- al decades. tion laws—but not yet having such laws swer (“First Things First,” March 2020) to But the Club comparison came to mind applied to the transgendered. The move- R.R. Reno’s attack on Chronicles in the as I noted the obvious ignoring of Ed’s com- ment also seems genuinely cool with gay February issue of First Things. The carica- ments about how First Things manhandled marriage, but not with forcing certain re- ture that Ed was addressing was the view our reputation. Of course, things would ligious groups to perform gay weddings or of our magazine as a crude xenophobic have been different if Chronicles were not to bake cakes for them. Not yet, anyway. publication which the late Father Neuhaus Chronicles but instead a publication un- Cultivating drag queen converts to was forced to break with before founding der the direction of Club members. If we Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA-brand First Things. Ed graciously suggested that were talking, say, about National Review of conservatism is just dandy, but only if Reno had been understandably defend- or The Atlantic Monthly I’m sure the buds this gesture aims at getting LGBTQ activ- ing the origins of his own monthly when involved would have held a cordial con- ists to vote for the GOP. It’s also OK from he misspoke about the reasons for its fate- ciliatory dinner for everyone concerned. a “conservative” perspective to pull down ful break with The Rockford Institute and Although our magazine has been statues of Robert E. Lee, but we shouldn’t do Chronicles 30 years ago. around for 44 years, has a growing sub- the same to statues of Lee’s fellow-Virginian That response was offered in such a scription list, and offers genuinely provoc- Thomas Jefferson. That’s because Jefferson, friendly fashion that one might have ex- ative articles, we remain both unclubba- although a slave-owner, set this country on pected the editor of First Things to have ble and unmentionable. That is because, its way toward standing for human rights, answered, however briefly. Chronicles among other reasons, we represent what by inserting into the Declaration the now has respectfully discussed other materi- the mainstream right was before the neo- famous “all men are created equal” passage. al published in First Things, and normal- conservatives took it over in the 1980s and Of course, party lines do change; and ly publications that engage similar top- pushed it to the left. when they do, the new position for Club ics and which supposedly share political The conservative establishment has members may be that Tom is out and some- and cultural perspectives (e.g., National continued to move away from where it one else is in—perhaps Harriet Tubman. Review and American Spectator) also es- was circa 1980 mostly on social issues; One can go through a long list of positions tablish friendly working relations. But that and it has done so for careerist reasons. in which established conservatism looks couldn’t happen in this case. Unlike Reno, Aspiring young “conservative” editors and like what the left used to be not so very

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long ago. The only thing that remains im- inevitable rise in deaths that would result. nominated debt to finance their own prof- mutable is the Club. Judging the effects of one socioeconom- ligate spending. The only reason I mention this go-along ic policy over another is inherently diffi- In his Mises Institute article “Why tendency is by way of noting a peculiar fea- cult, as French economist Frédéric Bastiat the World Has a Dollar Shortage, Despite ture of the Club. The Club premises have a showed in his 1850 essay “Ce qu'on voit et Massive Fed Action,” Prof. Daniel Lacalle communicating wall with the left. In fact, ce qu'on ne voit pas,” (“Things Which Are writes: Club members are delighted to have left- Seen and Things Which Are Not Seen”). ist guests, provided they can find friend- The gist of his observation is that because In the current circumstances and ly opponents who are willing to hang out socioeconomic policies are enacted in the with a global crisis on the hori- with them. The people who are truly un- real world and outside of the controlled zon, global demand for bonds clubbable are those who are noncompli- conditions of a laboratory, it is hard to track from emerging countries in local ant—that is, those who refuse to cooper- the unintended consequences of any pol- currency will likely collapse, far ate when the Club board decides that it’s icy, or to say with certainty what would below their financing needs. De- time to move further to the left. These are have happened if the government didn't pendence on the U.S. dollar will the true Deplorables, whom Club mem- take this or that action to stop the virus. then increase. bers may insult or stiff with absolute impu- Or, as the conservative English writ- nity. In fact, if accredited members make er Peter Hitchens observed recently on However, just because the dollar may enough of a point of scorning unclubba- Twitter: remain strong relative to other fiat mon- ble extremists, prominent leftists may al- ey currencies doesn’t mean that there will low them to write for their publications and Patient has pneumonia. Doctor be no negative effects on the U.S. popula- appear on their Sunday news programs. says he will cure it by amputating tion as their Federal Reserve plays the role For those who think I’m suggesting that patient’s leg. Patient recovers from of the world’s central bank. The monetary Club members have nothing substantive- pneumonia, (as he would have any- base will still expand, meaning that there ly in common with the subjects of our on- way) but now has only one leg. Doc- will be, at the end of the day, more paper going “Remembering the Right” series, al- tor praises himself for success of his dollars out in the global economy chas- low me to indicate that your suspicions bold, radical treatment. ing fewer goods. are correct. In the meantime, whatever benefits Better to be safe than sorry, and just there are from the Fed’s money printing —Paul Gottfried take off the leg, I suppose! are distributed unevenly, by those eco- This same rationale has been used time nomic classes closest to the printing press. What Has COVID-19 Done and again by the U.S. Federal Reserve and As Austrian School economist Murray to Our Money? government officials to justify repeated Rothbard writes about the effects of mone- bailouts for the banking sector and for tary inflation in What Has the Government the crony capitalist captains of industry Done to Our Money? (1963): As I write, political factions who have their hooks dug deep into the left and right are sparring over the right halls of Washington, D.C. The new money works its way, approach to the coronavirus. I don't envy In late March, we have an estimated $6 step by step, throughout the eco- President Donald Trump or the mem- trillion in economic stimulus coming in nomic system. As the new money bers of his coronavirus response team, for the form of dollars flying off of the print- spreads, it bids prices up—as we they appear to be in a damned-if-you-do, ing presses, with $2 trillion coming from have seen, new money can only di- damned-if-you-don’t situation. If they con- Congress and $4 trillion in liquidity from lute the effectiveness of each dol- tinue a general societal shutdown for too the Federal Reserve. This does not include lar. But this dilution takes time and long, the economy will teeter on the brink the massive “unlimited” quantitative easing is therefore uneven; in the mean- of collapse, and the loss of jobs and ruin of (read: money printing) program promised time, some people gain and other savings may end up costing more in lives by the Fed. The Fed has promised this eas- people lose. In short, the counter- lost to despair than to the virus. ing program in the face of a global shortage feiters and their local retailers have On the other hand, if Trump compro- of dollars as economies worldwide suffer found their incomes increased be- mises with the economy and loosens re- from the effects of the virus, and as they fore any rise in the prices of the strictions, he can easily be blamed for the have become dependent on U.S. dollar-de- things they buy.

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The Fed’s past interventions to prop population that doesn’t hold nearly as much decades, set to eclipse the past peaks of up the economy by increasing the money Fed-inflated financial assets. Real incomes World War I and II. supply have been reflected first in the price for average Americans have stagnated even As Roger McGrath points out in his fas- of financial assets, roughly 80 percent of as their cost of living has increased, making cinating look at the Spanish Flu of 1918-19, which are held by the top 20 percent of the them poorer than their parents or grand- (“Epidemic for the Record Books,” pages wealthiest U.S. citizens. By the time this ex- parents in real terms. 44-45), during that national crisis, the pub- tra paper money “trickles down” to the peo- The next chart shows the purchasing lic patriotically rallied on behalf of the na- ple in the lowest quintiles of the economy, power of the dollar since 1800. A dollar is tion, scrimping together its savings to lend the price of the goods they require to sur- now worth just 5 cents of its value then. money to the government to fight the war. vive have risen to reflect this higher cost. Before the Fed was created, the dollar some- Today, such displays of shared sacrifice are Economic specialists, of which I am times even increased in purchasing pow- unnecessary; just Netflix and chill, as the not one, can probably credibly accuse me er as an industrializing America became government prints the money it needs at of oversimplifying this complex process. a world economic powerhouse and shared the expense of future generations. But the end results of the Federal Reserve’s the benefits with its citizens, rather than si- So I don’t pay much attention to the fu- rescues do not appear to be benefitting the phoning their saved wealth away through ror over the president’s handling of the vi- average American. Printed here are charts the stealthy tax of inflation. rus. As always, one political side will beat that show the rising incomes over the past The final chart shows our public debt the drum and laugh while the other sulks; 50 years of that top quintile of wealthy citi- as a percentage of our economic output one will sob while the other sings; mean- zens, which has decoupled from the rest of heading into the stratosphere over the next while the Fed will print, print, print.

—Edward Welsch Obiter Dicta

Our April/May poet, Pete Beurskens, has taught college English for over 25 years, most recently at Minnesota State College, Southeast, in Red Wing. He considers him- self a Northern Agrarian in the tradition of Russell Kirk and Robert Frost. With his wife, he raises Shetland sheep, vegetables, and chickens on his western Wisconsin hobby farm. Beurskens is at work compil- ing a book-length collection of his poetry, and his literary detective novel, Snares of the Devil, is looking for a publisher. Source: U.S. Census Bureau/Advisor Perspectives Bureau/Advisor Census U.S. Source: Source: Congressional Budget Office /Wikimedia Commons /Wikimedia Budget Office Congressional Source: Source: Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics/Official Data Foundation Data Statistics/Official of Labor Bureau U.S. Source: Source:

8 Chronicles

pages-0420.indd 8 4/2/20 4:56 PM That Sinking Sunday Feeling by Pete Beurskens

Whence this sinking feeling, Sunday morning, This Sabbath morning early springtime When one should sense blessings falling? Whence this feeling, Sunday morning, sinking

Low, soaking moods like sleet descending From gray-drenched skies all monocolored, Skies sluggish, churned by winds lamenting— Whence this morning-sinking Sunday feeling?

Made for man, not man for it, the Sabbath sealing Another slough of days, teeming days of worldly Striving—could it be this gloom’s from grieving Sundays? Whence this morning-feeling, sinking?

The Noonday Devil has moved to morning Patiently haunting Monday’s awnings. Sodden, dreary, peevish, constant, yawning— Whence this feeling, Sunday? Sinking mornings…

There is a certain slant of light, the poet wrote; Yet comes a Sunday slump of heavier doubt: Hearts are restless till they rest in thee, said the saint; Thus angled rays fix tints of glass light-stained.

April/May 2020 9

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Coins of the Realm by Anthony Esolen America’s historical specie reveal times of change.

When he was president, Theodore Roosevelt, issue, because unscrupulous men in the hinterlands would a patron of arts and letters, commissioned the redesign plate the nickel with gold and pass it off for five dollars. I of American coins, especially the small denominations in have one such, hardly touched by wear. common circulation, from the penny to the dollar. It is hard for us to imagine that ordinary people used He was right to complain about the existing designs; at to care about the design of public objects: coins, dollars, least about the nickel, the dime, the quarter, and the half. bridges, court houses, town halls, churches, schools, and However, the Indian penny is, to my eye, easily the most even factories. We are the people, to extend C. S. Lewis’s beautiful of our cents: Miss Liberty on the obverse is an wry observation, for whom not only is drab a favorite color, Indian princess, with a feather headdress and a coronet but box is a favorite shape, prose is a favorite meter, grunt reading LIBERTY. The silver dollar designed by George T. is a favorite melody, and nose is a favorite place for a ring. Morgan—hence its popular name, the Morgan Dollar— But so it was, and Roosevelt’s call for a refurbishment of the is also striking, with the grand eagle on the reverse, wings coinage met with approval. The best-known engravers and outspread, clutching in its talons both the arrows of war and sculptors submitted designs, and the results were splendid. the olive branch of peace. Some of these designs warrant a closer look for what But the dime, the quarter, and the half all had the same they suggest about their time—and ours. Take the Winged pleasantly classical but unexceptional bust of Liberty on the Liberty dime, for example. This coin was quickly tabbed as obverse, and the nickel was pallid, too, its reverse dominat- the “Mercury dime,” and so it is still known by most people, ed by a large Roman numeral V, for five cents. The word including collectors who know better. The engraver Adolph “cents” had to be added in 1883, the first year of the coin’s Weinman used as a model for Miss Liberty a tenant of his,

10 above: vintage American coins (Zoonar/Tom Baker/Alamy Stock Photo) Chronicles

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may have been first in peace, first in war, and first in the hearts of his countrymen, but he was not first on our coins. Emperors and kings stamp gold with their faces, but we Americans were supposed to not hold generals and politi- cians in that sort of quasi-divine regard. a young lady named Elsie Stevens, whose husband was a And we didn’t—at least not at first. No historical per- lawyer and insurance man named Wallace Stevens; a Re- sonage appears on American coins until 1909, when the publican and conservative, later to win fame as a poet of bust of Lincoln graced the penny, where he remains to this marked originality and power. day. Once Lincoln broke the tradition, he was followed by Winged Liberty wears a Phrygian cap, a classical symbol Washington (quarter, 1932), Jefferson (nickel, 1938), Roo- of freedom that had been employed on American coin- sevelt (dime, 1946), Franklin (half, 1948), Kennedy (half, age in the past. Weinman decided to embellish that cap 1964), Eisenhower (dollar, 1971), Susan B. Anthony (dollar, with wings. His friend and teacher, Augustus Saint-Gaud- 1980), and Sacagawea (dollar, 2000). ens—himself the designer of what many critics praise as the Most of those designs we could do without, especially single most beautiful American coin, the double eagle with after such long duration. The likeness of Roosevelt is poor, Liberty striding forth—had shown Weinman how to en- unless it was meant to portray him as a mild-mannered grave feathers in relief. glad-hander. Why we should celebrate Kennedy, I do not His inspiration came not from the ancient messenger- know. The Susan B. Anthony dollar is a study in what not god, thief, and usher for the dead, swift footed Hermes. It to do with coins. Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.) had came from Miss Liberty herself. Weinman said he wanted been insisting that it was high time for a woman to appear to craft an allegory for freedom of thought. The coin was is- on our money, and, presumably after exhumation and a fo- sued in 1916, amidst war in Europe, two years before the rensic inquest, it was determined that Miss Anthony met emergence of a great plague, and one year before a great ide- the requirement. She was placed on the obverse, but since ology of vengeance, envy, hatred, materialism, irreligion, the moon landing had been on the reverse of the Eisenhow- and totalitarian control descended upon the continent, via er dollar, it remained on hers too, giving us barrenness on the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. both sides. The public disliked the coin, because it was too The reverse of the coin is handsome too and is meant to easy to confuse with the quarter—and besides, it was ugly. balance or to give context to the obverse. It shows the fas- If historical figures are to decorate our money with their ces, the bundle of rods, with its traditional ax, carried by the mugs, could we not at least choose somebody besides politi- Roman lictor as symbols of national unity and state force. cians, or a single-minded scold, or the common-law wife of This is the same ancient symbol that Mussolini would soon a French Canadian trapper, whose importance to the Lew- adopt for the name of his law-and-order movement in Italy: is and Clark expedition is undeniable, but who is therefore Fascism. The fasces were not new to American symbolism, subordinate in importance to many an explorer, including which borrows heavily from Ancient Rome. The fasces are Lewis and Clark themselves? to be found everywhere: see, for a rather unsettling exam- The Italians, before the advent of the ghastly euro and ple, the vertical sides of the throne upon which Abraham the Bauhaus design of its coins, had on their colorful bank Lincoln sits in his memorial. notes heroes of their culture: the educational reformer Of course, Weinman and the U.S. Mint officials who se- Maria Montessori, the scientists Guglielmo Marconi and lected his design cannot be held responsible for what an Alessandro Volta, the composer Bellini, and the artists Ti- Italian despot would do with this symbol clear across the tian, Caravaggio, and Bernini. In the U.S. we might dream ocean, but I do not know that anyone was uncomfortable of someday seeing Herman Melville on a gold coin, for some with it even then, nor do I see why anyone should have patriotic citizen to nail it to a post in the Capitol, promising been. The idea behind the fasces is the same as what animat- it and a million like it to any man who could harpoon just ed Benjamin Franklin when he said that he and his fellow one of the thousands of white whales snorting and sporting seekers of independence had better hang together, or they in the ocean of our modern managerial state. would all hang separately. You can easily snap rods over It occurs to me that we have inverted the Winged Lib- your knee one by one, but not if you bind them all together. erty dime. Freedom of thought requires two things, to wit, It bears mentioning not only how Miss Liberty is por- freedom and thought. You cannot have freedom without trayed, but that she is portrayed at all. George Washington virtue, said every Christian theologian as well as every pa-

April/May 2020 above: a Winged Liberty or "Mercury" dime minted in 1943, obverse and reverse (public domain) 11

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gan philosopher and statesman who ever lived. But we insist old. Or we might look at another coin designed by Wein- upon freedom from virtue, from manliness; and so we end man, the Walking Liberty half dollar (1916-1947), whose up with compulsions, surveillance, and confinement. Ask tall Miss Liberty on the obverse, striding like a goddess, anyone who dares to express a disapproved thought at Go- bears the American flag streaming in the breeze, along with morrah State University. branches of oak and laurel, while her right hand is extend- You cannot have genuine thought unless you are in con- ed forward in blessing, as a sower casting seed. The reverse tact with reality: either the excellent world about us with all features the eagle, perched on a mountain rock with a pine its salutary resistance to our wills, or the world as the great tree springing up from a fissure. The coin is both classical artists, poets, and thinkers from the past can present it to us. and American, rooted in a place, and grateful for its good- Freedom of thought thus requires discipline, strength, and ness and bounty. honest submission to truth. Otherwise we are talking about license and fantasy, slack and effeminate; these come to us readily from the manipulations of mass education and mass advertising. Think of the drag queens grooming the minds of little children at your local library. Meanwhile, since license is chaotic and fantasy unstable and unpersuasive, we find ourselves more and more under Those were splendid coins, and so too in my opinion is suspicion, lest any man utter the truth or act upon it. the Peace Dollar (1921-1935). But it’s the Indian Head or We need new coins to reflect our modern reality. I “Buffalo” nickel (1913-1938) that still can warm the rem- propose a new Charon dime. It should feature on the ob- nant of the American heart. The grave and masculine Indian verse the head of a boy, listless, drooping, eyes half shut, chief on the obverse was not a first for American coinage: an emblem of resigned captivity. On the reverse, a heap of Bela Pratt’s recessed or “incuse” Indian on the gold quarter scattered rods, I Ching wands perhaps, forming the 47th eagle ($2.50) and half eagle ($5) saw the light in 1908. hexagram, the Swamp, an allegory of confinement and op- The association of the native Indians with liberty had pression. And a new legend engraved: TRUST PUBLIC long settled deep into the American consciousness. James SCHOOLS AND THE FBI. Fenimore Cooper had written his Leatherstocking Tales long before Francis Parkman, in partial reaction against the figure of the noble savage and yet influenced by it too, wrote The Oregon Trail (1847-1849). The name of the great Indi- an chief Tecumseh, a worthy enemy of American expansion westward, an ally of the British against the United States in the War of 1812, and the most determined opponent of the Indiana governor, William Henry Harrison, who struck at Tippecanoe while the chief was away, was held in hon- or, not only by William Tecumseh Sherman’s father, but by Americans generally. Hence, for example, the U.S.S. Tecum- seh (1863). Hence also the panel, The Death of Tecumseh, at the Battle of the Thames, gracing the frieze of the Capi- tol rotunda in Washington—painted, I am proud to say, by an Italian, Filippo Costaggini, whom the Irish coal miners of my hometown, Archbald, Pennsylvania, hired to come We might go on here to look at Hermon MacNeil’s ex- north to cover the walls and ceiling of their Catholic church cellent Standing Liberty quarter (1916-1930), with Miss with sacred art. Liberty, wearing the light drapery of a Greek goddess, bear- As for the buffalo (actually, a bison) on the reverse, the ing a great round shield on her left arm and shoulder as engraver James Fraser took for his model the Bronx Zoo’s she faces Europe in the east, plunged in war. In her right notoriously ornery and majestic bull, Black Diamond. Fras- hand she bears an olive branch; on the reverse is a glorious er said he wanted the design to be unmistakably American, eagle, its wings raised in flight. That design places Amer- and sure enough, it appears that the great shaggy bison is ica in the context of a civilization more than 2,000 years standing on a slightly raised mound of an American prai-

12 above left: top row—a 1924 Standing Liberty quarter, obverse and reverse; bottom row—a 1945 Walking Liberty half-dollar, obverse and reverse Chronicles above right: a 1935 Indian Head or "Buffalo" nickel, obverse and reverse (all images public domain)

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rie. The bison serves the same allegorical function as does is all rather patronizing, as I see it, because often the per- the eagle, but is most fitting for the Indian chief on the other sons or the events engraved are known only to historical side of the coin, as we remember the times when the Indi- specialists. Such is Susan Gamble’s design for 2013, to com- ans roamed the plains, hunting the bison, whose herds of memorate a 1778 treaty with the Lenape Indians: it features thousands made the earth tremble under their hooves. Fra- three animals sacred to the Lenape: a turkey, a wolf, and a ser and his wife Laura also engraved the excellent Oregon turtle. The wolf is howling, and the turkey in the foreground Trail commemorative half dollar, featuring a standing Indi- appears to be mounting the turtle. an on the obverse, holding a bow in one hand and gesturing Such also is Emily Damstra’s design for 2019, to com- in what looks like an admonitory way with the other. On memorate two American Indians in the space program. the reverse, a Conestoga wagon riding into the sunset. One, Mary Ross, writes a physicochemical formula that she

Emperors and kings stamp gold with their faces, but we Americans were supposed not to hold generals and politicians in that sort of quasi-divine regard.

