Why this conversation matters: In 1996, First Things, the distinguished journal on religion and public life, published a symposium entitled “The End of Democracy? The Judicial Usurpation of Politics.” Decrying “an entrenched pattern” of judicial overreach that evinced contempt for traditional morality, the forum boldly warned of an imminent danger to American self-government. In “The Tyrant State,” Professor George argued key court rulings violated democracy’s “moral linchpin…the substantive principle of equal worth and dignity.”

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

THE CONVERSATION

RtW: Dr. George, what would you describe as the context and purpose of the symposium “The End of Democracy”? What justified the claim in 1996 of the judicial usurpation of politics, and the audacious question as to whether this could mean the end of American democracy?

George: In “The End of Democracy?”, my co-contributors and I argued that the judiciary’s usurpation of democratic legislative authority is, indeed, anti-democratic. In many cases over the decades prior to 1996, the courts had presumed to impose, by judicial fiat, final answers to properly political questions crucial to our life together. Roe v Wade was by no means the only example of that. Additionally, it appeared the Supreme Court might soon impose assisted suicide on the states in defiance of contrary legislative judgments. Government by an electorally unaccountable, black-robed oligarchy confounded our claim to be a self-governing people. Moreover, judicial rulings often flagrantly contravened justice and moral truth, the very premise of democracy. Left unchecked, this could mean democracy’s end.

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1. U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA)

Ostensibly, UNRWA serves Palestinian refugees. In reality, UNRWA propagates the myth that the descendants of Palestinians who fled Israel in 1948—after five Arab nations invaded the Jewish state—have a never-ending "right of return" to their ancestors' homes. Inevitably, this would mean a Middle East ethnically cleansed of Jews.

UNRWA encourages resentment among Palestinians. On October 7, 2023, UNRWA employees were involved in the massacre of innocent Jewish men, women, and children. Since then, UNRWA facilities have hidden Hamas fighters and weapons.

2. United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)

Ostensibly, UNESCO promotes peace "through international cooperation in sciences, education and culture.” In reality, it promotes an anti-Jewish agenda. UNESCO's 2016 Jerusalem Resolution exemplifies this, referring to the Temple Mount, Judaism's holiest site, exclusively as “Haram al-Sharif.” Reagan withdrew from UNESCO in 1984 because of its pro-Soviet leanings. The U.S. later rejoined, but little changed. Trump's decision to withdraw again recognizes that reality.

3. World Health Organization (WHO)

Ostensibly, WHO proves the value of global governance to human well-being, protecting public health worldwide by working to influence policy and craft strategy in response to health emergencies. In reality, it pursues a hidden political agenda. Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus has shown himself a staunch supporter of China. In its response to COVID-19, WHO helped cover up COVID’s origins in order to protect China.

4. United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC)

Ostensibly, the UNHRC protects human rights globally by calling out violators and examining the human rights records of UN members. In reality, the organization provides cover for human rights abusers such as Cuba, China, Russia, Venezuela, and Sudan, all of whom have been UNHRC members. The UNHRC has adopted more than 112 resolutions against Israel, a democracy that assiduously respects human rights. By comparison China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and others have never or rarely been formally condemned by the UNHRC.

5. United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC)

Ostensibly, the UNAOC—first proposed in 2004 to build bridges between the West and the Muslim world in the wake of September 11—"aims to improve understanding and cooperation among nations and peoples across cultures." In reality, the UNAOC often ignores Islamist violence and promotes a mushy, postmodern multicultural relativism. In effect, this lends support to Islamism. This sort of tyranny of relativism is at the heart of Western civilizational decline.

THE BOTTOM LINE

The U.S.'s intended withdrawal from a total of 66 international organizations is key to overcoming the machinery of global governance. Even sovereigntists can get lost in the all-consuming nature of this system, which is dominated by anti-Westernism, antisemitism, and a view of human rights which elevates individual autonomy and group identity above objective truth.

By Melanie Phillips, Post Hill Press, 2025 • 307 pages

The verdict: This book documents the West's severe decline, urging Jews, Christians, and others of good faith to revive the Judeo-Christian principles and practices that made the West.

WHY THIS BOOK MATTERS

The Builder's Stone structures its thesis around the Hamas atrocities against Israel on October 7, 2023. The West is at a "momentous and fateful juncture": when Hamas's brutality revealed the choice before us between civilization and barbarism, many Westerners chose barbarism. The situation is dire, but not hopeless: we can renew our commitment to the West's fundamental principles, deriving from the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old and New Testaments.

