Excommunication for thee...
Alan Wolfe's January 21 New York Times review of Dinesh D'Souza's The Enemy At Home issued a dictate to conservatives: If you "have any sense of honor, distance [yourselves], quickly and cleanly, from the Rishwain research scholar at the Hoover Institution."
Two weeks later William Buckley and George Gilder dissented from Wolfe's dictate in letters to the editor of the Times Book Review. (Based on the letters, I doubt that either the estimable WFB or Gilder has read D'Souza's book, though Gilder's letter at least implies that he has.) In his letter WFB genially countermanded Wolfe's dictate: "As commander-in-chief of decent and honorable American conservatives, I take this occasion to overrule Wolfe’s reprobation, and to advise him to curb his inclination to act as universal censor for the book-reading world."
I took the occasion of Wolfe's review to note the revulsion that D'Souza's book occasioned in me. Since noting my revulsion toward the book here, I have carefully reread it for an essay on it that will appear in the forthcoming issue of the New Criterion. I have reread parts of the book several times. Having been a fan of D'Souza's earlier work, I am astounded by what a bad book it is.
In the new issue of the Weekly Standard, Peter Berkowitz addresses Wolfe's dictate: "Excommunication for thee..." Berkowitz is a superb essayist; I think that he fairly states the gist of D'Souza's book as well as of Wolfe's review of it. Berkowitz does not dissent in principle from Wolfe's dictate. Rather, he finds Wolfe to be a hypocrite. Berkowitz argues that Wolfe himself has engaged in the precise kind of indecency that Wolfe finds D'Souza guilty of.
For my own purposes, I was interested in Berkowitz's take on D'Souza's book. Wolfe's review does not elicit any defense of D'Souza's book by Berkowitz:
There is ample reason to reject D'Souza's central theses. He contends that the "cultural left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11," but he provides no systematic inquiry and little evidence in support of so extreme an accusation. Moreover, his contention is undermined by his own discussion of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian-born intellectual father of radical Islam. For Qutb famously was scandalized by the popular culture he encountered at a church social in America in the late 1940s, two decades, on D'Souza's own account, before the emergence in the 1960s of the contemporary cultural left. Contrary to D'Souza, the jihadists hate America not in the first place because of feminism and egalitarianism, but because of our classical liberal beliefs in individual freedom and equality under the law, and their reverberations throughout all aspects of American society and culture.As I point out in my essay on D'Souza's book, once upon a time not so very long ago D'Souza himself rejected the blurring of these critical issues.Furthermore, D'Souza's assertion that left and right in America inhabit different moral universes distorts the situation. There is no doubt that tempers today are short and some policy differences do run deep. But generally, the disputes between right and left in America are not over rival conceptions of the political good but rather over competing ideas of what policies best serve individual freedom and equality under law.
As for D'Souza's charge that the cultural left represents a "domestic insurgency," it recklessly conflates disagreement, even vehement disagreement, which citizens are nonetheless inclined to settle through debate and elections, with war, which adversaries are disposed to resolve through death and destruction. Perhaps, as D'Souza asserts, some on the left, including some perched in and pontificating from high places, remain so convulsed with Bush hatred that in their hearts they would rather see America defeated in Iraq than the Bush administration vindicated. Yet it would still be wrong to confuse a fellow citizen's twisted passions with the murderous hatred of al Qaeda jihadists and Baathist insurgents.
To claim that by promoting, among other things, abortion, gay marriage, pornography, and atheism, the cultural left presents a threat to America as grave as that posed by radical Islam is seriously wrong and foolishly divisive. To make such an argument while America is at war with a fanatical adversary who regards all Americans as combatants and who seeks not concessions or reforms but America's annihilation is to blur critical issues when the rediscovery of our common ground is what is urgently called for.
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