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“People who spend a lot of time in front of Fox News or MSNBC,” writes Kevin Williamson in National Review Online (NRO), “are not in the main what you’d call happy and well-adjusted people.” Williamson is one of the bright young writers of NR and NRO, presided over by Rich Lowry (or is it Richard now?) who have made National Review increasingly irrelevant to modern American conservatism. Williamson’s estimation of Fox News viewers resembles Hillary Clinton’s description of populist conservatives as “deplorables” and Barack Obama’s snide remark about those voters who cling to their religion and guns. Bill Buckley (who...

The Western world has never taken Islam with the full seriousness it has earned. Down through history, once Islamic armies have conquered a land, with very few exceptions, that land has remained Muslim. A Christian will wish in vain that the great circle of Christian lands around the Mediterranean (and on up into Syria, Iraq, Iran, and northwards into Georgia) had not fallen irretrievably into Muslim hands, most of them before 732 A.D. For Christians who think that the future of the world favors movement in their direction, a study of the latent dynamism of Islam is not a little...

Conservatives have not been happy with George W. Bush. For each brand of conservatism, there is a different critique. Not so with Ronald Reagan, whom conservatives uniformly praise for various reasons. Seventy-nine percent of those in attendance at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference said they would prefer a candidate who is a Reagan Republican. Three percent would go for a G. W. Bush Republican. One gets the impression that Bush isn’t even considered a conservative. I argue with Joseph Bottum in the most recent First Things over whether President Bush should be seen as a disaster for conservatism. I...

More and more, I wonder whether lefties mean it, any of it. Take Rosie O’Donnell. The other day, one of her co-hosts on “The View” was musing on current events and opined, “If you take radical Islam and you want to talk about what is going on there you have to…” And at this point Rosie interrupted. “One second. Radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America where we have a separation of church and state.” Does she really believe that? That “radical Christianity” is “just as threatening” as “radical Islam”? These terms are...

...who brings down two hostile, tyrannous regimes in one year, and while a long regional war — actually the first stage in a worldwide war declared by terrorists for the past 20 years — was grinding on also managed the most radical transformation of the American armed forces in sixty years? I call Donald Rumsfeld the best Defense Secretary the U.S. has ever had. Close behind him, in my book, is Secretary Richard Cheney, and we have been lucky to have a number of other very good Secretaries of Defense during the past century. No one has had as tough...

Another stubborn fact is Washington’s insistence, ever since he had been a 24-year-old major leading an expedition of rough youngsters to the defense of the western frontier, that the government should supply outstanding chaplains to lead the men in public prayer and in moral teaching. Again, in his General Orders to the Continental Army on July 2, 1776 (when Independence was first voted on) and on July 9 (when printed copies were available to be read to his troops, drawn up in rank), Washington first entered the phrase “under God” into America’s public language — where, it is believed, Lincoln...

August 23, 2006, 6:10 a.m. Religiously ArguingA response to Michael Novak. By Heather Mac Donald I am honored that Michael Novak took the time to respond (in NRO and First Things) to my article on conservatism and religious belief; I can think of no more thoughtful or knowledgeable an interlocutor.  He has spoken from his heart and his capacious mind.  And I am grateful that he has returned to the threshold question posed by the current Republican association of religion with conservatism: the truth of Christianity. If a belief system is not true, however useful it may be, it...

NNow when he is at his lowest point yet in the polls is the time for those who love and admire President Bush to say so. Depending on the final success of his already successful campaign to bring the rudiments of democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq, George W. Bush, #43, may go down as a truly great president, who against fierce odds turned the entire Middle East in a new, more democratic, and more creative direction. But I do not want to argue here the question of his greatness (I have heard voices call him the worst ever) because the...

Washington's Faith and the Birth of America By Michael Novak, Jana Novak Almost everything about George Washington was hard-earned, and his faith was no exception. Although he ended up owning a library of nearly 1,000 books, some 40 or so concerning religious questions, his preferred teacher was experience. In his father’s line there was at least one Anglican cleric, and his mother was unusually devout and quite attentive to the religious life of her children. But Washington’s faith mostly grew out of his diligent efforts at self-improvement. Washington studied the thinking of British generals and European monarchs, the manners of Indian...

Tocqueville foresaw a new soft despotism coagulating around the lower classes, with their low tastes and their resentments of anybody supposedly better than they are. They will want everybody pulled down, controlled, regulated, to enforce a leveling equality. The passion behind this machinery of repression will be envy. Here is how he describes it: I am trying to imagine under what novel features despotism may appear in the world. In the first place, I see an innumerable multitude of men, alike and equal, constantly circling around in pursuit of the petty and banal pleasures with which they glut their souls....

