6

DOGMATISM, UTOPIANISM, AND POLITICS

As it emerged in the early post-war period, the fusion of traditionalism and libertarianism I have labeled anti-establishment conservatism embodied a politics of double rollback: of the New Deal and of international communism. Its grievance was not just with the liberals it so reviled but with the moderate, “me-too” apostates who constituted the Republican Party establishment and who practiced a more modest version of New Deal tyranny. Anti-establishment conservatives found in the New Deal and communism a common betrayal of individual freedom and a deification of the state power they so feared. The evil of the despotic, bloated American state was absolved, however, when it came to national security. The anti-establishment conservative cause was premised on halting socialist tendencies and restoring the free market and traditional values, while expanding the military-industrial complex and taking the fight to the Soviet foe. In the early 1960s, anti-establishment conservatives found their voice in Senator Barry Goldwater. When Goldwater’s defeat in the 1964 election removed anti-establishment conservatives from GOP centers of power, they went into a quiet rebuilding mode. Over the ensuing decades, they constructed the early intellectual, media, charitable, and political institutions that since have played such a critical role in channeling and shaping discontent with the post-war liberal consensus.

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Anti-establishment conservatism surged again in the 1970s, its ranks enlarged by the new Christian right, neoconservatives, and the bloc of big business that defected from the liberal consensus. A litany of factors underlay the resurgence. Accompanying the drive for African-American civil rights, a judicial expansion of Fourteenth Amendment protections, coupled with the decline of religious discrimination and discrimination in general in the 1950s and 1960s, led to a more pluralistic public sphere – backed by law. Fundamentalist and evangelical Protestants reacted negatively to these changes. Having long dominated American culture indirectly, in the form of the civil religion, conservative Christians experienced the growing pluralism of the culture as a direct attack on their institutions and life-world. This aggrieved sense of threat led them to denounce secular humanism and judicial activism and brought them into the circles of longtime Goldwater-bred political entrepreneurs who helped organize their discontent. The national Democratic Party’s championing of civil rights and remedies led to the eventual loss of the white South to the GOP and the defection of many northern ethnic and Catholic voters as well. The old conservative theme of the intrusive state found resonance in these constituencies. Neoconservatives were “reformed” liberals with strong misgivings about Johnson administration social programs and the perceived decline of American international standing in the wake of the United States’ defeat in Vietnam. They came to share with conservative evangelicals a disgust with the counterculture and the permissive direction of American culture under its sway. They, too, joined the anti-establishment conservative ranks, bemoaning the loss of traditional values of authority, restraint, virtue, and personal responsibility. Indeed, if the Christian right swelled anti-establishment conservatism’s electoral ranks, the neoconservatives expanded its intellectual reach, particularly with its critique of the New Class. Neoconservatives blamed liberals and Democratic administrations for fostering a culture of entitlement in domestic affairs and a culture of appeasement in international affairs. Finally, with the slowdown of the economy and the seeming inability of Keynesian tools to solve stagflation, business deserted the liberal consensus and demanded union concessions, lower taxes, leaner federal budgets, and the end of regulatory “despotism.” Certain businessmen and corporations funded the anti-establishment conservative institutions generously, providing a sound institutional base for the resurgent movement. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 was in no small measure due to the movement’s efforts.

Since the Reagan victory, the anti-establishment conservative movement has come to challenge the establishment Republican Party, if not mostly displace it. As this process has unfolded, the GOP, which historically had been relatively heterogeneous ideologically, by the mid-1990s began to look like a bona fide, disciplined, conservative political party and, arguably, a religious one. As such, it increasingly displays utopian and dogmatic features, about which many have commented.1

Outside of academic circles, utopianism signifies unrealistic, naïve, even foolish, if good-hearted belief. But in American intellectual circles, utopianism has long been a pejorative. At least since the post-World War II period, utopianism has signaled danger. The scholarly analysis and denunciation of totalitarianism – particularly communist totalitarianism – moved seamlessly into a critique of utopianism. Totalitarianism’s sacrifice of means in the service of abstract ends was characteristic of utopian thinking. According to the political philosophers Karl Popper, Jacob Talmon, Isaiah Berlin (and, to a lesser degree, the early Hannah Arendt), who helped establish the scholarly theoretical underpinnings of Cold War anti-communist liberalism, the search for perfection wasn’t an innocent exercise in unrealistic dreaming; it was a recipe for bloodshed.2 As the sociologist Karl Mannheim suggested several years prior, the utopian mentality was characterized by a closed system of deductive procedure, with an internally balanced equilibrium of motives comprised in a body of axioms capable of ensuring inner coherence, and hence, in many instances, isolation from the world.3 For the Cold War liberal political theorists, this characterization of utopian thinking fit their understanding of the communist movement – and, because that movement was very much in the world, had chilling and disastrous consequences. Communist utopianism imposed a black-and-white model on a gray world, and thus instilled a frightening moral absolutism in its followers.

