This week's shooting at the Holocaust Museum has sparked some discussion about whether it's accurate to describe the raving anti-Semite who opened fire at the museum (James Von Brunn) as a "right-wing extremist." That discussion has now taken an odd turn by the news that Von Brunn may have also targeted the offices of The Weekly Standard, a magazine associated with the neoconservative movement. How could Von Brunn be a right-winger, extreme or otherwise, when the Weekly Standard is a magazine of the right? Shouldn't we just call him a deranged all-purpose hater and be done with it?

For the sake of political and intellectual clarity, it's crucially important that we don't do anything of the sort.

The American political spectrum is extremely narrow. For all the seriousness of the differences that separate Democrats and Republicans, both parties are thoroughly persuaded of the legitimacy of liberal democratic government. That's a wonderful thing, since it's produced long-lasting civil peace and stability.

But that very peace and stability, and the ideological narrowness that makes it possible, can also lead us to forget the persistent character of the anti-liberal left and anti-liberal right, with which we (unlike citizens in less fortunate regions of the world) have very little acquaintance. The anti-liberal left has historically been defined by the radical universalism of its principles, the anti-liberal right by its exclusionary (racial, ethnic, national) particularism. That is the primary difference between them. And that's why Von Brunn is unmistakably a man of the anti-liberal right: he believes in a particularistic vision of the world in which Jews, blacks, neocons, people with low IQs, and sundry other classes and groups of people have been eliminated; on Wednesday, he made a small contribution to realizing this distinctively right-wing ideal.

This is also why I think Jamie Kirchick confuses matters by invoking the anti-Semitism of the left, which (though it may have similar psychological sources) is linked to very different ideas. For the far-left, Judaism (and especially Zionism) is offensive because of its particularism, its affirmation of ties to family, tradition, heritage, and nation. I'd say that this is even true for most of the anti-liberal leftists who have embraced the pseudo-particularism of radical multiculturalism. In the end, they take the side of the "other" mainly for the sake of undermining the authority of those currently in positions of political, economic, and military power -- not because they actually want to "go native" and affirm the particularism of the downtrodden as if it were their own. (How many admirers of Edward Said actually go off and become strictly observant Muslims?) On the contrary, the ideal world of the radical multiculturalist would be one of complete cosmopolitan egalitarianism in which every group affirms its own beliefs while (somehow) equally affirming everyone else's too. As for the few who take these ideas so far that they actually do "go native," well, they've moved so far left that they've ended up on the right.

This analysis also helps us to understand some of our confusion in placing neoconservatives on the political spectrum. Neocons tend to be staunch American nationalists (making them right-wing), but their vision of Americanism consists of universalistic ideals and principles (placing them somewhere on the left -- which is why left-leaning writers like Paul Berman and Christopher Hitchens have expressed sympathy for some neocon ideas and policies). In this, and perhaps only in this, neoconservatism resembles the ideology of French republicanism, which also asserts the universalism of a particular nation's ideals. 

So, yes: Von Brunn is unambiguously a right-wing extremist. 

Jonathan Chait Responds: "Liberal Fascism Reductio Ad Absurdum" 

I've had some nice things to say about conservative David Frum in some recent posts. Those comments had to do with his efforts to reform and moderate certain aspects of contemporary conservatism, primarily in domestic policy. On foreign policy, well, I think he overdid things more than a bit in this book and has never (to my knowledge) backtracked from its arguments. Let's just say I look elsewhere for wisdom on international affairs.

But Marty Peretz and James Kirchick must disagree, since they've both endorsed Frum's highly critical take on Obama's Cairo speech. I've spent the weekend trying to find a way to explain why I think all three are wrong to respond so negatively to the speech, which I think was a rhetorical masterpiece. But now I see paleocon blogger Daniel Larison has done a good part of the job for me. Here he is, making a very smart point contra Frum.

What critics such as Frum keep missing . . . is that [Obama] is making it much more difficult for other nations to oppose the United States without marginalizing themselves internationally. With respect to the Cairo speech, it does not legitimize or empower fanatics to acknowledge concerns that they have traditionally exploited to their advantage. On the contrary, acknowledging these concerns deprives the fanatics of their monopoly on . . . defining the appropriate responses to these concerns. Better still, acknowledging a past event, such as the U.S. role in ousting Mossadegh, steals the power from those who have made use of a real grievance for their own ends.

Exactly.

Sweeping denunciations and ringing declarations of democratic principle have their place, but after two terms of bluntly ineffectual moral posturing from George W. Bush, I, for one, am happy to see our foreign policy being conducted with a little cunning for a change. 

Theocon Robert P. George has put out a reasonable, responsible statement about the cold-blooded murder of abortion-provider George Tiller.

Whoever murdered George Tiller has done a gravely wicked thing.  The evil of this action is in no way diminished by the blood George Tiller had on his own hands.  No private individual had the right to execute judgment against him.  We are a nation of laws.  Lawless violence breeds only more lawless violence.  Rightly or wrongly, George Tiller was acquitted by a jury of his peers.  "Vengeance is mine, says the Lord." For the sake of justice and right, the perpetrator of this evil deed must be prosecuted, convicted, and punished.  By word and deed, let us teach that violence against abortionists is not the answer to the violence of abortion.  Every human life is precious.  George Tiller's life was precious.  We do not teach the wrongness of taking human life by wrongfully taking a human life.  Let our "weapons" in the fight to defend the lives of abortion's tiny victims, be chaste weapons of the spirit. 

As I said, reasonable and responsible.

But I have a question: If abortion truly is what the pro-life movement says it is -- if it is the infliction of deadly violence against an innocent and defenseless human being -- then doesn't morality demand that pro-lifers act in any way they can to stop this violence? I mean, if I believed that a guy working in an office down the street was murdering innocent and defenseless human beings every day, and the governing authorities repeatedly refused to intervene on behalf of the victims, I might feel compelled to do something about it, perhaps even something unreasonable and irresponsible. Wouldn't you?

This is the radicalizing logic of pro-life rhetoric. Which brings me to my question for pro-lifers: Who is the better, truer member of your movement? The man who murdered serial "baby killer" George Tiller? Or Robert George and other (comparative) moderates, who reject the use of violence to save the innocent?

UPDATE: Further evidence of this radicalizing logic: Note that even the reasonable and responsible Robert George draws an equivalence between "the wrongness of taking human life" in abortions and "wrongfully taking a human life," namely Tiller's. Anti-abortion activist Jill Stanek does the same thing on her blog this morning: "Pro-lifers are consistent. They are shocked and outraged by the vigilante murder of George Tiller as well as the thousands of children he murdered."

So, you see: To be a pro-lifer is to live with the equivalent of George Tiller's cold-blooded murder every day in clinics and hospitals all over the country -- only unlike Tiller, the victims of abortion are innocent and those who murder them are protected, not punished, by the law of the land.

We should consider ourselves very lucky that so few anti-abortion activists resort to violence. After all, as the pro-life Rod Dreher admits (in response to this post), it is merely "prudence" (and not principle) that keeps opponents of abortion from following the lead of John Brown instead of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Roughly four months into Barack Obama's presidency, it's possible to make a few observations about the factions forming on the intellectual right as it adjusts to life in the political wilderness.

It's fitting that National Review -- the intellectual incubator of the conservative movement that rose to power with Ronald Reagan -- seems poised to go down with the ship. In the magazine and more recently on its lively website National Review Online (NRO), National Review has always mirrored the mood on the political right: unpredictable and feisty in the 60s and 70s; exuding confidence in the 80s and 90s; overdosing on militaristic American exceptionalism under George W. Bush; and now spiraling down into the dumps with the post-Bush Republican Party. Today NRO's group blog The Corner is angry, sarcastic, cranky, irritable, grossly populist -- miles away from the serene high-mindedness cultivated by founder William F. Buckley, Jr. Contributors compete with one another over who can offer the most obsequious encomium for Rush Limbaugh and turn instantly against anyone who dares utter a criticism of him. Like the vulgar talk-show hosts with whom they've firmly aligned themselves, the editors and writers around National Review occasionally criticize the Bush administration, but they rarely do so in the name of new ideas. Instead, they treat Reagan as the Platonic ideal of the conservative politician, the standard from which all present and future Republicans diverge at their peril. Call it a cocoon or call it a casket -- either way, it's hard to imagine National Review in its current configuration contributing very much to the revival of the right either politically or intellectually.

