The Magnifying Trick of Liberal Paranoia

[Tigermike 3,067]

October 11, 2006

The Magnifying Trick of Liberal Paranoia

By Jonah Goldberg

If the Christian base of the GOP gets its way, "All government employees - federal, state and local - would be required to participate in weekly Bible classes in the workplace, as well as compulsory daily prayer sessions." We would all have to carry religious identity cards that "would provide Christocrats with preferential treatment in many areas of life, including home ownership, student loans, employment and education." Non-Christians would be indulged as second-class citizens, "but younger members ... would be strongly encouraged to formally convert to the dominant evangelical Christianity." Homosexual sex would be illegalized, while "known homosexuals and lesbians would have to successfully undergo government-sponsored reeducation sessions if they applied for any public-sector jobs." Dissidents would be on the run, the popular culture censored by bureaucratic Cotton Mathers, and "the mainstream press and the electronic media would be beaten into submission."

All of that is according to James Rudin in his book "The Baptizing of America." I learned about it from a brilliant essay in the August-September issue of First Things, in which Ross Douthat surveys the scare literature demonizing "Christianists," "theocons" and "Christocrats" - people who were under the impression that they were actually law-abiding, tax-paying, patriotic American citizens who happen to subscribe to the Christian faith. Little did they know they're actually all about rounding up infidels and torching the Constitution.

Liberal paranoia isn't solely Christophobic. "On the Media," a public radio program that purports to be an objective watchdog of the press, recently interviewed Lawrence Wright, the author of the acclaimed book "The Looming Tower," who also wrote the script for the mediocre 1998 movie "The Siege," starring Denzel Washington. According to "On the Media," the film was "prophetic" in that Wright had successfully "predicted" what would happen if America were attacked by terrorists. In the movie, Muslims are rounded up and put in concentration camps in sports stadiums, while martial law is declared in New York City. I guess I forgot to read the newspapers the day that happened.

A recent dispatch in the New York Times reported from a conference at Yale on the 100th anniversary of Hannah Arendt's birth. Arendt, recall, was the author of the brilliant but flawed "The Origins of Totalitarianism," which explored the rise of Nazism and Stalinism, and "Eichmann in Jerusalem," which covered the trial of the bureaucratic mastermind of the Holocaust. At the Yale conference, according to the Times, political scientist Benjamin Barber "dismissed the idea that Islamist fundamentalism was in any way totalitarian but suggested that given the current administration in the United States, an 'American Eichmann is not altogether impossible.'"

For the record, under the Islamic fundamentalism of the Taliban, music was banned. Women were made chattel. Homosexuals were crushed with stones. Children were forbidden to fly kites. But don't believe you're lying eyes; take Barber's word for it that such policies aren't totalitarian. Oh, and be sure to watch out for the Eichmanns in our midst.

Others at the conference conjured similar phantasms. Writer Jonathan Schell said America hasn't quite fulfilled Arendt's checklist for totalitarian systems, but "we are on the edge of that abyss." And so on.

We've been on the edge of that abyss for a while now. During those dark years of John Ashcroft's tenure as attorney general, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., lamented that the government had become "thought police." Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., said that Americans had become "afraid to read books, terrified into silence" simply because the government was given the same power to investigate suspected terrorists that it long had to scrutinize drug dealers and mob kingpins.

One is tempted to invoke Orwell's dictum that some things are so stupid, only an intellectual could believe them. But, truth is, lots of otherwise normal people believe this stuff.

Yet Orwell's point is still relevant. Intellectuals look at the world through literary prisms of theory. They come up with a vision of the world - one that usually magnifies their importance - and then select facts accordingly. Arendt herself was so convinced a Goldwater presidency would usher in an age of storm troopers, she looked for an apartment in Switzerland after he was nominated.

The waves of paranoia currently sweeping through America could be seen as the democratization of intellectual dementia. Criticisms of President Bush, Christians, the right wing, the Patriot Act, whatever: These are all fine. But presumably, such large claims against America should come with ample evidence to back them up. Instead, we get the opposite. The smaller the example, the greater its significance. And that trick is the intellectual class's gift to America.

link

[DKW 86 7,451]

That is too funny for words and would be exactly like the Libs to totally miss the real target.