The Neocon Reader

A great review in Salon about The Neocon Reader by Ann Marlow:

"My liberal friends asked how I could support the candidate of the Christian right, but Kerry came off as so plastic and corporate, so backpedaling and two-faced, that by election night I felt that wearing a Bush button was a punk rock gesture. If not for Christian fundamentalists, after all, we probably wouldn't have punk rock. Or rap, Goth fashion, skateboarding and lots of recent art. Strong art comes from cultural ferment, from the clash of ideas, not from homogeneity. Liberals have failed to recognize that the "diversity" they so celebrate includes people who disagree with them -- churchgoers and mosque-goers, pro-lifers and hunters.
And the life has gone out of liberalism as a result. One of the less well-known contributors to The Neocon Reader, the Portuguese political theorist João Carlos Espada, notes that the most successful liberal regimes resulted from "a combination of and a tension between religion and philosophy." "A liberal order," Espada sagely notes, "will be the more successful the less it aims at total supremacy." Those who inveigh against "the religious right" don't consider how dull a country we would have if everyone actually did think like them. A purely blue-stated America would be kind of like Europe (but, alas, without the great food and shoes).
Which brings us to the annoying cult of the Continent. "Europe doesn't have Christian fundamentalists," my liberal friends sneer, but then Europe doesn't have much in the way of a living popular culture either. They import their music, fashion and dance forms either from us or various countries of color, oppression and religiosity. They imitate our streetwear, our body language and our movies, and they'd hardly have any artists at all if they didn't subsidize them. Take Berlin, vaunted as a new boho art capital. The whole city has about the same volume of cultural ferment and creativity as one square block of the East Village in the '80s. It's hard to even find a cool T-shirt there. I had no trouble at all, however, finding young people who were upset that the death penalty was applied in the Nuremberg trials. Not because they were Nazi sympathizers, but because they thought capital punishment was barbaric. And here I'd spent decades believing that the only problem with Nuremberg was that they didn't apply the death sentence to enough of the Nazis. But this Rumsfeldian moral clarity is exactly what the left now hates and eschews, to the point where no one could figure out what Kerry's policy was on much of anything except getting elected. And when the left becomes mealy-mouthed, trimming its sails to catch the faintest hint of an electoral breeze, it loses its vaunted moral superiority... In fact, the main reason that neocons inspire so much venom, as British journalist Michael Gove explains in his contribution, is that they've stolen the left's thunder. "Because neoconservatism places human rights, democracy, and liberal principles at the heart of its foreign-policy vision, the left have become angered that they no longer have a monopoly on the rhetoric of values.
The left cannot abide the twin reverses of losing sole possession of the moral high ground and being proved wrong in the realm of action." What is a liberal to do when a Republican president says, as ours did last week, "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world?" (And what are liberals left to say when 8 million Iraqis risk their lives to show that they love liberty every bit as much as Americans?) Well, if you're desperate to differentiate your position, you can try to paint reality so that tyranny looks a little better and democracy looks a little worse. In my view, this has been the strategy of the mainstream American press ever since 9/11."