The Weekly Standard and Commentary -- the two magazines most closely associated with neoconservatism -- overlap quite a lot these days with National Review in both content and contributors. (Jennifer Rubin's endless string of lengthy posts on Commentary's Contentions blog, which mechanically praise nearly every Republican utterance while monotonously denouncing the Democrats for everything they do, would fit in quite well at The Corner.) Yet there is an important difference in emphasis. Whereas National Review promotes Reagan worship, the Weekly Standard and Commentary have chosen to rally around Dick Cheney, proud champion of "enhanced interrogation" and thoroughly unrepentant advocate of the invasion of Iraq. There's something admirable in this position, I suppose, since it can't possibly flow from a belief that an embrace of the wildly unpopular and increasingly grouchy Cheney will improve the political fortunes of the Republican Party, at least in the short term. No, William Kristol and John Podhoretz appear to be standing tall with Cheney out of principle. If you doubt it, take a look at this revealing blog post from Podhoretz, written shortly after Obama's national security speech last Wednesday, in which he bristles at the president's suggestion that the Bush administration sometimes "made decisions based upon fear rather than foresight.” To which Podhoretz responds with a heartfelt defense of conducting foreign policy in a state of acute fear, while also praising the former president's "brilliant efforts to thwart mass killings." Neoconservatism, 2009 reduced to a slogan: "Be Afraid! Be Very Afraid!" It's hard to imagine such a message succeeding politically, at least short of a genuine crisis (as opposed to a spurious one). Count that as one more reason to hope our luck holds out.

And that's about it for the right's flagship opinion journals. Oh sure, there are bright spots at all three magazines/websites: Jim Manzi's libertarian-minded commentary on economics and finance for NRO; Max Boot's historically informed posts on foreign affairs and military issues for Contentions; and best of all, Christopher Caldwell's carefully reported essays on various political and cultural topics for the Weekly Standard. But that's pretty much it for intellectual conservatism these day, at least in the places it used to thrive.

Which isn't to say that interesting things aren't going on in other places, just that those efforts have yet to gel into a coherent alternative to the old wares being peddled by the movement elders. In the pragmatic center, David Frum has brought together a group of journalists and policy intellectuals (many of them with ties to Rudy Giuliani's disastrous presidential campaign) to think their way to a new vision for the Republican Party -- one less beholden to the religious right and more attuned to the economic challenges facing the middle class. Frum's website (NewMajority.com) is fun and often surprising, and his own scrappy posts challenging various GOP pieties are refreshing. What does it add up to? Not much yet. But the hour is early -- stay tuned.  

Offering slight variations on Frum's approach are David Brooks and Ross Douthat, both of them New York Times op-ed columnists. Back in the late 1990s, Brooks championed "national greatness conservatism" in the pages of the Weekly Standard. These days his nationalist enthusiasms have mellowed into a defense of what might be called Hamiltonian communitarianism. That is, Brooks believes the federal government has an important role to play in fostering the institutions (families, neighborhoods, churches) on which a liberal society depends for its health and vitality. If this reminds you of the "compassionate conservatism" of George W. Bush's 2000 campaign, it's because that's exactly what it sounds like. Does Brooks really think that doubling back to the start of Bush's disastrous presidency is a sensible strategy for the GOP? We'll no doubt find out as Brooks refines his position over the coming months and years.

Douthat takes a similar approach and faces a similar challenge -- namely, how to differentiate his ideas from the ones that got the GOP into its current mess in the first place -- but he has the added burden of being a pro-lifer firmly committed to the agenda of the religious right. Douthat has written an interesting book (with Reihan Salam) that's filled with innovative policy proposals, many of which would help the Republican Party increase its appeal to middle-class voters. But as long as those proposals are wedded to social policies increasingly viewed as a sop to the culturally alienated religious extremists who form the base of the party, I suspect the GOP will remain stuck in the doldrums. I just can't see "Bush Plus Competence!" inspiring much excitement in either the party or the nation as a whole.  

And that leaves a final group of conservative writers--most of them younger and more intellectually interesting and eclectic, and for that reason much less politically consequential, than anyone listed above. I'm thinking of people like Conor Friedersdorf, John Schwenkler, Peter Suderman, Daniel Larison, Patrick Deneen, Jeremy Beer, my friends Russell Arben Fox and Noah Millman, and my old sparring-partner on same-sex marriage, "Crunchy Con" journalist Rod Dreher. Some of these writers (all of them primarily bloggers) can be found at The American Scene, while others contribute essays to Front Porch Republic and blog for the website of the American Conservative. The more moderate ones (Friedersdorf, Schwenkler, Suderman, Millman) are similar in temperament and outlook to Frum, Brooks, and Douthat, though they tend to be more philosophical and less policy-oriented in approach. Meanwhile, the more radical ones (Larison, Deneen) are downright anti-modern in outlook. Delighted by Christopher Lasch's indictment of the free market, enamored of Wendell Berry's poetic agrarianism, romantically drawn toward "localism," titillated by Alasdair MacIntyre's praise of monasticism as an option for those seeking refuge from the moral impurities of modernity, open to radical environmentalism, hostile toward an idealistic foreign policy, disgusted at the overall tone of life in America since sexual revolution--these writers are interesting in the way all reactionaries are interesting: as a provocation to deep thinking, and as a warning about the (political and intellectual) dangers of indeterminate negation.

Will any of these writers contribute to the emergence of a new right to take the place of the one that left such a profound mark on the nation over the past three decades? It's much too soon to know, of course, but reading their essays and blog posts, one at least senses them thinking for its own sake, following their ideas wherever they lead, without regard for whether or not their conclusions will contribute to the short-term advantage of a political party. That, at least, is a step in the right direction, as none other than William F. Buckley realized fifty years ago.

In Barack Obama's impressive speech at Notre Dame on Sunday (my opinion of it matches up quite closely with Ed Kilgore's), the president had some interesting things to say in defense of doubt, especially as it relates to religious faith.

But remember too that the ultimate irony of faith is that it necessarily admits doubt. It is the belief in things not seen. It is beyond our capacity as human beings to know with certainty what God has planned for us or what He asks of us, and those of us who believe must trust that His wisdom is greater than our own. This doubt should not push us away from our faith. But it should humble us. It should temper our passions, and cause us to be wary of self-righteousness.

This strikes me as indisputably true, albeit with an important caveat to which I'll return in a minute. But perhaps more interesting to me than the speech itself has been observing how certain religiously orthodox intellectuals have responded to this passage. Here, for example, is Daniel Larison (via Patrick Appel, who's sitting in for Andrew Sullivan):

Everyone is stricken with doubt at times, but it has to be understood that doubt, like an illness, is something from which one may suffer but which is something that needs to be remedied rather than perpetuated or celebrated. Physical illness can have a humbling effect, but a proper understanding of theological anthropology tells us that illness, like death, is part of our fallen state. Doubt is a function of a mind clouded by the passions -- it is the result of confusion. It does not teach us anything, but rather prevents us from learning.

E.D. Kain offers a mild rebuke to Larison here, but I would go quite a bit further than Kain's statement that doubt "plays a much more nuanced role in our lives (politically and spiritually) than merely as an agent of personal obfuscation and confusion." Far from being an intellectual illness from which we sometimes suffer and which we should work to overcome, as Larison would have it, I'd say that doubt arises from the ever-present sense that, short of analytic statements (if there are such things), all our statements about the world are opinions about which we can be relatively but never absolutely certain. And how could this not be doubly (or infinitely) true when our statements concern God -- an agent whose purposes and intentions transcend the world itself?

Doubt does not arise because our minds are "clouded by passions," as if we could conceivably attain a state of such dispassionate clarity that our statements about the world would become absolutely certain. That's a fantasy -- the epistemology of the willfully credulous. I say "willfully" because Larison is smart enough to know better, as he shows when he traces doubt to our "fallen state." That sounds to me like Larison is saying that doubt can be traced to the human condition as it exists in the here and now. I agree. By all means, believe if you wish that it once was and one day will be otherwise. But that's then and this is now -- and for now can we please agree that doubt is (and should be) the destiny of thoughtful human beings?

Unless, of course, one has had a divine revelation -- a direct experience of the absolute, nonrelativizable presence of God in one's own life, right here, right now. In that case, all bets are off, and doubt becomes superfluous. (Given how many Americans believe they have had divine experiences, from being born again to speaking in tongues to visions of the Blessed Virgin and beyond, I wonder how many will take Obama's paean to doubt as an expression of secular humanism rather than as a sincere defense of liberal Protestantism.)

Someone who's experienced a divine revelation possesses the absolute certainty the rest of us lack. Has Larison had such a revelation? If so, good for him. As for the rest of us, surrounded by the silence of infinite spaces, we'll have to make do with our doubts and relative certainties.  

In an article in the latest Weekly Standard, First Things editor Joseph Bottum argues that conservative Catholic outrage at the University of Notre Dame's decision to invite the President of the United States to speak at the college's May 17 graduation ceremony, where he will also receive an honorary degree, has "very little to do" with politics. Rather, the controversy is "a fight about culture--the culture of American Catholicism, and how Notre Dame, still living in a 1970s Catholic world, has suddenly awakened to find itself out of date."

