Damon Linker's The Theocons

...But Neuhaus, editor of First Things magazine and leading theocon strategist, remains at the center of Linker's story, much like William Buckley was once the linchpin of the Old Right's intellectual movement during the 1950s...

...Certitude and bluster seem to give way to spinmeistering postmodernism in this case...

...DISSENT / Winter 2007 n 141...

...And when it comes to the Iraq War, the theocons, though it's not their central cause, envision a "Christian America...

...Some of Linker's over-interpretation here might be due to his previous engagement in the movement (he was once an assistant to Neuhaus and editor at First Things...

...So he offers some ruminations about the Founding Fathers, religion, democracy, and pluralism...

...I mean, that is, a sense that the extremists are defining the movement...

...leaders to the White House to formulate environmental policy...

...1- INKER'S BOOK is important in assessing a fanaticism on the intellectual right...

...embroiled in a long-term civilizational struggle with militant Islam...

...in the end, it might become the only thing for Bush's legacy...

...4 But there are limits to his argument...

...This depiction turns blurrier when it confronts a recent cause célèbre of the theocon right, namely the teaching of intelligent design in America's public schools...

...Charles Colson— of Watergate break-in fame but now an evangelical Protestant—believed "the only political action believers can take is some kind of direct, extrapolitical confrontation of the judicially controlled regime...

...Besides, there's another social justice tradition in Catholicism that the theocons have missed...

...And so the theocons lashed out, not only at the courts but also at a profligate country deserving retribution...

...They would flinch at placing limits on their freedoms...

...Take the Iraq War...

...A problem with turncoat history also deserves quick mention: Though Linker's footnotes only cite published 140 n DISSENT / Winter 2007 writings, at times the reader senses that he's remembering meetings and phone calls for which he doesn't sufficiently account...

...Linker seems at his best when discussing the true-believer mind-set...

...I don't sense that the college students I teach, even the conservative ones, are hard-core fanatics...

...Indeed, in Linker's own words, intelligent designers "now portray themselves as defenders of skepticism and openminded inquiry against dogmatic defenders of a fanatical atheistic ideology...

...This is the optimistic side of Linker's book...

...On this count, then, the hard conservative mind of conviction bends to the demands of the wider culture...

...Theocon prominence might indicate a more general conservative crisis...

...If we ever do get to a full-fledged conservative crack-up, liberals can rely upon a sort of cultural vital center to frame the ways they fight back...

...It's a telling moment in conservative intellectual history because it crystallized an absolutist frame of mind central to today's movement...

...It's also telling because it suggests that conservatives, not the American left, might be the true inheritors of the radical 1960s spirit...

...According to Linker, "Piecemeal attacks on theocon policy must be coupled with a much broader response— one that seeks to push back, at the level of ideas, against the ongoing theoconservative assault on secular politics in America...

...After all, intelligent design is not the creationism of yesteryear (which condemned Darwinism as objectively wrong...

...So theocons did some of the intellectual heavy lifting of a White House purDISSENT / Winter 2007 •139 BOOKS suing Christian-based domestic policies...

...But like so much that happens within the Bush administration, it flew by journalists...

...An equivalent of 1968 has not yet been reached and may never be...

...Nothing elevates a sense of power and influence more than having been there and witnessed the energy of the committed...

...It's especially important because George W Bush, via his "evangelical theocon" speech writer Michael Gerson, welcomed Neuhaus to the White House with open arms...

...Perhaps the conservative movement will reach its own 1968 moment—the moment that helped kill liberalism in this country...

...Nonetheless, the defense might be implicit BOOKS in Linker's own assessment of the theocons...

...To get a sense of this, meet the "theocons...

...But I do think that a potential backlash against the theoconservatives' backlash has emerged...

...Neuhaus experienced an intellectual odyssey somewhat akin to the neoconservatives (except he was too young to "get" the 1930s...

...Here, theocon absolutism starts to melt...

...More broadly, it's hard to believe that the theocon dream of "Catholicizing" America—by which is meant emphasizing the conservative secular dimensions of the church's teaching will go anywhere anytime soon...

...I mean the 1968 takeover of Columbia University, the violence of the Chicago Democratic Party national convention, the rise of the Weather Underground, the pathology of the Black Panther Party, and, of course, the "radical chic" so easily mocked by the right...

