The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege by D Linker - Review

[applegrove]

God Squad

The Theocons:
Secular America Under Siege

by Damon Linker

Doubleday. 288 pp. $26.00

Reviewed by

Joshua Muravchik

"If you find the neocons—that much-talked-about Jewish conspiracy—scary, you will be downright terrified to learn about their Catholic cousins, the “theocons.” Although this latter cabal is almost ridiculously compact, consisting essentially of three individuals—Richard John Neuhaus, Michael Novak, and George Weigel—the “stealth campaign” it has waged to “build . . . institutions and form . . . alliances” has been so insidiously effective as to “propel ideas into the White House.”

So argues Damon Linker after spending several years in the very belly of the beast at the theocons’ flagship journal, First Things. Ideologically, Linker informs us in this exposé, the theocons are like neocons, but with a twist. They think not only about politics but also about God, and about the relation between the two. Thus, Neuhaus, a Catholic priest and the founder and editor-in-chief of First Things, has not only worked tirelessly to infuse religious sensibilities into debates about public issues but, in Linker’s words, wishes us “to believe that God is watching and judging every act we make as individuals and as a nation.” Similarly, Novak, a Catholic thinker best known for The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1980), believes that social systems should be viewed as matrices of mutually reinforcing political, economic, and “moral-cultural” planes, in which religious ideas do and should play a big part. Weigel, the biographer of Pope John Paul II, works the foreign-policy side of the street by proposing Catholic “just war” doctrine as a framework for evaluating contemporary American decisions to employ military might.

Slavishly advancing the dictates of the Vatican, the theocons, in Linker’s judgment, already endanger the free practice of science and of birth control. If they have their way, things will become far worse. They will saddle us with “a future in which American politics and culture have been systematically purged of secularism,” in which “the separation of church and state as we have known it will cease to exist,” in which “anti-Judaism be reborn in America,” and in which “the Constitution of the United States into conformity with the moral and sexual worldview of the Vatican.” Even if they do not succeed in all this, the theocons will surely “lead us back to a world of religiously inspired social and political strife from which the American founders worked so hard to liberate us.”


..........SNIP"

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=12204080_1

[applegrove]

1. The Catholics are coming..the Catholics are coming...

[Rabrrrrrr]

2. Wow - I just subscribed recently to "First Things", having never heard

of it and the advert they sent me only said "theology and politics" and it looked to be intelligent - I got the first issue, and threw it away half-way through. It was intelligent, in the sense of being academic, proper use of language, complex sentences, etc. - but ohhhhhhhh lordy lordy lordy, full of bizarre right wing spin on everything to the point of being almost nonsensical.

Like a Catholic - and slightly stoned - William Safire or Cal Thomas.

[54anickel]

3. Well, the House did pass HR2679 in Sept. The Public Expression of Religion Act

though I don't know if that group was involved. Looks like we're in for a Theocracy - will it be Catholic or Protestant? :scared:

http://www.progressiveu.org/034512-one-step-closer-to-theocracy-bill-passed-in-house-would-severely-curb-our-ability-to-sue-for-freedom-of-religion

[applegrove]

4. My next posted editorial article was on humanism. Saying to get rid of all dogma.

I'm with that. Though some dogma is good individually. But for population on the whole..this global one..we should be open ended and not afraid. Believe that we will create the good world we can live in. But then I think..

when the hell has that ever happened?

[starroute]

5. The reviewer, Muravchik, is himself a zany Neocon

See, for example:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3602&page=0

We neoconservatives have been through a startling few years. Who could have imagined six years ago that wild stories about our influence over U.S. foreign policy would reach the far corners of the globe? . . . The price of this success is that we are subjected to relentless obloquy. “Neocon” is now widely synonymous with “ultraconservative” or, for some, “dirty Jew.” A young Egyptian once said to me, “‘Neoconservative’ sounds to our ears like ‘terrorist’ sounds to yours.” I am shocked to hear that some among us, wearying of these attacks, are sidling away from the neocon label. Where is the joie de combat? The essential tenets of neoconservatism—belief that world peace is indivisible, that ideas are powerful, that freedom and democracy are universally valid, and that evil exists and must be confronted—are as valid today as when we first began. . . .

To say that our core beliefs remain true is not to counsel self-satisfaction. We got lucky with Reagan. He took the path we wanted, and the policies succeeded brilliantly. He left office highly popular. Bush is a different story. He, too, took the path we wanted, but the policies are achieving uncertain success. His popularity has plummeted. It would be pigheaded not to reflect and rethink. But we ought to do this without backbiting or abandoning Bush. All policies are perfect on paper, none in execution. All politicians are, well, politicians. Bush has embraced so much of what we believe that it would be silly to begrudge his deviations. . . .

One area of neoconservative thought that needs urgent reconsideration is the revolution in military strategy that our neocon hero, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, has championed. This love affair with technology has left our armed forces short on troops and resources, just as our execrable intelligence in Iraq seems traceable, at least in part, to the reliance on machines rather than humans. Our forte is political ideas, not physics or mechanics. We may have seized on a technological fix to spare ourselves the hard slog of fighting for higher defense budgets. Let’s now take up the burden of campaigning for a military force that is large enough and sufficiently well provisioned—however “redundant”—to assure that we will never again get stretched so thin. Let the wonder weapons be the icing on the cake.

[applegrove]

6. I could tell from the first paragraph ... cause neocons are the only ones

who claim other people think neocons are a bunch of jews. They have been hiding under those skirts for years. Their narrow distopia is much older than the old testament..as powerlust always is.

Was in commentary magazine. We should at least know where they are headed now that they closed down PNAC. They did close it did they?

I havent'read the whole thing. And may end up throwing it across the room like so much. But worth a look.

[Joe Bacon]

9. Sadly, I knew Muravchik 30 years ago

I knew him from Social Democrats, USA, he was a hard core Scoop Jacksonite. When Social Democrats moved radically to the right in support of Reagan, I broke with them after seeing how they allowed Reagan to destroy millions of blue-collar lives with the destruction of the steel industry in Pennsylvania. They cared more about shutting down the "Evil Soviet Empire" all the time they turned their backs on the blue-collar people whose views they allegedly espoused. They were nowhere to be found when the mills died in Pennsylvania. They are just as indeifferent to the new lives they are destroying in Iraq as they were to the people in my home town.

[silverojo]

7. "anti-Judaism be reborn in America”?

Sounds like neo-Nazism to me....

[applegrove]

8. Neocons have been after Lieberman and other leaders of groups

like Al Sharpton for years. They try and flip them..and then hope all the followers follow. It worked for Karl Rove when he flipped a few Democratic Leaders in Texas..he got more repukes. The same thing has been going on for the last decade. But has slowed. This is just more fear. To scare some into voting Repuke. Sam old, same old.