Tag: Chronicles Magazine

William Kristol, guardian of neo-conservatism.

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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)

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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

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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…)

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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.

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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.”

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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…)

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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…)

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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…)

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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…)