The Buffalo nickel is American, but in a way that ges- helped to discover, and the other—presumably it is the oth- tures toward universality. The Indian is not bound to a er, John Herrington—is a suited astronaut with a bubble particular personage. The bison in some other culture may helmet, grasping hold, from behind, of the circular band have been the aurochs of ancient Europe, the yak of Tibet, that contains the coin’s legend, and looking like an alien fall- the reindeer of Lapland, the elephant of India. The man ing out of the sky. What does it mean? That Chickasaws are who honors his place because it is his understands why an- smart, too? Did we need to be told that? Again, it is not re- other man far away does the same. ally a national coin so much as a metallic bumper sticker. To go from Miss Liberty to Susan B. Anthony is to go Of course, I realize that to complain is like shouting at from propaganda as expressing an already-existing uni- the seashore when the ship has already sunk. Several years ty—this is what we are at our best—to propaganda as a sales ago, I visited Arlington National Cemetery and the tomb of pitch or an ideological harassment—this is what you’d bet- the Unknown Soldier. It was a moving experience of what ter believe, pal, or there’s the door. Robert Weinman, the used to be national fellow-feeling and national honor. As I son of Adolph and a great artist in his own right, said that was leaving, my experience was altered as I came across the the legislation mandating the Anthony dollar bespoke a Women’s Memorial—a campaign button in three dimen- “billboard or campaign button approach to a national coin.” sions, a monster in bad taste, with a neoclassical exterior Since then, we have shown we like those billboards. and a political museum for an interior. With few exceptions, the recent Statehood Quarters series Compare the dignified treatment of Black Jack Persh- was composed of tourist signs, such as what you will find ing, buried beneath a simple gravestone, no bigger than when you cross a border: “Maine: The Way Life Should Be.” any of the thousands nearby. It is eloquent in its silence; the To go from the Buffalo nickel to the Sacagawea dollar is Women’s Memorial says a great lot of nothing in its gar- a similar descent. Glenna Goodacre’s young squaw carrying rulity. But what should I have expected? Had the people the papoose on her back is comely and far more appeal- who commissioned and designed the Women’s Memorial ing than was Frank Gasparro’s harridan. Sacagawea was really been thinking about war, the ultimate sacrifice that not the main guide for Lewis and Clark. Her presence, said over a million American men have made, and the patriotic Clark, assisted them mainly by showing to Indian tribes ties that bind generations together, they would never have that the expedition was peaceful, because otherwise a wom- plopped down their circus tent on that hallowed ground. an would not have been in the company at all. She was by I struggle to envision a redesigned coin that expresses all accounts a woman of grace and courage. I do not detract American unity, when there is no longer unity to express. from her character, or from the expedition she assisted. But Hey, Miss Liberty! It was pretty good, while it lasted. what does she represent? Why, other than for her sex and her ethnicity, was Sacagawea chosen? Contributing editor Anthony Esolen has published 24 books, in- Like the Anthony dollar, the Sacagawea did not catch cluding Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, an on. It is now minted only for collections. Each year since English translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, and most recent- 2009, the reverse has featured a tribute to the Indians. This ly, The Hundredfold: Songs of the Lord.

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Remembering William F. Buckley, Jr. Dangerous Charm by Jack Trotter

Two years after the death of the man whom one of his biographers, John Judis, dubbed the patron saint of modern conservatism, Encounter Books brought out a splendidly packaged omnibus volume of his columns and essays, entitled Athwart History: Half a Century of Po- lemics, Animadversions, and Illuminations (2010). On the cover, William Francis Buckley stands at the helm of a sail- ing vessel, an American flag flying high behind him, his hair tousled in a stiff wind, and a pair of sunglasses perched jauntily on his prominent nose. His smile can only be de- scribed as ebullient, not unlike the smile that we have seen in dozens of photographs of Buckley. The photograph brilliantly captures the sheer mag- netism of the man who stood at the helm of the National scent, deeply religious yet an extreme individualist in the Review for 35 years—the magazine which he founded and American grain. Politically, he was an isolationist, a vocal op- which was the flagship publication of the American conser- ponent of the New Deal, a virulent anti-communist, and an vative movement. In the photograph, Buckley appears to advocate of laissez-faire capitalism. Yet he thought of him- be well into his 40s, so the vessel is very likely the Cyrano, self not as a conservative but as a “counter-revolutionary.” a 40’ ketch upon which he made more than one transatlan- The Buckley children largely adopted their father’s tic crossing. The name is suggestive. It alludes to Edmond views, though none so ardently as his favorite son, Bill, Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac, a title taken epony- whose legendary debating skills were first honed in the mously from its hero, a multitalented nobleman and soldier Buckley household and were brought to perfection at Yale. who is celebrated for his charm, his wit, and his proboscis. There his campus-wide acclaim was achieved in part be- The choice says a lot about Buckley; it is at once a piece cause of his brilliant verbal acuity, but also because of his of braggadocio and yet a self-deprecating wink. This combi- controversial pen, which he wielded as editor of the Yale nation of qualities had long been a part of Buckley’s charm, Daily News. Even then, when one might have expected him dating at least from his college days at Yale, where he was to escape the shadow of his father, his politics remained in legendary for his arrogance, but well-liked because he was most respects identical. always ready to laugh at himself. This identification with his father was evident not only Buckley’s personal charisma had a great deal to do with in his student productions but in his early books and ar- his ability to unify a majority of American conservatives ticles. In McCarthy and His Enemies (1954), he and his of varying stripes around the principles of his movement. co-author, L. Brent Bozell, adopted a position defending Moreover, he had been possessed since childhood of an McCarthy that departed very little from what his father iron will to succeed at everything he tried and he had the in- might have argued. However, Buckley, Jr. brought to the telligence and good sense to do so at a very high level. Much subject a sensitivity to McCarthy’s excesses and the vul- of this drive was the legacy of his father and namesake, Will garity of the senator’s personal style that reflects a more Buckley, a self-made man who made a fortune in the Mexi- polished sensibility. can oil business in the first two decades of the 20th century, For the most part, during the late ’40s and early ’50s, and whose influence over his 10 children was enormous. Buckley’s work remained sympathetic toward the Old Right, Buckley pater, born in Texas, was of Irish-Catholic de- and vociferously libertarian regarding the intervention of

14 above: William F. Buckley, Jr., New York City, 1971 (RBM Vintage Images / Alamy Stock Photo) Chronicles

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the central state in the economy, as well as decentralist on states’ rights. Indeed, Albert J. Nock’s Our Enemy, the State (1935) had been a staple in the Buckley household, and young William remained an admirer, if not always a disci- ple, of Nock’s anti-statism all his life. The founding of National Review in 1955 was, of course, Buckley’s central achievement. From the outset the maga- zine’s agenda signaled, at least implicitly, a break with the Old Right, at least on the issue of the Cold War communist threat. One indication of this break was Buckley’s associ- ation with Willi Schlamm, an ex-communist immigrant from Austria who, after fleeing the Nazis, worked for Henry Luce at Time, Inc., rising to the level of chief foreign poli- cy advisor. not only an ex-communist, but a part of the Soviet espi- An admirer of McCarthy and His Enemies, Schlamm onage “underground” in the 1930s. His bestselling book was eager to start a new magazine. Both men believed that Witness (1952) was published in the aftermath of his widely an uncompromising anti-communism should be at the publicized testimony before the House Un-American Ac- forefront of the brand of conservatism they hoped to pro- tivities Committee, which identified a number of highly mote. Domestic politics held no interest for Schlamm, and placed American officials as Soviet agents, including Alger he was openly hostile toward the Old Right’s opposition to Hiss at the State Department. Chambers’ skills as a writ- an expansionist foreign policy. er and his unyielding courage against the domestic threat The Old Right, represented by figures such as Sen. Rob- of communism made him a valuable asset in Buckley’s in- ert A. Taft, H. L. Mencken, and Albert Nock, as well as ner circle. Burnham, an ex-Trotskyite and OSS operative, writers associated with the Southern Agrarians and a hand- would become, by Buckley’s own assessment at the time of ful of right-leaning libertarians, had been the dominant Burnham’s retirement in 1978, the preeminent intellectual conservative force in America since the 1920s. Howev- and ideological influence at National Review. er, it was never a well-organized, nationwide movement If I have given special emphasis to the communist back- with a unified agenda. While Buckley in his early years cer- grounds of Buckley’s inner circle, it is because their almost tainly aligned himself with the Old Right’s opposition to single-minded devotion to the anti-communist cause dur- the New Deal, he had little interest in what he called their ing the Cold War drove them, and Buckley himself, to a “isolationism,” or their regionalist concerns. According to position in tension with their avowed antipathy toward the Judis, “[Buckley] didn’t see himself defending the verities of growth of centralized government. Buckley had hoped from small-town America, but rather arresting the assault of So- the beginning to build his new conservatism around a “fu- viet communism.” sionist” balancing, as enunciated by political philosopher What is indisputable is that Buckley was adept at sur- Frank Meyer, of various strands of American conservative rounding himself with brilliant writers and editors. Many thought. These included the Old Right’s opposition to the of them had the kind of intellectual pedigrees that would expansion of the central state that had begun with the New demand the attention of the Northeastern intelligentsia, Deal; the libertarian support for laissez-faire capitalism; who tended to associate conservatism with Chamber of and anti-communism. Commerce business ethics and small-minded bigotry. In Of course, all of those strands were in some sense an- part to counter this perception, Buckley brought on board ti-communist, but the Old Right and the libertarians, like Catholics (like his brother-in-law and Yale debating part- Murray Rothbard, were adamantly opposed to an interna- ner, Bozell), Jews, and ex-communists. Among these were tional crusade against the Soviets which would inevitably Will Herberg, Whittaker Chambers, and James Burnham. require an enormous enlargement of what Eisenhower Herberg, a Russian Jewish immigrant, had joined the would later call the “military-industrial complex.” Early Communist Party in 1920, then gravitated toward a “dem- on, Rothbard attacked National Review for its support of ocratic socialist” position. By the early 1950s, he found “overseas adventurism and empire building,” echoing the himself increasingly aligned with conservative positions: criticism of the Old Right novelist Louis Bromfield, who in anti-communism, anti-liberalism, and anti-secularism. 1954 accused anti-communist interventionists of seeking Chambers, who became a senior editor for Buckley, was to extend the old “colonial system.”

above: William F. Buckley, Jr., seated with National Review staff and contributors, including Priscilla Buckley, James Burnham, and 15 April/May 2020 Linda Bridges. (Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images)

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There is no evidence that Buckley himself dreamed Communist monolith.” of a new imperialist system, even if it is true that the an- He repeated much the same argument late in 1954 in ti-communist ideology he promoted helped to justify the The Freeman, and his position throughout the Cold War construction of an American empire, one founded upon tended toward a policy of aggressive “liberation” of Soviet the evangelical conviction that the Soviet menace was an satellite states rather than the more cautious policy of con- unadulterated evil that had to be defeated at all costs. tainment. In Buckley’s view, either strategy would require In fact, Buckley’s willingness to abandon his commit- much the same bureaucratic expansion, “for to beat the So- ment to the Old Right ideals of his father proved even more viet Union we must, to an extent, imitate the Soviet Union.” disturbing than Rothbard imagined. In a 1952 essay pub- That vague qualification (“to an extent”) begs a host of trou- lished in the magazine Commonweal, “The Party and the bling questions. Deep Blue Sea,” Buckley was strikingly candid about the While there was no shortage of Old Right criticism of nature of the compromise he was prepared to make. He as- this willingness to sup with the Devil, the most troubling serted that the critical issue was survival, a reality which warning came from across the Atlantic. George Orwell, in many conservatives were unprepared to face. The “invin- one of his last published articles before his death in 1950, re- cible aggressiveness” of the Soviet Union, he argued, would stated an argument that had already been effectively spelled require a rearrangement of American “battle plans.” In out in his novel 1984. The gravest danger posed by the rise of short, “we have got to accept Big Government for the du- the modern super-states was that, whatever their outward ration—for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be ideological differences, they tended increasingly to resem- waged…except through the instrument of a totalitarian bu- ble one another. Their bellicose propaganda was largely a reaucracy within our shores.” manufactured attempt to consolidate power, while robbing Buckley provided no indication of what the “duration” their citizens of civil liberties. of this totalitarian response to a totalitarian threat might Much of 1984, as Orwell never attempted to disguise, is be. But he added that once the Cold War was won, conser- based on the arguments of James Burnham’s The Manageri- vatives would have to take up the task of securing a second al Revolution (1941). In this highly controversial work, and victory against an “indigenous bureaucracy,” though the the book which followed, The Machiavellians (1943), Burn- chances of winning such a victory would be “far greater ham revealed a theory of political power founded upon the than they could ever be against one controlled from abroad, idea of the inevitable rule of elites. While still a Trotsky- one that would be nourished and protected by a world-wide ite, Burnham, according to J.P. Diggins, had begun to view

16 above: Election Night, guest commentators William F. Buckley, Jr., and Gore Vidal, Oct. 15, 1968. Chronicles

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the modern state as neither solely a “reflection” of capitalist need to stem the growth of Caesarism, a phenomenon he class interests nor as a “representation” of democratic ma- attributed partly to twentieth-century wars, both hot and jorities, but rather “an increasingly autonomous structural cold?” The same question could be asked about Buckley. entity without exact precedent or analogy in the past.” With the passage of time, National Review became firm- In the modern era. Burnham saw emerging a “new ly established as the voice of the conservative movement, class” of bureaucratic experts, economic managers, scien- though the movement remained largely outside the Belt- tists, commissars, and so on—a “managerial” class which way corridors of power. The defeat of Goldwater, whom was, in its essence, totalitarian. Orwell agreed with Burn- Buckley had supported, was a blow, but the movement re- ham that managerialism was indeed the main trend of mained unified in the years leading up to the election of 20th-century politics, not only in Nazi Germany and Soviet Ronald Reagan. Russia, but in New Deal America, as well. Yet he objected to Unified, but not without a series of purges of those Burnham’s technological determinism and was disturbed groups and individuals whom Buckley regarded as outside by his barely concealed admiration, especially in The Ma- the pale. The John Birch Society was labeled anathema ear- chiavellians, for the vigor and ruthless use of power by these ly on for the alleged anti-Semitism and conspiracy-ridden new technocrats. views of its leadership. Also proscribed were Ayn Rand and Orwell’s perspective raises pertinent questions. To what her ephebes, not because they were libertarians but because extent was Buckley swayed by Burnham’s power politics? of their Nietzschean atheism. Did he view the struggle against the Soviets within the same Both of these purges were, in my view, justified. How- Machiavellian framework? That Burnham became, with ever, the early purging of “isolationist” libertarians must Buckley’s blessing, the mouthpiece for foreign policy at the be considered lamentable. In addition, in the ’70s and ’80s National Review suggests that to some extent their views fewer and fewer writers that were identifiably traditional- were yoked. ist or libertarian appeared in the magazine. As a number In his Struggle for the World (1947), Burnham had of observers have noted, Buckley drifted gradually into the argued for the establishment of an “American empire” in- neoconservative ambit, both politically and socially. tended to secure “decisive world control.” Under the flag of A few solidly paleoconservative writers remained on “democratic world order,” America would become a global the editorial staff, including Chilton Williamson, Jr., who hegemon, a “unifying power.” For more than two decades, left in 1989 to join Chronicles. Also Joe Sobran served as a Burnham pushed the same ideas in his National Review col- National Review senior editor for more than 20 years. So- umn, though not always so explicitly. bran was fired in 1992 after charges were leveled at him by Aside from his earlier articles on the need for a tempo- Midge Decter and her husband Norman Podhoretz, editor rary totalitarian regime to meet the Soviet threat, Buckley at Commentary. The crux of the matter was that Sobran’s himself was usually more restrained than Burnham. Yet he columns criticizing the “Israeli lobby” were deemed by was constantly at odds with the State Department and a Podhoretz and Decter—hypersensitive to perceived anti- succession of presidents over their lukewarm prosecution Semetism as they were—to be scurrilous. In Decter’s words, of the Cold War. There was too much appeasement and Sobran himself was “little more than a crude and naked not enough aggression toward the Soviet menace, Buckley anti-Semite.” thought. Nor did Buckley, as far as I am aware, ever express Certainly Sobran had been quite critical of the Israelis, serious concern over the growing power of what has been but anti-Semitic? Buckley thought not, and, to his credit, termed the National Security State, or even more colloqui- defended Sobran both publicly and privately, while at the ally, the Deep State. same time writing in a private letter to Decter, “What Joe Burnham and Buckley backed the war in Vietnam but needs to know is that certain immunities properly attach to complained when it was not prosecuted forcefully enough. pro-Israeli sentiment for historical reasons.” In short, you Burnham went as far as to call for chemical weapons strikes are allowed to criticize Israel only if and when your pro-Is- against North Vietnam. Yet he also lamented during the raeli sentiments have been satisfactorily rubber-stamped by same period, as in his 1959 book Congress and the American certain self-appointed gatekeepers. This had been, in fact, Tradition, the growth of Caesarism, or what today we might Podhoretz’s argument some years earlier in his much-de- call the “imperial presidency.” bated polemic “J’Accuse” (1982) published in Commentary. Not the first to notice the seeming contradiction, Burn- But Sobran refused to accept such admonitions, hence his ham’s biographer Daniel Kelly asks, “How did he think the departure from National Review. need to wage the Cold War…could be reconciled with the The culmination of Buckley’s success was to orchestrate