My first recoverable memory is of sitting on the back porch under candlelight in the spring of 1936, the evening after the flood of that year, in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. This was not the first Johnstown flood (there were six or so before 1889), nor the last (1977), nor the biggest (1889), but my father had been downtown at work when it hit, and he was missing. I remember the feeling of worry among the adults on the porch. I was not yet three years old. In 1889, when downtown Johnstown was a city of 12,000 people, a wall of water...

There has been something askew in the reporting from New Orleans. It has bothered me for a week now. Finally, when I took a look at the 2000 census data on New Orleans, a lot became clearer. According to the Census, the population of New Orleans in 2000 was 485,000 of whom 326,000 were black, 136,000 white, and the remaining ten thousand or so each, Asian or Hispanic. If 75-80 percent of the population evacuated the city safely before the storm hit, as everybody is reporting, that means that far more than half the black population escaped safely before the...

The Universal Hunger for Liberty: Why the Clash of Civilizations Is Not Inevitable Michael Novak, AEI Reuel Marc Gerecht, AEI Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, AEI Laith Kubba, National Endowment for Democracy Michael A. Ledeen, AEI Joshua Muravchik, AEI MR. DEMUTH: Ladies and gentlemen, let us begin. My name is Chris DeMuth. I am President of AEI, and I will be moderating this seminar. My colleague, Michael Novak, who holds the Jewitt Chair in Religion, Philosophy and Public Policy at AEI, has just published a new book. I can say that almost every month. [Laughter.] MR. DEMUTH: But this is a particularly...

Cardinal Ratzinger’s sermon on relativism at the Mass for the Election of a Supreme Pontiff hit the note most important both in his own life and in the coming life of the Church, in an age calling itself “post-modern” but perhaps more accurately described as the Age of Meaninglessness. In his most formative years, Ratzinger heard Nazi propaganda shouting that there is no truth, no justice, there is only the will of the people (enunciated by its leader). As its necessary precondition, Nazism depended on the debunking of objective truth and objective morality. Truth had to be derided as irrelevant,...

Cardinal Ratzinger has diagnosed relativism’s evils, and offers an alternative. Cardinal Ratzinger’s sermon on relativism at the Mass for the Election of a Supreme Pontiff hit the note most important both in his own life and in the coming life of the Church, in an age calling itself “post-modern” but perhaps more accurately described as the Age of Meaninglessness.

“‘Blue Environmentalism,’” writes theologian and scholar Michael Novak, “is the way we should build on the stunning success of the environmental movement of the past 30 years.” “Stunning success”? That’s right, though you’d never know it by listening to the scientists that the media feature. But the past century has produced, for the developed world, a string of environmental successes. Novak sites one simple example: replacing the horse with the car. Before the car, city streets were covered in tons of manure—twelve thousand pounds a year from every one of the 3.4 million horses on America’s urban streets. All that...

The famous AP photograph of a killer in Baghdad shooting a pistol into the head of one kneeling election worker, while another lies crumpled on the street, throws a burst of illumination onto the face of our enemy. It is the face of Muslim fascists murdering Muslim liberals. The victims were public servants of the people of Iraq. They were election workers– agents of the will of the people. They sprang from the millions proud and eager to vote for the first time in their lives. To kill election workers is a great sin against the will of the people....

Introduction JOANNE MYERS: Good morning. I'm Joanne Myers, Director of Merrill House Programs, and on behalf of the Carnegie Council I would like to thank you all for joining us as we welcome Michael Novak to our Books for Breakfast program. This morning he will be discussing his book, The Universal Hunger for Liberty: Why the Clash of Civilizations is Not Inevitable. One of the major challenges facing us today is how to modify the relationship between Islam and the West. In an attempt to understand what it is that has turned some Arabs toward Islamic extremism and against America,...

BOOK SUMMARY THE UNIVERSAL HUNGER FOR LIBERTY By Michael Novak “With characteristic breadth, incisiveness, and hope, Michael Novak has written a sweeping road map for the 21st century,”writes Carl Gershman, in an apt summary of The Universal Hunger for Liberty. This book is, indeed, an attempt to “map” some of the great landmarks of the coming century, in culture, politics, and economics. It depicts graphically many serious threats to humankind, and especially to liberty, and yet it is a hopeful book. It goes where few have gone before. It may be Novak’s most important book since The Spirit of Democratic...

The summer has blown through like a wind-driven prairie fire and is all but over — just as I'm finally settling down to rest a little. Here, at least, are a few fragments I've rescued from the flames. We've just hit the 1,000 mark for American military deaths in Iraq, and, unsurprisingly, the press is headlining the number with something less than the truth. Even in peacetime, the U.S. military suffers hundreds of deaths each year. Most are from accidents; some are from illness and other non-hostile causes. Young men and women are quite prone, even in civilian life, to...