I realize that every movement tries to portray itself as the party of the future, but this is pretty hilarious. Pro-life absolutists, the cultural vanguard? I guess that would make the many millions of Catholics who voted for Obama the old fogies of the faith? (And does that mean the cultural right's new winning strategy is to wait for cultural liberals to die off? My, how its hopes have diminished since the giddy excesses of January 2005.)  

But Bottum is less interested in portraying liberal Catholics as old fashioned than he is in relegating them to the periphery of Catholic culture in the United States. What Notre Dame president Fr. John I. Jenkins and his liberal colleagues at the nation's other leading Catholic universities don't understand, according to Bottum, is that opposition to abortion stands "at the center of Catholic culture in this country." They thus live "in a different world from most American Catholics," and until they bring themselves into closer conformity with this authentic American-Catholic world, "they will not be Catholic--in a very real, existential sense."

What a strange--one is almost tempted to say peripheral--view of the American Catholicism this is. Not only did Catholics vote for Obama over McCain 54 percent to 45 percent. But when asked in a recent Pew poll if they think Notre Dame did the right thing in inviting the president to campus, Catholics answered affirmatively 50 percent to 28 percent. (Among those Catholics who had heard about the controversy before being contacted by the Pew pollsters, the numbers were 54 to 38 percent in favor of the invite.)

Despite what they would like to believe, it is Bottum and his theoconservative allies who stand on the margins of American Catholic life, rallying an embattled, belligerent faction of the Church--a faction so obsessed with abortion that it has become indifferent to other moral issues and incapable of making the elementary distinctions that most of their fellow Americans, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, treat as the commonsense starting-point and touchstone of moral reasoning. Like, for example, the distinctions separating those who perform abortions, those who procure abortions for themselves or others, those who encourage women to have abortions, and those (like the president and many millions of American Catholics) who merely believe abortion should not be prosecuted as a crime.

If the parents of Notre Dame's graduating seniors want to catch a glimpse of what the theocons consider "the center of Catholic culture in this country," they should listen for the buzz of prop engines and then glance skyward to behold the plane that's been circling South Bend for the past week, trailing a massive photo of bloody, aborted fetus.

UPDATE: Bottum expands on his analysis here.

UPDATE 2: For a very powerful dissent from Bottum's argument made from even further right, see Patrick Deneen here.

UPDATE 3: Ed Kilgore weighs in with a strong post of his own here.

Andrew Sullivan has written a thoughtful response to this post of mine about torture from two weeks ago.

To recap, I argued that when defending the political community against a dire threat to the common good, actions that would under normal circumstances rightly be regarded as immoral and beyond the bounds of civilized decency (like torture) can become morally acceptable and even morally imperative. This is what Aristotle (and Leo Strauss) called the changeability of "natural right," and I consider it to be a permanent fact of political life.

Andrew seems to agree in general. In the opening paragraph of his post, for example, he concedes that the presidency can possess "extra-constitutional and extra-legal powers in an emergency." And then there's the title of his post (Taming the Prince), which is a reference to a wise book by his esteemed teacher Harvey Mansfield that explores at great length the moral "ambivalence" at the heart of executive power.

Yet Andrew also appears to deny that natural right is changeable enough to specifically permit or demand torture, at least as the Bush administration employed it. He writes:

[T]he kind of claims that Bush and Cheney made about executive power in the context of the current conflict, especially when allied with the power to seize individuals and torture them on the basis of executive judgment alone, goes far beyond such exigencies [i.e., temporally constricted emergencies in which the transgression of normal moral limits would be justified]. It goes beyond [them] because the emergency that usually justifies this kind of exceptional action is now permanent insofar as the Jihadist threat stretches indefinitely into the future; because the remit of the power is universal in so far as it has no geographical limits, and can extend, as Jose Padilla discovered, to citizens as well as non-citizens; and it is secret, in so far as we knew nothing about the torture policies of Bush and Cheney until long after they had tortured and abused people in their captivity.

Of these three objections, I find the first one the strongest by far. If a ticking time-bomb can temporarily justify extra-legal and extra-moral executive actions, then a perpetual ticking time-bomb appears to justify permanent extra-legal and extra-moral executive actions -- which would make the presidency, as Andrew puts it, "an elected tyranny."

That's a strong case against the Bush administration's torture policies. But is it an argument against torture in all conceivable cases? I confess that I can't tell. On the one hand, there's the post's opening paragraph and title. But on the other, there are Andrew's passionate, articulate, and relentless attacks on torture over the past few weeks, which certainly make it sound like he rejects torture on principle, in all conceivable cases. And then there is the final, remarkable sentence of his post: 

[T]he first Americans would gladly have lost a few cities - and countless lives - to resist it [an elected tyranny].

Andrew here appears to be admitting that a principled rejection of torture may very well come at an enormous cost to the United States. How many cities would be too many to lose? How many "countless" lives would we be willing to see extinguished for the sake of the principle that we ought never torture? If the principle is absolute, then the number has to be infinite: the United States should accept its own destruction rather than torture a single individual.

But I submit that this can't be right. Our leaders have a moral duty, a solemn responsibility, to defend the common good -- to defend the nation against those who would destroy it -- and when the threat is sufficiently grave, this moral imperative may demand that we diverge from our moral principles. How far should we be willing to go in defending ourselves? That, unfortunately, will depend on the ruthlessness of the enemy. If the nation's enemies refuse to wear uniforms, if they deliberately seek to maximize civilians casualties, if they embrace an ideology that exalts death over life and suicide over surrender, then we might have to stoop pretty low to combat them. I concede that this permanent dynamic of politics is ugly, but that doesn't make it any less true. When fighting for its survival, no nation is exceptional, no matter how high-minded the principles it embraces under normal conditions.

Let me be perfectly clear: None of this is meant as a defense of the Bush administration's torture policies, let alone Charles Krauthammer's recent revision of his somewhat narrower 2005 apology of torture, which would seem to permit it in an alarmingly wide range of cases. But if we reject these justifications, we should do so not because torture is everywhere and always wrong but rather because we believe that the threat over the past seven-and-a-half years has been insufficient to justify transgressing the ordinary moral norms that forbid it.

The primary reason that we should treat our rejection of the Bush administration's torture policies as a matter of prudence (or practical wisdom) rather than principle is that it allows us to maintain clarity about the often harsh reality of political life. Imagine, for example, that the slaughter of 9/11 had been followed not by an absence of terrorist strikes but by a string of spectacular attacks with conventional explosives. Imagine a dozen suicide bombers blowing themselves up in the food courts of the nation's 12 largest malls at precisely 1:30 pm, eastern time on a Saturday in mid-October 2001. Several hundred would have died, and the economy would have been dealt an enormous blow as Americans decide en masse to stay away from public places. Then imagine a half-dozen bombers blowing themselves up in coordinated attacks at Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal, Washington's Union Station, Philadelphia's 30th Street Station, and a handful of other major train stations at the same moment during evening rush hour on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, 2001. 

I submit that any president -- George W. Bush, Barack Obama, anyone -- who under these circumstances (let alone one involving attacks with weapons of mass destruction) did not do everything within his power to determine the location and timing of future attacks, including (if there was reason to believe it would be effective) torturing captured members of active terrorist cells, would be acting irresponsibly and immorally, even if his refusal to torture was based on the noblest liberal principles. Liberal ends can usually be defended using liberal means. But not always. It is perfectly acceptable, even admirable, to be deeply troubled by this fact. It is not acceptable to deny it.

Is Andrew Sullivan denying it? I confess, once again, that I can't tell.

UPDATE: Conor Friedersdorf has an interesting (and flattering) response to this post here. I'm afraid, though, that I don't find his objections especially compelling. Is it "a moral abomination" to say that a president in the situation outlined above would be morally obligated to do everything within his power to prevent future terrorist attacks? From the standpoint of morality under normal conditions, perhaps it is, just as it is normally a moral abomination for me to kill another human being. But what if this human being has broken into my house and is about to murder my children? I submit that in this case, doing everything to protect my children, including attacking and perhaps killing the other human being, becomes a moral imperative. That, writ large, is the situation of the president in the hypothetical scenario I sketched in this post. In such a situation, it may be moral to torture -- and to do lots of other unsavory things. (What, I wonder, would Conor have done in Truman's place in the summer of 1945? Not used the atomic bombs, I presume, since sending hundreds of thousands of American soldiers -- and presumably even more Japanese soldiers and civilians -- to their deaths in a land invasion of Japan would have been the "moral" thing to do?) As for nuking Mecca, destabilizing Pakistan, etc., there is nothing about the changeability of natural right that necessitates stupidity on the part of the president.  