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Bradford’s earlier support of the presidential campaigns of George Wallace and, more importantly, his repeated attacks on Abraham Lincoln’s contribution to the “decline of the West,” would embarrass Reagan. Kristol and Feulner pushed William Bennett—at that time a registered Democrat but a neocon ally—as an alter- native candidate. Buckley, having had a long association with Bradford, was torn at first, but in the end he joined the neocons to convince Reagan to appoint Bennett. As Feul- ner wrote later, “It was a coalescing of the different parts of the movement…that showed that we could in fact work to- gether, that we had common views.” Further evidence of Buckley’s drift from the traditional- ist right is evident in a collection of essays entitled American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century (1970), which he is credited with editing. While the essays select- the movement that led to the election of Reagan in 1980. ed for the volume are respectable enough, and do include a The great irony is that in the process, he had to leave behind piece by Russell Kirk, Southern writers are conspicuous by the “counter-revolutionary” that he had imagined himself their absence. It includes nothing by any of the Agrarians; to be in 1955, to become a pillar of the establishment. His nothing by Richard Weaver or Mel Bradford. What lay be- relationship with Reagan thrived for some 30 years, and he hind these omissions? was a major factor in the Great Communicator’s ascendan- Perhaps it had something to do with the kind of Lockean cy. A gratified Reagan offered him a post as ambassador to individualism Buckley had always promoted, in contrast Afghanistan (still at that time under Soviet occupation). to the Southern advocacy of what Richard Weaver called Presumably, this was an instance of presidential humor, but “social bond” individualism, which places the individual is also an indication of the esteem in which he held Buckley, firmly within the context of his ties to local and historical who remained an unofficial advisor throughout the Rea- communities which, in the Southern view, were the only gan era. real bulwark against the power of the state. Perhaps it was It is not my intention to besmirch Reagan’s ascendan- this philosophical commitment to an essentialist, abstract cy as a marker of Buckley’s accomplishment. America did individualism that led Buckley, in the end, to accept the no- move significantly toward conservatism in those years, and tion that America is, in essence, a “proposition nation” in for the first time in decades liberalism was driven into a de- the Lincolnian sense. fensive mode. Thus, just months before his death, Buckley wrote in a There is no doubt that Buckley enjoyed being at the short piece for The Atlantic: center of power, which is not in itself a crime. Yet, to place things in perspective, the Reagan years also marked the I would doubt any claim that the American idea is fi- rising tide of the neoconservative occupation of Washing- nally validated by historical and human experience. ton, and, as noted, it seems that Buckley had chosen to cast It is, for men and women of my perspective, judged his anchor on the neocon side of the good ship conserva- to be secure in warranting perpetual loyalties. But tism. To be fair, he continued at times to criticize the liberal ours are loyalties to an ideal, not to a revelation, and tendencies of the neoconservatives on social issues, on the this must have been the reason, even if he was not welfare state, and more. conscious of it, why Lincoln referred to the Ameri- But perhaps the best indication of how far he had trav- can ‘proposition.’ eled from the traditionalist Old Right was his involvement in the move to block the appointment of Mel Bradford to It seems that Buckley’s counter-revolution ended, not head the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1981. with a bang but with an egalitarian whimper. The story is complex, but as Mark Gerson tells it in his The Neoconservative Vision: From the Cold War to the Culture Jack Trotter is an English professor and a Chronicles pro- Wars (1996), prominent neoconservatives Irving Kristol duction editor. He writes from Charleston, South Carolina. and Edwin Feulner of the Heritage Foundation felt that

18 above: William F. Buckley, Jr., ran for mayor of New York City as the candidate for the young Conservative Party in 1965 Chronicles (Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo)

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Remembering Willmoore Kendall The Unsettled Conservative by David Frisk

Among the 20th-century conservative movement’s legendary leaders, Willmoore Kendall (1909- 1967) stands out as the one who most effectively offered a grounding in a specifically American philosophy. There is also a timeliness in this remarkable political scientist’s thought. Our society has become divided to an extent that Kendall might well have found horrifying—although not surprising. His acute sense of how such divisions can happen is, therefore, especially worth considering today. Kendall’s writings seem to converge on a single focus: how to make democracy work when so much threatens to either destroy it or turn it in a dangerous direction. After studying at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship dur- ing the Depression, Kendall completed a Ph.D. in political science at the University of Illinois. His dissertation was a

groundbreaking reinterpretation of Locke’s Second Treatise of Dallas Archive) (University Kendall Willmoore of Government. But his fledgling academic career was inter- permanent philosophical questions through the intensive rupted by World War II. With his knowledge of Spanish and study of canonical Western texts. Unfortunately, Kendall, a political science, he served at the State Department and in smoker and a heavy drinker, died of a heart attack at age 58. the Army bureaucracy, then worked for the early CIA. As a young scholar Kendall favored a radically demo- His intellectual home was, formally speaking, Yale, cratic majoritarianism and was in some respects a radical where he taught some of the nascent conservative move- leftist for a while. The mature Kendall grew not just in- ment’s “young people,” including William F. Buckley, Jr., creasingly conservative in a general sense but also more who graduated in 1950. In 1954, Buckley told the con- committed to the Constitution’s checks and balances, its servative publisher Henry Regnery: “I attribute whatever implicit requirements for geographically dispersed and du- political and philosophical insights I have to his tutelage rable—not nationwide, numerical, short-term—majorities and his friendship.” in order to enact major public policy. He also preferred con- It was natural, then, that Kendall would be a found- gressional as against presidential and judicial power. ing editor of the ambitious conservative magazine Buckley Another major theme for Kendall was public virtue in a started in 1955, National Review. But it was equally natural free society. Rejecting the behavioralism already prominent that this temperamental man walked away from both insti- (and he feared dominant) among political scientists, he tutions. After leaving his Yale professorship in frustration similarly came to reject the widely held pluralist view that with its uncongenial political science department in 1961, the American Founders envisioned self-seeking, mutual- Kendall also became permanently estranged from Buckley. ly frustrating clashes between factions or interest groups His last years were spent as a popular faculty member at the as the essence of politics in the new republic. Rather, he ar- University of Dallas—a Roman Catholic yet middle-Amer- gued that the Founding—as completed, Kendall believed, ican environment where the populist native Oklahoman not by the literal Constitution but by the brilliant, political- finally felt he was “home.” There he co-founded a great ly realistic interpretation of it in the Federalist Papers—was books doctoral program, inspired partly by Leo Strauss’s more communitarian in its core doctrine, belonging to a lifelong effort to revive a close engagement with mankind’s venerable pre-existing American tradition based on the

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concept of a “virtuous people deliberating under God.” This conclusion would be central to his most renowned book, the posthumous Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (1970), co-authored with his young colleague George Carey. Also central to Kendall’s work was his belief in what is sometimes called public orthodoxy. As he wrote in one es- say: “by no means are all questions open questions; some questions involve matters so basic … that the society would, in declaring them open, abolish itself, commit suicide, ter- minate its existence as the kind of society it has hitherto understood itself to be.” An example of a such question that he felt should be “closed” in America is whether commu- nism should be accepted as a legitimate political system. Writing elsewhere, Kendall warned that complete ideolog- ical openness to the extent advocated in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty would cause politics to “descend ineluctably into ever-deepening differences of opinion, into progres- sive breakdown of those common premises upon which ability to calm down or “settle” in either sense of the word. alone a society can conduct its affairs by discussion, and so His protégé Buckley would later say of himself that he was into the abandonment of the discussion process and the ar- not temperamentally a typical conservative. Neither was bitrament of public questions by violence and civil war.” He Kendall. had seen it as a journalist in Spain in the 1930s. Both a disdain for loose thinking and an eagerness to Along with his deep learning in political philoso- make conservatives more politically effective were charac- phy—Rousseau became another major interest—and his teristic, too, of Kendall’s National Review colleague James in-depth study of our country’s political and constitutional Burnham. Despite great differences in their personalities traditions, Kendall felt a strong identification with middle and intellectual interests, they both understood clearly that America. Appropriately, he was a major source for many the West faced an urgent crisis—the rampant growth of conservatives’ longstanding faith in the existence of a right- a centralized, bureaucratic state—which ran even deeper of-center “silent majority.” In his writings, we frequently see than communism, crucial though that challenge was. Yet a shrewd sense of how typical Americans think about is- another possible basis for a meeting of the minds was their sues in their capacity as citizens. He probably would have common rejection of libertarianism and political individ- understood both our current polarized polity and the cur- ualism. A collaboration between Kendall and Burnham, rent conservative political base quite well. He would have then, might have been highly productive, as might others empathized, probably, with the right’s impatience for con- we could imagine. But it’s a bit problematic to say “collab- servative reform, while oration” when writing about Kendall—or “productive,” starkly admonishing it to except to suggest that he was insufficiently so. overcome that impatience Despite his drinking problem, his irascibility, and a ten- and connect better with the dency to spend too much time writing letters and the like, general citizenry. what he did publish was excellent. Except for his much-re- Kendall’s intellectual life spected dissertation on Locke, Kendall did not produce a had an indomitable integri- major work on his own (although in addition to his even- ty, while his life as a whole, tual co-authorship of Basic Symbols, he wrote a textbook as the eminent historian of on democracy and the party system with a more liberal po- American conservatism litical scientist, Austin Ranney). But his articles and essays George Nash has remarked, are outstanding. Among the most relevant to conserva- was one of “restless eccen- tism are “The People Versus Socrates Revisited,” “The Two tricity.” His strengths must Majorities” (presidential and congressional), “The Bill of have owed something to his Rights & American Freedom,” “American Conservatism weaknesses, his apparent in- and the ‘Prayer’ Decisions,” “The Social Contract: The Ul-

20 above left: The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition by Willmoore Kendall and George W. Carey (The Catholic University of America Press, 1995 reprint) Chronicles above right: Willmoore Kendall converses with fellow faculty members during his time at University of Dallas (University of Dallas Archive)

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timate Issue Between Liberalism and Conservatism,” and “Conservatism and the ‘Open Society.’” All could have been the basis for entire, even more instructive, books. In reading them, one senses that weighty issues have been both meticulously chosen and rigorously analyzed, while brought to a fresh conclusion or restatement, not an echo of anybody else’s thinking. One hears Kendall speak- ing directly, in elaborately constructed yet beautifully clear, often colloquial prose, logically judging alternatives and making key distinctions. Discussions with him may have been similarly rigorous—even though he could, accord- ing to the left-wing essayist Dwight Macdonald, “bring an argument into the shouting stage faster than any man in town.” Also notoriously, Kendall is said to have been on speaking terms with just one of his fellow National Review editors at a time. Going along to get along, suppressing ma- jor concerns in the interest of careerism or friendship, were simply foreign to him. And so, perhaps, were intellectual closure and finality. While Kendall would have had little affinity for New Age sensibilities, there may have been a sense in which he felt that the journey mattered more than the destination. An en- gagement with Strauss’s writings in the 1950s had inspired him to seek out the great University of Chicago scholar and admit that he needed to rethink major questions. Perhaps his “greatest virtue,” Christopher Wolfe suggested in his in- troduction to a reissued edition of Kendall’s collection, The Conservative Affirmation, “is that he constantly argued with himself; more than once in his mature years, he had the hu- mility to ‘start over,’ changing his intellectual position in response to some challenge to his habits of thought.” When Kendall deliberated on how to define leading principles for conservatism in the post-New Deal era, he did so partly because he thought the right’s other promi- had some basis at the time, though arguably less reason for nent intellectuals were, in general, “false teachers” and a it today. Yet as the right rethinks its position in our society “poor lot.” Before his untimely death, he had written parts and reflects on the vast frustrations it has experienced in of a book, ironically titled Sages of Conservatism. A key the decades since his death, he remains a compelling figure. point in these fascinating chapter drafts is his insistence He insisted that conservatives, if they were to become more that Russell Kirk’s traditionalism was too vague and lacked successful politically, must convincingly articulate a claim real relevance to America (although he agreed with Kirk’s to be the defenders of the true American political tradition. “moral teachings”). But Kendall also diverged markedly In addition, opposition to intellectual hypocrisy and com- from the libertarian and mainstream right’s emphasis on placency were major themes in Kendall’s restless life and individual rights, a principle for a democratic polity that writings. He had, in one scholar’s apt description, “no time he was skeptical of. Majority rule and societal cohesion re- for sentimentality, woolly thinking, or self-serving ideas.” mained more important to him. Nor should we. Conservatism today needs Kendall more than ever. A philosopher and political scientist first and a conservative David Frisk is resident fellow at The Alexander Hamilton Insti- second, he was nonetheless a profoundly political man who tute for the Study of Western Civilization, and author of If Not aimed to make the right more effective. Kendall’s midcen- Us, Who?: William Rusher, National Review, and the Conser- tury confidence that most Americans were right-of-center vative Movement (2011).

April/May 2020 above: The Conservative Affirmation in America, a collection of writings by Willmoore Kendall (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1985 edition) 21

pages-0420.indd 21 4/2/20 4:56 PM My Penelope: Ten Moments by Pete Beurskens

1 6 She stands straight She’s bent back laughing, the way she does. clad in ranger khakis From the living room with the men in the Never Summer Wilderness. I glimpse her in the kitchen Genially, she grasps the lead rope and watch her mirth of a pack mule called Spenser. enwreathe the women.

2 7 Her neck arcs over a menu, She sprawls on Utah slick-rock, small smile on her mouth, mountain bike akimbo. while I strive to memorize Blood trickles across her forehead the precise silica tint like wine-dark veins of her hazel eyes. in time-smooth Navaho Sandstone.

3 8 She’s half inside her front door Her broad-brimmed straw hat hesitating while I decide bobs among the Brandywines to kiss her…or not. as she uproots buttonweeds, I reach for the hand instead, freckle-dappled arm rising and shake on a future chance. regularly, daubing droplets.

4 9 Pale, she cradles our first boy Sitting at the sun-faded farm table amid tousled hospital sheets. she, patient, inclines on one elbow She’s dank, drawn, over a stupid algebra book, and singularly coaxing a brooding boy lovely. toward quadratic equations.

5 10 After the pediatrician’s call Spinning, she masters distaff, maidens she, standing, slumps, and Mother-of-All. Deftly she harmonizes slim shoulders folded in on herself treadle and whorl, footman and bobbin, like self-protective wings. conjuring silvery skeins She does not cry. from fleecy roving.

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No one so much as pauses when are simultaneously unlikely and inevitable contemporary police records, Gambetta the mob shouts down reasonable voices over a long stretch of time, like the 2008 outlines the mafia’s growth in the 19th and during a panic. Just witness the media’s financial crisis. In our shortsightedness, 20th centuries from the lawless transition- daily performance during the COVID-19 we don’t reward those who avoid losses. al period between feudalism and democ- crisis. CNBC hit the ejector button on au- As Taleb writes, “The true hero of the racy. The book provides tables of statistics thor James Grant during a live broadcast Black Swan world is someone who pre- outlining the median ages of mafia boss- when he wondered aloud if the govern- vents a calamity and, naturally, because es and their apparent occupations, from ment’s civil society shutdown might lead the calamity did not take place, does not sheep breeders to undertakers and to bar to more harm than good. Even after crises get recognition—or a bonus—for it.” The owners; maps tracking the mafia’s spread subside, no one defends that same voice U.S. could have built more hospitals, man- from rural areas to the cities of Corleone of reason when he repeats his advice with ufactured more ventilators, and stockpiled and Palermo; and anecdotes about the po- the posterity of hindsight. masks. But it didn’t. Until this latest pre- litical and business dealings of the so-called Luckily for humanity, several modern- dictable disaster struck, such moves reeked Men of Honor. day prophets persist without defenders. of paranoia and inefficiency to hedge fund However, Gambetta’s purpose in these One prophet in particular, Nassim Nicholas managers, healthcare consultants, and anecdotes is to illustrate how mafia dealings Taleb, gloats at his opponents’ cowardice. Lizzo fans who prefer to believe whatever follow classic business concepts. Orderly He rubs his incontrovertible conclusions CNBC preaches. markets; customer demand; reputation- in the faces of those busy defending a sta- Outside his cultlike following, Taleb’s al effects such as trademarks, branding, tus quo that enriches a select few at the ex- warnings will sadly continue to fall on advertising; competition and barrier to pense of the common good—politicians deaf ears. But Chronicles readers should entry; informal regulation and industry with their power grabs, corporate exec- enlighten themselves with Taleb’s insights. standards—Gambetta finds a correlation utives with their bailouts, and academics If I didn’t know any better, I’d have assumed between nearly every aspect of conven- with their burnished reputations from re- he custom-wrote Antifragile for the readers tional economic behavior and mafia op- writing history during the maelstrom. of this magazine, given its abundant Latin erations. The comparison is enlightening, I coincidentally started reading Taleb’s and Greek phrases, quotes from Joseph de not only in that the mafia runs much like Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder Maistre, and timeless wisdom. conventional business and government, (2012) the week before the country melt- —Mark G. Brennan but also in that business and government ed down. Taleb argues for a third catego- seem to operate like the mafia. ry beyond the easily broken and the re- Perhaps because the current Another lesson in The Sicilian Mafia, silient: the antifragile, a thing that, like a social order seems more fragile than ever, which may not be what Gambetta intend- newly healed broken bone, becomes even I’ve been drawn to economist Diego Gam- ed, makes the book a classic for libertari- stronger through shocks than it was in its betta’s 1993 masterpiece The Sicilian Ma- ans and anarcho-capitalists to this day: the original state. Far too much of modern so- fia: The Business of Private Protection. This emergence of spontaneous order from so- ciety falls into the fragile category, a by- scholarly work published by Harvard Uni- cial chaos. Some of these people, annoyed product of gargantuan size and a failure versity Press takes the novel approach of at the presumption of sainthood conferred to build redundant systems. examining La Cosa Nostra in purely eco- on today’s civil servants, would rather re- Consider the massive American health- nomic terms, as a black-market industry place them with made men who burn im- care system now crashing headfirst into its specializing in protection services, run by ages of saints as part of their initiation. design flaws. In order to meet investor de- “entrepreneurs of violence.” Gambetta even calls out the great Austrian mands and government edicts, the United The subject of the mafia is inherent- School economist Murray Rothbard in his States has a hospital system designed for ly entertaining and fans of classic fiction introduction: “He seems oblivious to the profits, not problems. COVID-19 is anoth- from the genre, such as Mario Puzo’s The fact that the society he is proposing ex- er of Taleb’s ominous “Black Swans”: low- Godfather (1969), will find much of inter- ists already in Sicily and can hardly be de- probability, high-risk events that are rare est in Gambetta’s book despite its dry, ce- scribed as a success.” Both sides of that ar- and devastating, but not unforeseeable. We rebral presentation. Drawing on meticu- gument should read Gambetta. ignore at our peril these cataclysms which lously footnoted historical research and —Edward Welsch

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Traditionalism Redux by Derek Turner

War for Eternity: Inside Bannon’s Far- ally radical way of thinking had somehow sal truths and a supposed inexorable order Right Circle of Global Power Brokers moved from shrouded religious sects and of aristocracy, mysticism, nobility, spiritu- by Benjamin R. Teitelbaum ultraconservative intellectual circles into ality, and the warrior spirit. Th ey became HarperCollins the White House and beyond.” convinced there were four repeating “ages” 336 pp., $28.99 Defi ning traditionalism is the fi rst chal- in human history. During the golden age, lenge facing the author. Today’s tradition- societies are led by priests, during the sil- many intemperate critics have alism draws heavily on the aforementioned ver by soldiers, by merchants during the attacked President Trump and his intellec- Evola and his French contemporary, René bronze, and by slaves during the dark age, tual infl uences. Benjamin Teitelbaum is not Guénon (1886-1951). But its Western roots aft er which the cycle begins again. Time one of them. Cleverer and more fair-mind- have been traced back to Plato, as fi ltered loses meaning in this reading, as the linear- ed than most critiques, War for Eternity by early Christian and Renaissance neo- ity and progressiveness of both Christian strives to show that many modern national platonists, who formulated what became and Enlightenment thought are supplanted conservative and populist movements are known as “the perennial philosophy.” Th is by circularity and fatalism. To traditional- paradoxically informed by the arcane in- averred there was a single, fundamental, ists, there is endless decline in human af- tellectual current known as traditionalism. universal, metaphysical truth underlying fairs, but there is also endless rebirth—and At the book’s heart are 20 hours of prob- all religious traditions, and this amorphous violent destruction can be creative, because ing interviews with Steve Bannon conduct- idea was absorbed by academics, artists, it expedites the endless return. ed between June 2018 and September 2019. and religious reformers alike. Romantics Traditionalists are frequently eccentric, Th e president’s supposed Svengali is an ob- embraced it eagerly in the 19th and early to put it mildly. Evola believed Aryans de- ject of fascination to many, and Teitelbaum’s 20th centuries, looking ever further back scended from ethereal Arctic beings who interest was sparked in 2014 when he heard and farther afi eld for a unifying thread to had coarsened as they migrated south. Bannon alluding to the Italian fascist phi- help them disentangle the age of democ- Viewed from Himalayan intellectual losopher Julius Evola (1898-1974). Evola racy. With the help of ground-breaking heights, all kinds of mundane preoccu- was a central fi gure in today’s tradition- works like Sir James George Frazer’s Th e pations can seem unimportant, includ- alism, whose writings are circulated al- Golden Bough (1890), prehistory was plun- ing class, nation, race, religious denom- most exclusively on the outermost edg- dered to fi nd conceptual commonalities ination, and wealth. Even physical reality es of the right. from Greek myth to the Egyptian Book of can seem surmountable, given suffi cient When Teitelbaum learned Bannon the Dead, Babylon to Buddhism, Christian discipline. had an eight-hour private meeting in 2018 apocrypha to animists and Sufi sts. But these theories can also be infl u- with the Kremlin-connected traditionalist But the principal fountainhead was ential; permeating conspiratorial, esoter- Aleksandr Dugin, he became convinced always the “Aryan” lands, where jaded ic, and New Age circles, as well as the arts, a dangerously outré philosophical move- Europeans found an impressively ancient literature, philosophy, and high society. It ment was galvanizing global politics. At and brilliantly colored cosmology ripe for is said Prince Charles is a not-so-secret the time, American media were hyper- reinterpretation. Th ey saw in Hindu and traditionalist. Th e British composer John ventilating about Russian infl uence, and Zoroastrian beliefs an exotic antidote to Tavener dedicated works to both Guénon Teitelbaum felt “curious and unnerved” Europe’s technically advanced but spiritual- and the Swiss-German traditionalist to think that “an obscure and exception- ly empty civilization—purportedly univer- Frithjof Schuon (1907-1998). Such might

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be expected in rarefied circles. What is less Bannon squares theoretical aristoc- and, in any case, represent cultures with easily understandable is a militant variant racy with sincere populism because two- very different histories and geostrategic in- of these theories may also be helping pro- party democracy has clearly not benefit- terests. The principals also have perverse pel today’s national populist juggernaut. ed working people. To him, the working and powerful personalities. When Dugin Traditionalist concepts and terminol- class is less decadent, and more authenti- met de Carvalho, for example, they appar- ogy permeate rightist social media, the cally American, than the modern West’s ently got into a bad-tempered argument avatars from Hindu myth oddly analo- misrulers. People from any class can be- about “sacred geography.” gous to the shape-shifting trolls of the alt- come aristocrats because aristocracy is Clearly, Bannon has been influenced right. From 4Chan to Cambridge Analytica about rootedness and spirituality rather by these meetings and readings, and tradi- (which Bannon helped set up), minds have than birth, education, or wealth. “Every tionalism has some bearing on today’s tu- been changed, elections swung, and ref- person should be a priest,” Bannon reflects, mults. But in the final analysis, traditional- erenda won, using high-tech methodol- in what may be the book’s most telling sen- ism is more of an attitude than an ism—let ogy that may be underpinned by ancient tence. Teitelbaum coins the useful phrase alone a danger to the liberal order. Insofar symbology. “spiritual mobility”—and the working class as it is a discrete ideology, it can as easily

Traditionalist concepts and terminology permeate rightist social media, the avatars from Hindu myth oddly analogous to the shape-shifting trolls of the alt-right.

