Review of The Theocons by Damon Linker (Joshua Muravchik, Commentary)
God Squad (Joshua Muravchik, Commentary)
In short, the theocons and their allies, whether right or wrong in their beliefs, are far from having brought about a more sanctified America. If anything, they would seem to be fighting a rear-guard action against the relentless liberalization of norms.
So why this book? The answer would appear to be that whatever has happened to the United States, something has certainly happened to Damon Linker. Around the time he went to work for First Things in 2001—he was then also writing for other conservative journals, including Policy Review, National Review, and COMMENTARY—he penned a lengthy encomium to Pope John Paul II, whose many writings stood in Linker’s judgment as “a reminder of the greatness of which the human mind is capable when it sets itself to the task of understanding.” Five years later, the Pope appears in Linker’s book only as a stubborn reactionary.What happened, clearly, is that (for reasons unexplained) Damon Linker has turned Left, and this leftward turn has launched him on a crusade—the term is inevitable—to unmask and undo the insidious influence of the dogma to which he himself once succumbed. The sharpness of this turn is apparent not only in his attitudes but in his ferocious rhetoric. Thus, he refers to U.S. foreign policy as the work of “the world’s God-intoxicated hegemon.” He accuses Michael Novak of having once been a “rabid populist,” Neuhaus of “making moral judgments in a condition of self-imposed ignorance of the facts,” and theocons in general of viewing “the modern family [with] abomination.” Especially virulent is his treatment of Catholicism:
All the early modern liberals viewed the Catholic Church as the greatest obstacle to establish free government in the Western world. . . . Catholicism seemed to be the religious “faction” least likely to play by the rules of a pluralistic liberal order. These fears were confirmed in Europe during the 19th and early 20th centuries, when the Church became the most powerful reactionary force on the continent. . . . [Today] the Church remains (and under Pope Benedict XVI is likely to remain) a profoundly authoritarian institution.
One cannot help wondering how Linker would square these sweeping judgments, especially the last, with the fact that more than 90 percent of the world’s countries with majority Catholic populations—including those in Africa, Asia, and Latin America—practice democracy today. But one wonders in vain. Throughout, he spends much more time tracing the ascendancy of the supposed cabal and describing the peril it poses to American democracy than in debating the ideas of his subjects, which he takes to be self-evidently malign.
It's always interesting to watch such young firebrand scribes (toss in David Brock as another example) go from scorching the earth on one side of a debate to scorching the earth on the other. You have to wonder about the stability of their belief system (and their inherent intellectual seriousness) in the first place, not to mention if there was some triggering event that drove them to turn their rage against their one-time intellectual allies.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 12/08/06 17:38 | Books/Culture | Technorati
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