Recently at a "mainstream conservative" website that I sometimes frequent, they were all in a lather over Anne Coulter's much publicized remark about John Edwards. Most conservatives seem perfectly fine with it when Anne is screeching to kill more Arabs, but how dare she besmirch conservatism with here crude antics? The purge of Coulter has begun.
But something else at the website surprised me. Some were also, at the same time, trying to write Dinesh D'Souza out of the movement. Steven Hayward wrote, "Finally, I have a new category for a certain kind of right-wing polemicist: I'm going to call them “Ann D'Souzas,” or “Dinesh Coulters.” And I'm not going to discuss them. It ends here. No – don't even try. Just forget it. Who?" There you have it, a two for the price of one purge.
What is going on here, I wondered. The last time I checked, Dinesh was a neocon sub-deity, along with the likes of Rich Lowry and Jonah Goldberg, waiting to ascend to the heights of neocon deity currently occupied by Frum, Perle, Wolfowitz et al. What had poor Dinesh done to warrant this fall from grace? I knew there was some controversy over his latest book, but I had clearly missed this memo. So I enquired.
D'Souza's new book basically suggests that American cultural decadence and its exportation are a (the?) root cause of Islamic anger toward America. By conservative reckoning, the fault for moral decadence can be clearly laid at the feet of the cultural left. Voil, there you have it. The cultural left is at least partially or largely to blame for 9/11.
While this thesis could surely be taken too far, it does deserve some consideration. American/Western cultural imperialism and finger wagging often carried out by the UN as the book demonstrates (Per the reviews. I haven't yet read it.), is bound to cause resentment just as military imperialism does. To what extent Muslims would resent America and the rest of the West for being infidels even if we weren't churning out cultural drudge is a debatable question. It is too bad that it usually can not be debated rationally and theologically even, outside the polemic context of saber rattlers on one side and apologist on the other.
I was instructed that the problem with Dinesh's book is that it went too far. It was a sloppy thesis, and failed to account for evidence to the contrary. But this objection did not ring true to me on a couple of accounts.
Since when has the modern right been opposed to gratuitous assaults on the left? Hyperbolic condemnation of the left has been the stock and trade of conservatism for years. Some of us in paleoconservative/paleolibertarian circles have been pointing out for a long time that one of the problems with the modern right is that it defines itself too much, if not primarily, as being anti-left instead of pro-right. We even had a little help in making this distinction from the afore-mentioned neocon sub-deity, Jonah Goldberg, who correctly noted this: “Within conservatism, however, there are enormous philosophical arguments about the proper role of the state. This debate isn’t merely between libertarians and social conservatives. It’s also between conservatives who are u2018anti-left' versus those who are u2018anti-state.'” (The accuracy/utility of the left-right dichotomy is for another day. Bear with me, and I think you will see the point.)
This primarily anti-left dynamic is much in evidence in the Iraq War debate. Some anti-left conservatives can not get beyond the perception in their minds that opposing wars is what leftists do. They can not fathom that a conservative could oppose a war. Here anti-leftism as embodied by hippie leftist war protestors, trumps a pro-right desire for small, limited government.
Another reason their objection did not ring true is because mass market political books on both the left and right are full of sloppy theses. (Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks whopper comes to mind.) So why single out Dinesh? Had he written that the left is the cause of heart disease, a sloppy thesis, I'm sure some might have snickered, but it would have been one more opportunity to bash the left. I doubt it would have prompted calls for a purge.
The other complaint seems to be that D'Souza thesis amounts to "blaming the victim." First of all, when did conservatives start using that language? I thought only feminists pulled the "blaming the victim" card. You can not make self-inspection off limits and expect to have a rational debate. But post-9/11, the "blame the victim" objection has not primarily been raised regarding American cultural decay, and I think most of Dinesh's new antagonists know that. It has been raised on the right almost exclusively regarding our foreign policy. After 9/11, any critical examination of American foreign policy, especially with regard to the Middle East, was immediately greeted by cries of “blaming the victim.” Some knuckleheads were even tossing around the s (sedition) and t (treason) words. But one would have to be totally blinded by ideology and/or hate of Arabs/Muslims to not recognize that America's military presence in the Middle East and our clearly one-sided support of Israel contributes to Islamic resentment. In fact, this is the real flaw of the D'Souza book. I suspect that cultural imperialism is much less of a motivating factor than is military and diplomatic imperialism. However, the neocon circles that D'Souza travels in and the generalized atmosphere on the modern right will not allow this aspect to be explored. Hence, serious debate has been greatly hindered.
I developed a clearer picture of what is really going on here when I read that Srdja Trifkovic, the most vocal Muslin antagonist in the Chronicles Magazine orbit, had also gotten in on the game of attacking Dinesh. Dinesh seems to have deserved the criticism from Trifkovic since he lacked some basic knowledge of the Koran, but that is beside the point. The real nature of his transgression was made clearer to me.
The uniformity of the condemnation suggests to me that the real issue is that Dinesh has violated some unwritten taboo. By fingering the American left, he partially gives a pass to Islam, the designated enemy. (Think George Orwell's 1984 and the "two-minute hate.") I suspect that the real problem some have with D'Souza's book is not then a sloppy thesis or that it "blames the victim." It is that poor Dinesh has strayed from the tidy little official conservative narrative of evil, hateful “Islamofascists,” and a pure, uniquely virtuous America. Modern American conservatives are very comfortable with tidy little morality plays, note the Lincoln myth, and are very uncomfortable with moral complexity.
This is a historically anomalous position for conservatives. (The Rockwellian objection that there has never been a "good" conservatism is noted.) Part of the historical conservative rejection of "ideology" (Again this topic deserves an article of its own.) arises from the recognition that the world is a complicated place, and can not be easily explained with simple morality tales. For an honest debate to proceed, the potential contribution of American's heavy-handed foreign policy to Islamic anger must be considered. It can not be taken off the table or declared off limits.
Make no mistake; I am not a fan of Dinesh. Ironically, I believe he was guilty in the past of some purging of his own. His book The End of Racism took some not so subtle shots at paleoconservatives whom he fingered as racists and once again tried to write out of the movement. (Periodic neocon purges are as predictable as the tide.) I wonder how Dinesh feels now that he is on the other side of the purge. And isn't it sweetly ironic that one of the people who is modestly defending him, is someone from the group he previously wanted to purge?
Maybe we can all learn a lesson from this. These seemingly never ending purges of people for thought crimes give me the creeps. Perhaps that is why I instinctively defended Dinesh at the website despite his past transgressions. It is time for a reasonable debate, not hypervigilance for off limits thoughts.
March 7, 2007