The supposedly phlegmatic British might manage this most easily because they be interpreted as an intrinsically univer- voted quixotically to quit the EU, against have been so long distanced from the in- salist creed. Perhaps the publishers sought all “expert” arguments. The ultra-vulgar trinsically corrupt centers of education- sensationalism—or maybe, like some tra- Trump embraces the believer in aristocra- al, financial, media, and political power. ditionalists, the author got slightly swept cy—at least for a time. Cold-eyed Vladimir In the shorter term, radical transfor- away by the epic grandeur of his theme. Putin has a weakness for the “Eurasian” mative action can best guarantee their eco- The truth of the matter may be less romancing of Dugin. Jair Bolsonaro be- nomic and existential security. This is akin aesthetically pleasing—that Bannon read came Brazilian President thanks to four to the creative destruction beloved of tra- Evola and the others out of sheer intel- seminal texts—the Bible, Brazil’s consti- ditionalists, with Trump (or Bolsonaro, or lectual interest, as he once read Madame tution, a book by Winston Churchill, and Farage, or Putin) as a necessary “disruptor,” Blavatsky or Joseph Smith, rather than as Olavo de Carvalho’s 2013 traditionalist a bullheaded force of nature who throws ev- an effort to codify some cosmic agenda. He manifesto, O mínimo que você precisa sa- erything down so that others may build bet- says of himself, “I’m just some f***ing guy, ber para não ser um idiota (roughly, The ter. Government needs to be slashed, fam- making it up as I go”—a claim some will see Minimum You Need to Know to Avoid Being ilies boosted, globalizing imperialisms (big as disarming, but others as disingenuous. an Idiot). Traditionalism-influenced pol- business, China, equality, “human rights,” Teitelbaum himself sometimes seems iticians have risen and fallen in France, Islam, mass migration) restrained, troops uncertain of Bannon, and he is commend- Germany, Hungary, Italy, and elsewhere. brought home, and individuals allowed to ably unwilling to rush to a final judgment. A few rungs down, colorful individuals find their own levels, all within a spiritu- While he and we await events, and watch cluster from Tennessee to Tehran, Virginia ally uplifting culture. the metapolitical stars, we have for our edi- to Venezuela. While organizing their po- Traditionalism, never easily applica- fication his able and interesting survey of a litical plots, they attend Indian ashrams or ble to real-life politics, becomes even less recondite—and oddly relevant—tradition. Unite the Right rallies, beat drums in forest practical when it comes to potential inter- glades, run small but far-reaching publish- national alliances. While Bannon, Dugin, Derek Turner is the author of the novels ing houses and schools (Bannon has been de Carvalho and others agree on much the- A Modern Journey, Displacement, and trying to set up his own). State intelligence oretically—the desirability of a multipolar Sea Changes. services are in this soup somewhere, as are world, globalism, materialism, rejection of Mexican cartels, money from Chinese an- equality, and rationalism—they are rarely ti-communists, and agents from Moscow. able to carry theories through into policy

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Fatal Amendments by Betsy Clarke

Th e Cult of the Constitution all but white men of full participa- logically dishonest sexual predator” by Mary Anne Franks tion in society. Our First and Second Donald Trump, white men have felt Stanford University Press Amendment rights might be tolera- “freer than ever to endanger public 272 pp., $26.00 ble were white men not villains. Alas, welfare with their fetish for weapons.” “white men’s monopoly on deadly However, Franks cites no statis- enthusiastic defenders of the force” causes women and minorities to tics to support her thesis that white First and Second Amendments to the shrink from participating in civic life, men have a monopoly on violence, so Constitution are fundamentalist cult- for they cannot exercise their rights she seems to assume that her outrage ists—and women and minorities are “when they fear grave bodily injury over “the murder of Philando Castile” their victims. or death.” Franks’ view doesn’t explain will serve as a substitute. But the po- At least, that is the thesis of why nevertheless women can be seen lice offi cer who shot Castile, an armed University of Miami law professor everywhere in the workplace or in the motorist in Minnesota whom the of- Mary Anne Franks’ new book, Th e Cult political sphere. fi cer had stopped, was shown to have of the Constitution, an unforgiving dis- Flimsy evidence is Franks’s calling acted in reasonable fear of his life. He paragement of the Constitution’s white card, and she marshals it to support was never charged with, let alone con- male origins and the allegedly unwoke her position that the First and Second victed of, murder, nor was he white. application of its protections. Her subti- Amendments render life a nightmare Her libelous use of the term “murder” tle brings the point home: “Our Deadly for anyone not white and male. Cen- is reminiscent of former law profes- Devotion to Guns and Free Speech.” tral to her argument is the August 2017 sor Elizabeth Warren’s recent claim What has spawned such a jaded Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, that Ferguson, Missouri, teen Michael view of our founding document? First, which resulted in the murder of one Brown was murdered, even though says Franks, consider its history. White young woman—improbably by a car the police offi cer involved was acquit- men wrote the Constitution, acqui- rather than a gun. A white male ral- ted of any wrongdoing by a thorough esced in slavery, and deprived women ly attendee has been convicted of that grand jury. Our lady law professors of the Constitution’s protections. Sec- murder. For Franks, a rally protect- seem to be drinking a peculiarly be- ond, look around. Inequality, she says, ed by the First Amendment featuring fuddling type of Kool-Aid. is everywhere. Police murder blacks. armed white men and resulting in the Franks begins her book by telling us White men murder women, and those violent death of a woman symbolizes that she is of mixed race and was raised not murdered are beaten into retreat the Constitution’s toxicity. an impoverished half-white, half-Tai- from civil society through Internet That episode is just the lat- wanese Southern Baptist in Pine Bluff , threats and revenge porn. est example, says Franks, of how the Arkansas. “Saved” at age eight, she White men control the media, “Constitution has indeed functioned soon became disillusioned with fun- academia, corporations, the econo- to protect white male supremacy damentalism’s “bad faith.” Having my, entertainment, and government, since the day it was written.” Our cur- discovered the same bad faith in the Franks writes. It follows, therefore, rent president, she says, personifies Constitution, Franks has also soured that the First and Second Amend- the malady: With the election of the on that celebrated document. She now ments have joined forces to deprive “barely literate, openly racist, patho- concludes that the Golden Rule, Im-

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manuel Kant’s categorical imperative, and the Fourteenth Amendment are the exclusive keys to a just society. By contrast, the First and Second Amendments in deadly combination have driven women and minorities into hiding, denying them civic par- ticipation. She advocates a “civil rights approach” to constitutional rights— that is, the government should use the Bill of Rights to enforce equality tion, Professor Franks might consult it has received generous contributions among groups—rather than our “civ- former mayor of New York, Michael from both the Playboy Foundation il liberties approach,” which protects Bloomberg, or former mayor of Phila- and the tobacco industry. But the Play- the people from government power. delphia, Michael Nutter, or the Bureau boy Foundation also gave to feminist “Conflicts among constitutional rights of Justice Statistics. In many cities, 90 organizations, with a grateful Ruth must be resolved according to the de- percent of black male murder victims Bader Ginsberg eagerly seeking more. mands of equality,” she writes. In short, are killed by other black men. There- As for the tobacco industry, who can Franks wants the government to dis- fore, restricting the rights of white forget the Virginia Slims company’s tribute constitutional rights from each men will not result in black safety. One sponsorship of women’s tennis, link- according to his privilege to each ac- suspects that learning these facts will ing smoking with women’s liberation? cording to her needs. not bring relief to Professor Franks. Yet these associations provoke no Franks calls this idea that white One of the author’s complaints is criticism. men’s constitutional rights should be that the white men so enamored of In her final chapter, Franks drops rationed until full equality is realized the Constitution have no idea what it her constitutional analysis to address “constitutional reciprocity.” Howev- means. Among this group, she com- “the cult of the Internet” and specif- er, she does not articulate how this plains, have been certain justices of the ically Section 230 of the 1996 U.S. mandate would be administered. She U.S. Supreme Court. She deplores Jus- Telecommunications Reform Act, seems unaware that in many ways, tice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion which protects Internet service pro- equality for women would mean a in District of Columbia v. Heller, which viders (but not users) from liability for demotion. More women than men held that the Second Amendment defamation and harassment. Franks attend college, and they graduate at guarantees the right to defend oneself concedes that political pressure and higher rates. Women also have lower with a handgun in one’s home, even technological advances have curtailed unemployment rates than men. As for though the amendment says noth- online abuse without government their wealth, men and women in the ing about guns or self-defense. By this regulation but remains dissatisfied be- United States control nearly identical standard, how much more competent cause inequality prevails. assets, a statistic that is not matched in is Professor Franks, who asserts that Cults have long been associated countries without a First and Second the Fourteenth Amendment guaran- with irrationality, secrecy, and ma- Amendment. Of course, correlation tees women “bodily autonomy” even nipulation. But after considering the is not causation, but it is a correlation though that amendment mentions remedies that Franks promotes to im- worth pondering. neither bodies nor autonomy? pose on us her view of equality, one Are marauding, chanting white Not counting our nation’s found- must conclude that joining the cult men killing women and minorities in ers, the biggest villains in Franks’ of the Constitution appears to be not terrifying numbers? A quick review of book are the National Rifle Associa- only an acceptable but an imperative the research reveals that gun violence tion and the American Civil Liberties reaction to this potentially totalitarian is not disproportionately propagated Union: They are predominantly white threat. We had better seek member- by white men, women are not its dis- and male, they pursue an individual- ship while we still can. proportionate victims, and the First rights agenda, and they have immoral and Second Amendments do not benefactors. She declaims against the Betsy Clarke is a retired law clerk who sanction gun crime. For confirma- moral authority of the ACLU because lives in Columbus, Ohio.

above: the current Supreme Court Justices: Front row, left to right: Associate Justice Stephen G. Breyer, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John April/May 2020 G. Roberts, Jr., Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito. Back row: Associate Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, Associate Justice Sonia 27 Sotomayor, Associate Justice Elena Kagan, Associate Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh (Fred Schilling, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States)

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Hitler vs. the Anglo-Americans by Srdja Trifk ovic

Hitler: A Global Biography are close to the “historicization” of Hitler, and economic forces. Hitler provides the by Brendan Simms fi nally treating him like any other phenom- conclusive proof that Plekhanov, Marx, Basic Books enon from the past. In Germany, which et al. were wrong. By now all authors of 704 pp., $19.99 has been the key arena of Hitler-related stature agree that his persona mattered a scholarly endeavors for the past half-cen- great deal, that he remains a moral prob- On April 20, Adolf Hitler turns tury, the process matured in the early 1980s lem (more intractable than the popular 131. Ten days later comes the 75th anni- with the debate between “intentionalists” usage of the term “moral” implies), and versary of his earthly demise in the ruins and the “structuralists” (also known as that it is very important to determine, with of Berlin, but he is still our contemporary “functionalists”). seriousness and accuracy, what motivat- par excellence. He continues to haunt and While neither side denied the reality ed him. fascinate. Hitler’s countenance, his very of the Holocaust, the former—most nota- Brendan Simms, a Cambridge histo- name, seem to get indelibly etched in the bly Andreas Hillgruber, Klaus Hildebrand rian new both to Hitler and to biography, collective consciousness of each new gen- and Eberhard Jäckel—held that the Nazi has written a full-size biography of Hitler eration. On current form, Lincoln, Lenin, Final Solution had been planned well be- (555 pages, plus over a hundred pages of or Lennon may be forgotten in a few de- fore Operation Barbarossa, perhaps as ear- notes and index), which reads well and oc- cades, but the Führer will be alive and well ly as the 1920s. Th e latter—Karl Schleunes, casionally entertains, but it fails the test of a century hence. Hans Mommsen, Martin Broszat, et al.— seriousness and accuracy. Its publishers ad- At the low end of the cultural scale, argued that there never was a master plan. vertise Hitler: A Global Biography as a “re- politicians and their media abettors rou- Th is debate was followed by the acri- visionist biography,” which it is, although tinely Hitlerize the monstre du jour, from monious Historikerstreit (historians’ quar- not in the late Imanuel Geiss’s (let alone Saddam to Putin to Trump. Slightly higher rel) over the nature of National Socialism, David Irving’s!) sense of the word. up, Hitler consistently tops the biography its position vis-à-vis Bolshevism, and its Simms’ central thesis is that “Hitler’s rankings on Amazon.com. Napoleon is an proper place in the context of German his- principal preoccupation throughout his ca- increasingly distant second, while the great tory. Th e controversy exploded when Ernst reer was Anglo-America and global cap- and the good of more recent decades— Nolte contended that Nazi crimes were in italism, rather than the Soviet Union and Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, essence a defensive reaction against Lenin Bolshevism.” Hitler’s grand-strategic objec- Jr., Nelson Mandela, Mother Th eresa—do and Stalin’s “Asiatic” barbarism, and when tive was to establish racial unity in a great- not even come close. Andreas Hillgruber asserted there was no ly expanded Germany by overcoming the Among professional historians the fundamental moral diff erence between the Anglo-American capitalist world order. work started with Alan Bullock in 1952, Soviets’ treatment of Germany in the fi - Hitler’s earlier biographers noted his and it is not abating. Th ere are some three nal stage of the war and the Nazi geno- ambivalence towards Britain, a mix of dozen quality biographies thus far, as well cide against the Jews. grudging admiration and loathing com- as tons of trashy Hitlerana of the Escape to Most of the principals are dead, but mon to many Germans of his time (famous- Argentina sort. One noteworthy title has the debate is not over. At least its course ly including the Kaiser, who both longed for appeared every 18 months on average since conclusively refuted the notion that his- and hated his British mother). Simms goes Joachim Fest’s 1973 magnum opus. tory is “made” not by free-willed individ- much further. He sees “the centrality of the Th e good news is that serious authors uals, but by underlying social conditions British Empire and the United States in the

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gestation of Mein Kampf” and in practical- ly all of Hitler’s subsequent plans and deci- sions. His supposed obsession with Anglo- America in Simms’ rendering is the key to Hitler’s entire Weltanschauung, the philos- opher’s stone which explains Operation Barbarossa, the Holocaust, the yearning for Eastern Lebensraum, and the obses- sion with racial purity. On the basis of the scant new material he presents, Simms could have advanced and credibly supported the claim that Hitler had been acutely aware of the importance of Anglo-America, which he perceived as a monolithic geopolitical entity, and saw it as a global thalassocratic threat to his con- tinental design. Had Simms tried to correct the score on Hitler the Global Strategist by throwing a new light on the Anglo- American factor in his outlook and ex- plaining why it mattered more than previ- ously assumed, his book could have made a worthy contribution to our understand- marily driven by the contest against Anglo- in the way the fight against Anglo-America ing of the man and his times. America.” The capitulation of Axis forces in never did. The distinction was clearly im- What we get instead is a massive exer- Tunisia, according to Simms, “was a much plied in one of Hitler’s final orders, which cise in self-validating reductionism. Simms’ greater disaster than Stalingrad.” By the end Simms quotes without comment, for the central claim is that Hitler’s “true nemesis of 1943 “the western powers were absorb- entire front against the Anglo-Americans was the British Empire and especially the ing the greater part not merely of Hitler’s to turn and face the Russians. United States.” Literally everything follows attention, but also of his resources…. One In his introduction, Simms writes his from this bold yet unproven assertion. It way or the other, most of the German war intention was “to show rather than tell,” is in the context of his “overreaching pre- effort was now geared to fighting the Anglo- but he does the opposite. In his flawed ren- occupation with Britain and the United Americans, and the proportion increased dering, practically every idea, challenge, States that Hitler’s anti-Semitism should with each passing month.” In the end, the and dilemma faced by Hitler is explained primarily be understood.” The resulting war was lost because “the trophy was lift- as an attempt to preempt, frustrate, or mass murder of European Jews “was not ed once more by the Anglo-Americans, counter the Anglo-American monster. a distorted copy of Stalin’s Great Terror, with substantial help from their Soviet al- His Hitler is reduced to an uninterest- but a preemptive strike against Roosevelt’s lies, of course.” ing automaton, which trivializes his gro- America.” Far from being the product of These assertions are impudent and so tesque record. Hitler’s twin obsession with Bolshevism easily refutable that we are left wondering “[Wir sind] mit Hitler noch lange nicht and Lebensraum, the attack on the Soviet who Simms was hoping to deceive. At a fertig,” (We are not yet finished with Hitler) Union was really meant “to strike at Britain, deeper level, he consistently ignores the John Lukacs approvingly quoted a young- and to deter the United States.” distinction between Hitler’s war against er colleague at the prologue of his 1998 The entire war in the East, Simms the western powers, which for all its fe- survey The Hitler of History. Over two de- claims, “was to be a campaign of con- rocity was arguably a traditional European cades later it is clear that we will never be quest and annihilation, for reasons more war (ein europäisches Normalkrieg), and “done” with him. Brendan Simms has not to do with Anglo-America than the Soviet the exterminationist struggle he unleashed made the slightest difference to that fact. Union itself.” The same motive applied in the East. Against the Soviets, both ideo- even to individual operations: “the drive logical and racial enemies, no laws applied. Srdja Trifkovic is Chronicles’ foreign on Stalingrad, like the entire war, was pri- That struggle turned existential in 1944-45 affairs editor.

