While I often disagree with him on some issues, he nailed this one on the head.
Then I caught this in last Sunday's NYT Sunday Book Review.
Lets hope the next generation of Bush's dislike reading as much as the current crop.
"Where the Right Went Wrong
By DAVID BROOKS - NYT Sunday Book Review
Published: October 22, 2006
Andrew Sullivan is one of the best bloggers in the world, and for a time his blog was popular with members of the Bush administration. It used to amuse me to imagine Bush staffers rising early from their marital beds, the sleep still heavy in their eyes, padding over to their computers and having their first human contact of the day with a gay Catholic Tory.
In those days, as in these, the war on terror was Sullivan’s chief concern. He saw it as Bush did, as a comprehensive war against an extremist ideology, and he fervently supported the invasion of Iraq. But during 2004 Sullivan grew disenchanted with the Bush administration. He had always been inflamed by the Republican Party’s opposition to gay marriage (like most bloggers, Sullivan gets inflamed on a daily basis), but now his criticism spread to other issues.
Sullivan grew incensed by the rise in federal spending, the incompetence displayed after Katrina, the conduct of the postwar occupation in Iraq and, most of all, the Bush administration’s stand on interrogations. He ended up endorsing John Kerry and now he is contemptuous of almost all things Bush.
Yet Sullivan has continued to think of himself as a conservative. And he has been forced to ask himself the question that many conservatives have been forced to ask themselves: If I am a conservative, and I detest many of the things this conservative administration is doing, then what kind of conservative am I and what kind of conservatives are they?
“The Conservative Soul” is Sullivan’s answer to that question. His book is important, not only because he is willing to re-examine his own views relentlessly, but also because this is a moment when conservatism is in tumult, with old alliances breaking down, new divisions widening into chasms. I happen to be friends with Sullivan, and with many of the people he attacks, and I have no idea how we will all regard one another in five years.
“The conservatism I grew up around” Sullivan writes on the second page of the book, “was a combination of lower taxes, less government spending, freer trade, freer markets, individual liberty, personal responsibility and a strong anti-Communist foreign policy.” His heroes were Thatcher, Reagan, Solzhenitsyn, Havel, Hayek and Orwell.
But over the past few years, he argues, something new has usurped conservatism and threatened the world — religious fundamentalism. It is a mindset more than a faith, Sullivan argues: “Its core is not the individual conscience, but God himself, and the decision of the individual to surrender himself to God entirely as the premise of every action he commits and every decision he makes.”
The fundamentalist, Sullivan continues, is hostile to pluralism, feels alienated from society, surrenders to authority and is untroubled by doubt. “The fundamentalist does not tolerate a diversity of views. There is one truth; and all other pretenders are threats to it, or contradict it.”
Sullivan periodically distinguishes between the Muslim fundamentalism of the terrorists and the Christian fundamentalists he says now dominate the Republican Party, but he sees them as part of the same continuum, and often leaps between the two. He argues that Nazis, Communists, Wahhabists and certain orthodox Protestants, Catholics and Jews are all fundamentalists. He throws Osama bin Laden onto the fundamentalist pile, as well as the Princeton philosopher Robert George, the former presidential speechwriter Michael Gerson, William Kristol and Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor (“the quintessential voice of fundamentalism”). Fundamentalists, he concludes, reject “the entire premise of secular democracy: that religion should be restricted to the private sphere.”
Sullivan’s antidote to fundamentalism is the conservatism of doubt. “The defining characteristic of the conservative is that he knows what he doesn’t know,” Sullivan writes. “As humans we can merely sense the existence of a higher truth, a greater coherence than ourselves, but we cannot see it face to face,” he argues. So politics should be about acknowledging what we don’t know, and being cautious in what we think we can achieve..."
I agree totally, and I can imagine nothing further from the state of the current R Party.
Oh, I weep for the party of Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower R