THE ARGUMENT

Phillips argues that antisemitism and anti-Westernism have a common root: a hateful rejection of biblical religion and the values that sustain Western civilization. In its virulent hatred of the West, anti-biblical progressivism even ignores Islam’s fierce opposition to Western secularism’s licentious morality, and progressives must embrace jihadism because it is their most dedicated ally in dismantling the West. Judaism, Phillips opines, is Christianity’s “parent” religion, and Judaism’s moral foundation—as expressed in the Ten Commandments—is that of Christianity also. And Christians can learn from Judaism as well. In this era of multicultural “universalist liberalism,” Jewish history teaches us the importance of particularity, upholding nation, tradition, and history.

Phillips surveys the baleful effects of Westerners’ lost faith: a demoralizing moral vacuum filled by destructive pathologies, perhaps foremost of which is the West’s loss of will to defend itself. She shows how Britain and America, in dropping religion, forfeited an entire way of life. She probes the value the West can glean from Jewish history and resilience, and from Talmudic principles of interpretation, which encourage logical reasoning and constant openness to new insights. The Jews’ miraculous survival, she writes, offers an invaluable lesson in the centrality of a “profound reverence for an unbroken chain of cultural transmission.”

WHAT WORKS

The Builder's Stone establishes the biblical religions, Judaism and Christianity, as the West's heart and soul. Phillips points out that the Hebrew Bible—which Christians refer to as the Old Testament—is the origin of the Western way of thinking. She exposes progressives' "liberal universalism," the idea that we are all citizens of the world and that cultural rootedness is chauvinistic, as civilizationally erosive and inherently antisemitic: universalism opposes the particularity, tradition, and collective memory that characterize the Jewish life and that are needed to sustain the West. The Jewish "covenantal society….[grounded in] family and the transmission of tradition and collective memory" is not exclusive; it is open to Jews, Christians, and non-religious alike.

WHAT DOESN'T

The final chapter's ten-point program for saving the West is practical and profound. However, it treats religion too much in an earthly, civilizational sense. In an unintentional nod to dead, liberal Christianity, the section "doing, not dogma," comes close to recommending that Christianity's core doctrines be downplayed in order to "cement Christian identity into [the] everyday lives" of those who are not religious. Similarly, Phillips never acknowledges how Christians understand the Hebrew Bible in the light of Jesus as the Messiah. This profoundly changes its meaning. Without that, Christianity is dead. As the Apostle Paul—a Jewish Christian— said, "if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile…If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied."

THE BIGGER PICTURE

This book lays bare the civilizational lesson of October 7, 2023 and the West's reaction to it: we must protect Judaism in order to protect the Judeo-Christian West. Phillips convincingly argues that both religions, not just one of them, are constitutive to the development and survival of the West. Since October 7, many on the civilizational right have begun to flirt with antisemitism. This book helps inoculate civilizational conservatism from this folly.

THE BOTTOM LINE

A central biblical admonition frames the entire book: "I have set before you life and death…. Now choose life." This is a divine command, an imperative. For both Jews and Christians, civilizational renewal means covenantal renewal. We have the choice. If God exists, to choose faithfulness to him is to choose life—and to choose civilization over barbarism.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is Chief Editor of Restoring the West and a leading writer on freedom, religion, and Western civilization. After fleeing Somalia to escape a forced marriage, she built a life in the Netherlands and served as a Member of Parliament before moving to the United States. Her journey from Islam to atheism and ultimately Christianity shapes her perspective on faith, family, and the future of the West.

This conversation explores why citizenship must be understood as loyalty, belonging, and commitment rather than as a merely instrumental legal status. Ayaan reflects on national sovereignty, mass immigration, divided loyalties, and the way Christian faith informs a healthy understanding of nationhood and civic responsibility.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

RtW: How would you define citizenship, and what is its importance to restoring the West?

AHA: Being an American citizen is a core part of who I am. Of course, I have other identities—I’m a woman, I’m 5’7”—but my national identity shapes where I belong. That sense of belonging brings with it solidarity and loyalty. For me, it means knowing which society I would live and die for, something many people overlook when they talk about citizenship.

The importance is that we have to restore that particular meaning of citizenship and move away from citizenship as an instrument. For some, citizenship can become little more than a practical arrangement—a way to escape hardship in a country of origin, build a life somewhere else, and gain the benefits of stability and mobility without any real sense of commitment or belonging. A person may continue to see his or her original national identity as more important than their American identity, while valuing an American passport mainly for the access and convenience it provides. Even the simple appeal of living in America can be understood in primarily utilitarian terms. But citizenship has to return to its original meaning, which is bound up with national identity—and we have to restore it to that meaning.

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WHY IT MATTERS

During his February State of the Union address, President Trump introduced Sage Blair, a young woman who “socially transitioned” from girl to boy (behavior her school encouraged and hid from her parents). Until Sage courageously broke free, she suffered years of abuse and family estrangement, exacerbated by transgenderists’ obsession with social and governmental authorities. Her story illustrates the urgency with which we as a nation must address this issue—before it sinks us further into moral and societal oblivion.

