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THEOCON ARTISTS Michelle Goldberg FI Apr-May 07 Pages 2/27/07 1:22 PM Page 61 REVIEWS “culture of life” rhetoric to explain his THEOCON ARTISTS opposition to abortion; also, a number of the president’s most high-profile judi- cial nominees have been conservative Michelle Goldberg Catholics. Indeed, the opposition to con- traception that now pervades the entire The Theocons: Secular America under Siege, by Damon Linker Christian Right (and the Bush adminis- tration) represents the triumph of a dis- (New York: Doubleday, 2006, ISBN 0-385-51647-9) 272 pp. Cloth tinctly Catholic idea. $26.00. Neuhaus’s own Protestant back- ground probably helped him in fashion- ing an interdenominational anti-secular coalition. He began his career as a Lutheran minister, and, even as he embraced Catholic doctrine during the 1980s, he didn’t officially convert until ften fascinating, sometimes frus- tainable; that for most of its history the 1990. Submitting to the Church fulfilled trating, Damon Linker’s book United States has been a thoroughly something in him. Linker quotes him as OThe Theocons: Secular America Christian nation founded on absolute writing, “Do I have a felt need for under Siege is the story of the reac- moral principals that make no sense authority, for obedience, for submis- tionary priest Richard John Neuhaus outside of a religious context…[and] sion? But of course. Obedience is the and the clique surrounding his maga- that the liberal and secular drift of rightly ordered disposition towards zine, First Things. It traces how these American culture since the 1960s is the truth, and submission is subordination men, whose politics swung from Far Left result of an organized effort by liberal of the self to that by which the self is to Far Right around a steady axis of and secular elites in the nation’s educa- claimed.” Jacobinlike fury, helped craft the intel- tion and media establishment to impose His submission has not been total; lectual architecture of the religious their corrupt views on the nation Neuhaus, unlike the Vatican, was an Right and guide the domestic policy of through antidemocratic means.” In this ardent supporter of the Iraq War. Still, the Bush administration. A former First view, only the re-Christianization of pol- this is an enormously telling quotation, Things editor, alarmed by the antidemo- itics and culture can save the nation especially when coupled with what cratic ambitions of his ex-colleagues, from its own dissoluteness. Linker calls Neuhaus’s “often violent hos- Linker is uniquely positioned to report In challenging conventional wisdom tility to those temporal authorities who on the movement, and his book is very about the role of evangelical activism on fail (in his judgment) to live up to the valuable for elucidating an underreport- America’s rightward drift, Linker mildly metaphysical ideal.” Erich Fromm de- ed aspect of the rise of Christian con- overstates the influence of the First scribed just such a mix of rebellion and servatism. Reading it, though, one occa- Things coterie. Most of the ideas he longing for self-abnegation as compo- sionally wishes for more context, attributes to them, including their revi- nents of the authoritarian character in because the ideology Linker traces has sionist history of the United States, his landmark 1941 book Escape From darker antecedents than he reveals. were percolating in fundamentalist Freedom. “[T]he authoritarian charac- Linker argues that, while the reli- Protestant circles at the same time that ter’s fight against authority is essentially gious Right is usually understood pri- they started appearing in Neuhaus’s defiance,” Fromm wrote. “It is an attempt marily as an evangelical phenomenon, writings. It makes more sense to view to assert himself and to overcome his own many of the ideas animating the move- the Protestant Right and the Catholic feeling of powerlessness by fighting ment came from the group of largely Right as two parts of the same move- authority, although the longing for sub- Catholic thinkers clustered around ment, with significant overlap and mission remains present. ...There are Neuhaus. He sets out their ideology, cross-pollinization between them (as many individuals and political move- which he calls “theoconservatism,” at well as tensions and contradictions). ments that are puzzling to the superficial the beginning of the book: “Theo- Nevertheless, Linker convincingly observer because of what seems to be an conservatism teaches that a secular shows that Neuhaus and his comrades inexplicable change from ‘radicalism’ to society is both undesirable and unsus- had a significant role in bringing these extreme authoritarianism.” once-antagonistic groups together. “The Neuhaus, along with his longtime col- Michelle Goldberg is the author of theocons would provide evangelicals laborator Michael Novak, underwent Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian and other culturally alienated Chris- exactly this