Samuel Francis

Latest by Samuel Francis in Chronicles

• Principalities & Powers

  September 2004

  Holding the Pass

  10 ½ min

  It has been ten years since the death, at his home in the village of Mecosta, Michigan, of Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind and one of the main spokesmen for organized American conservatism as it was known throughout his life.

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• Principalities & Powers

  August 2004

  Queen of the Damned

  10 ½ min

  “What I like best about the Order of the Garter,” Lord Melbourne is reported to have remarked, “is that there is no damned merit about it.” Had the Philadelphia Society existed in Melbourne’s day, he would have found damned little merit in it either, though the society is not on quite the same level of social prestige as the unmeritorious Knights of the Garter.

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• Cultural Revolutions

  August 2004

  A Nonconservative "Godfather"

  3 ¾ min

  Norman Podhoretz, Doris Day, and Arnold Palmer were among the recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom on June 23, and it is by no means easy to say who deserves the award the most—or, for that matter, the least.

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• Reviews

  July 2004

  The Dialectic of Suicide

  10 ½ min

  The ambush was prepared and actually triggered several months before Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We? appeared in print.

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• American Proscenium

  July 2004

  Porno War

  4 ¾ min

  Just how high did authorization go for the Abu Ghraib “abuses,” as the deliberate torture and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by American troops are demurely called?

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• Cultural Revolutions

  July 2004

  Ronald Reagan, R.I.P.

  4 min

  By no means the least of Ronald Reagan’s achievements as man and president was that he may well have been the first chief executive since Herbert Hoover who did not deserve a prison term for his crimes.

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• Cultural Revolutions

  June 2004

  An Unappetizing Prospect

  3 ¼ min

  John Kerry may have blown it already. After an impressive come-from-behind nab of the Democratic nomination this winter, the Massachusetts senator seemed ready to offer a formidable threat to the bubblehead who currently takes up space in the White House.

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• Principalities & Powers

  June 2004

  A Question of Power

  11 min

  Movies come and movies go, but probably never in the history of American film has more controversy greeted any movie than that which met Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ before and after its debut on Ash Wednesday.

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• Reviews

  May 2004

  Smear Campaign

  14 ¼ min

  On April 14, 1996, the Washington Post published a 2,700-word article by liberal journalist Nicholas von Hoffman entitled “Was McCarthy Right about the Left? The Reds Were Under the Bed While the Liberals Looked Away.”

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• Principalities & Powers

  April 2004

  Amnesty

  10 ½ min

  Conservatives who saw through the fraud of the “temporary worker visa” program that President Bush unveiled in January and recognized it for the mass amnesty of illegal aliens it is might want to consider muting their fulminations against the concept of amnesty.

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• Principalities & Powers

  March 2004

  (Con)fusion on the Right

  10 ¾ min

  For the last year or so, neoconservatism has been the subject of an astonishing number of discussions, examinations, and denunciations by the far and “mainstream” left as well as by the right, soft and not so soft.

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• American Proscenium

  February 2004

  The Dean Delusion

  4 ¾ min

  What is wrong with Howard Dean? Not much, if you listen to many Republicans and some conservatives. Republicans are salivating over the prospect of a Dean nomination because it seems to be the best way to ensure that President Bush stays where he is.

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• Principalities & Powers

  February 2004

  Enthusiastic Democracy

  10 ½ min

  Less than a month after President Bush unbosomed his latest reflections on political philosophy before the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, one of the latest victims of his administration’s crusade to foster the “global democratic revolution” in Iraq was grousing that what the administration planned for his country simply wasn’t democratic enough.

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• Principalities & Powers

  January 2004

  The Cabal Strikes Back

  10 ¼ min

  The cabal (or, at least, its major leaders in government) ought to be standing in the same dock that Alger Hiss and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg once occupied, but that outcome cannot—yet—be realized.

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• Cultural Revolutions

  January 2004

  Passing for Democracy

  4 min

  Howard Dean almost blew it. With a slight edge in the polls and a strong following among both blacks and young, college-trained white professionals, the ex-governor of Vermont was beginning to look like the next nominee of the Democratic Party.

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• Principalities & Powers

  December 2003

  Turning Away

  10 ¼ min

  By the end of last summer, it had become transparently obvious, even to the graying stallions of the “conservative movement,” that organized conservatism in the United States since the 1950’s has been a colossal failure.

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• American Proscenium

  December 2003

  The Untergang of Our Gang

  5 ¼ min

  The Bush administration and its heavyweights spent the latter portion of this past summer trying to explain to themselves, to one another, and to American voters why the policies it has inflicted on the nation have not really been the unmitigated disaster they have proved to be.

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• View

  November 2003

  A Monopoly of Violence

  21 min

  Contrary to the claims of a number of mid-20th-century historians of the Tudor age, the Tudors and their servants did not invent the modern state.

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• Cultural Revolutions

  November 2003

  Not An Ordinary Criminal

  3 ½ min

  Kathy Boudin, by the time she walked out of the New York state penitentiary on parole last summer after serving 22 years for murder and bank robbery, should have been a forgotten name, but, thanks to the New York Times and similar organs, she was probably better known when she left prison than when she entered.

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• Principalities & Powers

  October 2003

  The GOP’s Secret Weapon

  10 ¾ min

  If the war with Iraq was largely the work of the Likudnik faction that has commandeered the Bush administration’s Middle East policies, the liberation of Liberia on which the President suddenly embarked the nation last summer seems to have originated at least in part with yet another lobby of questionable loyalties.

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