What we find now in the United States is a shift of utopianism from the left to the right. The Christian right’s utopianism lay in an anti-modern impulse to dissolve the separation of spheres, to obliterate the distinction between public and private – in the sociologist Max Weber’s terms, to “re-enchant” the world under some semblance of a sacred canopy. If in the recent past the process of secularization meant the ambiguous withdrawal of Christian fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals from the secular world to concentrate on saving souls within their own insulated institutions, since the 1970s they have re-engaged with the world in order, if not to destroy secularism outright, then at the very least to re-instill Christian values in American public life, to recapture the civil religion. Always stridently anti-communist and nationalistic, the Christian right’s effort to reaffirm Christian values in American society also has meant the assertion of American values in international affairs. Indeed, fundamentalists’ longstanding, vociferous anti-communism was one of the reasons to have doubted the standard story of their withdrawn status from the secular world. The Christian right believes profoundly in American exceptionalism, that God has granted a special role for the United States in human history.

The religious dimension of anti-establishment conservatism, particularly in the last several years, underscores one aspect of the underlying dogmatism of the movement and its uncomfortable relationship with democracy. This, again, is evidenced in the flight from science, the denunciation of expertise as self-serving elitism, of policy-making as a matter of conviction and faith. The most telling instance, of course, was the decision-making around the Iraq War. As some have suggested, the great, unexamined issue of the George W. Bush presidency was the extent to which Bush’s unwavering commitment to Middle East militarism was rooted in theological and religious convictions, not in pragmatic or geopolitical concerns.4 Because the Bush administration’s foreign policy decision-making was grounded in absolute moral and theological convictions, it was immune from re-examination or change. Bush himself said that he sensed a “Third [Great] Awakening” of religious devotion in the United States that has coincided with the nation’s struggle with international terrorists, a war he depicted as “a confrontation between good and evil.”5 Bush’s post-9/11 public theology is described as having shifted from a Wesleyan theology of “personal transformation” to a Calvinist “divine plan” laid out by a sovereign God for the country and himself. At the 2003 National Prayer Breakfast, for example, he said, “We also can be confident in the ways of providence, even when they are far from our understanding. Events aren’t moved by blind change and chance. Behind all of life and all of history, there is a dedication and purpose set by the hand of a just and faithful God, and that hope will never be shaken.”6 It was his theological conviction that allowed Bush his commitment, his calm, his dismissal of bad news and opposition, his imperviousness to change. Bush knew God and he knew what was right. Revealingly, journalist Kurt Eichenwald reports a telephone conversation in which Bush, trying to persuade Jacques Chirac to support a U.N.-backed invasion of Iraq, and appealing to the French president’s Christian (Catholic) faith, declared: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East. … Biblical prophecies are being fulfilled. … This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase His people’s enemies before a new age begins.”7 This, at bottom, is the reason we must understand the religious basis of the Iraq War and, more broadly, the Republican dismissal of science; and, further, grapple with the fundamental issue about whether and how religious arguments can and should play a role in the public sphere in a democracy. It is the certainty of belief, embedded inside and fostered by the cultivation of religious awe, itself wrapped around traditions, rituals, and ceremonies, that can make religion dogmatic and possibly anathema to a democratic politics.