April/May 2020 above: Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt in Casablanca, Jan. 18, 1943 (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration) 29

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Books in Brief

The Long Night of the Watchman: Essays by Václav sible were it not for Benda and Charter 77. maybe thus: to oppose all Social- Benda, 1977-1989 (St. Augustine's Press; 352 pp., The Long Night of the Watchman is a ist ideas and fabrications untiring- $35.00). On July 4, 1983, in Prague, there collection of Benda’s writings ably edited ly and completely mercilessly; es- occurred one of those moments that may by F. Flagg Taylor IV. The book is divided pecially to unmask pre-emptively rightly be considered a single loose pebble into three parts composed of “Reflections,” every camouflage which could en- that caused an avalanche. Film director “Essays and Inquiries,” and “Reports and able it to rise again from the ash- MiloŠ Forman had been permitted to Defenses.” The strategy of Benda and the es…However, I would behave as return to his native Czechoslovakia by its chartists was to hold the state to the let- considerately and as tolerantly as then-Communist overlords, to film the ter of its own laws so as to create spaces possible towards all Socialists (I movie Amadeus (1984). of freedom where culture could develop. don’t of course mean henchmen On that day one of the opera scenes While some of Benda’s writings are very or the guards of the The Gulag), was filmed in the great Estates Theater, the technical, written in response to particu- always prepared to meet them more site of the first performance of Mozart’s lar circumstances of totalitarian rule, they than half-way, and overlook a doz- Don Giovanni. In addition to cast and crew, demonstrate a precision of thought and en of their unbearable habits and there were about 500 Czech extras in period analysis that embarrassed and outmatched resentments for the single human dress present. When Forman yelled action his statist opponents. The book is not so moment which would perhaps en- on the first scene, instead of Mozart’s mu- much a gripping read of heroics in defiance able them to recover from that fa- sic, “The Star-Spangled Banner” began to of the state, but a record of chess strate- tal enchantment. play and an American flag unfurled from gy, in which Benda is Garry Kasparov and the rafters. The cast, crew, and all the ex- state officials are checkmated, one by one. As an ever more explicit left-wing and tras stood up and began to sing the United Benda’s thoughts on the preservation subjectivist-materialist-relativist-sexual to- States’ national anthem, in English! All, of culture, religion, and tradition would talitarianism infects the U.S., a thoughtful that is, but for the extras who remained have made him at home with the ancient populace would do well to engage with the sitting, with confused or terrified expres- Romans and their reverence for their an- writings of Benda. He has much to offer in sions—the secret police. cestors, the scholastics of the High Middle terms of a defiant detachment from “our In 1977, a disparate group that includ- Ages in their seeing a coherence in all of re- betters.” However, this book will probably ed ex-Communists, Catholics, Protestants, ality, and the political realism of his Anglo not interest the casual reader; it is more for artists, intellectuals, socialists, and other fellow travelers, Edmund Burke and Russell the political scientist, those interested in dissidents banded together to draft Charter Kirk, and their insistence on the indepen- Czech history or the Cold War, or those 77, a document challenging the reigning dence of the family and loyalty to interme- interested in totalitarian systems and their polity and to ensure that the government diate institutions. philosophical underpinnings. For the last, abided by the provisions of the Helsinki Possibly Benda’s most widely known es- Benda ranks along with thinkers such as Accords, which included a range of civil, say is “The Parallel Polis,” written at a time Hannah Arendt in his analysis. political, and economic rights. when dissidents were looking for ways to In Benda's view, totalitarianism could One of the group's leaders was Václav live outside the totalitarian state. There he not be defeated from within by compet- Benda, a husband, father, and intellectu- outlines timeless principles necessary to ing doctrines but only could be undone al. Outside of scholars of samizdat and the build a parallel culture outside the state. by organic rebellion: "a single loose peb- Cold War, personages such as Benda are Benda's subsequent writings and po- ble can cause an avalanche, an acciden- relatively unknown in the U.S. Yet their in- litical conservatism estranged him from tal outburst of discontent in a factory, at a fluence among their own people and their his fellow chartists after the fall of the Iron football match, in a village pub, is capable heroism in attempting to breathe free air Curtain. He explicates this notion of arti- of shaking the foundations of the state." amidst the smog of the worker’s paradise cles of peace between the philosophically This volume is also for anyone who was just as significant as the better-known disparate—specifically on some socialist wishes to engage in intelligent conversa- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Václav Havel. elements within this group—in his “Letter tion on the role of the state and the nature Czechs breaking into song on America’s to Roger Scruton” written in January 1985: of man. In this last sense, I suppose it is Independence Day in the middle of com- for every Chronicles reader. munist Prague would not have been pos- …I would formulate my position (John M. DeJak)

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Loveline: Stealth Conservative Talk Radio by Mark Bauerlein

I first heard the Loveline radio show in the late ’90s. It came on late at night, broadcast from Los Angeles back to me in Atlanta. The format was like an old-fashioned advice column, but with a coarse edge. People phoned in with ques- tions about sex and relationships, tales of abuse and heartbreak, disease and addic- tion. Hosts Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew Pinsky listened and gave guidance dur- ing the show’s heyday, from 1995 to 2005. Except, that’s not always what hap- pened—not even most of the time. Yes, some callers would describe a problem and the hosts would offer a solution: this boy- friend is bad and you should flee; those symptoms sound like an STD and you Dr. Drew is the medical advisor, a voice himself 15 years earlier, wasting hours in should see a urologist; get some therapy of professional concern, an expert in ad- junior college, crashing on buddies’ couch- to deal with how your father acted, etc. dictions and pathologies, and the author es, and laboring as carpet cleaner and con- The caller would pay attention, absorb the of books on dysfunctional behaviors. He struction worker. counsel, thank them, and hang up. preferred the questioning approach, this Adam has written several funny mem- When those calls came on the air, you time verifying that she wasn’t surprised oirs about his early years, one of them en- could hear relief in the voices of the hosts. that he didn’t like it. titled Not Taco Bell Material (2012), after A positive exchange with a troubled person, She admitted that his response made a line spoken to him when he applied for a man in Oregon who listens and pledges sense, but still probed for some way to calm a job at a Taco Bell outlet. He started in to act—wonderful! him down and make him “feel better.” radio and got his big break in 1994 when A more typical dialogue went like one “No,” Dr. Drew said quickly, shutting he arranged a boxing publicity stunt for that I heard the other night (dozens of the down her line of rationalization. Jimmy Kimmel. He would go on to co- shows are archived online—this one is That was Adam’s cue. If she couldn’t fol- host The Man Show on Comedy Central dated May 27, 2002). “Rebecca,” a sober- low a simple logical query from a doctor in 1999, which showcased girls in bikinis sounding woman, checked in because her and realize how blocked she is, it was time bouncing on trampolines and men guz- husband wasn’t happy with what was go- for another tack: the Carolla Treatment. zling beer. ing to happen the next day. They hadn’t Adam is the opposite of Dr. Drew: a Adam took up the caller’s case with an been married long—they were both 18— Valley guy who played high school football enthusiastic idea for her husband. “You but there was a rift. and never earned a college degree. He relied could give him, like, half off a lap dance “I start a job tomorrow at a strip club,” on his background as a raunchy youth from and a drink coupon,” he suggested. She she told the hosts, “and my husband is, uh, a broken home to reflect on the messy lives didn’t laugh. having a problem with that.” She avowed of the callers. Drew was diplomatic, Adam Drew stepped in with a dose of reality, she “loves him dearly,” but said her hus- politically incorrect. Drew gave medical telling her that she is there to arouse men— band was worried that she may come to en- opinions; Adam cracked wise. Drew identi- that’s all. She insisted once more that she joy taking her clothes off in front of other fied them as depressed and bipolar; Adam only likes to dance. Adam chuckled, Drew men. She insisted she merely liked to dance. called them “screwballs.” Drew referred to sighed, then Adam slipped into sleazy an- How could she get her husband to relax? patients he’s had in the past; Adam recalled nouncer mode, pretending to introduce her

above: Adam Corolla, left, talks with Dr. Drew Pinsky as they discuss a caller's problem during Loveline in 31 April/May 2020 Culver City, California, on May 29, 1997. (AP Photo/Chris Urso)

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the callers is stunning. A teenaged caller worried that his girlfriend’s mother doesn’t like him. Why? Because the mother caught the 16-year-olds engaging in oral sex in her bedroom. The boy asked how he might get back into the mother’s good graces. He can’t seem to acknowledge the fact that she now carries around a mental image of the two of them together that appalls her. Adam and Drew speculated, too, that the daugh- ter, who initiated the act and left the door open with her mother down the hall, want- ed to get caught as an act of rebellion, and advised the boy to stay away for his own good. The psychological considerations of the situation were beyond him. Another caller was a wife and mother of two kids. She and her husband regularly for the first time to a crowd of ogling men. raised a query that the rest of us consider met with a married couple for a “foursome,” Drew proceeded to the obvious point: why obvious and necessary. but she worried that the other wife had fur- was Rebecca in such complete denial over A teenaged girl had just gotten her nip- ther designs upon her husband. Adam and what she was doing? Adam added, “Why ples pierced and wanted to know if that will Drew told her to forget the other woman, are you screwing with him [her husband]? hinder breastfeeding once she has kids. that the whole thing is crazy—to which she What’s wrong with you?” Drew wondered why she didn’t check on replied with a confused, “Huh?” She was so She stuck to her story. “It’s a job. That’s that before she did the piercing. caught up in her jealousy, notwithstanding how I think about it. It’s just a job.” Adam A 20-year-old girl told the hosts that her sex acts with the other woman’s hus- raised the issue of why she and her hus- she and a friend went to Vegas, met a cou- band, that she couldn’t recognize the per- band married so fast as two 18-year-olds, ple of guys in a bar, ended up drinking in versity of the whole situation. They had to and Drew inquired, “What are you run- the guys’ room, and when they paired off yell at her to stop at once, adding that she ning away from, and why?” for sex, her partner eased a beer bottle in- was harming her children. “No, no,” she “We wanted to get married,” she an- side her as some kind of crude jest. It still objected, “we’re really good parents!” swered, a surly tone edging into her voice. bothered her, and she asked for sugges- The pleas kept coming, one obtuse or Drew repeated, “What are you running tions as to how she could get past it. After deluded individual after another. The cha- away from, and why?” Adam joked about long-neck and short- os in which they found themselves origi- “I’m not running away from anything.” neck bottles, they told her to take it as a nated inside them, but they couldn’t see it. “Alright,” Adam said, “then dance your learning experience—and part of the learn- All too often, the hosts detected a strange ass off and explain to your husband why ing is not to go to a complete stranger’s ho- aura about the callers—Adam says, “Drew, he shouldn’t care.” She stayed silent. “You tel room and drink! I’m getting some ‘energy’ here”—and they angry about something?” Before they called, it seems these callers asked the caller what happened to him. “No,” she sniffed. The conversation had never pondered how they bore some “What do you mean?” one such call- hadn’t gone where she wanted it to go, and responsibility for the situations they’d er answered. she wouldn’t go where the hosts suspect- found themselves in, and what their ac- “Did someone do something to you ed the real issue lies. tions said about their underlying priori- when you were young?” That was the pattern. A caller described ties. These internal contradictions and un- Nearly always a “yes” would follow, be a situation and posed a question, but the questioned assumptions they hold about it a rape, child abuse, or the mistreatment question sidestepped the real problem. life aren’t obvious to the callers, or even of an alcoholic parent. Adam and Drew And when Adam and Drew zeroed in on to the audience—until Adam and Drew proceeded to tie the caller’s current plight the core matter, the caller had to stop and pointed them out. to past damage, but most of the time the think. She answered as if nobody had ever Again and again, the incognizance of caller could barely make the connection

32 above: Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew Pinsky shoot an episode of the MTV television version of Loveline, Jan. 16, 1998 Chronicles (Photo by Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic via Getty Images)

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themselves. coworkers. They had friends, yes, but those A 21-year-old guy lived with a 28-year- • friends only added to the turmoil of their old woman who had two kids from a mar- lives. The jobs they had were just jobs; they riage that broke up years before, after her Back in 2000, my girlfriend at the spoke of their work in tones of boredom. husband beat her. He had grown close to time thought Loveline was ridiculous. We America had no more meaning to them the children, but she treated him like dirt. were professors living together and work- than did the grocery store down the street. He’s obviously a nice guy and couldn’t un- ing on scholarly books. She couldn’t under- And, of course, the families they came from derstand why she was so cruel. He want- stand how I could waste the night hours were cause for more pain than reassurance. ed advice on how to make her stop—as if listening to these human dregs go on about Merely by probing the cause of these this kid, barely out of adolescence, had any their pains. Everything in her northeastern callers’ dysfunctions, Adam and Drew chance of controlling her and fixing her life. prep school and Ivy League training taught turned what was supposed to be a raun- Their blunt advice to him—“You’re not go- her to stay away from screw-ups. People chy radio sex-advice show into a catechism ing to change her, buddy”—left the deep- like us should transcend this squalor. of conservative lessons. Every confused, er puzzle unsolved: what happened earli- Up until then, I agreed. I didn’t grow blind, self-destructive, promiscuous, ad- er in his life that had made him devoted up in a prosperous household and I never dicted caller was a testimonial to the im- to an abusive woman? attended a private school in my life, but I portance of conservative values. The call- Most of them were hopeless cases. The gave the poor and dysfunctional credit for ers were on their own; they relied on their hosts knew the callers would ignore the as much independence and self-awareness own meager resources in a world of lax sex diagnosis. The woman who was angry at as everyone else. People make their own norms and do-your-own-thing morality. all men because she couldn’t find a good decisions, I thought. Get them educated, They had slipped into depravity, and the boyfriend wouldn’t recognize that her an- show them the right course, and they’ll traditional protections against it were miss- ger may have had something to do with it. choose rightly. Or, they’ll hurt themselves. ing from their lives. Worse, the world they The guy who wanted to remove a tattoo Either way, it was up to them. occupied discouraged the very self-exam- from his penis and fretted about the pro- I was 40 years old, childless and un- ination that is necessary to transcend it. cess couldn’t answer why he ever got a tat- married. Family and fatherhood weren’t A teenage girl told the hosts about

Adam and Drew turned what was supposed to be a raunchy radio sex- advice show into a catechism of conservative lessons.

too down there in the first place. The high on the radar. I didn’t go to church or be- pain she suffered during sex and wanted school girl who hung out with guys in their lieve in God. I owned a small home but to know what might cause it. She let slip mid-20s and joined in their weekend sex had no contacts with neighbors and be- that she was raped on a camping trip two parties was incredulous when Adam and longed to no local associations. My coun- years before after she got dead drunk and Drew insisted they were exploiting her. She try was just a place of residence, my uni- a guy coaxed her into his tent. When Drew believed they were her friends, and she said versity the thing that gave me an office and asked her if she often drank that much, she she’d stick with that notion. paycheck. No patriotism and no on-the- muttered a casual, “No,” as if drinking her- Dr. Drew sighed and groaned. On a job loyalty. Reality was myself on one side self into oblivion had nothing to do with show I replayed this morning, he blurted and the universe on the other. what happened. at one person, “You’re not hearing any- That was the case with Loveline callers, I just listened to one of the most frus- thing!” Adam would rant at their stupidity, too. Adam and Drew asked them about trating callers of all: a 32-year-old single begging one caller after another: “Please, their lives and backgrounds, probed for mother who liked marijuana and had two please, don’t ever have kids!” He told one anything meaningful, anything to anchor unstable boys, a 14-year-old who had ex- who already had kids to send them up in the callers, but came up empty. I can’t re- posed himself to his cousins and a 12-year- a hot air balloon so that they’d float to an- member a single happy churchgoer in the old who had been arrested for vandalism. other state and take up with a new family 50 hours I’ve listened to recently. Some She asked how she could make the older that would give the son a chance to avoid young callers actually mocked their par- one stop doing bizarre things. Drew tried to prison and the daughter to avoid the side- ents’ faith. They didn’t mention any teach- get her to say in more scientific terms what walks of Hollywood Boulevard. ers or coaches, either—no priests or wise is wrong with him. She muttered something

April/May 2020 33

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nal choice that a liberal culture assumes its members should and will acquire. With- out good fathers and mothers, exposed to wickedness at a tender age, with no trust in God, and with no devotion to country or community or workplace, they act out in bad behavior the losses a liberal soci- ety has handed them. They want to fix their lives—that’s why they’ve called—but they don’t have the equipment. No religion, no role models, no patriotism or work ethic. They demon- strate more vividly than Milton Friedman ever did what happens to a fair portion of the population when a society of libertari- an individualism loses its moorings in the conserving institutions of church, family, and nation. Instead, liberalism offers them a career about special education and denied she had plan, an achievement focus. The elite tell atheist, started to suggest callers take up ever used drugs while she was pregnant. them, “You just need more education.” But religion as a final resort. Drew told her to have a neurologist evalu- Loveline callers couldn’t envision that, ei- Some conservative converts got there ate him first—she needed a diagnosis. She ther. After hearing one after another me- by reading National Review and Whittaker mumbled a half-hearted, “Uh huh,” which ander and stumble as they described their Chambers’ Witness. Others watched left- prompted Adam to bark, “Stop smoking conditions, Adam would ask, “Caller X, ist comrades become too radical, or saw the weed and start mothering!” what are you doing? What’s going on?” the Soviet Union collapse, or recoiled at “I don’t smoke weed around my kids,” “Huh?” he would reply. political correctness. The Loveline caller she countered. “Where are you going?” made a different case. He demonstrated Adam: “I don’t care—you sound out “What do you mean?” truths about human nature—the limits of of it!” Drew remarked that he could hear “What’s your plan?” self-determination, the insufficiency of pri- the effects of long usage in her voice at that “You mean right now?” vate reason, the necessity of family coher- very moment. “No, jerkoff,” Adam would grunt, “I ence—that liberalism denies. She protested, “I have no problem do- mean what are you doing with your life? Liberalism has to deny these traditions ing my job as a mother.” What do you wanna be?” that make up for human frailty in order Adam reminded her she’s got a 12-year- Confused silence. They knew in some to justify the sexual revolution and to ig- old who has already landed in jail. She re- part of their heads that they should find nore the cultural and social destruction torts that it wasn’t her fault, that the boy a steady job, stop jumping into bed with that has followed it. Liberalism’s parade of had broken windows while she was at work bad people, avoid drugs and booze, and human damage musters for roll call in stu- and that he was in his father’s custody at take care of intimates close by, but those dent health clinics, women’s shelters, in- the time. Adam grumbled, “Okay, keep go- obligations didn’t win out. They had no ner-city classrooms, in the streets of San ing; smoke more weed,” then cut her off God, good father, or civic duty to command Francisco and underpasses in Los Angeles, and asked Drew, “Listen, can we have her them. True, Dr. Drew frequently counseled in divorce courts and public housing—and sterilized?” therapy, but the therapy he had in mind on the phone lines of Loveline, the best con- wasn’t the once-a-week analysis and self- servative radio there ever was. • exploration of old. It was a program that would take charge of their lives, assign them Mark Bauerlein is a contributing editor at Liberalism can’t do anything a monitor, and restructure their behavioral First Things. with or for these people. They don’t pos- codes. After a few years of despairing for sess the enlightened self-interest and ratio- the callers he encountered, even Adam, an

34 above left: Adam Carolla in 2019 (Barry King/Alamy Live News) Chronicles above right: Dr. Drew Pinsky in 2018 (Billy Bennight/ZUMA Wire/Alamy Live News)

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Faux Originalism by Mark Pulliam

is antonin scalia’s originalism— nine justices.” In short, judges have im- indeed, constitutional self-government it- properly arrogated power to themselves self—passé? The eternal temptation to read by departing from the Constitution’s text. one’s own values into the Constitution be- In response to the activism of the guiles even religious conservatives espous- Warren Court (and the marginally better ing natural law. record of the subsequent Burger Court), The U.S. Constitution is the “supreme conservatives in the 1970s, led by Robert law of the land,” whose ultimate interpre- Bork, advocated a jurisprudence of “origi- tation is entrusted, by longstanding cus- nal intent”—hewing to the original mean- tom if not by explicit textual direction, to ing of the Constitution, based on its text the U.S. Supreme Court. Accordingly, it is and history. Following decades of heed- vitally important to divine the true mean- less activism, this was a bold position. In ing of our fundamental law. When a state a 1982 article in National Review, Bork fa- or federal law is alleged to conflict with the mously stated that “The truth is that the Constitution, how are courts supposed to judge who looks outside the Constitution resolve the conflict? How can citizens sat- always looks inside himself and nowhere isfy themselves that the black-robed ora- else.” Like the boy who pointed out that marital privacy” that precludes state regu- cles who interpret the Constitution are do- the emperor was naked, Bork’s critique lation of contraception. ing so accurately? was devastating. Griswold’s discovery of an implicit con- These questions are more pressing than Famed jurist Antonin Scalia and others stitutional right paved the way to the in- ever, as contested issues of public policy in- tweaked “original intent”—which focused vention of abortion rights in Roe v. Wade creasingly end up in court to be decided as on the subjective intentions of individu- (1973), the right to engage in homosex- cases involving constitutional law. Since the al Framers—into a more general inqui- ual sodomy in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), heyday of the Warren Court in the 1960s, ry into the original public meaning of the and, ultimately, the right to same-sex mar- federal judges have asserted primacy over constitutional provisions when they were riage in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015). The fundamental aspects of our lives, ruling on enacted and ratified. How were the words impact of originalism, although not suf- issues such as abortion, marriage, immi- understood at the time they were adopt- ficient to prevent Obergefell, produced a gration, voting, education, pornography ed? This is the central doctrinal question narrow 5-to-4 decision, unlike the lopsid- and obscenity, law enforcement, capital of constitutional originalism. ed 7-to-2 margins in Griswold and Roe. punishment, welfare benefits, racial pref- Originalism, now accepted—albeit Conservatives console themselves with the erences, religious expression, and the pow- with many variations—as an influential hope that President Trump may eventu- er of administrative agencies. theory of constitutional interpretation, ally appoint an originalist majority to the Legal scholar Lino Graglia, who taught served as a check on fanciful theories ad- Supreme Court; Trump’s excellent picks, for more than 50 years at the University of vanced by liberal scholars and jurists, who Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, join Texas School of Law, argues that a clique regard the Constitution as a “living” docu- Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas to form of life-tenured judges—a “tiny judicial oli- ment that can (and should) be adapted to a solid originalist bloc. One more solid garchy”—has usurped “our most essential suit the evolving needs of society. Taking Trump appointment could be decisive. right, the right of self-government,” by for- seriously the original public meaning of Non-originalist theories are not limit- mulating a body of constitutional law that the Constitution constrains extra-textual ed to the political left. On the right, some “has very little to do with the Constitution.” flights of fancy, such as the “penumbras, conservatives and libertarians have es- Graglia contends that many judicial deci- formed by emanations” that animated the poused constitutional law theories de- sions amount to no more than “the poli- activist decision in Griswold v. Connecticut rived from certain interpretations of nat- cy preferences of a majority of the Court’s (1965). That decision recognized a “right of ural law, the principles of the Declaration

April/May 2020 above: Antonin Scalia, former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (National Archives / Wikimedia) 35

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of Independence, and other extra-textual tional provision proscribing majority rule. ed law professor at Notre Dame, whose sources. This group includes Hadley Arkes Bork and Scalia both emphatically re- recent essay in Public Discourse, “Moral (Amherst), Richard Epstein (Chicago, jected the notion that unwritten princi- Truth and Constitutional Conservatism,” NYU), Randy Barnett (Georgetown), and ples of natural law lurked invisibly in the argues against the ethos of much of the the late Harry Jaffa (Claremont), although Constitution, warranting the judicial in- Supreme Court’s abortion jurisprudence. some claim to be originalists and even ris- validation of state or federal laws that did That ethos is epitomized by the widely ibly argue that judicial restraint is a vari- not otherwise contravene an enumerated ridiculed “Mystery Passage” penned by ant of the “living” Constitution. constitutional right. Bork archly remarked Anthony Kennedy in Planned Parenthood

The allure of such constitutional fantasies is heightened by the reality that politics is often a fickle tool for achieving desired policy results.

The motivation of such “conserva- that “Judges, like the rest of us, are apt to v. Casey (1992), which states, “At the heart tive constitutional revisionists” (as Bork confuse their strongly held beliefs with the of liberty is the right to define one’s own described them in his 1990 opus, The order of nature.” Scalia scoffed at the idea concept of existence, of meaning, of the Tempting of America, is the same as their that the Constitution—which he termed universe, and of the mystery of human life.” counterparts on the left. If they can con- “a practical and pragmatic charter of gov- Reacting against such secular nihilism, veniently find their policy preferences em- ernment”—contained enforceable “aspi- Bradley argues that judges must rely upon bodied in the Constitution, the attainment rations” or that abstract “philosophizing” “moral and metaphysical truths that lie be- of their goals rests only on mustering five was a substitute for concrete and specific yond the Constitution” in order to interpret votes on the Supreme Court, rather than textual commands. the Constitution. What are these unwritten in electing, persuading, and maintaining During their lifetimes, Bork and Scalia “truths”? They are truths that answer such a majority of sympathetic legislators at the were able to keep the revisionists at bay on “foundational questions as, [W]hen do per- state or federal level. both the left and the right. Alas, Bork died sons begin? Which propositions about di- The allure of such constitutional fanta- in 2012, and Scalia in 2016. Already the vine matters are answerable by use of un- sies is heightened by the reality that poli- revisionists are dancing on their graves. aided human reason, and which require tics is often a fickle tool for achieving de- With the legal academy dominated by access to revelation?” sired policy results. Bork called this allure progressives, and the handful of center- Bradley unconvincingly calls his ap- a temptation to substitute personal predi- right legal scholars consisting mainly of proach “originalism,” but it sounds sus- lections for legitimate constitutional inter- libertarians, the Bork/Scalia conception of piciously like Rawlsian moral philosophy pretation, and noted that succumbing to it originalism is being seriously challenged. masquerading as constitutional theory, the ineluctably turns a judge into a legislator. Judicial restraint is in decline, and various kind of thing that was commonplace on In the originalist view, the Constitution formulations of “judicial engagement” are the left in the 1970s. Bradley declares that puts certain things off-limits to political ascendant in academic circles. “today’s conservative constitutionalism is majorities, either expressly in the text or On the right, some theorists advance inadequate...” to turn the tide against the implicitly in the constitutional structure, natural law arguments that would super- vortex of activism evidenced in Planned such as federalism or the separation of pow- impose their policy preferences onto the Parenthood v. Casey. ers. A principled originalist judge will en- Constitution, sans text. In many cases, Given the state of “breathtaking sub- force the Constitution as written, but other- those policy preferences—e.g., opposing jectivism” evident in decisions from Casey wise will not override the political branches abortion, supporting traditional marriage, to Obergefell, Bradley charges that judges merely because he disagrees with the pol- promoting the family, protecting property cannot return to a neutral role as umpires, icy outcome. rights and economic liberties—are legiti- merely calling balls and strikes: “For de- As Bork explained, “in wide areas of mate conservative goals, but constitution- cades…constitutional conservatives have life majorities are entitled to rule, if they al government dictates that public policy diluted [constitutional interpretation] with wish, simply because they are majorities.” be enacted through the political process, a methodology of restraint, a normative ap- Adhering to the Constitution as written, not by judicial edict. proach to the judicial task marked by an a principled judge will defer to the polit- A notable exemplar of the natural law overriding aversion to critical moral rea- ical branches, absent an express constitu- theorists is Gerard V. Bradley, a respect- soning.” Returning to a neutral role would

36 Chronicles

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be, Bradley says,“philosophical abstinence.” Accordingly, judges should rule based on their own moral reasoning. Deferring to political majorities is, in Bradley’s view, inadequate because “We have passed a tip- ping point where damage control amounts to no more than a slow-walking surren- der.” Moreover, in view of “the collapse of public morality...in our law and culture,” we can no longer count on political ma- jorities to make morally reliable choices. In short, a debauched and godless pop- ulation is “incapable of wresting control of the law back from the regime-chang- ing project of autonomous self-definition.” The implication is that conservative judges, instead of simply overruling Roe v. Wade and leaving the regulation of abor- Weiner pushes back against the emerging a doubt. The solution, however, lies in re- tion to the states, should ban the practice center-right legal scholars advocating “ju- storing the judiciary to its intended role altogether on moral grounds; instead of dicial engagement”—a euphemism for em- as the “least dangerous” branch of govern- overruling Obergefell and leaving the def- powering judges to negate popular self- ment, not further eviscerating constitution- inition of marriage to the states, judges government. Even a decade ago, such a al democracy by encouraging judges to im- should restrict the institution to one man book would not have been necessary, but pose their subjective moral judgments on and one woman, and so forth. the legacy of Bork and Scalia is unravel- political majorities without their consent. Bork’s response to judicial activism ing before our eyes. Ordered liberty is to be found in the fil- in aid of the culture war was to advocate Weiner trains most of his fire on liber- tered political decisions of “We the People.” limits on judicial review, so that political tarians such as Timothy Sandefur, Clark Majority rule is not tyrannical; minority majorities could govern themselves with- Neily, and Randy Barnett, the go-to guru in rule would be. Consent of the governed is out undue interference. In contrast, pro- Federalist Society circles. He also includes possible only through democratic institu- ponents of natural law and similar con- in his critique various conservatives es- tions—the rough-and-tumble of represen- trivances seek to expand the judicial role pousing natural law, such as Hadley Arkes tative government. These concepts are en- to allow appropriately enlightened manda- and Harry Jaffa. I will not belabor criticism shrined in the Constitution; natural law is rins (those on “our” team) to impose their of the ongoing project of Jaffa’s acolytes, not. The artifice of deciphering invisible agenda on the polity. This is not how a con- sometimes referred to as “Claremonsters,” ink in the Constitution—moral truths re- stitutional republic is supposed to work, to override the Constitution with the vealed to our robed masters in séance-like and is not what the Founding Fathers in- Declaration of Independence. Suffice it to fashion—is a license for judicial activism. tended. Bradley’s invitation for judges to say that such a project is little more than an Disaffected conservatives tempted to sur- “replace bad philosophy with good philos- elitist maneuver to override not only the render their sovereignty to federal judges ophy” finds no support in Federalist 78. Constitution, but the will of the people, would be well advised to read Weiner’s illu- Fidelity to the Constitution self-evident- as well. By contrast, Weiner’s wide-rang- minating book, or to reread The Federalist ly cannot be achieved by looking “beyond ing defense of the res publica—the polit- Papers. Americans are capable of govern- the Constitution,” and it is absurd to call ical community as a whole—serves as a ing themselves quite well, if judges would such an end-run “originalism.” broadside against anti-majoritarian usur- only let them. Legal academia has become such a the- pation of democratic rule. oretical fever swamp that even erstwhile Is the Supreme Court’s constitutional Mark Pulliam is a contributing editor at conservatives have become advocates of jurisprudence an Augean stable badly in Law & Liberty who blogs at Misrule of the “living Constitution.” In The Political need of cleansing? Absolutely. Have activist Law. Constitution: The Case Against Judicial decisions over the past 50 years done grave Supremacy (2019), political scientist Greg damage to American institutions? Without

April/May 2020 above: President Ronald Reagan meeting with Judge Robert Bork in the Oval Office on July 1,1987 (National Archives / Wikimedia) 37

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Letter from Twickenham: In Deepest Remainland by Piers Shepherd

One would be hard pressed to the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, and settled in Twickenham. Manuel be- find a more pleasant London neighbor- it would become the home of the lead- came active in the local community, and to- hood than the leafy suburb of Twicken- ing royalist statesman of that era, Edward day Twickenham streets reference Manuel ham, where this author resides. Situated Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Lord Chancellor or Portugal: Manoel Road, Augusta Road on the Thames River and immersed in his- to King Charles II. (named after Manuel’s queen), Lisbon tory, Twickenham was for years a bastion Appropriately, given Twickenham’s Avenue, and Portugal Gardens. of conservatism. In the last two decades, connection with a king beheaded by rev- Twickenham’s political past is also however, Twickenham has become some- olutionaries, the town would become in lat- somewhat reflected in its literary histo- thing of a solid outpost for the liberal, glo- er centuries something of a haven for roy- ry. Twickenham’s most famous building balist elite. als fleeing revolution. In the 19th century, is the spectacular gothic castle known as Most famous today as the “Home of York House would become the home of the Strawberry Hill, home to the Whig poli- England Rugby,” Twickenham’s history Comte de Paris, grandson of King Louis tician and inventor of the literary genre shows the town to have been a locale par- Philippe of France. The House of Orleans’ of gothic horror, Sir Horace Walpole. The ticularly congenial to those of conservative connection with Twickenham is memorial- town was also meeting place for the Tory and traditionalist views. In the 17th centu- ized in another of the town’s famous hous- poets of the Scriblerus Club. One of those ry it became the residence of a number of es, Orleans House, where Louis Philippe poets, Alexander Pope, resided in a vil- those associated with the royalist cause in himself lived while in exile from 1815- la in Twickenham, famous for its garden, the English Civil War. York House, which 1817. The Comte de Paris’s daughter mar- though now only Pope’s Grotto, the under- is today the seat of local government, was ried Carlos I, King of Portugal. Following ground cavern where he wrote many of his once a royal property and formed part of the overthrow of the Portuguese monarchy famous works, survives. Pope and fellow the marriage settlement of King Charles I by leftist revolutionaries in 1910, Carlos’s club members Jonathan Swift and John Gay and his queen, Henrietta Maria. Following son and heir Manuel II fled to England were amusingly called the “three Yahoos of Twickenham” by the leading Tory states- man of the day, Lord Bolingbroke. When Twickenham first became a par- liamentary constituency in 1918, its first MP was William Joynson-Hicks, a strong social conservative and anti-communist who was also an early opponent of open immigration policies. Along with this impressive heritage, Twickenham presents an oasis of calm in the crazy city that is modern London. Still recognizably English, it has been lit- tle affected by mass immigration, multi- culturalism, and their associated prob- lems. It enjoys some of the lowest rates of unemployment, ill health, and crime in London. Unlike so much of London, it is an exceedingly pleasant place to live with none of the decay that afflicts so much of the larger capital. Given these facts, one might hope that Twickenham would have

38 above: Strawberry Hill House, Twickenham, Sir Horace Walpole's gothic castle (Gary Ullah / Wikimedia) Chronicles

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remained a bulwark of conservatism and ing out’ the virus ‘started in China.’ You would have strongly supported Brexit. But know what else ‘started in China’? The fleet alas, this is not the case. that discovered America in 1492.” In the mid-1980s, the Liberals, in al- Yes, this woman could actually be the liance with the Social Democratic Party future leader of a major British political (SDP), captured Richmond Council, un- party. Such is the party that has dominat- der whose authority Twickenham falls. In ed Twickenham’s local and national poli- 1988, the Liberals amalgamated with their tics for going on three decades. SDP allies to become the Liberal Democrats Twickenham’s victorious parliamen- (usually referred to by the abbreviation “Lib tary candidate in the 2019 general elec- Dems”). The Lib Dems have held the coun- tion, whose result dwarfed that of her cil in all but three elections since. Conservative opponent, was one Munira Just how liberal are the Lib Dems? It Wilson, who dubs herself “Whitton’s wom- would be fair to say there are moments an in Westminster” (Whitton is an area when they rival Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour of Twickenham). The Richmond and Party in their fanatical commitment to the Twickenham Lib Dem website describes latest politically correct fads. Just a few days her as “passionate about fighting Brexit before the last election, the party’s lead- and the untold damage it will do to our er, Jo Swinson, was on TV discussing her country.” Interestingly, Mrs. Wilson is of party’s support for transgenderism, hard- Indian ethnic origin, though representing ly a priority for voters. Among the policies an area with little ethnic diversity. The Lib living, walking, breathing example of some enunciated in the Lib Dems’ election man- Dems, in spite of their self-conscious ob- diversity in the party…We are making great ifesto was a commitment to “fund abor- session with “diversity,” have never man- strides working within the party to improve tion clinics to provide their services free aged to corner the ethnic minority vote, our representation from ethnic minorities of charge to service users regardless of na- that being overwhelmingly the preserve of and women, and that’s what I’m here as a tionality or residency.” In addition to pro- the Labour Party. The Lib Dems’ image is product of…” As if to allay any suspicion viding free abortions to the entire plan- that of an overwhelmingly white, middle that she might be a beneficiary of affirma- et, the Lib Dems committed themselves class, and affluent party. It has been said tive action she then added: “as well as my to granting a married person the right to that the Lib Dems are the party of those own hard work.” change his or her gender without the con- liberal middle-class people who just can’t In her maiden speech to Parliament, sent of their spouse. Their manifesto de- bring themselves to vote for an openly so- Wilson began by telling her colleagues that nounced a system that supports the “tra- cialist Labour Party. her five-year-old daughter was sitting in ditional family with a main breadwinner Wilson’s predecessor as MP for the gallery and that “with a record num- and two children” as “entirely out of step Twickenham, Sir Vincent Cable, who had ber of female and BAME MPs elected in with the modern world.” held the seat for all but two years between this Parliament, I hope that I and others The Lib Dems further committed them- 1997 and 2019, had in 2018 denounced his will be an inspiration to girls like her and selves to legislating to allow political par- own party for being “very male” and “very, other young women as we strive towards a ties to run all “BAME” (black and minority very white,” though Cable is himself a white more diverse Parliament that truly reflects ethnic) and all “LGBT+” shortlists of can- male. In the same speech, Cable accused British society.” She ended by stating she didates and to require companies with over Brexit voters of being driven by “nostalgia entered politics to “promote internation- 250 employees to publish data on gender, for a world where passports were blue, fac- alist values,” whatever that means. To give BAME, and LGBT+ employment levels. es were white, and the map was coloured the woman credit, she largely chose to fo- Due to undergo an election for new imperial pink.” In response to Cable’s in- cus on issues of concern to local people, in leadership later this year, one of the de- dictment, the party established a Racial between these politically correct platitudes. clared Lib Dem leadership candidates is Diversity Campaign to recruit more mi- Twickenham might be called “deep- Layla Moran, a self-described “pansexu- nority candidates. est remainland.” In the Brexit referen- al” who recently dropped this gem about Mrs. Wilson appears to see herself as dum of 2016, Twickenham voted 66 per- the current coronavirus crisis: “Farage and the answer to the party’s new diversity fe- cent to 33 percent in favour of remaining Trump engaging in racial hatred by ‘point- tish. In her victory speech she stated: “I’m a in the European Union. Anti-Brexit stick-

April/May 2020 King Charles I of England in his robes of state, oil on canvas, by Anthony van Dyck, 1636 (Royal Collection of the United Kingdom) 39

pages-0420.indd 39 4/2/20 4:56 PM CORRESPONDENCE Letter From England

man right. The council imposed a Public Spaces Protection Order, creating a huge “buffer zone” that stretches several blocks from the clinic’s location, making the vigil’s continuance virtually impossible and im- posing fines on any who violate the order. Ironically, from 1970 until 1997, Twickenham was represented in Parliament by the pro-life and strongly anti-EU Conservative MP Toby Jessel, who had opposed the establishment of an abortion clinic in his constituency. Jessel’s long reign may have been extended by a sense of per- sonal loyalty felt by many of his constitu- ents due to his impressive record of get- ting things done at the local level. Twickenham’s transformation from a ers on house windows are common. “Brexit deal,” remainer speak for a second refer- traditionalist conservative stronghold to a wrecks it” is a popular one. During the re- endum to overturn the results of the first bastion of the metropolitan elite has been cent general election, the Lib Dems cam- one. The Lib Dems and Greens forged a paralleled by many other locations on the paigned under the slogan “Stop Brexit,” similar agreement in the 2019 general elec- outskirts of London. It has evolved from a and, as if to further show their contempt tion when the Greens decided not to run semi-rural locality within what was once for the country and the people who had a parliamentary candidate, lest they dam- the County of Middlesex into a London voted to leave the EU, they invited the age Lib Dem chances. This was part of a suburb dominated by a liberal professional European Parliament’s leading Britain- pact called the Unite to Remain Alliance. class who make up the bulk of those who baiter Guy Verhofstadt to be a speaker at On January 31, 2020, Brexit finally hap- voted to remain in the European Union their party conference. pened. While many of those who supported and who champion “woke” so-called pro- Despite the party’s bad showing in the it rallied, draped themselves in the Union gressive causes. election, including its leader Jo Swinson los- flag, danced and sang patriotic songs in In common with so many other places ing her seat in parliament, in Twickenham Westminster and elsewhere, there can have in Britain, Twickenham has been a victim the Lib Dems were returned with an in- been little celebration among the politi- of the dull standardization caused by the creased majority. In the council elections of cos of Twickenham, who had spent the multiplying of chain stores and the grim 2018, they won 39 seats, the Conservatives last three and a half years warning of the functional oversized boxes that are modern 11. The Labour Party has little presence in supposedly devastating economic effects office blocks, which often replaced charm- Twickenham, but the Lib Dems have now Brexit would have. ing local-run businesses and aesthetical- been joined on the council by that other As if to illustrate its “wokeness” and ad- ly pleasing older buildings. Yet in spite of ultra-progressive party of the “woke” mid- herence to the current zeitgeist, the local this and its liberal politics, Twickenham is dle class, the Green Party, who elected four council recently declared a “climate change still an attractive place to live. In its beauti- councillors, one of them representing a emergency” and announced its target of be- ful historic mansions, pleasant village-like ward in the heart of Twickenham. coming a “carbon neutral organisation” by green, old churches, old boats on the riv- The Greens and Lib Dems reached 2030. Far more sinister, however, has been er, and lovely riverside pubs, we are able an agreement whereby the two parties its effective criminalization of a local pro- to catch a glimpse of an older and bet- agreed not to run against each other in life vigil. This vigil, which began outside a ter Britain. six wards. The idea was to ensure a pro- local abortion clinic many years ago, con- remain majority on the council. One lo- sisted largely of Catholics quietly praying Piers Shepherd is a writer based in Lon- cal pundit called the result “revenge of the the rosary at a substantial distance from don. He has written for The Catho- Remainers.” In September 2018, the coun- the clinic entrance. However, even such in- lic World Report, the Catholic Herald, cil passed a motion calling for what they offensive activity has become intolerable Christian Order, and other publications. called a “people’s vote on the future Brexit to those who regard killing babies as a hu-