UPDATE 2: Also over at The American Scene, John Schwenkler comes out against thought experiments that justify torture in the abstract. In its place, he advocates hard-nosed analysis of whether the Bush administration was justified in torturing terrorist suspects in the specific, concrete circumstances it faced after 9/11. I'm all in favor of the latter, since the changeability of natural right can only be objectively justified or condemned in retrospect (as I argued at the end of my first post, and as a reader at Andrew Sullivan's blog nicely states here.) But I think thought experiments like the one I lay out above also have their place, not because we should be open to torture (and other nastiness) in the abstract, but rather because such experiments might help us to understand and empathize with the moral complexity of statesmanship in times of genuine crisis (as opposed to during bouts of media-driven hysteria). And this understanding and empathy just might lead some to temper a bit of their indignation-fueled self-righteousness when they set out to judge the decisions of those who acted (and yes, perhaps erred in acting) to defend the common good.

I like the free-flowing, rough-and-tumble, demotic character of Internet-driven media as much as the next blogger. Information can be addictive, just as sharp-edged opinions can induce an adrenaline-driven thrill. But what about historical perspective? And philosophical reflection? And level-headed analysis? The 24-hour news cycle and instant Internet updates don't foster those habits and may even be incompatible with them. And I'm afraid our culture is beginning to pay the emotional and intellectual price.

Has a week passed in the last nine months when we haven't been confronting a "crisis"? Last summer, there was the "peak-oil crisis." Then there was the banking and stock-market crises of the fall. In his February 24 address to Congress, President Obama spoke of numerous crises facing the country. "The economy is in crisis," he declared, and the crisis had several dimensions. There was the "credit crisis" and the "housing crisis" and the "financial crisis" -- all of them leading ours to be a generalized "time of crisis." And now, of course, there's the swine-flu crisis. On top of the ongoing climate-change crisis. And so on and so forth.

Never mind that the peak-oil crisis seems to have vanished overnight. Or that the economy may have already turned a corner before reaching the severity of the 1981-82 recession, let alone the Great Depression's catastrophic levels of unemployment and human suffering. Or that roughly 36,000 Americans die of influenza every year without it being dubbed a public-health crisis. None of this matters, finally, because when it comes to hysteria, reality is beside the point. Whether or not the source of this season's anxieties fade, cable news and Internet prognosticators are sure to hype some new issue or event or problem into the next national Crisis.

Why will the pattern almost certainly continue? Because the rewards that come from magnifying the significance of and threat posed by every event and trend are too enticing to resist. Alarmist headlines generate an agitated buzz, which spreads through the culture like a contagion, driving people to seek out information to allay their fears, which in turn generates ratings and boosts page views (and rates of presidential approval) into the stratosphere, with the most hyperbolic headlines and rhetoric often grabbing the most attention of all.

Which is not to say that newscasters, writers, commentators, and politicians don't believe their own hype. Sadly, many of them do -- even those who should know better. The paranoid style in American politics has metastasized. No longer confined to the radical right as it largely was when historian Richard Hofstadter first diagnosed it in his classic book, generalized paranoia has now spread beyond politics and into the culture at large, infecting nearly everything it touches, transforming otherwise thoughtful Americans into modern-day doomsayers anxiously awaiting imminent civilizational apocalypse. 

This isn't to say that the problems we so readily refer to as crises aren't worthy of attention or concern. But it is to say that we will be better off as individuals and as a society when we (re)gain some perspective on our troubles and (re)learn how to respond to them with poise and composure instead of technologically driven populist panic.

I remember when Peter Berkowitz was my favorite public intellectual. Back in the late 1990s, he covered political philosophy (broadly defined) for the back of the New Republic, and his review essays were a delight: wise, literate, tough, surprising, unideological.

But that was then. Since 9/11, Berkowitz has drifted rightward. Whereas his essays once appeared in a wide range of magazines across the ideological spectrum, now he writes exclusively for conservative outlets, most often the Hoover Institution's bimonthly Policy Review, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and Bill Kristol's Weekly Standard. There's nothing shameful about ideological commitment, of course, but it poses dangers for a writer. Rather than allowing his mind to roam freely, the engaged intellectual will be tempted to direct it exclusively toward practical ends. Bill Kristol himself has been doing this for so long, he appears to have forgotten (or perhaps he never learned in the first place) how to think independently of ideological considerations. Berkowitz isn't there yet, but to judge from his latest essay in the Weekly Standard, he's getting mighty close.

The article, "Pragmatism Obama Style," begins by asserting that Obama has presented himself as a "postpartisan pragmatist" and then seeks to demonstrate, using a few quotations from a short book by the late pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty and three examples of Obama's actions and words in office (on Iraq, federal funding of stem-cell research, and the federal deficit), that the president's pragmatism is "aggressively partisan" in the sense that it consistently uses flexible means to achieve "progressive ends."

That's right: The president has a progressive agenda, and he's willing to compromise on how to enact it. Peter Berkowitz wants us to know, in other words, that Barack Obama is a liberal. 

But he's not just a liberal: He's a liberal who uses a rhetoric of pragmatism "to disguise the size and scope of his progressive ambitions." And that's where the problems really begin, because the president is supposedly using this rhetorical disguise to impose "far-reaching progressive policies on an unwary public" -- an approach that is "disrespectful of citizens" because it obscures the administration's "governing principles and ultimate intentions." Worst of all, Obama's progressive pragmatism is also "a threat to our freedom, which depends on a lively understanding of our constitutional principles and an informed and robust debate about the full range of consequences -- social and economic, moral and strategic -- of our political choices."

There's just one problem with this analysis and indictment: It's completely disengaged from political reality. Sure, Obama used post-partisan rhetoric, as nearly every presidential candidate does during the general-election campaign, when the contest is over which candidate will claim more of the ideological center. But no one who paid any attention to any one of the dozens of primary or general-election debates, or who visited Obama's website, or who listened to his stump speech -- in other words, no one who was even vaguely informed about Barack Obama's campaign -- could have come away believing that he was anything other than a liberal. He favored a cap-and-trade plan on the environment. He supported health-care reform. He opposed the Iraq war and the "surge," and he favored a relatively rapid draw-down of ground forces in Iraq. He attacked the Bush administration for limiting federal funding on stem-cell research. He proposed cutting taxes for the vast majority of Americans and raising them modestly (back to pre-Bush-tax-cut levels) on upper-income earners. On these issues and many others, Obama was and is a liberal.

And yet Obama won. And won big. And his approval ratings have stayed quite high among Democrats and independents even as he's moved to enact many of the liberal policies on which he campaigned. And yes, even as he's gone beyond those campaign proposals in order to stimulate the economy and soften the impact of the deep recession and banking crisis he inherited from his Republican predecessor.

And that's where Berkowitz's analysis reaches its intellectual nadir. In a series of sloppy paragraphs that read like talking points authored by the same know-nothing House Republicans who have proposed a spending freeze in the midst of a massive economic contraction -- the same proposal that another conservative writer (David Brooks) has accurately labeled "insane" -- Berkowitz hits Obama for significantly increasing the deficit, since a "truly postpartisan pragmatist" presumably would have responded to the economic downturn by cutting the deficits that George W. Bush (irresponsibly) ran up during a period of economic expansion.

Peter Berkowitz is a smart man. He must know that cutting federal spending during a recession would be far more reckless (and unpragmatic, by any definition) than increasing the deficit -- just as he must recognize that the Republican Party has far deeper problems than his essay suggests. Above all, Berkowitz must understand that Obama's persistent and broad-based popularity is most likely a result not of the president disguising "the size and scope of his progressive ambitions" but rather of solid support for those clearly and repeatedly stated ambitions. And yet, rather than responding honestly and creatively to this sobering reality (as David Frum has been trying to do at his website), Berkowitz has decided to put his mind to use composing a consoling lullaby for conservatives -- one that traces their troubles to the cleverness and mendacity of the president while denying that they deserve any blame for their significant political troubles.

I can understand why (short-sighted) Republican Party operatives would approve of such a message. The deeper mystery is why a man of Peter Berkowitz's considerable talents would stoop to craft it. 

With this post, I'm inaugurating an occasional feature on the blog. Think of it as an idiosyncratic monthly book review section. The books I'll mention will often be new(ish), but not always. They will simply be a sample of what I've been reading and thinking about in recent weeks. Hence the unassuming title of the post. 

David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (Yale, 2009). One of the intellectual highlights of my time as an editor for First Things magazine was publishing the work of David Bentley Hart. Yes, he can be insufferably pompous. (And yes, he was quite happy to serve as Roger Kimball's hit man when it came time for the New Criterion to do its part for the conservative movement and savage my "extremely boring" book.) Still, there is no denying Hart's polemical gifts or his brilliance as a theologian and as an intellectual historian of Christianity. With Atheist Delusions, he has written a learned response to the "New Atheists" (Dennett, Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens) -- writers who, in Hart's view, exhibit astonishing ignorance and superficiality compared to the greatest atheists of the past (Hume, Gibbon, Nietzsche). His book aims to transform the New Atheists' straw-man version of Christianity into a warrior capable of defending himself against antagonists both sublime and ridiculous. Anyone interested in taking the debate about God to the next level should read and reflect on Hart's spirited brief on behalf of Christian truth.   

Michelle Goldberg, The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World (Penguin, 2009). Author of one of the first (and still the most richly reported) books about the American religious right during the early years of this decade (Kingdom Coming), Goldberg has now turned her attention to the rest of the world. In a series of engaging and troubling chapters, she examines the "one thing that unites cultural conservatives throughout the world" -- namely, the view that "women's equality and self-possession" is "unnatural, a violation of the established order." Her book is a sharply critical (and deeply informed) examination of the misogynistic ideas and fears that link Protestant fundamentalists, Islamists, Hindu Nationalists, ultra-Orthodox Jews, and ultramontane Catholics into a global inter-religious movement that aims to curtail the rights of women and stamp out feminist ideals. Highly recommended for those interested in understanding the culture war and/or waging it from the secular-liberal side. 

Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Harvard, 2006) and Open-Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (Harvard, 1998). Do you know the work of Jonathan Lear? You should. In an age when a motley crew of feminists, evolutionary and cognitive psychologists, right-wing culture critics, and pharmaceutical and insurance companies have formed an unlikely alliance in furious opposition to Freudian psychoanalysis, Lear (an accomplished philosopher at the University of Chicago and a practicing psychoanalyst) has taken on the important but thankless task of defending Freud against his critics and mounting a sophisticated defense of psychoanalysis as a highly effective method for achieving the ancient philosophical goal of self-knowledge. Open-Minded contains some of his most accessible (and stimulating) essays, one of which was originally published in TNR back in 1995. Radical Hope is something very different -- namely, an attempt to explore (using a mix of philosophical and psychoanalytic concepts) the meaning(s) of a haunting, elliptical utterance of Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Native-American Crow Nation: "When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened." What might Plenty Coups have meant in saying that "nothing happened" after the culture of his people had been destroyed? Lear uses this question as an occasion to reflect both on the fate of the Crow and more broadly on the human capacity to cope with the most shattering of experiences: cultural annihilation. It is a remarkable book, as profound as it is original.

Eugene O'Neill, The Iceman Cometh (written in 1939). In the wonderful American Experience biographical documentary of Eugene O'Neill, long-time TNR drama critic Robert Brustein describes The Iceman Cometh as having a "nihilistic vision," and he pairs it with Shakespeare's King Lear, calling them "twin plays." I couldn't agree more. Not to diminish the awful, wrenching greatness of Long Day's Journey into Night, the play usually ranked as O'Neill's finest, but in my view the Iceman surpasses it in both dramatic impact and humanistic depth. O'Neill's ambition in the Iceman is nothing less than to subvert one of the core assumptions of the Western philosophical (and scientific) tradition: that the true and the good are one, or at least compatible with one another. (For more on this theme, see here and here.) The Iceman, in other words, is a profoundly Nietzschean play -- and like Nietzsche's greatest works, it will shake you to the core if you let it. On paper, the play is powerful, but O'Neill's needlessly fussy stage directions and overuse of exclamation points can become a distraction. Much better, of course, is seeing it performed. Unfortunately, though, the play is rarely revived, and even more rarely revived competently. (That'll happen with a four-hour play with an extraordinarily demanding lead role and a dozen significant characters.) The 1973 film is a failure. That leaves the 1960 teleplay version, available on DVD in the magnificent Broadway Theatre Archive series, as your best bet. The image is grainy and the sound often muddy. And some of the performances (including a young and largely unknown Robert Redford in the difficult role of the tortured and treacherous Don Parritt) are uneven. But Jason Robards, in a role he perfected on Broadway, is simply electrifying as salesman Theodore Hickman ("Hickey") -- the "iceman" of the title who makes his friends miserable by insisting that they give up their pipe dreams and face the dark, unadulterated truth about themselves and the world, and who reveals in the course of the play that his own life and sanity are held together by a single, horrible, ineradicable illusion. No one who cares about fine theatre and acting -- or who is fascinated by the seemingly infinite human capacity for self-loathing and self-deception -- should miss Robards's definitive, and chilling, performance of Hickey's 25-minute confession speech in Act 4, which forms the climax of the play. (And thanks to the wonders of the Internet, you can watch it on YouTube: first here, then here, and finally here.)

I've pondered for years what to say about the Bush administration's use of torture in the years after 9/11. So far I've remained quiet about the issue because I'm so uneasy about it -- not just about what the United States has done, but also about the reactions of nearly everyone who has commented on it. On one side, the right mocks those concerned with our actions in that insufferably smug, proudly parochial tone that has marked nearly all conservative commentary about foreign affairs for the past seven years. As far as the right is concerned, we haven't tortured anyone, even though the definition of torture accepted by liberal-democratic nations around the globe (including the United States until the day before yesterday) clearly tells us that we did. 

Meanwhile, on the other side, critics (often but not always on the left) work themselves into an indignant rage. I share much of their disgust as well as the conviction that torture rarely works as a means of procuring information. At the same time, I find much of their fury -- like their tendency to describe senior members of the Bush administration as war criminals -- much too easy. The United States did not engage in torture because the Vice-President's office and the Justice Department under Bush were populated by sadistic would-be totalitarians. On the contrary, we engaged in torture for reasons deeply rooted in the troubling nature of politics itself.

In thinking through the complicated issues surrounding torture, I've looked for guidance to none other than Leo Strauss. My own views about Strauss and his influence in the United States are ambivalent, as you can see here. But I think he's at his strongest in discussing what he called the "permanent problems" of politics. This is especially true of pages 156-164 of Natural Right and History, where he examines the complexities involved in thinking about political life in moral terms.

Strauss begins by noting that Aristotle (in Book 5 of the Nicomachean Ethics) asserts, with little explanation, that natural right is changeable -- in other words, that standards of what is right and wrong vary from time to time and place to place. According to Strauss, this claim follows not from historical relativism but rather from the multi-faceted and ambiguous character of political morality itself. Simply put, political morality sometimes means commutative and distributive justice (what the parts of the political community deserve or are owed according to commonly accepted standards of fairness), while at other times political morality means the common good (what is required for the political community as a whole to survive and thrive).

Under normal circumstances, the two parts of political morality cohere enough that the tensions between them rarely show themselves. But in extreme situations -- situations in which (in Strauss's words) "the very existence or independence of a society is at stake" -- there may be "conflicts between what the self-preservation of society requires and the requirements of commutative and distributive justice. In such situations, and only in such situations, it can justly be said that the public safety is the highest law."

This, in Strauss's view, is what Aristotle meant when he asserted that natural right is changeable. Under normal circumstances, the common rules of political morality tell us that torture is simply wrong. (The example of torture is mine; Strauss focuses on espionage.) But in a sufficiently extreme situation -- when faced with an "an absolutely unscrupulous and savage enemy" -- torture may become not merely a permissible evil but a positive good that is necessary to fulfill the highest law of political morality (which is the defense of the common good).

At this point, Strauss attempts to distinguish Aristotle's subtle and supple understanding of the mutability of political morality from the similar but morally distinct views of such writers as Machiavelli and Carl Schmitt. These latter authors take their bearings "by the extreme situations in which the demands of justice are reduced to the requirements of necessity." They also seem to "derive no small enjoyment from contemplating these deviations" and are unconcerned "with the punctilious investigation of whether any particular deviation is really necessary or not." (This pretty much exactly describes the way the question of torture is handled by several writers at NRO's The Corner and by Abe Greenwald at Commentary's Contentions blog.) An Aristotelian statesman, by contrast, "takes his bearings by the normal situation and by what is normally right, and he reluctantly deviates from what is normally right only in order to save the cause of justice and humanity itself."

But the need for statesmen to make a decision about when to deviate from what is normally right creates a massive problem for decent politics in dark times. As Strauss writes,

There is no principle which defines clearly in what type of cases the public safety, and in what type of cases the precise rules of justice, have priority. For it is not possible to define precisely what constitutes an extreme situation in contradistinction to a normal situation.

