Verwandte Artikel zu Writing from Left to Right: My Journey from Liberal...

Writing from Left to Right: My Journey from Liberal to Conservative - Hardcover

Novak, Michael

 
9780385347464: Writing from Left to Right: My Journey from Liberal to Conservative
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385347464 ISBN 13: 9780385347464
Verlag: IMAGE BOOKS, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

“In heavy seas, to stay on course it is indispensable to lean hard left at times, then hard right. The important thing is to have the courage to follow your intellect. Wherever the evidence leads. To the left or to the right.” –Michael Novak

Engagingly, writing as if to old friends and foes, Michael Novak shows how Providence (not deliberate choice) placed him in the middle of many crucial events of his time: a month in wartime Vietnam, the student riots of the 1960s, the Reagan revolution, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Bill Clinton's welfare reform, and the struggles for human rights in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also spent fascinating days, sometimes longer, with inspiring leaders like Sargent Shriver, Bobby Kennedy, George McGovern, Jack Kemp, Václav Havel, President Reagan, Lady Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II, who helped shape—and reshape—his political views.

Yet through it all, as Novak’s sharply etched memoir shows, his focus on helping the poor and defending universal human rights remained constant; he gradually came to see building small businesses and envy-free democracies as the only realistic way to build free societies. Without economic growth from the bottom up, democracies are not stable. Without protections for liberties of conscience and economic creativity, democracies will fail. Free societies need three liberties in one: economic liberty, political liberty, and liberty of spirit.

Novak’s writing throughout is warm, fast paced, and often very beautiful. His narrative power is memorable.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MICHAEL NOVAK is one of the world's most influential living social philosophers. Since the 1960s he has played a prominent role in American political life, writing on everything from the ethics of the free market and welfare reform to the faith of the Founding Fathers. He has taught at Harvard and Stanford, and held chairs at Syracuse, Notre Dame, and the American Enterprise Institute, a leading international think tank. In 1994 Novak received the Templeton Prize ( the Nobel Prize of the life of the spirit ), an honor he shares with Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn, Desmond Tutu, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and Charles Taylor. His writings have been translated into every major western language, as well as Chinese and Japanese. He has received the highest medals the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland can give to a foreigner.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Prologue
This book is about political and economic upheavals between the years 1960 and 2005, and the navigation through heavy waves that many of us chose. This is not just my story, but the story of hundreds of thousands, even millions. Many more are likely to join us over the next decade. Reality does not flinch from teaching human beings hard lessons.

One of my first political involvements was to prepare a lyrical speech—I suggested the “New Frontier” as a theme—for a Democratic aspirant to the U.S. Congress from New Jersey, who wanted to invite John F. Kennedy to campaign for him, and to have his own high-toned talk to impress the senator. I wrote the talk, but the Kennedy team never came to Paterson. I sent the speech to Boston any- way. The nominating convention was a little less than two months away, so I suspect the Kennedy team had already chosen the theme themselves. But the effort did have some interesting repercussions among the local union leaders and city hall “realists” in New Jersey.

During the early 1960s, Tom Hayden and the Students for a
Democratic Society used an article of mine from Harper’s alongside their own founding documents. A bit later I began writing about the war in Vietnam, first defending it, then slowly becoming more critical of it—and then even more critical of the anti-war movement itself.

From 1965 on I found myself out in California as an assistant professor at Stanford, just as the Berkeley radicals were coming into full throat, and conscientious objector rallies were heating up at Stanford. My dear Karen and I attended one peaceful march in Oakland that turned mean, and we were very nearly arrested.

By the beginning of 1968, Bobby Kennedy called me to San Francisco, as the first person (so I was told) he would meet with when opening his California campaign. He had two messages: that an article of mine, “The Secular Saint,” had moved him to step up and finally jump into the race; and that he now needed my support among young people in the West. A bit startled, I said I needed twenty-four hours to clear some obstacles, but—yes.

I had loved Bobby’s brother Jack and was still desolate after his sudden bloody death. (The murder of my own brother in Bangladesh followed two months after Jack was slain.) I was in Rome for the Vatican Council on November 22, 1963, and that night we few Americans huddled together with other Americans—my stricken wife, Karen, and I ended up at dinner with John Cogley (who drafted Kennedy’s address to the Protestant ministers in Houston) and Michael Harrington (author of The Other America). The four of us could barely talk, we felt so empty, so plunged into the Absurd.

