William Kristol, guardian of neo-conservatism.

2,353 words

Ruling classes exercise power through combinations of coercion and manipulation — what Machiavelli called force and fraud, or the habits of the lion and the fox that he recommended to princes who wish to stay in power. Like most princes, most ruling classes tend to be better at one than the other, and depending on their talents, interests, and psychologies, they will habitually rely on one style of domination more than on its complement. (more…)

James Burnham (1905-1987)

2,363 words

A man from Mars visiting the United States at the beginning of 1997 might have thought that the country was wobbling on the brink of political crisis. He would have learned that the White House was occupied by a gentleman immersed in so many scandals that even supermarket tabloids could not keep track of them and that this same gentleman, having been re-elected without a majority of voters behind him, faced a Congress controlled by an opposition party sworn to working a revolution in government. (more…)

The current Justices of the Supreme Court – 5 out of 9 of whom were appointed by Republican presidents.

2,315 words

Back in March, Republican Majority Whip Tom DeLay took lunch at The Washington Times and started jabbering about how he and his party were going to impeach what he called “activist judges” who handed down improper rulings. I know something about how those luncheons at the Times work, so I was not as impressed as some people. (more…)

Members of the West Ohio Minutemen Militia outside the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in 2016.

2,394 words

Is it idle, or at least premature, to talk about “revolution from the Right”? Whether it is or is not, that is exactly what leaders of the Right have been talking about for some years, from Pat Buchanan’s “Middle American Revolution” and his imagery of the “Buchanan Brigades” and peasants with pitchforks rebelling against “King George,” to Newt Gingrich and his now-forgotten jabber about the “Republican Revolution.” (more…)

Republican leaders in 1996, including Bob Dole (center), Jack Kemp (to Dole’s right), and Patrick Buchanan (far right).

2,212 words

After spending several weeks in deep hugger-mugger at the Republican Party platform committee this summer, the leaders of the Right wing of the GOP emerged triumphant. Their deeply beloved and totally useless Human Life Amendment was reaffirmed. (more…)

J. P. Morgan

2,244 words

One of the more exciting prospects for the Dole-Clinton presidential contest should have been the “presidential debate,” which, ever since the Kennedy-Nixon slugfest of 1960, has titillated the mass electorate with the delusion that the voters actually have a real choice between two different viewpoints. The only reason a Dole-Clinton debate ought to have been exciting, however, is that it should have been interesting to see what the two participants could possibly disagree about. What exactly were they supposed to debate? (more…)

2,256 words

History, wrote Voltaire, is the sound of silken slippers running up the backstairs and of wooden shoes running down — a remark that implies that the real story of high politics is never what we are able to see but always a tale hidden from public view. Since he lived in an age of despots, enlightened and otherwise, and was on intimate terms with several of them, Voltaire was in a good position to know, and it’s doubtful, if he were alive today in the age of such despots as a Free Press and Open Government, that he would be any more convinced that what he saw was really what was going on inside the dark corridors of power. (more…)

President Trump signing legislation that bans federal funds from going to international organizations that provide abortions during his first days in office.

2,389 words

With all the febrile ebullience of a re-run of a 1950s sit-com, the Republican Party will descend upon the city of San Diego this month determined to efface any evidence that Pat Buchanan ever existed and committed to staging the miraculous spectacle of a political convention without any politics. (more…)

David Irving being arrested in Austria on November 11, 2005 on the charge of “trivializing the Holocaust.”

2,360 words

In the last few years, what we may conveniently call the “System” under which Americans live has begun to show unmistakable signs of strain, and, as in most other systems of the past, those who run and manage the System have responded to these signs with increasingly blatant tactics of repression. The most obvious strains have appeared in the emergence of potentially violent resistance in such movements as the militias, the Freemen, white separatists, secessionists of one kind or another, religious oddwads like the Branch Davidians and the Identity Churches, “sagebrush rebels” in the Far West, tax protesters, and even home schoolers. (more…)

2,235 words

Whether a full-scale nuclear war between modern superpowers would last quite as long as the three-week blitzkrieg among this year’s candidates for the Republican presidential nomination is an intriguing question that neither military nor political scientists seem to have asked, but whatever the answer, a duel with nuclear weapons might well be less bloodthirsty than the GOP’s recent shoot-out at the OK Corral of American democracy. (more…)

2,268 words

The Great Republican Revolution took a brief trip to the benches last summer when committees in both House and Senate paused in their deliberations to burrow into the federal atrocities at Waco and Ruby Ridge. (more…)

2,296 words

One of the ironies of American political discussion in the last generation or so — indeed, of the last century — has been that, for all our boasting and braggadocio about being a nation founded on the proposition that all men are created equal, it is almost impossible to find any significant American social thinker who really believes it. (more…)

2,475 words

One good way to ruin your Christmas this year would be to spend the holidays reading a new book entitled Abandoned: The Betrayal of the American Middle Class since World War II, by two law professors at the University of South Carolina, William J. Quirk and R. Randall Bridwell. Maybe you don’t want to ruin your Christmas, and that’s understandable, but if you do read the book, you will at least be prepared to understand what is likely to happen to you and to what remains of your country in the coming years. (more…)

2,110 words

Even the weariest presidential campaign winds somewhere to the sea, and this month, as the ever dwindling number of American voters meanders into the voting booths, the sea is exactly where the political vessels in which the nation sails have wound up. Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. (more…)

Bill Clinton, George H. W. Bush, and Ross Perot at a 1992 presidential debate

2,310 words

Perhaps the greatest irony of the periodic political revolutions that occur in American democracy is that most of the voters who make them possible have not the foggiest notion of what they are doing. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt won the White House by running on a platform that promised to balance the budget and reduce the scale and power of the federal government, and there is no doubt that most of the Americans who sent him to Washington supported him simply because of the desperate economic straits in which they found themselves and their country, not because of any passion they shared with him for the socialist and internationalist experiments that he and his brood immediately imposed. (more…)

Patrick Buchanan in 1992

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Nothing churns the entrails of the professional democracy priesthood more than the rancid taste of a little real democracy. Since one of the main dishes on the 1992 political menu has been a generous serving of authentic popular rebellion, the sages have spent a good part of the last year lurching for their lavatories. (more…)

President Obama and Mark Zuckerberg, two leading figureheads of the globalist elite.

2,287 words

One of the redeeming features of imperialism is that it makes for great adventure stories. The works of H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling and the literature of the American West from James Fenimore Cooper to Louis L’Amour would not have been possible without the empires and imperial problems that provide the setting for their tales. The reason for the relationship ought to be fairly obvious.

Empires offer all the standard fare of blood, guts, intrigue, romance, and action: villains plotting to overthrow civilization, heroes striving to protect it; (more…)

1,867 words

With a whoop and a holler, politicians have suddenly discovered that there’s a wild animal called the American middle class prowling around the voting booths, and officeholders are pounding down the stairs to make sure the rough beast does no damage once it gets inside the house. (more…)

David Duke in 1989

2,243 words

The time has come, to paraphrase Caspar Gutman in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, for plain speaking and clear understanding. Last November, David Duke failed to win the  governorship of Louisiana, but he did gain some 39 percent of the popular vote and carried a majority — about 55 percent — of the white vote. (more…)

Graphic: Voivode Wingate

1,737 words

It appears that polemics against “white nationalism” have become quite the trend at Chronicles, the flagship publication of paleoconservatism. A couple weeks ago I responded to Aaron Wolf’s article “Incidentally White” at radixjournal.com, and now I discover that only a month earlier, editor Chilton Williamson, Jr. had produced a broadly similar piece under the title “White Like Me.” (more…)