But Sage’s is not an isolated case. Per the Wall Street Journal, states all over the Union are “ripping families apart to serve transgender ideology.” And this dismantling goes beyond transgenderism: many among our governing authorities are prepared to encroach on our most intimate spaces, families, faith, and very lives to enforce a new, radical and utterly destructive view of morality. It is now commonplace in Western democracies to require complete subservience to what social elites deem to be right and good, regardless of reality. “Do as we say, lest ye be deemed on the wrong side of history,” their mantra seemingly goes.

This new moral orthodoxy manifests itself primarily in the arena of sexual morality. Take any questioning of hookup culture, the latest obsession of self-care as the highest level of love or even the most minor condemnation of “slut-shaming” as a negative for a supposedly enlightened, empowered society. But crucially, and at a more basic level, this orthodoxy paints the very idea of objective truth as oppressive. It asserts each person’s right to decide for oneself what is true for himself regardless of any larger reality. And in jettisoning objective truth, it threatens not only parental rights and children’s health, but our very right to life and fundamental freedoms.

As one can see in progressives’ undying attachment to abortion and euthanasia, this “right to choose” extends to whether vulnerable human beings will (and should) live or die. Abortion is rampant throughout the West. In the U.S. alone, it’s claimed more than 63 million victims over the past 50 years. The new moral orthodoxy sells euthanasia, meanwhile, as “dignity in dying.” In practice, it has become a mortal danger to the chronically ill, aged, disabled and depressed. In Canada, “medical assistance in dying,” or MAiD, is quickly developing into a death expectation rather than a choice. Originally limited to adults with “grievous and irremediable” medical conditions, it now offers death to physically healthy people who suffer from mental illness.

Inevitably, the new moral orthodoxy opposes religious freedom. In Europe, Christians risk hate speech charges. On both sides of the Atlantic, they could lose jobs or suffer social ostracization. In England, one might even be sanctioned for unspoken religious thoughts, getting arrested for praying silently near abortion clinics. In America, meanwhile, our Supreme Court just ruled that California cannot keep schoolchildren’s transgenderism secret from parents—but Democrat-appointed justices dissented. Throughout the West, in other words, the old moderate left that shared the West’s Judeo-Christian worldview is fading; countering this turn, therefore, is a matter of rescuing healthy center-left/center-right debate that sustains Western self-government.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Sage Blair’s story, among other modern milieus, reminds us that the Declaration of Independence’s self-evident truths are meaningless outside the Judeo-Christian worldview. As responsible citizens, we who cherish the West must be bold and resolute in upholding our Judeo-Christian heritage. In learning to articulate its truths persuasively, humbly and lovingly, we must persist in refuting the postmodern lies surrounding us.

Todd Huizinga is Senior Editor of Nation and Citizenship at Restoring the West by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Follow him on X @Todd_Huizinga.

WHY IT MATTERS

America’s “Next Generation Passport,” introduced in 2021, represents a major technological upgrade in the nation’s travel documents. The passport features a polycarbonate identity page, laser-engraved personalization, and upgraded technology designed to prevent tampering and counterfeiting. These changes strengthen security and durability while keeping the United States aligned with modern standards for international travel. But a passport is not merely a secure credential; it is also the symbol of American sovereignty that citizens carry across international borders.

Until recently, I hadn’t given any thought to the design change. Journalist Ken Klippenstein drew attention to it when he posted a side-by-side comparison of the old and new passport identity pages on X earlier this week, and the difference is surprisingly stark. The older passport included a patriotic flag motif, prominently featuring a bold rendering of the American eagle alongside the text of the Preamble to the Constitution. In the Next Generation Passport, the eagle is still present but faint and subdued against an uninspiring, monochromatic background. Once you see the comparison, it’s impossible to miss: what once felt unmistakably American now feels muted, bureaucratic, and stale.

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau noticed the critique and offered a refreshingly candid response. “Thanks for highlighting this,” he wrote. “I share your concern that all parts of our civic life are becoming dull and uninspired/uninspiring. This is the great danger of bureaucratization. There’s no reason passports shouldn’t have a little flair and it pains me when things get affirmatively uglier and more generic. I’ll look into this decision and see what I can do.” Landau’s response identifies the deeper cultural dynamic at work: bureaucracies often excel at solving technical problems, but they rarely preserve symbolism, beauty, or civic identity.

Some will argue that aesthetics are irrelevant when security is the priority. And the NGP’s security upgrades are undeniably important. The polycarbonate data page dramatically reduces the risk of passport alteration, while laser engraving and embedded security features make counterfeiting far more difficult. But pitting security against civic meaning is a false dichotomy. America can maintain world-class security standards while still designing documents that express national heritage and pride. The problem is not that the passport isn’t technically better—it’s that it now reflects the aesthetic instincts of bureaucracy rather than the spirit of a nation.

