D'Souza's Trojan Horse — part 5 — VOICES for REASON

[In part three, I suggested that The Enemy at Home is an ideological trial balloon intended to test the disposition of D'Souza's other target audience: the intellectual gatekeepers and arbiters of mainstream conservatism. First, let's consider what I take to be one of the more penetrating reviews of the book; next time, I'll talk about several other conservative reactions to D'Souza and their broader significance.]

Reflecting on the book, many conservative reviewers displayed a distinct unease, a kind of intellectual heartburn signifying unidentified and troubling issues beneath the surface.

One particularly insightful review, by Andrew Sullivan, appeared in The New Republic. Sullivan indignantly attacks the theocratic, anti-freedom vision for society that D’Souza shares with Islamists. The chief value of Sullivan’s analysis is that he locates the book within a wider perspective. In its assault on secular society, he writes, the book pursues the “logic of Bush-era conservatism all the way to its end.” He sees it as a symptom of a profound intellectual crisis within the conservative movement.

The [conservative] movement is now centrally dedicated to the proposition that secularism is the primary enemy, that a neutral public square is a pernicious illusion, that faith of any kind is always and everywhere preferable to no faith or sincere doubt, that the distinction between religion and politics is at heart a false one. Its problem, however, is that it is also dedicated to a war against the most violent form of theocratic politics in recent decades, in the shape of Islamist terror. How to fight theocracy abroad while sustaining and celebrating the enmeshment of church and state at home? It is a paradox that is leading America’s conservatives and Republicans into a dead end of their own choosing, into a war they seem to be losing on both the home front and abroad.

The book’s “real significance, its only significance, . . . is that it offers the army of the saints a radical and new way out — a last desperate bid to rescue what is beginning to look like a doomed adventure.”

D’Souza’s proposed global synthesis of the faithful, Sullivan writes, “must be tempting” to the “theocons,” because it “deeply enrages the liberals whom the conservatives now exist to enrage.” He locates the book as a development within conservatism’s “deepening rejection of cultural and philosophical modernity.” It is “the obvious logical next step toward severing conservatism from its roots in the post-Enlightenment world and welding it permanently to an older, pre-modern vision of mankind and religion.”

But Sullivan gives the “idea of fusing Islamism and Christianism” far too much credence as a sincere goal. For Sullivan it is a serious, albeit tenuous “long shot” program for conservatives to gain political power. He’s right that this proposed union is instrumental to their grab for power, but it is a minor, indirect element. Its function is to probe how parochial religious Americans are: would they swallow a bonding with other “people of faith” as such, or will only strictly Christian appeals work on them? This aspect is better understood as part of the book’s role as an intellectual trial balloon.

Sullivan rightly diagnoses the conservative movement as intellectually bankrupt, but he misreads the religionist thrust for power as a last-ditch effort. Perhaps religious conservatives appear desperate, if one takes seriously D’Souza’s call for a global fusing of faiths. And if the conservative movement splinters politically, under the stress of its own contradictions, that may temporarily retard the religionists’ advance within the movement. But the religionists have no reason to feel desperate, to the extent they understand D’Souza’s book as aiming at a larger, long-range mission. They have every reason to expect eventual success, given the kind of reviews the book received from conservatives other than Sullivan.

Next time: I’ll turn to the response of other conservative commentators.