Mark Malvasi

The Death of Europe: Two Classic Films and the Great War

So incisive and troubling did the Nazis find Jean Renoir’s indictment of war and his embrace of the shared culture of Europe, that when the Wehrmacht invaded France and occupied Paris in the spring of 1940, Renoir's film La Grande Illusion was among the first cultural artifacts Nazi officials confiscated...

Nature, Science, and Civilization

At its finest, the new conception of nature enabled people to appreciate, and wish to safeguard, the natural environment on which life depends. At its worst, this reverence for the natural world gave rise to a mindless sentimentality that regarded all human activity as harmful and exploitive...

Do Americans Really Value Hard Work?

The tiresome cant about the work ethic notwithstanding, Americans do not celebrate, or even recognize, the dignity of labor. Although they profess to disdain both the idle rich and the idle poor, they do not at the same time esteem those who must work for a living,...

Immigration: A Troubled History

Immigrants became American, or at least what they thought of as American, because they had no alternative. Educated in the rituals and standards of citizenship, they conformed to the vague but robust doctrine of “Americanism,” and sought, above all, to avoid being “un-American"... I.

A Healthy Respect for Limits: Recovering the American Founding

The Founding Fathers and their heirs wanted to establish and maintain a prosperous republic, yet they welcomed limitations on prosperity as much as they had welcomed restraints on power. This healthy respect for limits offers a way to recover the political and moral realism that contemporary Americans...

Gambling and the American Mind

More and more Americans, all of them convinced that their side is losing, try to rig the game in their favor. No longer willing to play fair, they want only to win... Born on October 4, 1809 and orphaned...

“The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” as a Fable of Modern America

Literary scholars have long interpreted The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a fable of populism, but it is more than that: It is a celebration of consumer culture as the the very meaning of America, this bright and shining land where men and women are happy to...

The Lasting South? A Reconsideration

Ambiguities and contradictions aside, the Southern conservative tradition, by a heroic act of mind, may yet be summoned against the distortions of modernity, and, in particular, against the alluring gnostic supposition, now so prevalent, that men can alter the nature of existence and transmute the substance of...

Thomas Jefferson and the Paradox of Slavery

The masters of slaves, it turned out, were themselves neither independent nor self-sufficient, but were bound to, and reliant upon, their slaves both for their welfare and their identity. This vague recognition in part accounts for the grim tone that Thomas Jefferson adopted in his analysis of...

Race and the Western Mind

Racial ideology helped Europeans to make sense of their world. Like all ideologies, it did not provide them with a true picture of the world, only one that satisfied them for a time because it provided a workable interpretation of reality...

Nationalism and Totalitarianism

The militant nationalism of the twentieth century made it futile to assert clear ideas, to ask honest questions, to make reasoned judgments, or to engage in truthful debate... Permit me to begin at the end. Joseph Pearce...

Definitions and Their Discontents

Words are not static. They are dynamic. Like the birth of a child, there remains always something mysterious, even miraculous, about the birth of a thought and about the words we use to bring that thought into being...

Toward Patriotism: An Alternative to Nationalism

Nationalism has not brought and will not bring unity, if for no other reason than nationalism insists on uniformity and must always exclude those who do not conform. Yet, if there is a chance to achieve some measure of unity, patriotism might enable it...

History as Tragedy and Farce: The Rise of Nationalism

In their political offensive against socialism and democracy, many European statesmen of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries found in nationalism a convenient doctrine to electrify and exploit the masses... Karl Marx famously began The...