Here’s a sampling from Jamell Bouie’s review of Markos Moulitsas’s book American Taliban: How War, Sex, Sin, and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right:
Given the subject matter and his own influence, Moulitsas is sure to find a large audience for American Taliban. This wouldn’t be a problem if the book were a careful comparison of populist nationalist movements, highlighting similarities, underscoring differences, and generally documenting points of congruence between the U.S. conservative movement and populist nationalist groups around the world. But it isn’t.
Like Liberal Fascism, American Taliban is another entry in the tired genre of “my political opponents are monsters.” Indeed, Moulitsas begins the book with the Goldbergian declaration that “in their tactics and on the issues, our homegrown American Taliban are almost indistinguishable from the Afghan Taliban.” And he fills the remaining 200-plus pages with similar accusations. In the chapter on power, Moulitsas writes that “the American Taliban seek a tyranny of the believers in which the popular will, the laws of the land, and all of secular society are surrendered to their clerics and ideologues.” Which is, of course, why these American Taliban participate in the democratic system and hew to the outcomes of elections. Later in the chapter, Moulitsas argues that the right-wing hates democracy — they “openly dream of their own regressive brand of religious dictatorship” — loves war, fears sex, and openly despises women and gays. In the chapter on “war,” Moulitsas calls Rep. Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota a “high priestess of the American Taliban” — a veritable Mullah Omar, it seems! — and in the final chapter on “truth,” Moulitsas concludes by noting the foundational “kinship” between the two Talibans.
Now, it’s true that certain tendencies on the American right have analogues in fundamentalist Islam; for example, and as Moulitsas points out in his chapter on sex, right-wing conservatives share a hatred of pornography with fundamentalist Iranian authorities. Of course the similarities end there; conservatives boycott pornography, Iran punishes it with death.
I haven’t read the book and so I will not critique it. When I learned that Markos had chosen to write a book about the threat from the American Right, I was generally pleased and pleasantly surprised. It showed me that he understands what it really at stake in our country right now. But when I saw the cover and title of the book I was disappointed that it looked just like a liberal version of Jonah Goldberg’s idiotic screed: Liberal Fascism.
What matters, ultimately, is not the cover art or title, but the content of the book. And, to make just one observation about the critique above, the point I believe Markos is making is about what these conservatives would do with absolute power if they could attain it. It’s not about what they are doing right now under the constraints of the Constitution and their minority position. So, for example, the reason that social conservatives don’t put pornographers to death is not necessarily because they think that is too strong of a punishment; it may be simply because they don’t have the votes to make that the punishment.
The threat from the far right, which has now captured one of our two national political parties, is that they do not subscribe to what we might call the post-war consensus. The post-war consensus can be defined as the system that was set up during and after World War Two, which includes the Bretton Woods System, the establishment of the United Nations, the desegregation of the military and the country, the Civil Right’s Movement, court rulings defending the separation of church and state, the women’s liberation movement, liberal immigration law, gay rights, and so on. We can argue to what degree these social conservatives have accepted the civil rights of black people, but they don’t agree on how it was done, as Rand Paul exemplifies.
So, the question is, what would these conservatives like Joe Miller, Joe Buck, Rand Paul, and Sharron Angle do if given power? They are not all the same. Paul, for example, is likely to defend against too much government intrusion into our social lives. But, the rest of them are in a different category. And you can’t judge them by what they do now when they are powerless. You can’t say, “Hey, these people are engaged in the political process, they’re not cutting off anyone’s noses, so what are you so worried about?” That misses the point. For all their talk about returning to constitutional principles, the truth is that they want to repeal half of the later amendments. They don’t respect the Constitution because it prevents them from running the country as a theocracy or, at a minimum, as a country where Christianity is legally recognized as a favored religion. And that’s probably their most innocuous ambition.
