Conservatives and Islamists, together again for the first time

Amazingly good article by Andrew Sullivan in The New Republic. It's long, but I recommend reading the whole thing.

The article is about Dinesh D'Souza's new book, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11. This is the book in which D'Souza claims that American conservatism and Islamism must make common cause against their true enemy, secular liberalism.

Like I said, the whole article is a must-read, but here's an excerpt from the ending:

The [American 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 real significance, the only significance, of D'Souza's book 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. Given the radical transformation of American conservatism in the last six years, the idea of fusing Islamism and Christianism on a global stage is not such a surprising development. It remains a long shot, of course. Some leaders of the religious right are not as cynical as D'Souza. Some even believe in their God more than they believe in their conservatism. Others on the right still remember a conservatism rooted in individual autonomy, limited government, religious freedom, and cultural optimism--not in faith-based big government and civilizational despair.

In some ways, though, D'Souza's global synthesis must be tempting. It deeply enrages the liberals whom conservatives now exist to enrage. And 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, premodern vision of mankind and religion. Whether the right decides to resolve its own contradictions by choosing this promising but dark global path is anyone's guess. But they want to win the war that they are currently losing. One response is to broaden the enemy and change the rules. If that means an attack on America itself, so be it.

That chilled me to the bone.

But it's true. D'Souza has spoken a plain truth, which is that many American conservatives hold beliefs that are not too different from those of hard-line Islamists. And the only thing saving our Enlightenment civilization from destruction may be that James Dobson and Osama bin Laden worship different gods. Check out the full article...