The Fleming Foundation Cultural Commentary

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Brownlow / Essays

19 Oct, 2015

The Missing Middle Classes, Part III: The Great Secession

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  The one absolutely essential feature of middle-class psychology is confidence.  If father ran a successful hardware store, then as long as they live his sons must treasure an understanding of the finer points of the hardware business.  If the old boy designed and built houses, they must be sure to have some grasp of the arts of brick-laying, carpentry, and plastering.  If he was a respected local attorney or solicitor, they must rejoice in the knowledge that he was the impenetrable vault of the town’s secrets. They must never allow themselves to start saying things like, “Well, the old...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Wednesday's Child

14 Oct, 2015

Wednesday’s Child: A Worldly Delusion

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Two ladies, long past the first bloom of youth and recently arrived in what Russian wits call the Age of Balzac, are scrutinizing the map of Palermo in the bar on the ground floor of my apartment building. They turn the map this way and that, like two army recruits conspiring to desert in the middle of a dense and inhospitable forest supposedly traversed by a national frontier, and from the air of anxious isolation about them I gather they are American tourists. The bar’s proprietor, Carmelo, is enthroned at the cash register not two feet away.  Nothing would be...

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Brownlow / Essays

14 Oct, 2015

The Missing Middle Classes, Part II: War, Taxes, And Socialism

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What happened to the middles classes?  Three things happened to them: war, socialism, and what we can call, borrowing a term, the great secession. We can start with war.  All governments routinely soak their citizens or subjects to pay for their wars, and that is why the first income tax was introduced into England in 1798 to pay for the war with revolutionary France.  It was rescinded on the signing of the Peace of Amiens, but reinstated with the renewal of hostilities a year later.  A year after the Battle of Waterloo it was repealed again, in 1816.  Then the...

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Fleming / Interviews

12 Oct, 2015

Interview With Polonia Christiana, Part II

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PC     Do you believe the neoconservative dominance of mainstream discourse of US foreign policy is slowly coming to an end or we simply seeing a generational shift? Also, have the neoconservatives in your judgement played a role in instigating the current crisis in Ukraine? TJF    The neoconservatives in themselves are of little or no importance.  They do not formuulate policy, they merely repeat the slogans of the Cold War Democratic Party and put a slight conservative spin.  Their great success was in making an alliance with American Evangelical Zionists, who have been taught to see the world...

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Fleming / Interviews

11 Oct, 2015

Interview With Polonia Christiana, Part I

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Thomas Fleming was interviewed in August by Mike Krupa of Polonia Christiana.  For readers of Polish, the inteveiw is available here.  For those less fortunate, we have posted the original exchange in English., PC  After almost 8 years of Barack Obama’s presidency, what kind of country is the United States? TJF  When Barack Obama was elected President, reaction was divided along party lines.  Democrats, especially those who belonged to ethnic minorities, expected rapid improvement in their condition and in their opportunities for advancement. They also expected a quick end to the military adventurism that had characterized his predecessor’s administrations.  Republicans, by contrast, feared...

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Fleming / From Under The Rubble

9 Oct, 2015

John Kasich’s Bible

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Governor Kasich has finally got himself into the news.   Falling asleep in the debate did not work.so now he turns to that last refuge of corrupt Republican: religion.  Accused of pandering for votes by supporting socialized medicine, he offers to give his critics free copies of the Bible. Looks like this is one more cause of a good Catholic boy who has followed the papacy into  non-revolutionary socialism. This is one we cannot blame on Pope Francis or Paul VI or even on Leo XIII.  Kasich abandoned  the Catholic Church for materialist hedonism, and when he found he needed some...

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All Paid Subscribers / Andrei Navrozov / Wednesday's Child

7 Oct, 2015

Wednesday’s Child: The Three Consuls

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  In English we signal everyman randomness by speaking of Tom, Dick, and Harry, with the French it’s “Pierre, Paul or Jacques,” while the equally boring Russians employ the common surnames “Ivanov, Petrov, Sidorov.”  But when the Italians, God bless their intractable little souls, want to do the same, they speak of “Tizio, Caio e Sempronio,” that is to say, Titus, Gaius, and Sempronius.  Just imagine how that would trip off the tongue:  “If he thinks I’m gonna let every Titus, Gaius, and Sempronius use the new lawnmower, he’s got another thing coming.” When I first came to Palermo some...

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Brownlow / Essays

5 Oct, 2015

The Missing Middle Classes, Part I

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It is not so long since any time historians wanted to explain something—the wealth of medieval Europe, the disappearance of bubonic plague, the Reformation—they would trot out the middle classes as the uncaused cause of all effects.  Others—the more prophetically-minded—took a gloomier view of the middle classes, and attributed all the things they disliked to them.   Bad taste in art, for instance.  How does one explain that?  Or the general stodginess and frumpiness of all those people commuting into work on the train in the morning?  Their refusal to be impressed by free-verse poetry, twelve-tone music, and abstract expressionism? ...

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Best Revenge / Fleming

2 Oct, 2015

On Secund Thawt: The Grammar of Dating

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Good grammar is said to be all the rage on dating sites.  This story would be good news, had it been reported anywhere but in the Wall Street Journal, whose columnists and editors do not appear to know the difference between grammar and spelling.  They lead the story with a young man who was put off by a potential date who  wrote him a confirmation of their first meeting: “I’ll see you their.”  Poor Mr. Cohen—a chump more interested in spelling than romance.  The young lady has made a fortunate escape.  One is almost tempted to agree with the Columbia University...