I agree. But it’s entirely consistent with a strain of strident, militant, degenerate “conservatism”.
[quote=“Andrew Sullivan: review of D’Souza’s The Enemy at Home"”]American conservatism is in crisis. That much is almost universally clear. But the next period in American politics will be determined not least by how clearly we understand the crisis of the right. […]
The crisis, rather, is of a different kind. It is intellectual, and it is deeper than anything captured by the conventional categories. The sole merit of Dinesh D’Souza’s new book is that it acknowledges this intellectual collapse, even as it is itself a document of that collapse; and it proposes a new way forward. Whatever else may be said about The Enemy at Home – and the maledictions from left and right have been ferocious – it has at least the courage to pursue the logic of Bush-era conservatism all the way to its end. In this sense, it is a mainstream conservative book, in its own way even a visionary one, expanding on the direction that American conservatism has taken and daring it to continue aggressively on that very path.
What is that path? At its core is a deepening rejection of cultural and philosophical modernity. D’Souza believes that the defining new distinction in American politics is no longer between the economic right and the economic left. The size of government and its role as a guardian of the public welfare are increasingly dead issues, or issues where no vital energy crackles. D’Souza rightly holds that the real divide in the new century is between authority and autonomy, between faith-based politics and individual freedom. And in this struggle at the level of first principles, D’Souza chooses his own side. He is at war with the modern West. If forced to choose between a theocratic order that upheld traditional morality and a secular order that saw such morality marginalized, D’Souza is with the former. He puts it more graphically himself: “Yes, I would rather go to a baseball game or have a drink with Michael Moore than with the grand mufti of Egypt. But when it comes to core beliefs, I’d have to confess that I’m closer to the dignified fellow in the long robe and prayer beads than to the slovenly fellow with the baseball cap.”
The Enemy at Home is essentially an unpacking of that extraordinary confession. D’Souza argues that there are only two choices for a human being to make in the twenty-first century with respect to “core beliefs”: “traditional morality” and what he calls “liberal morality.” Traditional morality, in D’Souza’s view, “is based on the notion that there is a moral order in the universe, which establishes an enduring standard of right and wrong. All the major religions of the world agree on the existence of this moral order. There is also a surprising degree of unanimity about the content of this moral order.”
[…]
It is crucial to remember that, for all the conservative criticism of The Enemy at Home, this argument is just as central to the base of the current Republican Party as it is to this book. In this respect, The Enemy at Home is an utterly unremarkable exploration of what theoconservatism really requires. It demands that individual autonomy be sacrificed for obedience to the external moral order. Theoconservatism refuses to accept the notion that government can ever aspire to be neutral with respect to competing visions of morality.[/quote]
:roflmao: