Professor Alan Wolfe has firmly planted himself on the left wing of American politics for his entire adult life. However, as befits a Jewish atheist running a center for “religion and American public life” at Boston College, he has long been a broad-minded, generous-spirited and tolerant observer and interpreter of, well, religion and public life in America.
That record, and this column in the latest edition of Commonweal, make him the latest winner of the Dionne Award, given at the whim of this blog to a “habitually even-tempered and fair-minded commentator for excellence in expressing moral outrage”.
Wolfe makes the counter-intuitive argument that “there will be an explicit choice between two different understandings of American purpose” in this year’s election. Not because of the country stands on the brink of civil war (as in 1860), or is mired in an unprecedented economic collapse (as in 1932), or faces the prospect of entering a second world war (as in 1940).
No, Wolfe argues that “(t)he choice this year is not finally between conservativism and liberalism, but between fantasy and reality”. Today’s Republicans are so extreme and so unified that a “closed-information system has allowed the Republican Party to create an entirely fictitious reality that bears no relationship to facts in the real world–and then to pretend that this fictitious creation is the only one that matters”.
When the election is still six months away and mild-mannered academics (including the author of a book titled One Nation After All) are questioning your grip on reality, you’re headed in the wrong direction.
Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/