kind of change. Both began Nationalism. She is a contributing tians and Jews with ideas and rhetoric their careers as 1960s leftists given to writer at Salon.com, and her work to challenge secular politics at a funda- pondering the violent overthrow of the has appeared in Rolling Stone, The mental level—and to contend, for the American government. Like many total- New York Observer, The (UK) Guardian, first time, for political and cultural itarians before them, they lurched from In These Times, Newsday, and many power,” he writes. Neuhaus advised sentimental reverence for “the people” other publications. George W. Bush, who adopted Catholic to callous rage when said people failed 61 http://www.secularhumanism.org April/May 2007 FI Apr-May 07 Pages 2/27/07 1:22 PM Page 62 REVIEWS to live up to their own exacting ideals. adversarial relationship to the culture, lic’s Web site with a First Things con- At one point in the 1960s, Linker writes, provoking the perception that Jews really tributor, he wrote, “In his insistent Novak speculated that, if Americans are . strangers in their own country,” he emphasis on the need for order, authori- couldn’t be made to recognize the need wrote. ty, and tradition, as well as in his warn- for revolution, “it might become neces- Linker doesn’t delve too deeply into ings about the psychological and social sary to place ‘the American majority . this aspect of Neuhaus’s thought, but it ravages of modern skepticism, Neuhaus for a change, in the line of fire.’” seems germane to his broader ideology, echoes such luminaries of the European Neuhaus’s and Novak’s politics would because his words echo centuries of (and Catholic) Right as Joseph de change drastically by the 1980s, but their clerical authoritarianism. Indeed, if Maistre, Juan Donoso Cortés, and (once characters seem to have remained con- there’s one thing missing from The again) Carl Schmitt, all of whom were stant. An infamous 1996 issue of First Theocons, it’s a reckoning with the staunch opponents of liberalism and Things, titled “The End of Democracy? antecedents of Neuhaus’s philosophy. To modernity.” (More than that, Schmitt The Judicial Usurpation of Politics,” tip- what extent does theoconservatism was an unrepentant member of the Nazi toed toward a call for armed revolution derive from the same sources as old- Party.) Linker’s book would have been against the Clinton “regime.” A few years fashioned clerical fascism? Neuhaus richer if he had grappled with this intel- later, Neuhaus’s curdled populism led him and friends are not, after all, the first lectual history—a history fundamentally to speculate, albeit with many caveats, on group of intellectuals to yearn for a spir- hostile to the foundational ideas of the power and subversive influence of itualized national unity that would American democracy. Nevertheless, he American Jewry in an essay titled, erase democracy’s contradictions and has written an important inside account “Whatever You Do, Don’t Mention the overcome enervating decadence. of the ultramontane radicalism that Jews.” The Jewish devolution to public Linker, of course, knows this—in a passes for mainstream political dis- secularism “places American Jewry in an fascinating dialogue on The New Repub- course in our unfortunate age. patient representatives. If patients and AUTONOMY SHORT-CIRCUITED their families are more at ease and do not have as much to fear from the dying process, this spells trouble for institu- Ronald A. Lindsay tions that rely on human anxiety and misery to stay in business. Empower- Unplugged: Reclaiming Our Right to Die in America, by William H. ed patients have less need to turn to priests, pastors, and prayers. Colby (New York: AMACOM, 2006, ISBN 0-8144-0882-6) 272 pp. Ironically, the other threat comes Cloth $24.95. from patients themselves or, more pre- cisely, from the failure of most individu- als to make clear their wishes regarding treatment prior to becoming patients. Almost all litigated cases involving with- drawal of treatment result from situa- tions in which a patient is no longer com- t is difficult to believe that just a little regarding life-sustaining treatment. petent and the patient’s representative over thirty years ago there was no Given the prior entrenched practice (usually a spouse or other relative) must I generally recognized legal right to under which physicians paternalistically determine what the patient “would have refuse or direct the withdrawal of life- assumed responsibility for making treat- wanted.” Unfortunately, there are often sustaining treatment. The seminal case ment decisions for the patient’s “bene- other relatives who have sharply distinct of In Re Quinlan transformed our legal fit,” this recognition of patient autonomy recollections about the desires of patient and medical landscape. As a result of and responsibility was nothing short of X. Enter the lawyers, and, instead of judicial decisions in the wake of Quin- revolutionary.
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