To be sure, I do not suggest that religion can play no role in politics – that would be both historically inaccurate and normatively untenable. Religious motives and motifs are inextricably woven into the American experience, and religion informs not only the way in which many, perhaps most, Americans understand their everyday lives and identities, but their political inclinations and commitments as well. Religious belief has animated any number of consequential political stances in American history, from the abolition of slavery to Prohibition to civil rights to efforts to reduce poverty.8 No one can gainsay the importance of religion to political experience, and of religious perspective to political perspective. But religious argument is not political argument. That is, religious argument ultimately is based on some form of revelation or revealed truth, and thus is not “argument” per se. Rather it is a foundationalist, pre-rational appeal not amenable to counterclaims outside of its faith-based framework. A democratic political public sphere is in principle the space for reasoned communicative exchange, wherein we exchange reasons in public in order to assess validity claims that have become problematic. Religious claims are not of this character, because they are true not through argument; they are true through revelation or faith and thus not accessible to those outside the revelatory framework. It is in this sense that the reasons offered by religious argument are not really “public.” Political argument in a democracy must be open to everyone at both participatory and epistemic levels; hence political claims must in principle be accessible and fallible, subject to evidence and counterclaims. Because of this, religious claims per se cannot pass for legitimate political argument in a democracy; they can only be legitimate if presented in terms of secular – hence, public – rationales. Even the conservative theologian Richard John Neuhaus concurred with the claim that religious arguments must be cast in public reason.9

Of course, religious convictions can comprise the very identity of persons. We cannot expect religious individuals to split their essential beings into public and private components as soon as they participate in public debates. Indeed, as we have seen in this book, the bifurcation of identity is one of the features of modernity that has so incensed conservative Christians. But, as the social theorist Jürgen Habermas suggests, every citizen must know that only secular reasons count beyond the institutional threshold that divides the informal public sphere – that is, the sphere of public opinion formation – from parliaments, courts, ministries, administrations, and the decisions and policies that emanate from these political institutions. Democracy ensures that people can practice religion freely; democracy must require the separation between church and state to be a democracy. That is the balance that must be struck in a democratic system: individuals can articulate religious arguments in the informal political public sphere, but as those arguments move into the formal institutional political realm they must be translated into secular, reasoned terms, in language and epistemic structure that are in principle accessible to all citizens.

It is here where the religious right and the Bush administration breached this balance. Bush appointed large numbers of conservative evangelicals to public positions high and low, and even among non-evangelicals in the White House there was a general affinity for religious faith. Bible study groups permeated the administration and federal agencies. The linkage between Republican public officials and Christian right organizations during the Bush years was extensive, including weekly closed-door meetings of the Values Action Team (representing Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, Eagle Forum, the Traditional Values Coalition, Concerned Women for America, among others) and the Arlington Group (run by Paul Weyrich).10 One cannot conclude any prima facie causal relationship between religion and public policies from the fact that conservative evangelicals served in the government and engaged in broad contacts with Christian right organizations. But we know from the notorious episode when a number of U.S. Attorneys were summarily fired in 2006 that young evangelicals and fundamentalists recruited straight out of law schools such as Pat Robertson’s Regent University to serve in bureaucratic positions had bearing on how that fiasco played out.11 We also know that political allegiance and religious credentials, rather than experience or particular competence, determined the hiring for various bureaucratic positions in the Coalition Provisional Authority in occupied Iraq, with occasionally disastrous consequences.12 And, finally, we know that the Bush-created Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives channeled billions of federal dollars to groups such as the National Right to Life and Christian organizations running drug and pregnancy clinics and abstinence-only school programs not accountable to independent oversight.13

The reasons for the Iraq War and Middle East policy were articulated publicly in both religious and secular registers, but with the religious largely underpinning the secular. Indeed, it was the pervasive religious attitude that so suffused the Bush administration that helps clarify the plethora of disturbing instances in which facts and evidence – not just regarding the Middle East, but in the realms of science, environmental protection, and public health policy as well – were deemed dispensable, irrelevant, even irritatingly inconvenient. For the Bush administration what mattered was the predetermined dogmatically held policy. What was of consequence was Bush’s conviction in the rightness of his policies – not as a matter of evidence, but as a matter of faith. But dogmatism, particularly religious dogmatism, should be out of bounds in a democracy as a matter of principle.14 For all its frustrations, politics must be a process of continual negotiation – an ethic of responsibility rather than an ethic of convictions or “ultimate ends,” in Max Weber’s terms.15

In fact, although Weber’s notion of an ethic of responsibility is helpful, his equation of an ethic of convictions with that of ultimate ends is not. One can possess practical political commitment without holding to an ethic of ultimate ends, even if the latter informs the former. As the mid-twentieth-century Protestant theologian and public intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr expressed so perceptively in Moral Man and Immoral Society:

Religion, in short, faces many perils to the right and to the left in becoming an instrument and inspiration of social justice. Every genuine passion for social justice will always contain a religious element within it. Religion will always leaven the idea of justice with the ideal of love. It will prevent the idea of justice, which is a politic-ethical ideal, from becoming a purely political one, with the ethical element washed out. The ethical ideal which threatens to become too purely religious must save the ethical ideal which is in peril of becoming too political. Furthermore there must always be a religious element in the hope of a just society. Without the ultrarational hopes and passions of religion no society will ever have the courage to conquer despair and attempt the impossible; for the vision of a just society is an impossible one, which can be approximated only by those who do not regard it as impossible. The truest visions of religion are illusions, which may be partially realized by being resolutely believed. For what religion believes to be true is not wholly true but ought to be true; and may become true if its truth is not doubted.16

Utopianism, religious or otherwise, often animates political courage and action. Utopianism marshals a vision of the future that can transform the dreary, stuck politics of today. But it must be contained within democratic values and norms or it threatens to become dogmatic and crush them.

The neoconservative intellectuals who attacked the New Class, challenged the bona fides of expertise, and championed the Iraq War did adhere to the church–state balance, but they offered arguments in a dogmatic spirit parallel to their comrades of the religious right. They, too, were utopians. Neoconservatism began as an intellectual movement with a distinctly anti-utopian approach to the world. It recognized the “crooked timber of humanity” and demonstrated a corresponding skepticism of progress and social engineering – the features usually taken as the hallmarks of liberal hubris.17 But as Irving Kristol and his compatriots grew closer to the new Christian right and their war on the counterculture and secular humanism, the neoconservative attack on the New Class morphed into an attack on the basis for scientific claims writ large. And as neoconservatism evolved into its second generation, it moved precipitously toward a utopian mode of analysis and advocacy. Second-generation neoconservatives’ utopianism lay in a vision of the United States as the exceptional nation whose national interests are identical to its deep-seated democratic values, and hence whose actions in the world are ipso facto benevolent. America’s values are universal. By nature innocent, the United States can never truly be imperialist. Because of its special historical provenance, America’s proper mission is to assert its values. In so doing, the exceptional nation brings the blessings of freedom to the world and rectifies the world’s problems.18 Because of the ways of the world and the existence of evil actors, the principal means to carry out America’s mission is military force. War is not only the right tool in the international arena, it has beneficial consequences at home, as well, for war and its preparation restore private virtue and public spirit.19 The Iraq War was nothing if not a utopian project, revealing that current anti-establishment conservatism is not conservative at all; it is a movement of redemptive reaction or Jacobinism in which the cleansing fire of violence is mobilized to create a new world.

Neoconservative dogmatic utopianism may be best revealed in the recent demand that the United States deal harshly with Iran, on account of that nation’s lack of cooperation with nuclear non-proliferation. In a June 2007 essay in Commentary, Norman Podhoretz, advocating the bombing of Iran, wrote of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: “Like Hitler, he is a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism.”20 The language is virtually identical to what Podhoretz wrote of the USSR thirty-seven years earlier (see pp. 126–7). And that’s for a reason. The world is always endangered by Hitlers, and it is the task of patriotic American Podhoretzes to rouse a sluggish United States against them.

Neoconservative utopianism is rational, in the sense that it offers reasons for its positions, while, as we have seen, the dogmatism of the Christian right is not, in the sense that its positions ultimately are based on some form of revelation or of reason not accessible to those outside of that religious tradition. But the deep structure of both approaches is similar. As Leszek Kolakowski suggests in an exploration of religion and ideology:

What is common to both ideological and religious belief systems is that they both purport to impose an a priori meaning on all aspects of human life and on all contingent events, and that they are both built in such a way that no imaginable, let alone real, facts could refute the established doctrine. I refer here to the classic Popperian frame of interpretation. Religious and ideological doctrines are both immune to empirical falsifications, and they are able to absorb all the facts while surviving intact.21

Absolutism and certitude – the dogmatic approach to thinking and acting – are anathema to the give and take of democratic politics.22 The Tea Party movement is simply the latest incarnation of dogmatic anti-establishment conservatism, buoyed by the economic collapse of 2008 and the strength of the institutions of right-wing media, money, and idea-generating organizations. The Tea Party movement currently polices the GOP’s ideological boundaries with a rage and dogmatism that calls to mind Richard Hofstadter’s paranoid style.