In the end, the statesman needs to rely on his judgment -- on what Aristotle called practical wisdom (phronesis) and President Bush (and Stephen Colbert) called his "gut" -- in making the decision about whether and when and for how long and in what ways to deviate from what is normally right in order to "preserve the mere existence or independence of society" against its mortal enemies.

We all know what President Bush and his advisors decided. In the wake of 9/11, they (along with writers such as Charles Krauthammer) judged militant Islam to be an existential threat to the United States. And an existential threat is perhaps the clearest example of a case in which normal justice has to give way to the preservation of the common good at all costs. If we were truly confronting an existential threat -- a perpetual undetected ticking time bomb -- then it would have been immoral for those responsible for defending the common good of the United States not to torture a high-ranking al-Qaeda operative such as Abu Zubaydah in order to extract every last bit of information from him. (Even if torture rarely works, the fact that it sometimes does would be quite enough to justify its use in a genuinely dire situation.)

Judging the justice of the Bush administration's policies on torture thus requires answering a single (extremely difficult) question: Was the administration right to believe that militant Islam posed (and perhaps still poses) an existential threat to the United States? If the answer is yes, then its policies may very well have been justified and even demanded by the circumstances. If the answer is no, then its leading officials may well have been guilty of bending or breaking the law for no good reason -- most likely out of a combination of ignorance, fear, and paranoia.

So what's the answer? In the months following 9/11, I certainly thought another spectacular attack was imminent and seriously pondered the possibility of a nuclear detonation in New York City (where I worked, about two miles from Ground Zero) or Washington -- an event that would not only kill hundreds of thousands if not millions in an instant but also wipe out trillions of dollars of wealth and spark panic in cities around the world. Urban civilization itself seemed under threat.

Seven-and-a-half years later, such fears seem delusional, no doubt in large part because there have been no more attacks on the United States. Is that because the Bush administration's much-derided policies thwarted attacks that would have otherwise been carried out? Or is it because the threat was never as great as the administration feared it was? The truth is that I have no idea. And neither does anyone else writing on the topic. President Obama probably knows somewhat more, because he receives classified intelligence briefings. But we all know how unreliable those can be.

Ultimately, the retrospective view is the only one that can settle the question of whether a statesman's decision to contravene normal justice was truly moral (i.e., necessary to defend the common good). Someday, when our conflict with militant Islam is over, historians with access to information on both sides -- in Washington, but also in the Middle East and the borderlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan -- may be able to reach something approaching a definitive answer. But until then, we will have to settle for partial information and uncertainty about the Bush administration's actions -- just as we must resign ourselves to living with uncertainty about whether the Obama administration is right to reverse the more aggressive approach of his predecessor.

(Disclaimer: In drawing on Leo Strauss's ideas in this post, I do not at all mean to contribute to the inane debate about Strauss's influence Bush administration policy. In my view, Strauss provides an insightful analysis of the nature of political life in general. If his analysis helps us to make sense of recent events, then that confirms the worth of the analysis. It doesn't tell us that the analysis produced or inspired the events, at least without quite a bit of additional evidence of influence.)

Sociologist Daniel Bell once famously defined an intellectual as someone who knows how to make relevant distinctions. He might have added as a corollary: Disputation among intellectuals more often than not involves disagreement about which distinctions are relevant.

I give you Exhibit A:

In this post, I argued that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism would make a more suitable form of civil religion than the "mere orthodoxy" favored by traditionalist evangelicals and Catholics over the past two decades. Though I didn't go into the details in the post, I make the case in my book that the worst aspects of the Bush administration can be traced to the influence of these religious ideas on George W. Bush and several of his key advisors.

Ross Douthat disagrees, but not because he thinks Catholic-Christian orthodoxy had a positive influence on the 43rd president. No, according to Ross, the failures of the Bush years can be traced to . . . Moralistic Therapeutic Deism!

But wait a minute: Didn't many of the country's leading champions of orthodoxy loudly and enthusiastically support the president's "self-centered, sentimental, and panglossian" policies and pronouncements for the better part of eight years? And though I can't say I regularly watch the Oprah Winfrey Show, was that really where the absurdly overwrought American exceptionalism of Bush's second inaugural address was developed and championed? (I guess I spent too much time reading the Weekly Standard back in 2002-2003.)

To the extent that Ross wants to make an argument about the detrimental effects of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism on the broader culture (e.g., its contribution to the housing and financial bubbles), he might have a point worth pondering. But when it comes to politics, things get much trickier -- as I tried to argue in another recent post. Instead of seeing the Bush administration as a straightforward example of what happens when Moralistic Therapeutic Deism comes to power, I think it makes more sense to treat it as cautionary tale about what happens to politics and faith when religious orthodoxy seeks to serve political ends -- that is, political judgment gets distorted by otherworldly theological concepts and religion gets polluted by the all-too-human ways of the political world.

The problem with Ross's way of drawing these distinctions is that it's liable to convince orthodox believers that in the future they should work even harder to influence a sympathetic president. Instead, I hope thoughtful and serious believers like Ross will learn a very different lesson from the Bush years -- namely, that the purity of their faith no less than the health of American democracy depends on them keeping their distance from political power.

In closing, a final distinction. I can understand how my comments about Moralistic Therapeutic Deism serving as an adequate civil religion for the United States could lead readers to conclude that I'm in favor of civil religion as such. In fact, though, I agree with Ed Kilgore (and Michael Lind): liberal democratic nations in general have no need of civil religion, and liberal democratic America in particular would do just fine without it. But alas, from William Bradford to George W. Bush, political and cultural figures of nearly every persuasion have assumed that the United States both has and needs a civil religion. In the post on Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, I was taking this peculiarly American reality as a given. For the past couple of decades, Ross's theoconservative friends have argued that our civil religion should consist of an idiosyncratic combination of fervent evangelical piety and orthodox Catholic social theory. Contra Ross, I think we tried that over the past eight years and that it was a crashing failure. It is in light of that failure that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism looks like a comparatively promising alternative. But only if we assume the United States can't get along without any civil religion at all.  

The ordinary resources of empirical observation and ordinary human knowledge give us no warrant for supposing that all good things are reconcilable with each other.
--Isaiah Berlin

This quote -- a long-time favorite of mine -- came to mind when I heard that James Dobson had conceded the religious right's defeat in the culture war. Let's assume for a moment that the right has indeed been routed (which I doubt). Dobson and his admirers and allies no doubt view the event as a terrible thing -- as definitive proof that the United States is in irreversible moral and cultural decline. Yet there are powerful reasons why all American citizens, religious and secular, left and right, should greet it with cheer.

Berlin tells us why, by way of an assertion: Because good things -- and I'm taking it for granted that politics and religion are genuine human goods -- don't fit together. The world doesn't add up. Its parts clash. What is good for one sphere of life is not necessarily good for another. Goods can rarely be synthesized without losing something of value in each. Thinking and acting responsibly thus involves making trade-offs and choices among irreconcilable goods while giving up the hope of combining them in some unified, holistic vision that will inevitably do damage to its constituent parts. This was Berlin's profoundly anti-utopian, deeply pluralistic vision of human life.

There are of course Christian analogues to Berlinian pluralism -- most prominently Augustine's dualistic political theology of the city of man and the City of God. (For a powerful statement of Augustinianism by a contemporary liberal, see this recent post by Ed Kilgore at Beliefnet.) And yet the religious right, easily the most utopian movement in recent American political history, has never shown any interest in acknowledging, let alone exploring, the permanent tensions between religion and politics.

Perhaps now, with the movement in disarray, morale at an all-time low, and defeat (just possibly) having arrived, this will begin to change. If it does, members of a dissolving religious right would do well to brush up on their Augustine. If they can stand his incorrigible secularism, Berlin could also teach them a thing or two about the tragic tensions at the heart of human life, as could the writings of Daniel Bell and Michael Oakeshott. But the thinker who may be able to teach the religious right more than any other about this crucially important topic is none other than Aristotle.

In Book 3 of his Politics, Aristotle raised the question of whether and under what circumstances a good citizen can be a good human being in general (meaning someone who actualizes the peak of virtue). His answer was that it depends on (or is relative to) the character of the political community in which one is a citizen. In the worst political communities -- in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, for example -- it may very well be impossible for a good citizen to be a good human being, because citizenship in those cases requires behavior diametrically opposed to virtue.

In more decent political communities, by contrast, much more overlap will be possible: in most cases, good citizens will be capable of being good human beings, and vice versa. Yet the overlap won't be total -- because, for Aristotle, virtue at its peak involves disinterested philosophical contemplation of the eternal truth, while politics at its peak (statesmanship) demands active devotion to the common good of a particular political community. Aristotle indicated that only in an imaginary best political community would political excellence harmonize perfectly with human excellence as such. In the real world of imperfect political communities, the two will always diverge.