I then watched supportively as President Johnson launched the War on Poverty, and then the big push on the civil rights revolution (which had begun under President Kennedy and Martin Luther King).

I was still at Stanford the night that Bobby Kennedy was shot. (I had been invited to fly with him and his family to the Los Angeles hotel that night.) Just two months earlier, on April 4, Martin Luther King had been struck down in Memphis. An awful spring. An awful year. An awful five years.

A longtime supporter of Hubert Humphrey (a hero to my father- in-law, who was the Iowa Democratic Party committeeman), I had been horribly embarrassed by a speech Humphrey gave at Stanford on the war in Vietnam. That crushingly miscalculated speech and the immense disgust that followed led me to promise myself that I could never vote for him for president. Internally, I moved left of left. By August 1968 I was working with Harris Wofford at Old Westbury, the new experimental college of the State University of New York. Harris had been Sargent Shriver’s point man in the Peace Corps; he was later elected U.S. senator from Pennsylvania. He was a decent, generous, and spirited man.

In 1970 the great and wonderful Sarge, a truly good, large- hearted, and—if it’s not too much to say—even saintly man, asked me to come with him on his national campaign to elect Democratic congressmen, and we traveled together to thirty-nine states. Two years later I was on the campaign plane with him again, in 1972, having shown up at his home with a draft of his acceptance speech when he got the nomination to be George McGovern’s running mate. I had already written speeches for McGovern. Throughout the campaign I came to admire both men greatly. It didn’t hurt that both were fans of The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, but it was the sheer goodness of their characters that won me over. Both were war heroes. Both were modest, not self-promoting.

Through a mutual Baptist friend, Jimmy Carter came to see me in New York late in 1975—it was his very first campaign trip there, and we spent all day in Queens (Archie Bunker country), and then drove in for his first ever talk in Manhattan. Afterward I wrote a piece that turned out to be the first coverage of him in the national press, and it went into all the early press books of the campaign.

In 1976, for foreign policy reasons, I decided I could not support Carter after all, and I began campaigning for Senator Scoop Jackson in Pennsylvania. At the convention in New York I was in Scoop’s hotel room on standby, in the event that Jimmy Carter telephoned to ask him to be his running mate (the senator had been tipped off that he was one of two finalists).

By 1979 Carter’s foreign policy weaknesses tempted Muslim rioters to take hostage many Americans at the embassy in Iran. Domestically, Carter was forced by the economic “stagflation” to speak of American “malaise,” but he then irrelevantly campaigned against millionaires and “three-martini lunches.”

I learned a lot from that campaign, and even more from the next twenty-five years of the greatest prosperity ever experienced in human history. I saw the force of ideas in that campaign and the political battle that followed. The sunny Ronald Reagan (coming into office in the wake of Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II) was a good deal shrewder and his ideas were stronger and deeper than the press and his opposition had bargained for. The facts of America’s rapid revival forced me to change my approach to economic policy, from Democratic welfare designs to the creation of new industries and millions of new jobs. For the first time, against my presuppositions, I saw the contributions to the common good made by the founding of a few million new small businesses. “Entrepreneur” went in my mind from being a slur to being an indispensable vocation for the benefit of the poor and unemployed. To have employees you need employers.

Further, Ronald Reagan’s determination to take the “Kick me!” sign off the backs of Americans (he picked up the phrase from a speech of Jeane Kirkpatrick’s at the 1984 Republican National Convention on the San Francisco Democrats) and his new toughness in working every single day to bring down the Soviet Union taught me an ancient  lesson again: “Si vis pacem, para bellum: If you wish for peace, prepare for war.” I learned from Reagan’s clearheadedness about two terms Americans in their moralism like to avoid: “self- interest” and “power.” I saw how his hard-minded thinking about ridding the world of nuclear weapons outflanked  the Soviets by building superior power and through American inventiveness. (His threat of “Star Wars” was taken with deadly seriousness and shook them to the bottom of the Soviet treasury, even while many of my old liberal friends ridiculed it.)

For some years, meanwhile, William Simon, Jack Kemp,...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
IMAGE BOOKS
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385347464
ISBN 13 
9780385347464
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
316
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
CMN Printpool Inh. Mathis Neumann
https://www.also.com/ec/cms5/en_6000/6000

Friedrich-Karl-Str. 9
Hamburg
22391
Deutschland