The Enemy At Home

by Dinesh D'Souza

  Traditional Muslims have numerous concerns about American foreign policy, and most stem from the belief that America is prejudiced or unfairly hostile to Muslims. I believe these concerns are largely erroneous, and many of them could be dispelled if the administration clearly articulated its strategic concerns and made the moral case for America. This is the area in which the Bush administration has failed abysmally. Presidents have to recognize that deeds must be backed up with words. Bush seems incapable of taking on the critics of American foreign policy, and no one else in the government seems up to the task.

  So my third recommendation is for the Bush administration, and conservatives generally, to level with traditional Muslims and talk sense to them. Currently Muslims who raise difficult questions about U.S. foreign policy are met with uneasy equivocations. Many traditional Muslims who do not support Hamas or Hezbollah nevertheless question the role of America as an honest broker in the Middle East. They note that while the United States poses as a neutral peacemaker, its politicians routinely assure their home constituencies they are unequivocally on the side of Israel. Muslims demand to know if America is an umpire or a player. America’s diplomats make supreme efforts to dodge this question, hoping that the Muslims will stop posing it. This hope is unrealistic, and moreover, there is no reason for the United States to equivocate in this way. Instead, the Bush administration should say, “Yes, we are on Israel’s side, and there are reasons for it. There is a religious affinity between Jews and Christians. Israel is a democratic society like the United States. Many Americans are much more comfortable with Jews, whom they know, than with Muslims, whom they don’t know. Older Americans remember that during the Cold War many Arab countries were allied with the Soviet Union, while Israel has been a reliable American ally. Memories of the Holocaust remain strong, and there is a lot of guilt about what happened to the Jews, in part because they had no place of their own to go to. Finally, Jews exert effective political influence in both of America’s major parties, and Muslims have not developed that.” The advantage of such candor with traditional Muslims is that it wins their respect, even when they find themselves on a different side. Muslims, who understand the language of political self-interest, might oppose America’s actions in a given situation, but they cannot deny that if they were in America’s position they would act in the same way.

  IN THE SOCIAL domain, the right is perfectly poised to forge an alliance with traditional Muslims. The natural basis for this alliance is the moral framework shared by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Conservatives need to discover what several thoughtful Muslims have already recognized. The attitude of the ordinary Muslims to the liberal assault on the family, Seyyed Hossein Nasr writes, “is not much different from those of traditional Jews and Christians in the West.” As Nasr puts it, “Secularism is the common enemy…. Men and women in the West who are still devoted to the life of faith should know that those closest to them in this world are Muslims.” Mustafa Akyol makes the same point. “From the Muslim point of view, Christians are the closest friends and allies in the world.” He offers conservatives some sage advice: “America must help Muslims see that it is indeed a nation under God. The culture it exports should celebrate more than materialism, disbelief, selfishness, and hedonism. America must do a better job of portraying its principles of decency. Otherwise it will be despised by devout Muslims throughout the world, and the radicals will channel that contempt into violence.”6

  The implication of this counsel is that conservatives must support rather than condemn Muslims when they defend their traditional values. The right must stop its ridiculous preening as the champion of secularism and feminism—a pose that does not fool the left and only alienates traditional people around the world. Nor should the right make the disastrous mistake of defending moral depravity as it did at Abu Ghraib. Moreover, the right must strive to prevent the cultural left from exporting bogus rights and cultural debauchery abroad. One way conservatives can convey their seriousness about this is by choosing appropriate occasions to attack Hollywood. Of course, the right-wing media does protest the debauched values of the movie and music industry. But this time we must do it in the full recognition that the domestic culture war has international ramifications. So the conservative critique of Hollywood must be launched with the global audience in mind. The right should organize an international conference on the effects of Hollywood and American popular culture on non-Western cultures. It would be fascinating to hear from Muslims and other traditional people about how their local cultures are being affected by Hollywood movies and TV shows. Besides, on what basis would self-styled American liberals object to a proposal so open-minded and multicultural?

  Conservatives can also work with traditional Muslims, and with traditional people from around the world, to promote shared values at the United Nations. At the very least the right can lead a global coalition to thwart U.N. resolutions undermining the family. A hint of how this might succeed can be seen from the 1994 U.N. Population Conference in Cairo, where Catholic groups from Western and non-Western countries teamed up with Muslim groups to exclude any reference to abortion as a legitimate form of birth control. More recently, the Bush administration took a bold step in the U.N. when it supported a resolution introduced by Iran to deny consulting status to a group of homosexual organizations led by the International Lesbian and Gay Association. This group is so outlandish that until a few years ago it included as affiliates pedophile clubs like the North American Man-Boy Love Association. Predictably, leftist groups were incensed by the Bush administration’s stance. Imagine siding with the Iranians! Congressman Tom Lantos, a California Democrat who serves on the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, warned that Bush’s decision was a “major setback” for a “core component of our nation’s human rights diplomacy.”7 If so, our nation’s human rights diplomacy is way off track and more such “setbacks” are needed.