The debate over passport design may seem small, but it reflects a broader cultural trend as bureaucratic minimalism continues to displace symbolism and tradition. One needs look no further than at the soulless federal buildings and sterile government complexes scattered across the nation. President Trump recognized this problem in a 2020 executive order encouraging classical architecture for federal buildings, arguing that civic architecture should “uplift and beautify public spaces” and embody the “dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability” of American self-government. And as America approaches the 250^th anniversary of its founding, restoring visible civic symbols—including the design of the passport—offers an opportunity to reaffirm national confidence and cultural continuity.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Over time, bureaucratization makes civic life dull, generic, and forgettable. America’s passport should look unmistakably American. Security upgrades are welcome, but national symbolism should not disappear in the process. Restoring bold patriotic imagery to the passport would reaffirm the pride and civic identity the document is meant to represent.

Todd Huizinga is Senior Editor of Nation and Citizenship at Restoring the West by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Follow him on X @Todd_Huizinga.

By Douglas Murray, London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2017 • 352 pages

The verdict: This convincing account of Europe's civilizational decline captures why the West will not survive without a revived commitment to Christianity—or, at least, to its values.

WHY THIS BOOK MATTERS

The first step in solving a problem is understanding it. Murray's book is an invaluable contribution to exactly that: understanding what ails the West, and why. Though the U.S. is a bit better off than Europe, Americans can't be complacent as similar signs of decline are undeniable.

THE ARGUMENT

Murray begins with a trenchant claim: “Europe is … committing suicide.” This is mainly due, he says, to two concurrent chains of events. The first is mass immigration. Europe, he writes, has “become a home for the entire world.” Significantly, many of these immigrants follow Islam, whose tenets contrast in key areas with Western Christianity.

The second problem is Europe’s steady loss of faith. While giving classical antiquity and the Enlightenment their due, Murray affirms that Christianity is the primary source of Europe’s beliefs and traditions.

It is key that mass immigration and de-Christianization are occurring at the same time: “the world is coming into Europe at precisely the moment that Europe has lost sight of what it is.” This inevitably leads to crushing change. To survive, Europe must reappropriate its Judeo-Christian heritage and regulate immigration if it has any hope of preserving its social cohesion.

WHAT WORKS

Murray argues with both mind and heart. He dedicates an entire chapter to Europe’s vanishing “story,” a moving description of many Europeans’ inability to believe in the traditional answers to life’s big questions: “What am I doing here? What is my life for? Does it have any purpose beyond itself?” While bemoaning the “irreversible damage that science and historical criticism have done to the literal truth-claims of religion,” Murray affirms the durable human intuition that we are more than just animals; there is an essential transcendent element to life which cannot be denied. Disregard of this principle has resulted in a “gulf that now exists between the accepted secular-atheist world view of our culture and the reality of how people live and experience their lives.” The denial of transcendent meaning has led to cultural despair. Europe—and all of the West, insofar as it has abandoned Christianity— have surrendered to a civilizationally fatal nihilism.

WHAT DOESN'T

An unbeliever when he wrote this book, Murray fails to consider whether Christianity is true and therefore does not fully appreciate its power. However, he persuasively addresses readers immersed in today’s pervasive secularism, showing that those who value the West can’t afford to disregard the religion that shaped its political and cultural heritage.

Murray’s sketch of a way forward is incomplete in its agnosticism. Nevertheless, it points in the right direction. He argues that “much of the future of Europe will be decided on what our attitude is towards the church buildings and other great cultural buildings of our heritage. … [a]round the questions of whether we hate them, ignore them, engage with them or revere them, a huge amount will depend.”

THE BIGGER PICTURE

This book is not the only jeremiad about a West enmeshed in self-destruction. In 2014, the French essayist Eric Zemmour wrote Le Suicide français (The French Suicide). American journalist Jonah Goldberg’s The Suicide of the West appeared in 2018. Civilizational suicide has rightly become a popular trope; it underscores how serious our predicament is. Murray doesn’t offer easy answers, because there are none. Nevertheless, in its determined honesty, The Strange Death of Europe helps show the way toward restoration. You can’t deal with the problem if you shrink from recognizing how serious it is.

Murray correctly notes that Christianity is unlikely to regain cultural ascendancy in the West anytime soon. For that and many other reasons, restoring the West is the work of a generation at least.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Concerned citizens, cultural critics, and Christians trying to understand the moment will all benefit from Murray’s incisive insights on the state of the West. Murray’s fundamental insight carries weight for people of all faith backgrounds who desire to collaborate toward Western renewal: "Unless the non-religious are able to work with, rather than against, the source from which their culture came, it is hard to see any way through."

Todd Huizinga is Senior Editor of Nation and Citizenship at Restoring the West by Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Follow him on X @Todd_Huizinga.