Posted on 09/06/2006 9:13:55 AM PDT by Reagan Man
Rudolph Giuliani has repeatedly extended the hand of friendship to Christian conservatives in recent months. But a leading member of a think tank closely associated with the former Mayor has just delivered a powerful jab to the face of the same constituency.
Mr. Giuliani, long viewed with suspicion by the religious right because of his pro-choice, pro-civil-union positions, went so far as to campaign for former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed back in May. The move was widely seen as an attempt to curry favor with a voting bloc that will play a crucial role in electing the Republican Presidential candidate in 2008.
But last month, Heather Mac Donald—a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, the organization that served as a semi-official brain trust to Mr. Giuliani during his time in Gracie Mansion—mounted a brazen frontal assault on the politics of piety. Moreover, she chose Pat Buchanan’s magazine, The American Conservative, as the unlikely platform from which to do so.
Ms. Mac Donald is a heroine to many in the conservative movement, in part because of her robust attacks on everything from feminist ideology (“lunacy”) to The New York Times (“a national security threat”).
She is also, not incidentally, a self-described nonbeliever.
“Skeptical conservatives—one of the Right’s less celebrated subcultures—are conservatives because of their skepticism, not in spite of it,” she wrote in the Aug. 28 issue of The American Conservative. “They ground their ideas in rational thinking and (nonreligious) moral argument. And the conservative movement is crippling itself by leaning too heavily on religion to the exclusion of these temperamentally compatible allies.”
The article ignited a firestorm that continues to sweep across conservative opinion journals and Web sites. Pundits including John Podhoretz, Ramesh Ponnuru and Jonah Goldberg have, to varying extents, made their disagreement plain. Philosophy professor (and Opus Dei member) Michael Pakaluk has complained that Ms. Mac Donald’s “mockery of common religious sensibilities … is so unfeeling as to border on the inhuman.”
Asked about the timing of her article, Ms. Mac Donald suggested that her exasperation with the religiosity of present-day conservatism had simply reached a boiling point.
“I’ve just been impatient over the last six years,” she told The Observer. “I don’t remember anything like this current assumption that candidates should talk about their relationship with God. What is that supposed to tell citizens?”
There is no suggestion that the Manhattan Institute fellow is doing Mr. Giuliani’s bidding in making the controversial case for secular conservatism. On the contrary, Ms. Mac Donald’s argument is more likely to be met with consternation by allies of the former Mayor, for fear that it could dynamite the bridges to the religious right that they have been so assiduously trying to build.
Baruch College political-science professor Gerald De Maio, who teaches a course on religion and politics, believes that the debates about a Giuliani candidacy—and about the issues raised by Ms. Mac Donald’s article—are manifestations of the longstanding divide in the G.O.P. between social conservatives and libertarians.
The libertarian wing, he said, “is muted. They count for much less than they used to. In many ways, Gerald Ford was the last President to represent that tendency. Now, one of the questions is: Could Rudy Giuliani get the nomination as a social liberal? I can’t see how social conservatives in the heartland can back him.”
Ms. Mac Donald admiringly told The Observer that the former Mayor “never invoked God, but transformed this city in ways that couldn’t have been imagined.” But she insisted that her main concern wasn’t electoral politics. She was, she said, more interested in the need for “a sound philosophical basis for conservative argument.”
That may sound like a nebulous aim. But it is also an honorable one.
When the President names Jesus Christ as his favorite political philosopher, uses a sly phrase like “wonder-working power” during a manifestly political occasion like a State of the Union address or invokes God in support of his decisions in Iraq, he seeks, at the minimum, to give his agenda a religious veneer.
The invocation of religion in support of political beliefs is, above all else, a dangerously effective tool for foreclosing debate, discouraging scrutiny and suggesting that one’s opponents lack moral fiber.
The battle of ideas should be fought with the weapons of reason and logic alone.
That is not an intrinsically liberal idea. There is much to support in Ms. Mac Donald’s contention that conservatism is strong enough to prosper without being propped up by the language of religious piety.
But as Mr. Giuliani already seems to have demonstrated by his actions, many conservatives will never see things that way.
I'm a bit confused here.. are you supportive of Giuliani?
Ain't no such critter as a "Guiliani Conservative." Just a Guiliani RINO.
It may be an absurd criteria to you, but it isn't absurd to millions of evangelical protestant and observant Catholic Christians, and roughly 15-20 million of us voted for GW Bush twice. Some of us happen to believe that our national security lies not with superior weapons or superior military strategy and tactics, but with the grace of Almighty God who built and has maintained a protective wall around America since the first Pilgrim Christian immigrants landed.
Our liberal Supreme Court decided to spit in God's face with Roe v Wade in 1973, and that aroused a sleeping giant who had snoozed for 200 years under the deluded notion that the vast majority of Americans were practicing Christians of various denominations who basically believe and think like us on moral issues. I don't think we will make that same mistake again.
Okay, he improved law enforecment and was functional in a crisis. That's kind of the least reasonable people would expect from a mayor!
However, gun control will sink him. Even the Democrats figured that out.
It was more a question to Coleus... anyway, it might seem to be nosy for an Irishman to be looking into the internal affairs of America - but with abortion, it's and issue that affects us all.
Excellent points. It seems that far too many Christians are perfectly comfortable with expanding the power of government. I think that's an unwise position, to say the least!
Americans have opinions on Europe's politics, too. It's a small world, after all.
Yup! Still, it's a terrible day when elections cause moral dilemnas for us conservatives... I'm dreading the up coming General Election here (next year, sometime)!!
Too late for that, we already know his REAL position on what you casually dismiss as "social stuff" and it's far from neutral. And in case any conservative Christians don't know his real position, they will by the time the primaries reach critical mass.
I agree. I expect we'll end up with a reasonably conservative nominee for President, eventually. It's still a long way to the election!
By far the greatest damage to social conservatism has been done by liberal SCOTUS justices, not by any president.
Giuliani's telling people the government will "stay out of it" while appointing SCOTUS justices in the mold of Ginsburg (whom he admires) is beyond disingenuous.
I'm not going to buy it. No sensible conservative would.
You'd think with a multi-party democracy, Ireland would get a conservative government....
Well, she should read Lincoln and Washington and other presidents who felt God was important enough to invoke. Cheez.
You would! I understand that, in many parts of the world, the people who call themselves "conservative" are what we in Red State America call "liberals," while others' "liberals" are what we call "nutcases."
The U.S. may be tending that way, though ... certainly our leftists are getting steadily crazier.
Thanks for the stunning information! May he never get the nomination.
I just love watching the gun-grabbers drag out racist terms and memes to support their fear-driven agenda. It's doubly ironic when the gun-grabber in question is also a loud opponent of perceived 'racism' in other contexts ... the hypocrisy is hillarious.
BTW, those 'lousy neighbourhoods' are among the places where the honest folk are most in need of arms to defend themselves ... yet folks like your hero Giuliani, Hillary Clinton, Sarah Brady, Diane Feinstein, et al. wish to forcibly disarm them. Fine company you keep ...
Yeah, that seems to be the case.
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