  Conservatives usually criticize the U.N. for its financial corruption and shameless anti-Americanism. But the U.N. has also become an instrument of left-wing cultural imperialism, and this part of its agenda has been completely overlooked on the right. Conservatives typically call for America to withdraw from the U.N. or stop funding it. The right’s hostility is understandable, and was no doubt heightened by the U.N.’s refusal to authorize the Iraq invasion. Conservatives pay a price, however, for their rejectionist attitude. The left is able to portray the right as a group of isolationist cranks. Moreover, the left is able to implement its global agenda at the U.N. without being challenged in that forum by the American right.

  Conservatives should recall that during the Cold War, the U.N. had the same flawed structure it does now, but the right was able to use the organization to choreograph symbolic confrontations with the Soviet Union. A series of high-profile diplomats, from Daniel Patrick Moynihan to Jeane Kirkpatrick, made the U.N. an international stage on which to successfully dramatize the differences between the totalitarian state and the free society. If the Bush administration took the U.N. seriously, it could better bend the organization to its purpose. Rather than surrender the U.N. to the left, conservatives should become more involved, not merely in the Security Council but also in the General Assembly, where American influence has been weak. Not that we need the U.N. to highlight the crimes of Islamic radicalism. It is much more important for the right to make the U.N. the international theater to expose the depravity of the left, and thereby build ties with traditional people around the world. The right can restore American influence in the U.N. by working cooperatively with non-Western cultures to stop the liberal cultural aggression that operates under the pretext of “human rights” and “international law.”

  None of this is to deny that there are universal human rights. These are the rights affirmed in the United Nations charter. There is the right to human dignity, the prohibition of genocide, the right to practice one’s religion, and the right to marry and to form a family. These rights are the product of the old liberalis
m—of classical liberalism—and they are rights that traditional Muslims and traditional people around the world generally support. There is a crucial distinction, however, between the legitimate rights of classical liberalism and the bogus rights of the cultural left. Conservatives should feel no qualms about allying with traditional people around the world to disband this regime of bogus rights. In this way, the right can deliver a major blow to the international left and undermine the left’s domestic claim to be the party promoting “universal rights.” In reality, the left is promoting a parochial Western agenda that is morally repulsive to, and emphatically rejected by, most of the world.

  Conservatives must strive to convince traditional Muslims that there are two Americas, and that one of these has a lot in common with them. To the degree that conservatives highlight the traditional morality of red America, they risk further alienating many Europeans. Let them be alienated. Despite the ancestral attachment that many on the right have for Europe, conservatives gain nothing by courting people who do not share their basic values, either on foreign policy or on social issues. Conservatives should pay less attention to Europe and more to their real allies in the rest of the world. During the Danish cartoon controversy, for example, the American right made a huge tactical blunder in viewing the entire matter through the prism of free speech. Yes, we support free speech, but that wasn’t the only issue here. As the Danish, French, and German newspapers that reprinted the cartoons understood, what was also at stake was blasphemy as a social virtue, what one newspaper arrogantly termed “the right to blaspheme against God.” So this would have been the perfect opportunity for conservatives to distinguish the United States from Europe, and declare that in this country we do not consider ridiculing other people’s religion to be a sign of virtue or enlightenment. So how should American conservatives have responded to the cartoons? With the same distaste that American liberals would react to cartoons mocking Martin Luther King! The general lesson is that while Europeans cozy up to the radical Muslims, conservatives must move closer to the traditional Muslims, and one way to do this is to seize every opportunity to repudiate European decadence.

  Here is the message that conservatives should convey to traditional Muslims around the world: “We know that America has some serious cultural problems. We consider these our problems, and we are taking responsibility for addressing them. Our biggest task is not one of nation building abroad but of nation building in America. Leave this project to us. Do not support the radical Muslims who attack America. This is an intolerable strategy that gives Islam a bad name, and we will resist it with all our power. It is also unnecessary because you have allies in America who are doing what we can to make our country better. There are healthy and wholesome aspects of American culture that enrich our lives, and we would be happy to export these to you, if indeed you want them. At the same time, we are determined to reverse the tide of liberal immorality in the United States, and we pledge to do what we can to stop the export of cultural depravity to your society. When we are unable to do this, we will speak out and clarify that this part of America makes us ashamed. In this way you will see that we, like you, are working not merely toward the free society but also the decent society.” On this basis the right can establish its own truce with traditional Islam, mirroring the truce that bin Laden seeks with the American left.

  WE HAVE SEEN how conservatives can win the war on terror by more effectively fighting the culture war at home and on the international stage. I now want to explore the other side of the equation by raising an issue pertinent to the next presidential election. Our elections have become global media events, giving conservatives a unique opportunity not only to address the American people but also the rest of the world. So, how can the right use the war on terror to win the culture war? This is a crucial question because the war on terror has never been solely about the future of the Islamic world. It is also about the future of America, about what kind of people we are and about which values we want to project abroad.

  Now conservatives need to inquire whether there is a way to harness the foreign policy debate over terrorism in such a way as to redefine, and reinvigorate, the domestic culture war. It is impossible to overstate the importance for the right to win the culture war. More than anything else, it is the culture war that has been the reason for the right’s electoral success in the last decade and a half. Conservatives, having fallen into a kind of governing lassitude, sorely need some of the bold confrontational strategies of the kind they employed when they were in the minority. In order to give the culture war a new thrust, I propose that conservatives adopt a two-part strategy.