Writing in 1944, Reinhold Niebuhr warned of the Soviet Union’s threat to the peace of the world, “not because it is communistic or materialistic; but rather because it is informed by a simple religion and culture which makes self-criticism difficult and self-righteousness inevitable.”23 How ironic that Niebuhr’s observation is a spot-on description of anti-establishment conservatism’s dogmatic and messianist America. And because anti-establishment conservatism has succeeded in taking over one of America’s two political parties, utopianism and dogmatism are not going away anytime soon.

Notes

1 Sam Tanenhaus, The Death of Conservatism (New York: Random House, 2009); Michael Lind, “The Three Fundamentalisms of the American Right,” Salon.com (July 5, 2011), at http://www.salon.com/2011/07/05/lind_three_fundamentalisms/ as of October 2012; Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism (New York: Basic Books, 2012).
2 Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge, 1945); Jacob Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker and Warburg, 1952); Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969); Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1958).
3 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, Louis Wirth and Edward Shils, trans. (New York: Harvest Books, 1936), p. 218.
4 Gary Greenwald, “David Brooks’ Field Trip to the White House,” Salon.com (July 17, 2007), at http://www.salon.com/2007/07/17/brooks_24/ as of October 2012.
5 Peter Baker, “Bush Tells Group He Sees a ‘Third Awakening,’ ” Washington Post (September 13, 2006).
6 Deborah Caldwell, “George W. Bush: Presidential Preacher,” Baptist Standard (February 17, 2003), at http://www.baptiststandard.com/2003/2_17/pages/bush_preacher.html as of October 2012; Jim Wallis, “Dangerous Religion: George W. Bush’s Theology of Empire,” Sojourners Magazine (September/October 2003). George W. Bush, President’s Address at the National Prayer Breakfast, CNN.com (February 6, 2003), at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0302/06/se.01.html as of October 2012.
7 Kurt Eichenwald, 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars (New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 2012), p. 459.
8 David L. Chappell, for example, makes a compelling case that the civil rights movement was rooted in the extraordinary courage of southern blacks inspired by prophetic Christianity. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
9 Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984). The book was premised, however, on the claim that not only has religion been banished from public discourse, but without religion the public square will be “naked” and democracy suffers.
10 D. Michael Lindsay, Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 26–7, 57.
11 David Iglesias, In Justice: Inside the Scandal That Rocked the Bush Administration (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2008).
12 Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (New York: Vintage, 2006), pp. 103–10.
13 The White House, “Fact Sheet: The Faith-Based and Community Initiative: A Quiet Revolution in the Way Government Addresses Human Need” (January 2008), at http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2008/01/20080129-8.html as of October 2012; Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (New York: Free Press, 2006), pp. 13, 23–4.
14 John Rawls, “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” The University of Chicago Law Review, Vol. 64, No. 3 (Summer 1997), pp. 765–807; Jürgen Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” European Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 14, No. 1 (2006), pp. 1–25; Robert Audi and Nicholas Wolterstorff, Religion in the Public Square: The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate (Lanham, VA: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997).
15 Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation” [1918], in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 77–128.
16 Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics [1932] (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), pp. 80–1.
17 In realistic recognition of human frailty, Immanuel Kant wrote, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” Reputed to be Isaiah Berlin’s favorite quotation, he used part of it as the title of one of his collections of essays. Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, Henry Hardy, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
18 Labeling American exceptionalism as utopian is hardly a new insight. Early in the Cold War the vociferously anti-communist Niebuhr expressed the view that America’s virtue – its innocence, the presumed nobility of its intentions – could easily become its vice. The central claim of The Irony of American History is that American exceptionalism is a perilous variety of utopianism. Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952).
19 Anne Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 179.
20 Norman Podhoretz, “The Case for Bombing Iran,” Commentary (June 2007), at http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-case-for-bombing-iran/ as of October 2012.
21 Leszek Kolakowski, “Why an Ideology is Always Right,” in Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 232–3.
22 Richard J. Bernstein, The Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of Politics and Religion since 9/11 (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005).
23 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of its Traditional Defence (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944), p. 183.