What We’re Not Fighitng For
The list includes short skirts, dancing, and secularism.

By Ramesh Ponnuru, NR Senior Editor

n the nation at large, the September massacres have revealed a persistent unity under the surface of our political and cultural divisions. Among liberals, however, they have uncovered a deep divide lying under surface agreement. Many liberal intellectuals have rallied to the defense of the country. The Washington Post and The New Republic have been models of intellectual and moral clarity, supporting the president vigorously — more vigorously, indeed, than he may intend to act.

But the left wing of the liberal co alition has reacted to the attacks with instinctive opposition to military action coupled with not a little anti-Americanism. The Saids, the Sontags, the Chomskys, the other contributors to The Nation — Christopher Hitchens being a noteworthy exception — have been more interested in flaying America for its supposed sins than in defeating its enemies (or "enemies," as they would no doubt put it).

This is a deep disagreement about America's moral status. It is not, to be sure, a new disagreement. But since it manifests itself in debates about foreign policy, it has not been politically consequential since the Cold War. Differences on Kosovo were not important enough to prevent liberals and the Left from living together in the Democratic party. Now foreign policy matters again. The last few years saw an attempt to reunite campus leftists and labor — who had parted ways during the Vietnam War — in opposition to globalization. Owing to the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, that alliance is breaking up again.

For left-of-center supporters of the war, bringing around their allies is thus not only a patriotic service but a political imperative. Yet there is a danger that in the course of arguing for the war, liberals will settle on an interpretation of it that is both wrong and dangerous. According to this interpretation, what we are fighting against is "fundamentalism." What we are fighting for is "tolerance," "pluralism," "modernity," and "the open society" — and these terms are, with varying degrees of explicitness, to be understood as liberals understand them. What we are fighting for is, essentially, moral liberalism.

This, I take it, is what Salman Rushdie is getting at when he writes, in a generally quite admirable op-ed rebuking anti-American leftists, that we must be willing to die for "short skirts and dancing." Michael Lind, who is hard to categorize politically but is certainly a liberal on moral issues, makes the point more clearly: "It's a war of reason and tolerance against medieval superstition." Such superstition is not confined to radical Islam. "The anti-American Muslims believe that the United States is a godless, secular humanist regime. So does the religious right," writes Lind. "The radical Muslims want to roll back feminism and stamp out abortion and homosexuality. So does the religious right." Aryeh Neier, the head of the Open Society Institute, has drawn the same parallel. The Rev. Jerry Falwell's notorious remarks, he writes, "make clear that American fundamentalists are as hostile to modernity as their counterparts elsewhere."

Andrew Sullivan — who is not himself a liberal in the contemporary sense but is a scourge of religious conservatives — has been a strong and eloquent supporter of the war on Islamist terrorism. He goes so far as to call it "a religious war." In the New York Times Magazine, he writes that it is "a war of fundamentalism against faiths of all kinds that are at peace with freedom and modernity. This war even has far gentler echoes in America's own religious conflicts — between newer, more virulent strands of Christian fundamentalism and mainstream Protestantism and Catholicism." He concludes, "What is really at issue here is the simple but immensely difficult principle of the separation of politics and religion."

As I've said, not all the above-quoted people are orthodox liberals, but it's easy to see the appeal their view of the war will have for liberals. Many of them tend to regard what Alan Wolfe calls "moral freedom" as the essence of freedom and the highest achievement of our civilization. As the Supreme Court put it in an abortion case, "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." (That's quite a lot to pack into the Fourteenth Amendment's due-process clause, one might think, but never mind.) Many of them tend to think that any form of absolute conviction, especially religious conviction, is likely to lead to coercion and, at the end of the road, totalitarianism. And all liberals, whether for or against the war, can agree that the Religious Right is a threat to American democracy. The Taliban, for them, is simply Gary Bauer in power.

If this view of the war might recruit some liberals, if widely adopted it would cause many others to stop supporting the war. It would shrink our international coalition. Is Pakistan prepared to fight by our side for abortion rights? Latin America has not been keen on tolerance for gays. And this is to say nothing of our domestic coalition. "Fundamentalist" Christians make up, by some estimates, a quarter of our population. We will not get our side of the war off to a good start by defining them as, philosophically, part of the enemy. And there are millions of Catholics who share many of their moral views. (I would wager that social conservatives make up a disproportionate number of our men in uniform.)

Sullivan outlines some of the parallels between Christian and Islamic "fundamentalists": Both groups have strong faiths based on absolute truths; both feel their cultures are slipping away from them and are consequently insecure. But this isn't much, really. Secular philosophies can be absolutist, and totalitarian, too. (Sullivan concedes, at least in his Times Magazine piece, that secular philosophies can be totalitarian. On his website, though, he writes, "In my view, atheists are far less politically dangerous than fundamentalists of any stripe.") The flip side of the coin is that philosophies of freedom can be held with absolute, indeed religious, conviction: Many of us believe that God commands us not to kill one another in disputes about God's commands. Most of us feel no doubt whatsoever when we say that the mass murders of 9/11 were absolutely wrong.

Islamists and Christian fundamentalists may agree that the West is decadent, just as Islamists and liberals may agree that the West bears responsibility for Third World poverty. Were we really attacked for our social license? One hesitates to make definitive judgments about the psychology of the strip-club Islamists who crashed our planes. But the answer is probably, "Yes, in part": This is the kernel of truth to the social-liberal analysis of the war. It seems unlikely that Osama bin Laden would hate us less, however, if we were really the "Christian crusaders" coming "under the banner of the cross" of his propaganda. It was evangelizing for Christianity, not peddling pornography, that landed Americans on the Taliban's death row.

The Revs. Falwell and Robertson lent some credence to the argument that Christian and Islamic "fundamentalism" are brothers under the skin. (This was, in fact, a reason that many conservatives regretted their remarks.) But for all their frequent folly and occasional malice — and I wrote an essay criticizing Falwell and Robertson the day their remarks were reported — conservative Christian leaders are not bringing down buildings. And what they, together with rank-and-file conservative Christians, want is a far cry from theocracy.

What conservative Christians want is to restore certain aspects of the America of the 1950s. That America banned abortion and practiced a mild censorship. Perhaps it was wrong to do these things. But most people would agree that the America of the 1950s was a free society, and a society worth defending from external attack. All of these things, of course, could also be said of the America of 1941.

We can fight for freedom while disagreeing about the full meaning of freedom. The war on Islamism does not need the distraction of our culture wars: of clerics who say our decadence is to blame for the attacks; of intellectuals who exult that our decadence has brought us such ugly enemies. Liberals should not support the war because the Taliban is hostile to feminism. They should support it because they are patriots. That is why most of them actually do support it. They are better than their ideology.