40 above: Twickenham and Richmond Liberal Democrats joined the People's Vote March in London, Oct. 19, 2019 Chronicles (Twickenham and Richmond Liberal Democrats)

pages-0420.indd 40 4/2/20 4:56 PM Srdja Trifkovic THE AMERICAN INTEREST

decision-making, and economic flows in the three panregions that matter in today’s world: Asia-Pacific, Europe, and North America. In all three we are witnessing rap- id rejections of globalization, multilater- al mechanisms such as the World Health Organization, and transnational insti- tutions—most notably the European The Geopolitics of Coronavirus Union—in favor of the revitalized sense of national cohesiveness and national in- terest-based survival strategies that are de- “Nothing will ever be the same tally wounded and thrown into the abyss veloped and pursued by newly energized again!” The cliché is invoked whenever in which we now live. sovereign nation-states. It is to their own people think they are facing an event of The COVID-19 outbreak initial- governments that nations great and small metahistorical significance. Sometimes its ly looked like a periodic epidemic in the have turned. State-directed crisis manage- use is justified: Sarajevo 1914, the Bolshe- manner of porcine and avian flus, SARS, or ment has given governments of different vik Revolution, Hiroshima, and the fall of the West Nile virus: a temporary problem ideological hues enormous new powers. the Berlin Wall fit the phrase. More often which affects other people, usually far away. They will not give them up willingly once it is not. Versailles 1919, JFK’s assassina- This virus turned out to be different, how- the virus is contained. The State is back. tion, Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap,” Water- ever: hitherto unknown, highly contagious, Corona’s notable geopolitical con- gate, 9/11, Lehman Brothers’ collapse, and sequence is the collapse of the neocon- many other alleged watersheds eventual- servative-neoliberal sacred cow known ly turned out to be less momentous than as “America’s global leadership role.” By initially claimed. contrast, after a faltering start marked by Some turning points are not rec- the Chernobyl-like disinclination to be ognized immediately. The Bastille riot open about the nature and magnitude of could have ended, a year or two later, like the problem, China acted with impressive the Glorious Revolution did across the speed and efficiency to contain the virus. Channel a century earlier. Only with the Beijing’s measures seemed draconian in horrors of 1792 did it become clear that “he the West when they were imposed with who has not lived before the Revolution stony resolve. does not know the sweetness of life.” More Interestingly, three other virus suc- recently, the impact of nuclear weapons cess stories are Singapore, Taiwan, and on the grand-strategic thinking of the two untreatable, and lethal enough to warrant South Korea. Unlike China, they are dem- principal Cold War adversaries took over radical measures to contain its spread. The ocratic in institutional form, but they are a decade to mature. Chinese tried to hide the magnitude of the closely related to the Middle Kingdom in There are megacrises which are im- problem until late January, the Europeans Huntingtonian terms. A civilization which mediately seen, initially by the lucid few, did not quite believe it even as disaster hit promotes respect for authority, delayed for what they are. The Guns of August Italy in February, and the Americans final- gratification, and communal interests over hit an ostensibly well-ordered and sta- ly grasped the seriousness of the threat in individual rights is seen as more efficient ble world like a thunderbolt. “The lights the second week of March. in protecting its members while continu- are going out all over Europe,” Sir Edward The pandemic’s future course and cost ing to function than is the Western model. Grey presciently remarked a day before cannot be predicted. It does appear cer- With just a trickle of new cases, mainly Britain declared war on the Kaiserreich, tain, however, that the world is experienc- among returning students and expatriates “and they may not come back in our life- ing changes which are likely irreversible. who were duly quarantined, by the end of time.” Arguably they never did: over the The contours of its geopolitical impact are March China was able to start sending its ensuing four years a vibrant civilization, becoming apparent in the rapidly chang- seasoned medical teams and life-saving unmatched in its fruits and vigor, was mor- ing patterns of mental mapping, political equipment to Europe and elsewhere. Since

April/May 2020 above: illustration of a virion of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes coronavirus 41 disease 2019 (COVID-19) (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Public Health Image Library)

pages-0420.indd 41 4/2/20 4:56 PM THE AMERICAN INTEREST Srdja Trifkovic

compassion for the gweilo (a Cantonese slur the right thing to do because we need that Another manifestation of the EU’s on- for a Westerner) is not a common Chinese equipment for our healthcare systems.” going collapse is the revamping and clos- trait, Beijing obviously seeks to fill a power In other words, according to a local ing of internal borders within the Schengen vacuum. That much is already apparent in commentator, “as far as Brussels was con- zone. This was initially opposed by France’s a remarkable development in the Balkans. cerned, it is the right thing to let the Serbs Eurofederalist president Emmanuel On March 17, Serbian President and other non-EU Europeans perish.” Or Macron, who said on March 12 that EU Aleksandar Vučić declared that, despite cope as best they could, which Vučić did— states should keep borders open and not his country’s long-standing objective of and Xi was happy to help. Greeting the give in to what he called coronavirus na- joining the EU, he could only count on first planeload of Chinese doctors and tionalism. “This virus does not have a pass- China for support. “That great internation- ventilators on March 21, China’s ambas- port. We must join forces, coordinate our al solidarity does not exist. European sol- sador to Belgrade said the aid was a sign responses, cooperate,” he said. “European idarity does not exist,” Vučić said. “It was of the “iron friendship” between the two coordination is essential.” There was none. a fairy tale on paper.” Therefore he sent a countries. One after another, EU member countries

...we are witnessing rapid rejections of globalization, multilateral mechanisms such as the World Health Organization, and transnational institutions.

letter “to the only ones who can help,” ask- This scenario has been replicated even closed their borders, Germany included. ing Chinese President Xi Jinping to deliv- within the EU itself. There was no response As Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine noted er desperately needed medical supplies. to the request from Italy’s ambassador to on March 23, “The signal is clear: When Only recently, Vučić went on, Brussels the EU for medical equipment, but China things get serious, every member state still had pressed Belgrade to reduce its trade promptly dispatched three teams of doctors looks out for itself first – even 60 years af- with China and increase imports from the with supplies to Rome. The second-hard- ter the founding of the community.” EU instead. But when Serbia tried to pur- est hit European country, Spain, “can also Discrediting the Harlot of Brussels and chase ventilators, protective suits, and face count on our help,” Xi Jinping said after a ending the migratory deluge may be a sil- masks from Europe, it was flatly turned call from Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. ver lining on the Corona record. Just like down. “[S]uch medical goods can only be China is also shipping aid supplies to Iran, during the 2008 financial meltdown, the exported to non-EU countries with the Iraq, the Philippines, and Africa. This ep- EU nomenklatura is showing itself to be a explicit authorization of the EU govern- idemic is certain to enhance the ongoing dysfunctional machine that is only good at ments,” European Commission President explosion of cultural confidence among imposing self-destructive ideological fiats Ursula von der Leyen explained. “This is the Chinese people. on immigration, diversity, and multicultur- al platitudes. Today’s “United Europe” does not create social and civilizational com- monalities, except on the basis of whole- sale denial of old mores, inherited values, and “traditional” i.e., Jewish and Christian, culture. Bruxella delenda est! The shock to the global financial and economic system may also have long-term benefits. Both supply chains and distribu- tion networks are exceedingly fragile, as we have seen, and it is better to return to some degree of autarky now than to be left pow- erless if and when the threat becomes truly existential. It is absurd for America to be dependent on China for some 97 percent of antibiotics, as well as vital medicines for blood pressure, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s,

42 above: Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić, left, and Chinese President Xi Jinping pose for photographers as they meet at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing Tuesday, May 16, 2017. (Damir Sagolj/Pool Photo via AP) Chronicles

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epilepsy, and depression. (It would be un- eyes. At its root is the notion that we should and communities—not some abstract forgivable, however, to correct the strate- not feel a special bond for any particu- “Europeans,” but Lombards and Tyrolers gic vulnerability by granting Big Pharma lar country, nation, or culture, but base and Bohemians. The claim of the elite class another license to print money.) our preferences on the quantifiable pa- that all countries are but transient, vir- The same applies to steel, electronics, rameters of self-interest. The current cri- tual-reality entities has been discredited, plastics, etc. It is necessary to redesign and sis has had a beautifully subversive effect probably permanently. shrink the multi-step, multi-country supply on the process of transforming globalized Sir Kenneth Clark defined decades ago chains that dominate today’s production. society into a socio-technological system the challenge the Western world is facing All vital supply chains need to be brought in which most human relations would be today: “It is lack of confidence, more than back home, and warehouses rebuilt and streamlined into manageable routines and anything else, that kills a civilization.” But restocked, to protect against future dis- procedures. not all is lost, it seems. After the initial ruptions. This will not be good for short- The community of vulnerable and shock, Americans and Europeans who term balance sheets of American business- mortal human beings—who for all their love their own lands more than any oth- es, but in the long run it will shield them money and technology cannot prevent er, and who put their families and their from possible man-made disruptions in the getting sick, and needing help and empa- neighborhoods before all others, are the future. More importantly, it will enhance thy from their fellows—is still there. This ones fighting this coronavirus with resil- long-term national resilience. epidemic shows that it functions when ience and stoicism. Those who had been Neoliberal globalization in its post- absolutely needed. It is the polar oppo- telling them that their attachments should Cold War form has been dealt a major site of the “culture” of the artificial world, be global, and that their lands and neigh- blow by COVID-19, which is a good thing. of post-historical, globalized, genderless borhoods belong to the whole world, are The architecture of global economic and Person. This epidemic is an existential now consigned to the dustbin of history. political governance developed over the crisis which enhanced the sense of sol- There is hope, and all will be well, because past three decades is collapsing before our idarity among members of real nations there is God. ◆

above: an Italian flag hung outside of a window in Bologna, Italy with the slogan "Andrà tutto bene" ("Everything will be all right") and the 43 April/May 2020 hashtag #iorestoacasa ("I stay at home") during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 (Pietro Luca Cassarino / Wikimedia)

pages-0420.indd 43 4/2/20 4:56 PM SINS OF OMISSION Roger D. McGrath

As the hysterical coronavirus overreaction crashes our economy, I can’t help but think of the Spanish flu, which took some 675,000 American lives in 1918 and 1919. Adjusting for the difference in the size of the American population then and now, that number would be equiva- lent to two million deaths today. I’ll be sur- prised—I’m writing this in late March—if COVID-19 takes as many as 50,000 Amer- Epidemic for the Record Books ican lives, or proportionally 1/40th of the lives lost to the Spanish Flu. Even some of the current projections of 100,000 or more during the fall of 1917 and ravaged thou- whether this was the Spanish flu has been deaths would still be only a small fraction sands. It was later determined to be iden- questioned, principally because not enough of those who died of the Spanish flu. tical to the one causing the Spanish flu. soldiers died. Everywhere else, the Spanish The Spanish flu has been called This bug was then brought to Europe flu was even more deadly. Moreover, the America’s forgotten epidemic. It was not by nearly 100,000 Chinese contracted by argument that the Spanish flu originated forgotten in my family. My mother was the British and French to perform labor be- in Kansas doesn’t account for the appear- one of 11 children and the age range from hind the war’s front lines. These Chinese ance of the virus in China six months be- youngest to oldest spanned 20 years. When workers were far less affected by the virus fore it struck Camp Funston. my mother and several of her sisters were than were the British and French, simply The first American cities to feel the still in their single digits, two of their old- because they had already been exposed to full effects of this virulent flu were the er brothers were already cops and the old- it the year before and had built up immu- East Coast seaports. The Navy barracks est sister was married with a son. That sis- nity. A variation on this explanation says at Commonwealth Pier in Boston held ter and her husband died in the Spanish the virus came with the Chinese on a ship thousands of sailors in cramped quarters. flu epidemic. Their toddler son was tak- that put in at Boston and that the virus mu- In late August 1918 sick bays began filling en in by my mother’s family and raised tated there before the Chinese carried the up with sick soldiers. About 50 sailors fell as a little brother. Until I was five or six, new mutated version with them to Europe. desperately ill and were immediately trans- I thought he was another one of my un- There is also an argument that the vi- ferred to the Chelsea Naval Hospital. They cles—he was of the right age—and not, as rus originated among farmers in Kansas were isolated in an attempt to contain the I learned, my cousin. who contracted it from their hogs or poul- virus, but it was already too late. Early in The origin of the Spanish flu is great- try in January 1918. The farmers then car- September sick civilians began arriving at ly debated, but it is universally agreed that ried the virus to the Army’s Camp Funston, Boston City Hospital. it did not originate in Spain. However, which had an influenza epidemic in March. Meanwhile, in late August at Camp Spanish newspapers were the first to re- However, there were soldiers at Funston Devens, some 30 miles northwest of port an influenza virus wreaking havoc who had returned from Europe to train Boston, soldiers began falling ill with what in their own country, and also decimating fresh troops, and they could have brought was thought to be pneumonia, meningitis, Allied troops during 1918. Spain was neu- the virus with them. or some unknown virus. Nothing much tral during World War I and her newspa- Whatever the source, the virus spread could be done but to quarantine the camp pers were not subject to censorship, unlike rapidly at Funston among the thousands of and isolate the patients. By the third week newspapers of the Allies, whose countries doughboys who trained and lived in crowd- of September, a fifth of the soldiers were didn’t want anything published that would ed conditions. Eleven hundred soldiers re- infected and many were dying, and some frighten people and lower morale. By the quired hospitalization and 38 died. The flu doctors and nurses were dying as well. war’s end more troops were becoming ca- spread as the soldiers were transferred to By October the flu had spread through sualties of flu than of bullets or bombs. other camps before deployment to Europe, the population of Boston. Boston City It’s probably best left to virologists and not only at other Army bases but also at Hospital alone treated 2,300 patients, epidemiologists to debate the true origins towns near the camps. mostly in September and October, but of the Spanish flu, but China is one likely There is no question that Camp new cases were still arriving in November candidate. A respiratory virus hit China Funston had an influenza epidemic. But and December. Of the patients treated, 675

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died. The virus took a toll on the medical Spanish flu. staff at the hospital as well. Nine nurses, Without question, the virus was com- two physicians, and four other employees ing to the city and health officials decided died. Altogether, Boston lost more than to fight it the way they had fought tubercu- 4,000 residents to the Spanish flu before losis. “When cases develop in private hous- the end of the year. es or apartments, they will be kept in strict Early in September 1918 a Navy ship quarantine there,” Health Commissioner from Boston with dozens of sick sailors Royal Copeland said. “When they develop aboard steamed up the Delaware River in boarding houses or tenements, they will and docked at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. be promptly removed to city hospitals, and The next day two of the sick sailors died. held under strict observation and treated Health officials told the public it was not the there.” Ultimately, this policy meant New Spanish flu and, whatever it was, it would York’s hospitals weren’t overwhelmed as be confined to the Navy Yard. The next day Boston and Philadelphia’s had been. 14 sailors and one civilian died. Day by In addition, by the middle of September, day, civilians began falling ill. Nonetheless, New York City had a public education cam- also, but their death rates were lower than Philadelphia forged ahead with a Liberty paign in full swing. More than 10,000 post- their coastal sisters’. Not surprisingly, the Loan parade on September 28. The war ers describing sanitation and hygiene first cases of Spanish flu in Chicago ap- effort was paramount, and these parades practices were placed in train and sub- peared in September 1918 at a military fa- were held across the country to encourage way stations, on storefronts, police sta- cility: Great Lakes Naval Training Station. the public purchase of war bonds to fund tions, and libraries, and in hotel lobbies. The Navy reacted immediately by quar- the war. What would become the largest Health education materials were dissem- antining the base and isolating those who parade in Philadelphia history seemingly inated throughout the city, including the had contracted the virus. Nonetheless, went off without a hitch, with thousands schools, which were kept open. There was within a week civilians were falling vic- of spectators lining the parade route. also strict enforcement of the city’s sani- tim to the flu. Chicago would ultimately However, in the six weeks following the tary code, which included a prohibition have a death rate of 3.7. St. Louis is often parade, some 12,000 Philadelphians died on spitting in public. cited for its preparations for the arrival of of the Spanish flu, most of them young The measures New York City took saved the Spanish flu and for its practices once and healthy until struck down by the vi- lives, and it fared better than other cities, the flu arrived, but it still had a death rate of rus. Archbishop Dennis Dougherty had despite its exposure to the troop ships. 3.6. The cities of Minneapolis, Milwaukee, his priests join the police in carrying bod- By October, the Spanish flu was roaring Dallas, Grand Rapids, Indianapolis, Toledo, ies from stricken homes throughout the through New York, but the city’s death rate and Columbus all had death rates slight- city. Piled high with corpses, death carts of 4.7 per 1,000 infected was significantly ly under 3.0. There was a striking excep- rattled down the streets. Local cemeteries better than Boston’s 6.5 or Philadelphia’s tion to these lower death rates for interi- were overwhelmed, and many bodies were 7.3. Altogether, from September 1918 or cities—Pittsburgh with a rate of 8.0. It’s dumped into mass graves. Thousands of through January 1919, New York City lost thought that Steel City’s terribly polluted children lost a parent or were orphaned. 30,000 of its residents to the virus. air in that era caused numerous respirato- At Philadelphia General Hospital nearly 10 Meanwhile, the virus was spreading ry problems, and made residents especially percent of the nurses died. Doctors were rapidly to other American cities, most of- vulnerable to the influenza virus. The high dropping as well. Three dozen cops died. ten first appearing at such seaport cities as rate of cigarette smoking in China today is New York City was the principal port Baltimore, New Orleans, Los Angeles, San also thought to have made their population for soldiers sailing to and returning from Francisco, and Seattle. From September more vulnerable to COVID-19, though it the war in Europe, making any gener- 1918 to March 1919, San Francisco had may be some time before we get the true al quarantine of ships impractical. Col. J. some 3,100 of its residents die at a rate of death toll from China. M. Kennedy, the Army officer in charge 6.7. During the same period, New Orleans Any death from illness is upsetting. But of medical affairs for the district of New lost 3,500 at a rate of 6.5, Baltimore 4,100 given the current hysteria, the historical York, made it clear to public health offi- at a rate of 5.6, Los Angeles 2,800 at a rate perspective provided by the exponentially cials during the summer of 1918 that the of 4.9, and Seattle 1,400 at a rate of 4.4. more deadly Spanish flu of a century ago war effort would take precedence over the Cities in America’s interior suffered should help us keep our fears in check. ◆

