The Conservative Soul by Andrew Sullivan

Author:Andrew Sullivan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061843280
Publisher: HarperCollins

IV

BUT IT WAS IN FOREIGN POLICY THAT THE NEW CONSERVATISM made its most spectacular impression. The defining event of the Bush presidency was the mass murder of thousands of innocent civilians only eight months after George W. Bush took office. The administration’s response to that seismic event reveals both the strength and the weakness of the new politics of American fundamentalism.

The strengths first. What the American people needed after 9/11 was clarity, purpose, and a vision for a proportionate response. And this was what the new conservatism was almost designed for. Its sweeping faith in American exceptionalism, its natural, unforced patriotism, its ease with religious belief at a moment of national shock and mourning: all these were immense gifts to the country at the time. Maybe any president would have rallied to the occasion. Bush faltered at first, but then soared, with one of the most moving addresses to Congress ever given by an American president. Bush’s capacity for the sweeping vision, the bold stroke, the simple, unifying message met its moment.

The new fundamentalism’s ease with authority also helped. In crisis people look for strong leadership, for someone able and willing to take command. They do not want or need public displays of hand-wringing or doubt or prevarication. Bush didn’t give them any. He made a couple of key decisions that still reverberate. He understood that the attack by al Qaeda and its supporters among the tyrannies of the Arab Muslim world was a declaration of war; and that the war might well at some point involve weapons of mass destruction. He also grasped that mere reaction to terror was insufficient. The West had to seize back the initiative, to put the terror networks on the defensive, to attack them before they attacked us again. He was also careful not to engage in any crude “war of civilizations” rhetoric. Despite his own Christian faith, and the fundamentalist Christian nature of his political base, he sagely eschewed any public thought of a war between Christianity and Islam.

But it was still impossible not to see, even in the beginning, the incipient dangers of a fundamentalist mind-set grappling with a huge, complex, and terrifying problem: Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. The absolutism of one almost inescapably triggered the absolutist tendencies of the other. 9/11 became, for the president, his second “born-again” moment. Just as a born-again Christian fixates upon a moment on which his entire life now pivots, the born-again presidency redefined itself entirely in terms of an absolute commitment to fighting an abstract enemy, easily conflated into a single entity, readily accessible to the fundamentalist psyche: evil.

Some of this was perfectly justified and understandable. The murder of innocents going about their daily lives is indeed evil. There is no other word for it. So too is the spiritual fanaticism of the suicide bomber. What was needed was both an ability to grasp this evil, but also a capacity for shrewd, calm, rational strategy in response, a capacity to resist the simple instinct to respond

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