  Expose the domestic insurgency. Oddly enough, many conservatives continue to treat the cultural left as a kind of well-meaning opposition that is deluded or simply hasn’t come up with its own effective strategy for fighting the Islamic radicals. In reality, the left already has a foreign policy and a strategy, and it is called working in tandem with bin Laden to defeat Bush. As we have seen, the left and the Islamic radicals operate like the two sides of a scissors, each prong working separately, but toward the same end. Conservatives need to identify the enemy at home and show its tacit relationship with the foreign enemy. Not only is there a close parallel between the rhetoric of the two groups, but they have the same goal of defeating Bush in Iraq, and they need each other to accomplish this goal. In short, the left is the domestic insurgency that provides a counterpart to the Iraq insurgency. It is at least as dangerous as any of bin Laden’s American sleeper cells.

  Conservatives need to expose the alliance between the left and Islamic radicals. Once they do this, the leftist chorus in the media will let out a banshee-like howl of indignation. In order to silence the right, the domestic insurgents will no doubt hurl the charge of “McCarthyism.” Conservatives should not be intimidated by this accusation. Although McCarthy was vilified for claiming that there were communists and Soviet sympathizers in the U.S. government, the files of the former Soviet Union reveal that he was largely right, even if he made some of his points in a reckless and buffoonish way. Moreover, the charge of McCarthyism is a diversion because (as I have repeatedly pointed out throughout this book) I am not accusing anyone of treason or even of anti-Americanism. At any rate, with the end of the Cold War, the weight of the accusation will be greatly diminished. At the same time, the left’s shrieks of outrage will confirm that the right has finally come close to accurately describing the strategy of the enemy at home.

  Unlike McCarthy, who never disclosed the identities of the communists and Soviet sympathizers in high places, I intend to name the enemy at home. Recognizing that list making is a tenuous business, I provide mine solely for the purpose of truth in advertising. Drawing from the various species of leftists portrayed in this book, I offer this roster of people and groups that deserve the label of domestic insurgents. Here is the litmus test that confirms their eligibility. If you presume that these individuals want Bush to win and bin Laden to lose the war on terror, their rhetoric and actions are utterly baffling. By contrast, if you presume that they want bin Laden to win and Bush to lose the war, then their statements and actions make perfect sense.

  The Congressional Left: Ted Kennedy, Patrick Leahy, Barbara Boxer, Russ Feingold, Hillary Clinton, Robert Byrd, Patty Murray, Barbara Mikulski, Nancy Pelosi, Charles Rangel, Carl Levin, Tom Lantos, Maxine Waters, Ed Markey, John Conyers, Dennis Kucinich, Cynthia McKinney, Barney Frank, Jim McDermott, and Jack Reed

  The Intellectual Left: Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Edward Said (deceased, but his influence is very much alive), Richard Rorty, Martha Nussbaum, Rashid Khalidi, Eric Hobsbawm, Cornel West, Sean Wilentz, Paul Starr, Robert Reich, Eric Foner, Laurence Tribe, Henry Louis Gates, Tony Judt, Thomas Frank, and Garry Wills

  The Hollywood Left: Martin Sheen, Barbra Streisand, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn, Harry Belafonte, Rob Reiner, Rosie O’Donnell, Oliver Stone, Danny Glover, Jane Fonda, Spike Lee, Alec Baldwin, Norman Lear, Cameron Diaz, Sharon St
one, Ed Asner, and Janeane Garofalo

  The Activist Left: Howard Dean, Michael Moore, George Soros, Cindy Sheehan, Ramsey Clark, Nicholas De Genova, Markos Moulitsas, Nan Aron, Ralph Neas, Paul Begala, Amy Goodman, Ward Churchill, Jim Wallis, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Gary Kamiya, and Arundhati Roy

  The Foreign Policy Left: Chalmers Johnson, Robert Fisk, David Cole, Gore Vidal, Jonathan Schell, William Blum, James Carroll, Seymour Hersh, Jimmy Carter, Bob Herbert, George Galloway, Mark Danner, Robert Scheer, Juan Cole, Anthony Lewis, and Richard Falk

  The Cultural Left: Frank Rich, Al Franken, Maureen Dowd, Salman Rushdie, Tony Kushner, Toni Morrison, Jane Smiley, Arianna Huffington, Eve Ensler, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, Katha Pollitt, Eric Alterman, Karen Armstrong, Bill Moyers, Ellen Willis, Barbara Ehrenreich, Molly Ivins, Mari Matsuda, Thomas Frank, Joe Conason, and Wendy Kaminer

  Leftist Organizations: Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER), United for Peace and Justice, Peaceful Tomorrow, Open Society Institute, National Lawyers Guild, Human Rights Watch, Center for Constitutional Rights, Amnesty International, Ford Foundation, Code Pink, Planned Parenthood, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), People for the American Way, and moveon.org