The Conservative Face of Evil

Dennis Prager argues that "the Achilles Heel" of liberals is their "desire to be loved." According to Prager, that's why liberals have been reluctant to describe the Soviet Union as an "evil empire," discipline their children, and are so sensitive to the damage that George Bush has done to America's global reputation. Conservatives view the left as reluctant to judge, overly worried about thinking about politics in moral terms, and consequently too cautious in their pursuit of American interest.

To put the matter crudely, conservatives view people on the left as effete, effeminate and ineffective.

But times have changed.

People on the left have redoubled our identification with the heritage of constitutional liberty, learned to make the harshest kind of moral judgments, and started to use the language of good vs evil.

And we have our conservative friends to thank for that.

Certainly that's been the case with American legal rights. The Bush administration has raised awareness of American rights in a lot of ways. By kidnapping and torturing those accused of terrorism, denying them legal rights, and flushing them into Guantanamo, Bush has reminded liberals of the preciousness of legal rights and the vigilance needed to maintain them. In this context, liberal bloggers like Glenn Greenwald identify the rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights as the essence of the United States as a nation and readily label Bush and his supporters as "un-American," "corrupt," "morally bankrupt," and "cynical."

Contrary to Praeger, neither Greenwald nor any of the other major liberal bloggers care the least about being loved by the Bush administration, the media, or the "establishment" they view as aiding and abetting the abuses of the Bush years. In relation to the moral failings of the Bush administration, liberals are as judgmental as any Puritan, abolitionist, or sixties feminist.

But I doubt Praeger would be comforted by that thought.

But the moral judgmentalism of liberals extends farther than that. Liberals condemn the swaggering arrogance, personal intolerance, and sense of entitlement on the right and everyday liberals refer to people on the right as "arrogant assholes" to such an extent that I've encountered conservatives who have internalized the insult. Liberals also condemn conservatives like Ted Haggard, Mark Foley, David Vitter, and Larry Craig as fantastic moral hypocrites but also believe that conservatives in general share in the outsized hypocrisy of these men. Finally, liberals view the right as racist, misogynist, homophobic, and animated by religious bigotry because of conservative resistance to the Civil Rights movement, feminism, gay rights, and freedom of religion.

That's an enormous amount of moral condemnation. In some ways, I wonder what Praeger had in mind when he accused liberals of not being judgmental enough.

In the final analysis though, I don't think liberals engage in quite enough moral condemnation of the right. There's a growing body of evidence that there is a body of opinion in the American right that favors the overthrow of American democracy and the establishment of a dictatorship. Yesterday a group called "Family Security Matters" published an article by Phillip Atkinson calling for George Bush to kill the Arab population of Iraq and then overthrow democracy in the United States.

If President Bush copied Julius Caesar by ordering his army to empty Iraq of Arabs and repopulate the country with Americans, he would achieve immediate results: popularity with his military; enrichment of America by converting an Arabian Iraq into an American Iraq (therefore turning it from a liability to an asset); and boost American prestiege while terrifying American enemies.

He could then follow Caesar's example and use his newfound popularity with the military to wield military power to become the first permanent president of America, and end the civil chaos caused by the continually squabbling Congress and the out-of-control Supreme Court.

It would be easy to condemn Philip Atkinson and "Family Security Matters" as a bunch of crackpots. But it doesn't work out that way. Even though "Family Security Matters" disavowed the Atkinson article, leaders and opinion-makers on the right have been calling for the end of democracy as we know it ever since the Democrats won control of Congress. For Newt Gingrich, the road to overturning democracy changing the first amendment to restrict political dissent and create military commissions to prosecute war dissenters. Frank Gaffney, the head of the Center for Security Policy that created "Family Security Matters," favors military tribunals for leading war opponents as well. Thomas Sowell is more in favor of a military coup while Harvey Mansfield likes one-man rule in general.

Perhaps more significantly, everyday right-wingers are starting to get the idea that shooting a few prominent liberals would be a good idea. According to Johann Hari, a fellow traveler on the National Review cruise offered up this tidbit.

When I hear her say, " Of course, we need to execute some of these people," I wake up. Who do we need to execute? She runs her fingers through the sand lazily. "A few of these prominent liberals who are trying to demoralise the country," she says. "Just take a couple of these anti-war people off to the gas chamber for treason to show, if you try to bring down America at a time of war, that's what you'll get." She squints at the sun and smiles. " Then things'll change."

The Bush administration correctly characterizes Osama bin Laden as "evil" because he advocates the establishment of a harsh dictatorship and is willing to kill enormous numbers of human beings to accomplish his goal. It's becoming more and more evident that the American right shares that brand of evil. It goes without saying that right-wingers in the United States have had no problem with the deaths of more than one hundred thousand Iraqis over the last four years. Now that right-wing opinions in the United States is beginning to coalesce around the idea of overthrowing American democracy, it may be time to consider the right-wing as a real threat to the American way of life. Certainly, the American right is a much more powerful and scarcely less aggressive force than al-Qaeda. If a right-wing American government made a push to overthrow democratic institutions in the United States, it would certainly be more of a threat than al-Qaeda will ever be able to generate.

In that sense, the right-wing is becoming the most prominent source of evil now facing American society.