April/May 2020 above: during the Spanish Flu epidemic, a crowd of approximately 200,000 people gathered for the Liberty Loan parade in 45 Philadelphia, Sept. 28, 1918 (U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command Photograph)

pages-0420.indd 45 4/2/20 4:56 PM IVORY TOWER ICONOCLAST Mark G. Brennan

Is there anything Americans do not think they have an unalienable right Deep North Privilege to anymore? Our collective delusion did not spontaneously generate itself. The fur- ther left a politician, the more new rights grounded in your duty not to murder your elite collectively howled in February when he will promise. The right to free health- fellow man. Likewise, your right to prop- President Trump denied them the right to care? If elected, Bernie Sanders promis- erty is grounded in your duty not to steal participate in the Trusted Traveler securi- es to bestow that nightmare on us. How the property of others. But now, politi- ty program, commonly known as Global about free college tuition, or the forgive- cians conjure up new rights with com- Entry. The Trump administration was re- ness of debt for those dumb enough to plete disregard for antecedent duties and sponding to New York’s treacherous im- have financed it themselves? obligations. migration policies. As of Dec. 16, 2019, the Elizabeth Warren planned to wave a The concept of duty highlights the in- Empire State’s idiotic Green Light Act al- magic $1.25 trillion wand to create that exorable cultural chasm still agape between lows undocumented immigrants, a nebu- fiscal black hole. According to Joe Biden’s America’s North and South. Unlike in the lous moniker that would logically include campaign website, he spent his eight years Deep South, duties and obligations to one’s both MS-13 gangbangers and octogenari- as vice president championing still more family, friends, and neighbors do not rank an Belgian tourists who left their passports rights, including the Deferred Action for highly here in New York, the capital of the in their Times Square hotel rooms, to get Parents of Americans program, creating Deep North. In his most important book, New York State driver’s licenses. and expanding the Deferred Action for Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in The Feds correctly identified a problem Childhood Arrivals program, and the America, historian David Hackett Fischer with this. “Because the [Green Light] Act Central American Minors program, which attributes this societal division to the rise prevents DHS from accessing New York facilitated allowing Central American chil- of honor culture in the American South. DMV records in order to determine wheth- dren to enter the United States to live with For example, an 1805 article in North er a TTP [Trusted Traveler Program] appli-

Deep Northerners take pride in their multiple passports, dual citizenship, and service in foreign militaries.

their legal U.S. resident parents. Carolina’s Raleigh Register shows how fam- cant or re-applicant meets program eligibil- With all those destructive accomplish- ilies impressed the value of honor on even ity requirements, New York residents will ments, the Wilmington Wonder raised the their youngest sons. Backcountry parents no longer be eligible to enroll or re-enroll insanity quotient by extending rights to instructed their boys to defend their honor in CBP’s Trusted Traveler Programs” ex- noncitizens, a demeaning designation that at any expense, and in the quickest way pos- plained Acting Secretary of the Department will be illegal under the Tlaib administra- sible, which often meant violence. Fischer of Homeland Security (DHS) Chad Wolf. tion in 2024. But rights historically find writes, “Honor in this society meant pride New York had arrogantly assumed the their basis in preexisting duties and obli- of manhood in masculine courage, physi- self-appointed right to declare itself a sanc- gations. Your rights as a citizen are ground- cal strength and warrior virtue.” Southern tuary state for persons in the U.S. who re- ed in your obligation to comply with the boys had an ineluctable familial duty to de- fuse to comply with their obligations under rules and regulations that legitimize your fend their honor. That obligation eventu- American immigration law. Of no surprise citizenship—immigration laws first of all. ally extended to the defense of their clan, to Americans residing outside the self-ab- Despite Pope Francis’s condemnation of state, and country. sorbed Deep North, the Feds objected. Europe’s handling of the 2015 immigra- In glaring contrast, today a typical Wolf’s letter also detailed the im- tion crisis, the Catechism of the Catholic Deep Northerner’s duty to country ranks portance of federal access to New York’s Church is clear on the matter; “Immigrants lowest in his hierarchy of loyalties. Deep Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) are obliged to respect with gratitude the Northerners take pride in their multi- database. Working off those records in material and spiritual heritage of the coun- ple passports, dual citizenship, and ser- 2019, U.S. Immigration and Customs try that receives them, to obey its laws and vice in foreign militaries. With no single Enforcement arrested 149 child predators to assist in carrying civic burdens.” place or people providing a patriotic foun- and 230 gang members. It also confiscat- That means that your right to life is dation, New York’s cosmopolitan, priestly ed more than 6,400 pounds of illegal nar-

46 Chronicles

pages-0420.indd 46 4/2/20 4:56 PM Mark G. Brennan IVORY TOWER ICONOCLAST

cotics. Some criminal records are main- ment first broke, a Deep North friend ea- eration anymore. tained only by New York’s DMV, according ger to start an argument texted me, “Hope New York’s demographic and ethno- to Wolf. New York’s DMV data, while not your global entry doesn’t expire anytime cultural makeup, brewing for centuries in the sole source of important information soon.” Without Global Entry, I’m a ver- a Deep North cauldron devoid of honor, on immigrants, is nonetheless a rich one. itable cultural alien in my bizarre home has led to the state’s whiny, litigious, and New York’s dynastic governor Andrew state. I haughtily wrote back, “Never got narcissistic opposition to the federal gov- Cuomo reflexively deemed the Trump ad- it in the first place.” He then countered: ernment’s measured immigration policy. ministration’s ruling as “obviously political “Fascinating to watch a federal govt. con- Of course, New York lawmakers have no retaliation.” The state’s Attorney General trolled by conservatives/republicans assert intention of making the state a sanctuary Letitia James filed a lawsuit against the federal authority.” for gun owners acting in accordance with DHS, describing the Trump administra- I shook my head in confusion. Rather their Second Amendment rights. New tion’s actions as “political retribution, plain than continuing the argument, I instead York’s Green Light Act only helps those and simple…for its unfair targeting of New meditated with pleasure upon the thought who laugh at their obligations under U.S. York State residents.” of my enraged, Trump-hating neighbors’ federal immigration law. Wolf spoke to Cuomo when the policy heads exploding over this minor imposition One New York politician seems to was first announced, informing our very on their global gallivanting. The wealthy understand this, mirabile dictu! Niagara own dauphin “that if the State of New York class of elite Deep Northerners have as- County Republican State Senator Rob Ortt restores access to mission-critical law en- sumed that their quick passage through tweeted in response to Cuomo’s grand- forcement information”—which is its du- customs and immigration takes priority standing, “Pure politics is passing laws that ty—“then New Yorkers will once again over the security of regular American cit- prioritize illegal aliens over law-abiding be able to enroll in CBP Trusted Traveler izens. You know—those forced to have the citizens and law enforcement officials to Programs”—their right. aforementioned MS-13 gangbangers and score political points with a far-left base.” Doesn’t New York State, and every oth- child predators as their neighbors. Senator Ortt, expect Twitter to deplat- er state for that matter, have an obligation While American states do have rights form you any second. to the federal union to prevent loopholes in the federal union, these rights are not Unlike the Deep South, whose honor in the national immigration enforcement unlimited. The bloodiest war in American culture reveres duty and obligation to kin mechanism? Deep Northerners await- history proved that. New York has the same and country, the Deep North does what it ing their flights in the Royal Jordanian rights as every other state. More impor- can to eradicate such retrograde thought. Airlines business class lounge at JFK tantly, it also has the same reciprocal du- No wonder the Raleigh Register never did would dismiss such a parochial question ties as the other states, even if no one in much in the way of newsstand sales north out of hand. New York or anywhere else in the Deep of the Mason-Dixon Line. ◆ When the Fed’s sensible announce- North understands the concept of coop-

above left: members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang (MS-13) arrested for attacking a Queens teen in 2016 that left him paralyzed (Official Court Evidence) 47 April/May 2020 above right: a toast during a romantic dinner in a Deep North gourmet restaurant (Adobe Stock)

pages-0420.indd 47 4/2/20 4:56 PM IN THE DARK George McCartney

Parasite (2019) Directed by Bong Joon-ho ◆ Written by Bong Joon-ho and Han Jin-won ◆ Produced by Ba- runson E&A ◆ Distributed by Neon

Snowpiercer (2013) Directed by Bong Joon-ho ◆ Written by Bong Joon-ho and Kelly Masterson ◆ Produced by Mohu Film, Opus Pictures, Union Investment Partners, and Stillking Films ◆ Distributed by The Wein- stein Company

Little Women (2019) Directed by Greta Gerwig ◆ Written by Greta Ger- wig, based on the novel Little Women by Louisa Family Finances May Alcott ◆ Produced by Columbia Pictures, Re- gency Enterprises, and Pascal Pictures ◆ Distribut- and their single toilet geysers urine and cashing in on the Parks and are determined ed by Columbia Pictures feces into their rooms. What’s more, their to continue this arrangement. Class struggle, low-rent neighbors routinely urinate in the you see, is not just between the rich and the Parasite may be both the most street just outside their windows. Despite poor. At first the Park family remains bliss- amusing and the most horrifying movie of all this, Kim, Sr. (Song Kang-ho), takes no fully ignorant of their parasitic interlopers. the year. That is, if you can get past its in- steps to improve their circumstances. He When they learn the truth, it is too late. The ept attempt at making a political statement. is content to laze about the apartment, en- struggle is on, and it proves quite deadly. Written and directed by Bong Joon-ho, tirely unconcerned about tomorrow. As he All of Bong’s films express his hatred for Parasite recently became the first foreign tells his son, Kim Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), what he regards as the capitalist-enforced language film to win the Academy Award he refuses to plan ahead. Why should he? class system. In his vision, a socialist re- for best picture. Plans always go wrong anyhow, he explains. gime would serve the common man far Bong’s investigation of class strife in Then an unexpected opportunity aris- more equitably. It is odd he should think contemporary Seoul spends its first 40 min- es. Ki-woo’s friend asks him to take over so. There is an object lesson quite close to utes setting up its premise and then springs his tutoring job temporarily. His student, home that says otherwise. It is called North its trap. Just as you are getting used to the he explains, is a 15-year-old daughter of Korea. But no matter. Ideologues are not sordid charm of the Kims, a slum-dwelling the Parks, an extremely wealthy family troubled by facts. family of dedicated grifters, you are sud- living well above ground in a Seoul sub- Two other films by Bong illustrate his denly plunged into an entirely unexpect- urb. No flooding for the Parks. All Ki-woo obsession. In The Host (2006), a whale-like ed Grand Guignol. must do is pretend he is a licensed educa- monster with legs rises from the Han riv- The Kims live in the basement apart- tor well-equipped to teach the girl English er in Seoul. It is a mutation caused by an ment of a Seoul slum. Despite their strait- and math. With the aid of phony creden- American corporation’s dumping of form- ened circumstances, the parents and their tials devised by his computer-savvy sister, aldehyde in the river. The beast attacks the two grown children barely strive to alter Ki-woo easily cons the Parks. city’s population, just like his forerunner their situation. Even though their sole Then the plan begins to expand. Ki-woo Godzilla. When the authorities move in, source of income is folding delivery box- presents his sister to the Parks as a highly they strive to save the upper class before es for a chain of pizzerias, they perform qualified therapist who will be able to care bothering with the lower. their task so shoddily their employer con- for the family’s autistic son. He doesn’t both- Eight years later, Bong made the post- stantly threatens their dismissal. Beyond er to tell them she is his sister. Nor does he apocalyptic film Snowpiercer, in which the their official work, they are expert leeches. acknowledge his relationship with his moth- world’s population has dwindled to a mere Their principal nourishment comes from er and father when they in turn apply to the thousand souls. It seems the world gov- the pizzas they steal from their employ- Parks for work as housekeeper and chauf- ernments had given climate scientists too er. Without a customer account, they tap feur. Revealing their family ties might jeop- much heed. To save the world from its into the electric utility’s grid. For internet ardize their plan, which is to colonize the prophesied overheating, they decided to access, they piggyback off of their neigh- Park home after displacing the employees refrigerate the planet, but they unwittingly bors’ signals. who have been serving the Parks for years. went too far, killing almost all life forms. Still, they cannot offset other problems. Complicating the plan is the presence of The remaining humans are packed into When it rains, their apartment floods to another indigent family secretly living in the a train that perpetually runs around the a knee-deep river of flotsam and jetsam, Parks’ sub-basement. They also have been frozen planet, never stopping, not even at

48 Chronicles

pages-0420.indd 48 4/2/20 4:56 PM George McCartney IN THE DARK

Times Square. not have been more mistaken. Her book were involved, such as the evening when The passengers comprise people from was an immediate success and is still in Jo stands too close to the fireplace and her every social stratum, and the usual class in- print today. dress begins to burn. Her sisters then throw equities remain apparent. While the upper The Alcott family had four daughters, her on the floor and beat the fire out. It’s class dines on gourmet meals in the lead- presided over by a capable mother. Their fa- a comical moment, certainly, but one that ing cars, the working class is forced to ride ther, however, was a feckless dreamer who has a stamp of truth on it and further illus- in the rear, munching on black protein bars never earned enough to support them ad- trates the sisters’ devotion to one another. made of freeze-dried insects. This is even equately. This weighed on Louisa from the The novel is overly preachy at times, a scarier than those Godzilla meets Mothra time she was 11 years old. That was when complaint Niles made to Alcott about her extravaganzas. she decided she had to make money in or- early stories. In the novel, Niles becomes Mr. The politics of these films could hard- der to care for her family. Little Women en- Dashwood, who tells Jo the public does not ly be sillier. Yet, predictably, critics have abled her to do that. In today’s money, the want moral instruction, a judgment with been bowled over by Bong’s dystopian vi- book made her over $2 million during her which Jo silently disagrees. Gerwig’s film sions. How many film reviewers do you lifetime. Its royalties provided for her imme- includes this scene, placing it at the begin- know who are not bleeding-heart social- diate family and quite a few of her relatives. ning to demonstrate what a woman writer ists? I suppose their bad judgment comes Since she insisted on being given the copy- had to put up with in the past and perhaps from spending too much time in the dark. right, it also gave her economic freedom. in the present. After all, this was a time when Greta Gerwig’s new adaptation of Little Alcott modeled her characters on her women’s rights were more limited. Women (1868) also deals with a financially family members, paying special attention Gerwig plays some other editing tricks troubled family. Novelist Louisa May Alcott to her sisters. As in Jane Austen’s Pride and to make the narrative serve her purpose. wrote about the March family, a fictional- Prejudice, each sister embodies an aspect of She has said she wanted to “correct” or “up- ized version of the Alcotts, to tell the sto- feminine psychology. Meg (Emma Watson), date” Alcott in order to make her more of ry of a New England family in the 1860s. the eldest, is demure and conservative. Jo a feminist than she was. For one thing, in Alcott did not want to write the novel, be- (Saoirse Ronan), the second in line, is an inde- the novel, Jo goes on at length about the joy lieving it would be too dull to be successful pendent, outspoken tomboy, based on Alcott of caring for the children in the school she in the marketplace. She was urged to do so herself. Beth (Eliza Scanlen), who comes runs in the house she inherited from her by publisher Thomas Niles, who had been down with scarlet fever, is sweet, thoughtful, wealthy aunt. All the students are boys— accepting her commercial short stories of and uncomplaining. Amy (Florence Pugh), or ragamuffins, as she calls them. It seems sensational adventure and sultry romance. the youngest, is a talented painter but, in her Jo cannot get enough of them. Gerwig has For an example of the latter, read her story own estimation, lacks genius and so resigns “corrected” this episode by including as “Perilous Play,” in which the protagonists in- herself to making a prosperous match. many girls as boys among the students. dulge in hashish as an aid to their romance. There’s not much that is adventurous or Not a big deal I suppose, when you con- Niles urged her to try something else, startling in the narrative, but it’s compel- sider Gerwig’s decision to be faithful to suggesting she write about what she knew. ling nevertheless. The book’s appeal derives the novel’s surprisingly unfeminist end- What she knew was her family in Concord, from the recognizable realism with which ing, which I will not discuss here, in def- Massachusetts. She did not think they were Alcott portrayed her family’s ordinary lives erence to male readers who may not have an especially bankable subject, but she could and the amusing incidents in which they read the novel yet. ◆

April/May 2020 left to right above: Sun-kyun Lee and Yeo-jeong Jo in Parasite (2019), Chris Evans in Snowpiercer (2013), 49 Emma Watson, Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh, and Eliza Scanlen in Little Women (2019)

pages-0420.indd 49 4/2/20 4:56 PM UNDER THE BLACK FLAG Taki Theodoracopulos

As everyone who has not been in total coronavirus quarantine knows, Har- vey Weinstein was recently condemned to death for sexually assaulting six Hollywood wannabes. Actually, he was given 23 years in prison, but in view of his 67 years of age, it would have been far more dramatic and fitting for the former Hollywood film pro- ducer—and no more fatal—had the judge simply sentenced him to death. #MeToo for Me, But Not for Thee Following his sentencing, the wom- en who had testified against Harvey had their day in the sun. They were all inter- pression of defenseless cows! That was a is a pittance after years of police and court viewed on television and took the oppor- new one brought up by the moronic, in- officials refusing to prosecute, in fact turn- tunity to gloat over his fall. Their facial articulate, and obviously brain-damaged ing a blind eye to the outrage. In total the expressions during these victory laps ap- Joaquin Phoenix while accepting an acad- men got 55 years, which means about 10 peared to convey joy, happiness, and satis- emy award for his role in an unwatchable years each, less than half of what “Uncle faction that justice had been done. Alas, I superhero movie. Harvey” got. am old enough to know better. Call me cyn- For all their apparent concern, our ce- According to reports, 57 young girls ical if you like, but had Harvey paid these lebrities seem more focused on who com- were thought to have been exploited by women and paid through the nose, their mits injustice than injustice itself. They are up to 100 Asian members of a gang, and smiles would be shining even brighter off eager to condemn anyone who says any- both the police and social workers knew camera, and he’d still be walking around thing perceived as mildly offensive to the what was happening. Under the dreaming free—of that, I am sure. aforementioned causes and victim groups. spires of Oxford, three Asian men were Be that as it may, had he done to my Anything or anyone outside this sanctioned jailed for raping and sexually abusing a daughter what he did to those women, I’d circle of concern is ignored by the woke schoolgirl of 13, but none of the usual sus- be up in front of a judge instead—for mur- brigades with their burnished morals and pects that demonstrate at the drop of a hat der. Except that my daughter would never burning zeal to expose oppression. appeared to denounce these rapists. Where have put herself in a situation like those of Just one case in point may serve to show were the social justice warrior students? the plaintiffs—but then she’s not in show the trend: the abuse of poor white girls by You know, the ones who once booed me business. Casting in Hollywood has always Asian men in the north of England. The off the stage at Oxford Union for telling a involved quid pro quo, and perhaps now victims of these “grooming gangs” are in 400-pound African American student who things will actually change. But I doubt it. the hundreds, and they are traumatized, claimed she almost starved to death fol- “Do you REALLY want the part?” will be- broken, raped, used, and abused, and not lowing Hurricane Katrina that she could come the catchphrase, and all the things a single trained seal on either side of the do with a bit of a diet? that go with that understanding. Atlantic has dared bring their plight into How these grooming gangs operate Human nature does not change, at least the light. No actor’s trophy has been ded- with such impunity in so many British cit- not where Hollywood types are concerned. icated to them, no author has mentioned ies is a huge, ongoing scandal. Had these Hypocrisy, not talent, is the number one them while accepting an award, and no ce- victims been black schoolgirls targeted by a commodity in Tinseltown. For confirma- lebrity has asked for justice. The girls re- bunch of white men, there would be bloody tion, simply listen to the utter drivel ex- main nonpersons in what used to be one of riots in the streets, the government would pressed daily by the trained seals who pass the most civilized countries on the planet. fall, and Hollywood would suspend film- for artists nowadays. They’ve learned to The reason for the silence from our ing for an afternoon of silence. The true bark on command platitudes of concern Oprah Winfrey types is easy to guess. The racists are the media, and the celebrities for the poor, for racism, climate change, the perpetrators have all been Pakistani men the media enables, for refusing to make a handicapped, empowered women, LGBTQ who cry racism at a raindrop, and as we big deal out of these outrages. The injus- rights, or whatever a Hollywood accep- all know, it rains a hell of a lot over in that tices against the privileged #MeToo wom- tance speech script requires. tight little island. Mind you, five men final- en, bad as they are, pale in comparison. ◆ Oh, I’ve forgotten to mention the op- ly have been tried and convicted. But this

50 back cover: portrait of Thomas Jefferson, oil on canvas, by Rembrandt Peale, 1800 (public domain) Chronicles

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pages-0420.indd 51 4/2/20 4:56 PM sincerely believe, with you, that Ibanking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

— Th omas Jeff erson, Letter to John Taylor, May 1816

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