D'Souza's Trojan Horse — part 6 — VOICES for REASON

[Last time I began discussing conservative responses to D'Souza's book, focusing on the review by Andrew Sullivan; let's see what kind of reception the book got from other conservative intellectuals. ]

In taking the wider perspective on the book, Sullivan was very much an outlier. Many other reviewers missed the fundamental issues. Critical reviews in conservative publications challenged, for the most part politely, the book’s contradictions and fuzziness. They picked apart D’Souza’s factual errors and tendentious, collage-like approach to quotations. Some said that he fell far short of demonstrating his case. Some were even troubled by D’Souza’s soft spot for Islamists — evidenced by passages such as:

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 Claremont Review of Books published a review by Jonah Goldberg that captures the tone and attitude of several such reviewers. Goldberg came away from the book with mixed feelings. After poking a few holes in D’Souza’s argument, Goldberg writes:

It needs to be said that the problem with D’Souza’s case is one of emphasis. If one were to make a list of important reasons why the Muslim world or Islamists in particular want to kill us, just about every reasonable person would put the D’Souza thesis on the list, though partisans of particular schools might rank it higher or lower depending on their agendas. But very few would rank our alleged pagan depravity at the top of the list. And virtually no one, save D’Souza himself, would say that our pagan depravity is pretty much the entire list.

And what about the book’s political “solution”?

D’Souza’s argument for reaching out to moderates and traditionalists in the Islamic world is a defensible approach given the paucity of alternatives. The problem, as critics often very capably demonstrate, is that there is also a severe paucity of moderates and traditionalists on whom the U.S. can rely. So, we’ve got a big problem. The Left wants to say we don’t really have a problem at all. And some on the Right want to make it much bigger than it is. Unfortunately, D’Souza’s analysis doesn’t succeed at finding a defensible middle ground. But he deserves credit for trying.

Mark Steyn, a syndicated columnist, came at the issue from a similar angle, explaining that: “I agree, up to a point” in that D’Souza

makes a good observation about pornography: every society has it, but you used to have to pull your hat down and turn your collar up and skulk off to the seedy part of town. Now it’s provided as a service in your hotel room by every major chain. That’s a small sign of a big shift.

Steyn thinks that while D’Souza’s analysis of American society has merit, the book’s solution will not end the Islamist threat. “Look, if it would persuade ‘em [the jihadists] to hang up the old suicide-bomber belts,” Steyn says, “I’d lay off the Tupac CDs and Charlie Sheen sitcoms and Britney Spears navel piercings.” But, Steyn adds, “Where I part company is in his belief that this will make any difference” to the war on terror. Steyn believes that D’Souza’s proposal for an accommodation with Muslims would be “the right’s strain of appeasement and just as doomed” as that of the left.

Yet he comes around, in his own way, to D’Souza’s basic message: “For the West to reverse the gains of the cultural left” — i.e., what religious conservatives see as our supposed cultural decadence  – “would not endear us to Islam but would make us better suited to resisting its depredations.” To stand up to them, in other words, we still need to overthrow the debauched secularism of American society.

In favor of what alternative?

Ultimately the answer for many conservatives, including nominally non-religious ones, is “traditional” moral values and faith. The principle that D’Souza stands for is the same one that so many conservatives share — regardless of disputes over methods or how far to take the end. Since they widely agree that our major cultural problems stem from secularism, and since none offers a reasoned defense of the virtue of an individualist secular society, the book has faced no real challenge to its basic message that (paraphrasing the Muslim Brotherhood, a wellspring of the jihadist movement): Religion is the solution. The criticisms of D’Souza’s argument have been fundamentally impotent.

This is also why, angry though some conservatives may be with D’Souza, the implications of his theocratic program have not caused him to be drummed out of the movement. The Conservative Book Club carried the book, which also made it onto the New York Times Bestseller List. Indeed, D’Souza himself has lost none of his superstar cachet.

After a furious review in the New York Times Book Review by Alan Wolfe, a liberal professor, William F. Buckley Jr. swooped in to reinforce D’Souza. Buckley’s letter to the editors offered his blessing of the author, whom he called “a lively and curious, independent and scholarly young man.” In response to the flurry of negative reviews from conservatives, National Review’s web site published D’Souza’s detailed, four-part reply to his critics. A cruise organized by that magazine featured him as one of its headlining speakers, and he has hardly lacked for speaking invitations. D’Souza continues to pull in large crowds on the lecture circuit, and now has a column at Townhall.com, a popular online hub of conservative commentary.

If D’Souza’s goal was to test the resistance that mainstream conservatives might offer to his religious agenda, he now has ample reason for confidence. The annoyed but impotent reaction of mainline conservatives points to a fault line within that movement. Conservatism was never an intellectual, or even an ideologically coherent, movement. The closest it came to a defined purpose was by negation: to retard whatever socialist-statist policies the liberals were advocating. The only fire remaining in conservatism today emanates from religionists like D’Souza. They have a real ideological program — abhorrent though it is — that re-imagines America as the land of the obedient and the home of the faithful. And for the last few decades, they have worked to seize the helm. The Enemy at Home signals their ambitiousness. They are the driving force behind an increasingly more explicit religious platform, advancing without resolute opposition within the movement. This suggests that the direction of conservatism is becoming inseparable from the gathering tide of religion in American politics.

We must face the meaning of this trend. While American religionists may seek power peacefully and gradually, their ultimate goal is to exercise suffocating control over individual lives. Some Americans express revulsion at what they regard as the distinctive perversity of Islamist regimes — the public stonings, the death sentences for blasphemy, the authoritarian control — while comforting themselves in the belief that Christianity couldn’t lead to a totalitarian society (though it once did). We should remember that in spirit and methodology, religious conservatism in America is a blood relation of those hateful Islamist regimes.

Should D’Souza and his ilk make further strides, we may find ourselves enmeshed in an incremental “Talibanization” of America — based on the ideals, not of the Koran, but of the New Testament.

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Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6

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I’d like to thank Dr. Onkar Ghate, Dr. Yaron Brook, and Thomas A. Bowden for their editorial input and guidance on this article.