Author: Shadia B. Drury

The 1619 Project The publication of The 1619 Project is a good place to start for understanding the controversy over critical race theory and woke liberalism. The project started as an effort on the part of a group of African American writers for The New York Times to focus on the role that slavery has …

When the Russians invaded Ukraine in February 2022, President Joe Biden offered to fly President Volodymyr Zelenskyy out of the country to a safe haven. When Zelenskyy replied, “I need ammunition, not a ride,” he instantly became the hero of the West, fighting for freedom and democracy against the despotism of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. It …

Tom Flynn was a moralist and a pragmatist. He rejected religion on moral grounds. He knew that the alliance of religion with morality was spurious. But in light of the power and intensity of the anti-abortion movement, he was pragmatic enough to side with those who defended abortion in ways that would circumvent monotheistic furor. …

Christianism—like Islamism—refers to the determination of religious ideologues to use the coercive power of the state to enforce religious morality. This is not supposed to happen in the West, where Enlightenment rationalism and its secular legacy have established a rigid separation between church and state. On the other hand, there is no English or French …

In the Christian imagination, the hardship and suffering that human beings endure is seldom the result of bad luck, natural calamity, ignorance, or the folly of imperfect human beings. It is a function of intentionally malign forces and diabolical conspiracies inspired by the Devil. The only consolation is that Satan is destined to be defeated …

Political realism beseeches us to accept the world as it is. It acknowledges the difficulties that human beings encounter in a world without established laws, a global policeman, or a preordained history. Nevertheless, realism eschews the project of defeating all evil, overthrowing all dictators, and transforming the world. Such conservative instincts are at odds with …

Generally speaking, there are two approaches to foreign policy: realism and liberalism. The realist view is generally associated with Thucydides (d. 400 BC), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Despite considerable variation, the realists believe that the domain of international relations is a lawless, violent, and unpredictable contest for power. The liberal view rejects …

The United States is not a democracy but rather an oligarchy in the classic sense of the term: rule of the rich in the interests of the rich. American ideals of equal liberty and equal opportunity have become a relic of the past. As economist Thomas Piketty has argued, inequality in the United States surpasses …

The spineless corruption of the current Republican Party has led many liberals and Democrats to romanticize the good old days when the GOP was dominated by neoconservatives. Democrats picture the neoconservatives as men of principle, conviction, and intellect—patriots who cared about their country, unlike the pathetic crop of cowards eager to curry favor with a …

The presidency of Donald Trump has divided the United States along racial, ethnic, and religious lines. He has shredded the Constitution by acting and speaking as if he were above the law. Like autocratic leaders from time immemorial, he identifies himself with the nation. As the French monarch Louis XIV famously said, “L’état c’est moi.” …

(From the Diary of Joseph) April 15, 2019: Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, the Cathedral in honor of my girl Mary, has been ravaged by fire. Early reports suggested that it would burn to the ground. There was a suspicion that Islamic terrorists were behind the devastation, but French police attributed the fire to an electrical …

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the United States found itself the sole superpower of the world. Instead of relishing this great stroke of luck; instead of enjoying this “unipolar moment”; instead of reducing its military footprint around the world; instead of focusing on its people, their health, education, and opportunity, it decided to …

The American Founders did not romanticize democracy. They were liberal democrats, which means they were liberals first and democrats second. They thought that liberal principles such as the rights to life and liberty and the freedom of thought and speech were more fundamental than democratic principles such as elections and majority rule. In our time, …

Americans tend to have a romantic view of democracy as government of the people, by the people, and for the people. They imagine that democracy is identical to freedom and self-government. They forget that democracy is primarily rule of the majority. They forget that the majority can be hoodwinked by the propaganda of demagogues, oligarchs, …

Ever since the debate between Patrick Devlin and John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century, conservatives and liberals have been arguing over the proper role of law in society. Devlin thought that the function of law is to uphold the moral values of society. In contrast, Mill thought that using the law to enforce the …

The cyclical view of history is not just a testament to human folly but to human limitations.

Many GOP ideologies are profoundly illiberal or staunchly undemocratic—or both.

Frederick Crews’s new book paints Freud as a swindling purveyor of pseudoscience.

Don’t lament the loss of the “free media.” On the contrary, embrace the post-truth world as a wake-up call.

Like other U.S. presidents before him, Donald Trump has vowed to defend Western civilization against the menace of Islam. Other presidents defined the values of the West as liberty, democracy, and the rule of law, but Trump has defined them as Christianity, culture, and tradition.

“Conservatives yearn for the fixed, unchanging order that belongs to God or nature, but their actions often
precipitate radical disruptions.”

“The media should affirm the post-truth world as an antidote to the childishness of the feel-good propaganda in which they have basked for so long.”

“Fox News legitimizes violent insurrection—and invites calamity. How did it come to this?”

Fox News is fact-free. Yet some of its critiques—only some—cannot be dismissed.

It’s a long shot, but Donald Trump might cut the GOP’s ties to a toxic neoconservatism.

“. . . Being the strongest and wealthiest nation in the world is not an occasion for self-aggrandizement or self-congratulation. On the contrary, it means being the custodian of international peace and order”

Far from defending the goodness of God, Hick’s portrait of God is so repellent that human decency requires denouncing him without reservation.

American democracy needs sweeping and, yes, socialistic reform, or the nation will stumble into empire.

The Christian concept of grace has pernicious effects for morality—and for world affairs.

Postmodernism is inclined to embrace the Islamic State’s demand for submission and its reliance on terror. This is not a virtue!

The massacre at Charlie Hebdo highlights not only the menace of religion but also the shortcomings of liberalism.

Vanquishing evil cannot be the goal of any state or empire for the simple reason that evil, violence, and injustice are the foundation blocks of every state, not to mention empires.

Critias believed not in religion but only in its utility. His closet atheism made him more reprehensible than many tyrants who were honest theists.

“. . . Despite all its successes, liberalism suffers from debilitating flaws that incline it to self-destruction.”

Liberalism and democracy are very different things. Failure to grasp that underlies America’s failed attempts to “export” “liberal democracy.”

Did Putin say anything outrageous? Not in the least. What he said was almost platitudinous.

In a desperate effort to whitewash the Christian burning of witches, C. S. Lewis argued that the triumph of reason over the Dark Ages is not necessarily a triumph of a superior morality over an inferior one.

It is no exaggeration to say that the invention of monotheism has been the greatest misfortune of humanity. In the polytheistic world, every city had its gods, who were deemed to be its protectors against very real threats such as floods, famines, crop failure, volcanoes, military defeat, and other disasters. Even when a city was …

The Decay of American Democracy, Part 2 In the first part of this essay (FI, October/November 2012), I argued against the American inclination to think that democracy is the best form of governmen t and that all good things come with democracy. Instead, I maintained that like any other form of government, democracy needs at …

Shadia Drury’s two-part column “The Decay of American Democracy,” Part I of which appeared in the October/November issue, will be concluded in a future issue – Eds. The display of Muslim rage in over twenty countries that was triggered by an American-made video insulting the prophet Muhammad has once again turned the conflict between religion …