Pensées

During the three decades I worked as an editor and writer at Chronicles I must have participated in at least a dozen literary fora, round-tables, and conferences on the subject of “What is conservatism?” Without exception, these were exercises in academic dullness and intellectual futility. As Raymond Chandler wrote of Partisan Review and the rest of the small intellectual magazines (most of them edited in Manhattan) of his day, and their interminable discussions of “art, what it is, literature, what it is, and the good life and liberalism,” and so forth, “too many good men have been dead for too long” for any of this to matter. Recently, lying awake at three in the morning and trying to get to sleep again, a brief but comprehensive answer occurred to me. Conservatism is, quite simply, humility + prudence + common sense + Christianity. Nothing more, nothing less–and beyond that, the Hell with it.

Politics corrupts and successful politics corrupts absolutely.

American liberals are complaining bitterly about, warning against, and angrily denouncing the resurgence of “tribalism” in America. These, of course, belong to the same class of people who for the past two centuries have advocated adding unlimited numbers of people from everywhere to the original American ethnic and cultural stock. What did they expect would be the result of cobbling together a continental territory shared by dozens, and now scores, of tribes of radically disparate peoples and cultures to form a society that is less a nation that it is an international house of 323 million people? “After one tribe, many” should be the official motto of 21st century America.

James Burnham would have understood Dr. Fauci and the other Wuhan Laboratory deniers perfectly: “No enemy to the left.”

Why is the phrase “people of color” considered not only inoffensive but somehow complimentary, while “colored people” is thought highly offensive and actually racist? Where do these distinctions come from, and who makes them? And what are their standards in making them? Both terms suggest that whiteness—the absence of color—is the fixed standard by which all shades of human skin are to be judged. Where is the improvement here?

Originally published in my Blog: chiltonwilliamson.com/ .