One need not accept Aristotle's assumptions about the content of virtue to see that his analysis can be fruitfully applied to the relationship between citizenship and piety in contemporary liberal democracies like the United States. In a liberal political community with a high degree of religious freedom, devout believers will be free within very broad limits to live their faith, and in most cases they will be quite capable of fulfilling the (relatively limited) ordinary duties of citizenship: voting, occasionally serving on juries, paying taxes, serving in the armed forces when called to defend the nation in times of war, etc. Yet even in these seemingly easy cases, there will sometimes be difficulties for the most intensely devout. The Amish in the United States and Haredi Jews in Israel refuse to serve in the military, for example. Likewise, the ritual observances of many faiths may at times make it difficult for their members to fulfill jury duty or vote. And so on.

The tensions increase exponentially as we approach the peak of each sphere: the most intense forms of piety and the most exalted forms of citizenship (which involve serving in high political office). A deeply devout Christian -- someone who places his faith at the center of his life -- will tend to think of himself first and foremost as a member of the One True Church working toward the establishment of the Kingdom of God under Jesus Christ, if not in this life, then in the next. His ultimate loyalty will be to Christ, just as the ultimate loyalty of the most observant Jew will be to God and the Torah, while a Muslim's will be to Allah and the Koran. Citizenship at its peak, by contrast, requires devotion to the laws of the political community above all else. That's why American presidents and other high officials swear an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States and not natural or divine law of any kind.

These divergent loyalties might not come into direct conflict every day, but they nonetheless stand in deep and abiding tension with one another, forever threatening to pit the theological duties of the believer against the political duties of citizen. It is possible for a person of moderate or lukewarm faith to be a great president because his spiritual convictions will give way in the event of a clash between the two spheres. But the same cannot be said of the most intense believers, whose faith may stand in the way of doing what needs to be done to secure the common good of the political community. And the opposite is equally true: The purest man of God might be capable of serving as a moderately good president, but his devotion to the Lord will prevent him from compromising with the wickedness of the world to the extent sometimes required by his office.

That's the core Aristotelian lesson about religion and politics: Our saints will not be statesmen and our statesmen will not be saints. Whether the religious right has been definitively defeated or lives on to fight another day, it can never succeed in its goals -- because those goals deny this ineradicable truth about the permanent tensions between incompatible goods.

(I should note, in closing, that the attempt to find a compromise between incompatible political and religious goods tends to produce theological monstrosities like Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD), which I discussed here. From the standpoint of liberal politics, MTD is unobjectionable; from the standpoint of serious religion, it's offensive, which is why it sends devout Christians like Rod Dreher into a tizzy. But the alternative is not the religious right's fantasy of remaking liberal politics along orthodox Christian lines -- or a medieval pipe dream about "our entire civilization" living in the light of a common moral-religious "Absolute Truth" that sets theological "limits on human conduct." The real (and perhaps only) alternative to MTD is the "Benedict Option" of devout Christians withdrawing from liberal political life to preserve their purity.)

Book, magazine, and newspaper publishers love headlines announcing the "end" of this or that -- because they sell books, magazines, and newspapers. And so we have this week's issue of Newsweek, announcing "The Decline and Fall of Christian America" in red letters laid-out in the shape of a cross on a black background. Powerful. Dramatic. Exciting. Chilling. Inside, the lead article, by Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, is titled "The End of Christian America." Really? Christian America is coming to an end? It seemed just a few years ago that we were on the verge of succumbing to a theocratic coup that was about to install a distinctly American form of Christian fascism. And now we're living through the end of Christian America? So soon? I'm so relieved! I better buy this issue of Newsweek and read that story!

But wait: Don't bother. Not only can you read the article online for free, but what you'll find if you plow through its 4,000 or so words is nothing very remarkable. Meacham quotes some widely reported statistics: For instance, 8 percent of Americans in 1990 claimed no religious affiliation, whereas now 15 percent do. Over that same 18-year period, the number of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 percentage points, from 86 to 76 percent. That's right, over four-fifths of Americans used to call themselves Christians, while now merely three-quarters of them do. And that means we're living through the end of Christian America. Or something. Eventually. Down the road. If trends continue unchanged for a very long time. I guess.

All snarking aside, what Meacham's statistics show is something far less monumental (and far more interesting) than his headline would have us believe. Fights over the role of religion in American public life nearly always concern the question of how much theology, and what style of theology, can and should be incorporated into the nation's civil religion. Will it be the theology of liberal (mainline) Protestantism, as it was through the middle decades of the twentieth century? (Meacham seems to favor a return to something along these lines.) Or will it be a synthesis of traditionalist evangelical Protestantism and orthodox Roman Catholicism, as the religious right has advocated over the past decade or so? As we learned during the presidency of George W. Bush, the problem with the latter option is that makes huge numbers of Americans (including non-Christians, those Christians who are less fervently religious, and those who aren't particularly religious at all) feel like second-class citizens for failing to conform to traditionalist Catholic-Christian moral teaching. And that has produced a backlash. Somewhat fewer Americans are identifying as Christians; somewhat more are identifying as secular. And even those who remain religiously traditionalist are a bit less likely to believe that they should work for the transformation of the nation through the medium of electoral politics.

To my mind, these are all encouraging trends. (Though they are merely trends, and so could be reversed given the right circumstances.) And yet they leave the most important and interesting question unanswered: What will provide the theological content of the nation's civil religion now that the "mere orthodoxy" of the evangelical-Catholic alliance has proven unsuitable for a pluralistic nation of 300 million people? To my mind, the most likely and salutary option is moralistic therapeutic deism. Here is the core of its (Rousseauian) catechism, in the words of sociologist Christian Smith:

1. "A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth."

2. "God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions."

3. "The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself."

4. "God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem."

5. "Good people go to heaven when they die."

Theologically speaking, this watered-down, anemic, insipid form of Judeo-Christianity is pretty repulsive. But politically speaking, it's perfect: thoroughly anodyne, inoffensive, tolerant. And that makes it perfectly suited to serve as the civil religion of the highly differentiated twenty-first century United States.

Would this mark "The End of Christian America"? Only if we define "Christian America" the way the religious right prefers to -- namely, as a nation with the soul of an orthodox Catholic-Christian church. Viewed in broader terms, a nation in which a majority embraced something like moralistic therapeutic deism would still be Christian in all kinds of important ways. Its moral and civic outlook, for example, would be a distillation of the Christian ethic of loving one's neighbor. Meanwhile, the millions of Christians who crave more from religion than New Age comfort food would be perfectly free to take advantage of their religious liberty to worship in more orthodox parishes. Hell, they might even stop talking endlessly about taking the "Benedict Option" and actually join or start a monastery. An America in which all of this is happening would still be Christian is significant senses. It just wouldn't be the kind of Christian nation that makes a theocon feel all warm and fuzzy. And that's a very good thing indeed.

UPDATE: Rod Dreher doesn't like this post at all. And why? Because if it weren't for traditionalist Christians like Dreher and Martin Luther King, Jr., there would have been no civil rights movement. Because apparently you need to be a traditionalist Christian to stand up for social justice and human rights. Gee, that's a pretty confusing way of using the term "traditionalist Christian." Let's see if I follow. All those devout Christian racists (and slave owners) in the American North and South over much of the past 400 years -- they weren't traditionalists. But the abolitionists  -- they were traditionalists. And so were Christians who protested for civil rights. But not the bigots beating those protesters to a pulp in the name of Christian tradition and authority. They weren't traditionalists. And yet, those who at this very moment proudly oppose the expansion of civil rights to gay men and women in the name of Christian tradition and authority -- they're traditionalists. As I said, this is pretty confusing. And ridiculous.

What more is there to say in the Great Gay Marriage Debate? (Start here for my first post. Then go here and here for Rod's responses. My rejoinder to Rod can be read here. Andrew Sullivan's intervention can be read here. Finally, Rod replies to both of us here.) I've spent the past few days pondering Rod's claim that I concluded my last post with "a snarky and facile summary" of his views. What I wrote is this:

Summary of debate between Damon Linker and Rod Dreher: 

Linker asks: Why is Rod so troubled by the possibility of homosexuality being accepted?

Dreher answers: Because I believe it's wrong for homosexuality to be accepted.

Am I being snarky and facile? Well, perhaps a bit too clever. But I stand by the basic claim. I'm happy, though, to say a little more about why, not only because it's important that each side of this debate understands where the other side is coming from, but also because I think it's the solemn duty of every self-respecting champion of modernity to take advantage of an opportunity to show that Alasdair "All Our Problems Would Be Solved If We Were All Thomists!" MacIntyre is full of it.  

