…even its enemies.
Writer, professor, historian and former New Republic editor David Greenberg has a piece today in the Washington Post that tries to poke holes in the idea that Rudy Giuliani is not really a conservative.
I was doing a little poking of my own into the writing of Dr. Greenberg, and I made it a couple of paragraphs into his Slate.com screed against Christian zealots and their campaign to keep secular liberals from destroying Christmas before I started worrying about how many brain cells I was losing and stopped. I can only imagine that binge drinking probably kills a comparable number of neurons, but it’s still likely to be better for my health and is certainly a more enjoyable pastime.
I digress.
Greenberg says with a straight face that:
The case for Giuliani’s moderation rests mainly on three overblown issues — guns, gay rights and abortion — and even in those cases, his deviation from conservative orthodoxy is far milder than is usually suggested.
The “social” and “cultural” issues that divide Americans encompass much more than guns, gay rights and abortion. They include state support of religion; the legitimacy of dissenting speech; the president’s right to keep information secret; the place of fair procedures in dispensing justice. The Bush administration’s hard-line stands on these matters have polarized the nation as much as the Iraq war has. And on these issues, Giuliani is just as hard-line as the man he’d like to succeed.
Greenberg thinks that the second amendment, the objections to sodomy and the unmitigated holocaust of unborn children are “overblown” issues. Like many revisionist historians, he also believes that America was meant to be a pluralist’s paradise, if pluralism means an utterly totalitarian governmental secularism that polices the slightest utterances of divine worship in the public square. The altar of free speech, however, at which liberals like Greenberg would sacrifice the innocence of children and public deceny, is sacrosanct. Speech, in fact, should be so free that the commander-in-chief of our miliary forces should not be allowed to keep secrets, even when they affect national security.
On the other hand, he equates suspension of habeus corpus, the implementation of the technique-formerly-known-as-torture and the ongoing support of the war with Iraq as conservative causes rather than neoconservative ones - even though neoconservatism has more in common with leftist fascism than authentic conservatism.
The neocononservatism that Greenberg fails to distinguish from authentic conservatism has, in fact, many tactics in common with his own apparent views on societal governance. It believes in taking civil liberties away for its own good and in fearmongering in order to convince voters to sustain and build its power base.
Liberals, I’m sure, would balk at this suggestion, but the same means neocons use are simply applied by liberals to obtain different ends. The reinterpretation of the first amendment from an anti-establishment clause to an anti-religious statue is a violation of our right to practice religion freely, even in the public square. Of course, changing the freedom of religion to the freedom from religion benefits the attack on Christian values that strengthens liberal party platforms. Influential Marxist thinkers like Antonio Gramsci and George Lukács knew this all too well. Observing the failure of Russian Communism in progress, they recognized that a Christianized West would resist the cultural revolution they desired and so they set about severing its religious roots - a tradition that liberals carry on today.
As for fear-mongering, it should come as no surprise that this is not a tactic Bush or Cheney or even Karl Rove wrote the manual on. Liberals are constantly warning us that conservatives are going to “eliminate a woman’s right to choose” or “legislate what goes on in the bedroom”. They bemoan our insensitivity when we allow prayer in schools, they accuse us of oppressing women because we believe that it’s best that mothers should be at home with their children, and they call us racists for opposing unchecked immigration or affirmative action. The left are fear-mongers about the imposition of moral values - they want society to think that if morality is codified that the next step will be ghettos and prison camps, whether literal or figurative.
Greenberg’s own Slate column about Christmas belies this sensibility:
Once again, it’s time to indulge in the perennial yuletide joys: harried trips to mobbed shopping malls, wasteful spending on pointless presents, spikes in depressive and suicidal feelings. And to these merriments we can now add what is fast becoming another cherished annual rite: defending the tolerant, pluralistic, ecumenical society that most of us have known and loved for decades against the Christian zealots, conservative bullies, and opportunistic pundits who insist that liberals, Jews, Muslims, and other un-American types are waging a “War Against Christmas.”
Zealots, bullies and opportunists. That’s who Christians are when they want to defend one of their holiest days from an onslaught of secularism that yes, Dr. Greenberg, dates back more than the past few years. Greenberg points out that Presidents as far back as Eisenhower were politically sensitive and ecumenical in his “holiday correspondence”, as though we are using our historical Hubbel telescopes to peer back into the foundations of American history. Nevermind the fact that the US government has always been overtly Christian, if non-denominational, and in fact made Christmas a Federal Holiday in 1870.
Again, the left is ideologically aligned with Marxism, which is the philosophy that gave rise to the murderous Communist regimes the world over and the National Socialism in Germany that became the Nazi party. The progressive social agendas of the liberal movement are incompatible with Christian beliefs, and it is for this reason that the political movement of “tolerance” refuses to tolerate Christian morality, be it concerning abortion, homosexuality, religion in the public sphere, public decency, sexual responsibility or the like.
Tolerance in a pluralistic society is by its nature untenable; it accepts only those who give unequivocal loyalty to its all-embracing ideology, an ideology that can only exist if there is no absolute truth. Anyone who has faced the vitriolic verbal assaults of the politically correct ignorati over their un-PC stances on hot-button issues knows that a new, leftist inquisition is forming. They are a minority, but they have seized the institutions of influence, and they are not about to cede power.
Having reached a day when the left thinks a man like Giuliani is too far to the right, I shudder to think of where we go from here.