...He began on the left during the 1960s in the civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements and then moved rightward during the 1980s...

...But it's not clear that this is an accurate assessment, especially considering how central the war on terror was in 2004...

...What I mean by that isn't the 1968 of Eugene McCarthy...

...This would have been like Bill Clinton inviting Earth First...

...Linker's book helps do that, if only partially, by exposing the scarier element of the theocons' dark dreams...

...He was joined by Michael Novak, George Weigel, Hadley Arkes, and others...

...We need to explain why a secular culture matters to all Americans, why pluralism is a constitutive element of democracy...

...In this case, its biggest was a 1996 symposium entitled "The End of Democracy?: The Judicial Usurpation of Politics...

...But even if this book had been written by an outsider to the movement, questions would still linger about its interpretation...

...It doesn't operate on the level of absolute truth but rather postmodern doubt...

...It can be widened by bringing in the steep decline in support for the Iraq War, immigration debates within the Republican Party, and the anger of certain elements on the right toward what's now known as "big government conservatism...

...The philosophy and tactics of the 1950s civil rights movement—break the written law for the sake of a higher moral law—now wedded itself to a populist right-wing movement...

...Readers will have to go elsewhere for a more thorough defense of "secular America...

...Neuhaus himself warned that America might have reached a stage where "conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime...

...Linker admits that "the theocons" didn't exercise "much direct influence on the making of the Bush administration's foreign policy...

...Well, Iraq is a big thing for this administration...

...That the theocons had little influence here suggests that they live in something of a parallel universe to the world of real political power...

...It's also hard to believe that the theocons have the sort of impact Linker believes they do...

...KEVIN MATTSON is on the editorial board of Dissent and is the author, most recently, of Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century and When America Was Great: The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism...

...When George W Bush told the press that "both sides ought to be properly taught so people can understand what the debate is about" and to "expose people to different schools of thought," he sounded like a postmodernist fresh from a reading of Thomas Kuhn's theory of clashing paradigms...

...All of this is wrapped up in the big broad idea of protecting a "culture of life...

...Here was talk of sedition, of grassroots and extralegal action backed up by moral certitude...

...At the center is Richard John Neuhaus, a strident convert from Lutheranism to Catholicism...

...As much as it's not enough for Democrats to rely solely upon a Republican breakdown on the Iraq War to regain power, it's not enough for intellectuals to point out the foibles of the right's fanaticism...

...The other area where Linker's weaknesses become apparent is in his response to the theocon attack on "secular America...

...Theoconservatism is an intellectual movement, so it's not surprising to find its controversies in the pages of its magazine, First Things...

...Though W. once made an offhand comment about "crusades" way back when, he's obviously not going to sell the war from the theocon perspective...

...Linker documents how theocons grew angrier and angrier with Clinton's impending reelection and with the American courts' unwillingness to overturn abortion rights...

...But this element of his argument feels tagged on at the end...

...This is true in more ways than one...

...Rather, it means that to be conservative demands picking up on some not-so-native-born traditions (Catholicism) or turning populist in style—making for strange alliances and belief systems that don't necessarily hinge together too well...

...Bereft of rooted traditions, organic hierarchy, or state-based religion— all those things that built the European scaffolding for intellectual reaction—American conservatives have had to reconcile themselves to an alarmingly individualistic and populist society...

...They are too wedded to a culture of privacy and individualism— to both that culture's more pernicious elements (consumerism) and its more liberal ones (tolerance...

...Quite simply, Americans don't like extremism and fanaticism...

...There was open talk of "civil disobedience...

...They have helped formulate "abstinence only" sex education policies, blocked the morning-after pill and embryonic stem cell research, pursued an anti–gay marriage amendment to the Constitution, chipped away at abortion rights, and engaged the almost surreal and now largely forgotten Terri Schiavo legislation...

...For instance, they believed that the 2004 election revolved around religious faith and thus shared a "confidence and optimism" about it...

...That's not to say that America was born and will remain a liberal country, the way political scientists like Louis Hartz once confidently prognosticated during the 1950s...

...But I'm not suggesting complacency here...