Let's begin with a recap: Rod opposes gay marriage and thinks it would be a disaster for homosexuality to be accepted in our culture -- or rather, he thinks it will be a disaster, since he concedes that his side is going to lose the argument and that homosexuality will eventually be accepted. This whole debate started with me asking Rod why he holds these views. I asked because I wanted to hear a clear statement of the argument, which was nearly always implied but rarely ever explicitly laid out in his posts on homosexuality.

Rod's first response was to say that he holds his views because Christian scripture and tradition forbid homosexuality. In response, I pointed out that Christian scripture and tradition forbid and command lots of things that contemporary Christians (including orthodox/traditionalist Christians like Rod) ignore, discount, or explain away. In other words, appealing to scripture and tradition is insufficient to answer the question I posed. Rod still needs to provide an argument about why scripture and tradition are right to denounce homosexuality.

What is that argument? Well, first Rod claimed that the acceptance of homosexuality would signal the culmination of the "nihilistic" sexual revolution. I disputed that in my second post, as did Andrew in his. (TNR's Christopher Orr also chimed in with some strong posts of his own here and here.) I have to admit that I consider these arguments to be pretty decisive -- and I see nothing in Rod's subsequent posts (like this one, for example) to dispute them. To be sure, Rod continues to make assertions, but (as far as I can tell) he's stopped talking about, let alone arguing for, his assumptions. In other words, he's taking for granted that it's right to denounce homosexuality instead of explaining why it's right to denounce homosexuality. What follows, then, is my attempt to tease out two of these assumptions and explain why I reject them. That is, I'm going to make Rod's argument for him and then explain why I don't think it's persuasive. If I do a bad job of the first part, I trust Rod will correct me in a later post.

First, Rod seems to hold that homosexuality is contrary to (human) nature. Now, as Andrew and many others have argued, homosexuality is pervasive in nature, so this argument assumes that there is something fundamentally distinctive about human nature that precludes homosexuality. Rod and other social conservatives tend to believe that this human distinctiveness can be traced to God and the transcendent ends he assigns to us -- above all, procreation. In other words, homosexuality is wrong because it's sexual behavior cut off from the possibility of making babies.

Now, critics of this view often dive right into the trenches and start disputing claims: What about sex between sterile heterosexual couples? Is that also contrary to nature? And for that matter, don't fertile heterosexual couples engage in all kinds of sexual activities that don't lead to procreation? Aren't we all sodomists now?

These are valuable objections, but I'm going to side-step them, and not only because they've been made many times before. I'm also going to side-step them because I don't think they go to the heart of the matter. To do that, we need to ask Rod how he knows that God has given humanity the teleological goal of procreation. We've seen that it can't just be because scripture and tradition say so. Perhaps, then, it's based on a revelation? But if so, how can Rod convince those of us who haven't experienced such a revelation that it's wrong to act on homosexual desires? (Contrary to what Rod might think, this isn't an example of an insidious "emotivism" -- MacIntyre's catch-all term for deep moral disagreement in modern America. If one group of citizens base their moral beliefs on a revelation that the rest of their fellow citizens haven't experienced, the problem isn't emotivism. It's revelation.) 

Luckily for Rod, Leon Kass has suggested an answer that doesn't rely on revelation: Rod could say that we can know homosexuality is contrary to (human) nature because many heterosexuals (especially men) find the idea of homosexual intercourse (especially between men) repulsive. This is what Kass has described as "the wisdom of repugnance." Now, to be fair to Kass, he uses this argument to argue against cloning, and I have no idea if he'd endorse its use against homosexuality. But there's no reason why the logic of the position can't be applied in this way, since it's undeniably true that lots of straight people are disgusted by the thought of homosexual acts. And that, following the Kassian logic, can be taken as a sign that such acts are contrary to (human) nature and perhaps also intrinsically wrong.

But as any number of people have argued against Kass, the "yuck" response is an extremely weak basis on which to build an argument about nature because the things that disgust human beings change so much over time, and because such responses are so often wrapped up with ignorance and prejudice. I don't often draw parallels between the push for gay marriage and the earlier movement to overturn anti-miscegenation laws. (Why? Because allowing men and women of different races to marry is a much more minimal departure from received norms than allowing members of the same gender to marry.) But in this matter, the parallel is crucially important. Opponents of interracial dating and marriage no doubt felt profound disgust at the thought of blacks and whites engaging in sexual intercourse; and such responses no doubt convinced many of them that miscegenation was contrary to (human) nature. And yet here we are, a few decades later, and thankfully most of that disgust has disappeared, showing, of course, that it wasn't rooted in (human) nature at all -- except in the sense that it might be natural for human beings to fear change.

And that brings me to what I think is the core of Rod's case against homosexuality. It seems to me that Rod's opposition to gay marriage and social acceptance follows less from an argument or an assertion about the world, nature, or God than it does from a disposition or temperament -- from a disposition or temperament inclined toward fear. (In retrospect, I can see how significant and telling it is that one of the first questions I posed to Rod in my original post was "What are you afraid of?", and that Andrew fastened onto that passage in his initial response and returned to it in the title of his longer post in response to Rod. Fear has been at the center of this debate from the beginning.) 

Rod imagines a future in which homosexuality has been brought completely into the mainstream of American life, and he responds with a shudder. But why? What does he fear?

First, as I noted above, he fears change. This is perhaps the most fundamental characteristic of the conservative temperament. (And that's just one of the reasons why I think Andrew is wrong to insist on calling himself a conservative. But that's a topic for another post.) Rod fears that if our understanding of marriage changes to include homosexual unions, this bedrock institution of civilization will collapse. Pretty soon we'll have polygamy. Then before you know it, I'll be taking my golden retriever to dinner parties and introducing him as my fiancé. The assumption behind this fear is that change tends to make things worse -- that the primary thing holding civilization together is received custom. Without those limits to channel and direct and limit our actions, human beings will behave like beasts, or worse. We therefore tinker with and change those customs at our peril.

Say what you will about this view of things, try to come up with empirical examples to demonstrate its paranoia, etc. But, in my view at least, it has a certain dignity. I don't view the world that way. I don't fear that if I tell my young son that the men living together down the street are married to each other that he will join a group-sex club in high school or be any less likely to marry when he grows up, or be more likely to divorce. But as a humanist -- as a student of human history and culture -- I can understand where Rod's fear is coming from, because I've seen it before, and I'll see it again. And I can accept that nothing I say to him is likely to change his tendency to view the world in the way he does. Because temperament isn't the product of an argument; it's what leads you to find certain arguments more compelling than others.

Rod also seems to fear living in, and raising children in, a centerless society -- in a nation in which the society as a whole doesn't back up his own convictions about the meaning of marriage. Rod is afraid that without the support of the society as a whole, his children will be exposed to ideas and opened to possibilities that will corrupt them -- and he fears this because he assumes that if given the choice, human beings will choose badly. Once again, I don't share these fears -- or at least not as intensely as Rod does. But I've read widely enough and encountered enough people with such concerns to know that they have been expressed by some very impressive minds over the years (as well as by a fair share of kooks with atrocious political judgment).  

Finally, Rod fears what his new best friend (author James Kalb) calls a "tyranny of liberalism." He fears, in other words, that once homosexuality is widely accepted, the liberal state will require churches and other private organizations to stop teaching that homosexuality is a sin. Once more, I think Rod is wrong about this, and that he's being paranoid. I see no evidence that such a thing is happening, or is likely to happen, in this country, with its robust tradition of upholding near-absolute rights to freedom of speech, expression, and religious worship. But let me be perfectly clear: I'm a liberal, and I would strongly oppose any such limitations on religious rights -- and I suspect a great many of my fellow liberals would join me in opposition. Liberalism upholds freedom of thought, not freedom of the right thoughts.

So there you go: That's the best case I can make for Rod's position -- and also a bit about why I reject it. In the end, I still think that this position amounts to him saying that he rejects homosexuality because he rejects homosexuality. But that's because, in my view, all of his arguments either collapse on inspection or flow from a temperament -- an outlook on the world -- that I don't share. That probably means we're never going to convince each other to switch sides in the debate. But we can still try to understand the sources of our disagreement, which is what I've tried to do here.

UPDATE: Conor Friedersdorf has an interesting response to this post here. In very brief reply, I didn't mean to imply that I never view change skeptically. Indeed, my initial instinct was to be skeptical of the push for gay marriage. But after thinking about it for several months, and reading the arguments on both sides of the issue, I concluded that there was no strong argument against it, and no reason to fear it. Why is that? And why does someone like Rod look at those same arguments and conclude the opposite? I think it's temperament: Rod is more inclined than I am to assume the worst about change, which is where the fear comes in. So yes, I'm often skeptical or suspicious of change -- but I'm also skeptical or suspicious of my skepticism and suspicion of change.