Some bedfellows are stranger than others

"Be angry at democracy, if such things anger you. No party is ever the complete choice of all its voters, and no election is ever without a little mixing of issues, writes Joseph Bottum in his provocative essay about the future of conservatism, "The New Fusionism" in First Things: The journal of Religion, Culture and Public Life [via Milt's File]:

As nearly every commentator has observed, abortion and the war on terror are now linked at some of the most practical levels of partisan political calculation.

This fact is usually noted by way of indicting the conservative coalition: The presidential election featured two-faced foreign-policy activists using religious voters -- “poor, undereducated, and easily led,” in the famous formulation of the Washington Post -- to advance their empire-building agenda. Or maybe it featured hypocritical religious leaders cynically trading support for the Iraq war in return for help confirming anti-Roe judges. Regardless, the joint effort was a purely political arrangement.

But the author hypothesizes something beyond mere political calculation may lie behind the recent bundling of those strange bedfellows -- social conservatives and neoconservatives -- in the name of re-electing President Bush last year:

“The remoralization of America at home ultimately requires the remoralization of American foreign policy, for both follow from Americans’ belief that the principles of the Declaration of Independence are not merely the choices of a particular culture but are universal, enduring, ‘self-evident’ truths,” William Kristol and Robert Kagan wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs back in 1996. “That has been, after all, the main point of the conservatives’ war against a relativistic multiculturalism."

The angry isolationist paleoconservatives are probably right -- this isn’t conservatism, in several older senses of the word. But so what? Call it the new moralism, if you like. Call it a masked liberalism or a kind of radicalism that has bizarrely seized the American scene. Mutter darkly, if you want, about the shotgun marriage of ex-socialists and modern puritans, the cynical political joining of imperial adventurers with reactionary Catholics and backwoods Evangelicals. These facts still remain: The sense of national purpose regained by forceful response to the attacks of September 11 could help summon the will to halt the slaughter of a million unborn children a year. And the energy of the pro-life fight -- the fundamental moral cause of our time -- may revitalize belief in the great American experiment.

Now comes Hillary, jumping into the big bed -- Reagan's big tent is so yesterday -- smack in the middle of the bundling board between the social conservatives to her right and the neoconservatives to her left, embracing the war even as she moderates her position on abortion in recognition of a tilt toward the pro-life position in the nation. We're trying to imagine Hillary aligned with Darwinian libertarians like ourselves, let alone two other bedfellows named by the author on the foreign-policy activists' side of the putative fusion:

The actor Ron Silver, who spoke at the Republican National Convention last summer, and Roger L. Simon, a popular mystery writer turned popular blogger, are examples of liberals who, though reoriented on foreign policy by the attacks of September 11, seem nonetheless to remain solidly pro-choice. And then there are the pro-intervention libertarians, from the Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds on, who have only the smallest interest in the life issues, and that mostly in opposition to the pro-life side.

It would take a miracle.  Or maybe not.  Argues Bottum:

The opponents of abortion and euthanasia insist there are truths about human life and dignity that must not be compromised in domestic politics. The opponents of Islamofascism and rule by terror insist there are truths about human life and dignity that must not be compromised in international politics. Why shouldn’t they grow toward each other? The desire to find intellectual and moral seriousness in one realm can breed the desire to find intellectual and moral seriousness in another.

When we think of intellectual and moral seriousness, the ever-calculating Hillary does not come to mind. ("There is nothing organic to her politics," as Jay Cost wrote in Opinion Journal last week).  But a number of our favorite bloggers who also happen to be deeply religious do come to mind. La Shawn, of course, but also several recently discovered bloggers we've stumbled upon -- Blue Goldfish and Dancing the Tide -- who've caught our blogging eye and ear. Perhaps a new kind of missionary work is going on in the blogosphere, quietly winning hearts and minds through reasoned argument and gentle persuasion. Even so, don't look for us to lower the metaphorical bundling board anytime soon.

Comments

[goomp]

As yet there is no Supreme Court ruling that says that Darwinian Libertarians, Agnostics or Atheists have to rule out the wisdom of the ages of man as expressed in the moral teachings of the Judeo-Christian traditions. As one of the above I study what others have learned and let their wisdom help me establish my own beliefs. To say that what others have thought about and experienced and the conclusions they have reached are meaningless and should be ignored is to join the "Intellectual Morons".