111 Quotes by Ross Douthat

The thinking person’s case for Romney, murmured by many of his backers, amounts to this: Vote for Mitt, you know he doesn’t believe a word he says.

The result is a nation where gurus and therapists have filled the roles once occupied by spouses and friends, and where professional caregivers minister, like seraphim around the throne, to the needs of people taught from infancy to look inside themselves for God. Therapeutic religion promises contentment, but in many cases it seems to deliver a sort of isolation that’s at once comfortable and terrible – leaving us alone with the universe, alone with the God Within.

For presidential power to meaningfully expand, it is not enough for a president to simply make a power grab.

The neoconservatives of the 1970s, former liberals who became Nixon or Reagan backers, eventually accepted the 'neocon' description instead of calling themselves 'The Real New Deal Democrats' forever.

Our great national drama was a westward expansion that conquered a native population rather than coexisting with it.

Jewish Americans weren't just integrated, like other ethnic and religious groups. They also attracted a particular sympathy and admiration, rooted in Holocaust remembrance, affection for Israel, and a distinctive pride in the scope of their success.

Modern conservatism was forged in the crucible of the 1970s inflation crisis, and in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash many conservatives were convinced that there was nothing the Federal Reserve could do about the vast army of the unemployed without touching off a similar inflationary spiral.

I think true atheism is a rare thing in human affairs: Even in the most secularized precincts of Europe, a lot of nominal nonbelievers turn out to have all sorts of supernatural and metaphysical beliefs.

The idea that America has some distinctive role to play in the unfolding of God's plan is compatible with orthodox Christianity. But it should be tempered by recognizing that America is not the church.