CONSERVATIVE EXTREMISTS

The title seems like an oxymoron but it's not: the so-called "movement conservatives" are literally trying to destroy a remarkable child of The Enlightenment, the United States of America.

(Link chain: Atrios -> Digby -> Robert Parry -> Lefarkins)

When I listen to wingnut radio, I sometimes get anxiety because I get the feeling that the hosts and their devoted listeners simply can't be reached by rational arguments. Parry gives us two examples of unreachable people who are highly respected on the Right:

In the winter 1991 issue of the conservative Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Sentelle praised the writings of right-wing jurist Robert Bork.

"Leftist heretics perceive our system of separated and federated powers as a stumbling block to their goal of remaking the Republic into a collectivist, egalitarian, materialistic, race-conscious, hyper-secular, and socially permissive state," Sentelle wrote.

Sentelle and Bork shared the view that the American left was riding roughshod over the nation. "Modern liberalism," according to Bork's 1996 book, Slouching Toward Gomorrah, "is what fascism looks like when it has captured significant institutions, most notably the universities, but has no possibility of becoming a mass movement.

"Only "the rise of an energetic, optimistic and politically sophisticated religious conservatism" can counter "the extremists of modern liberalism," Bork argued. [For an examination of the intellectual underpinnings of the new religious conservatism, see The New York Times Magazine, Oct. 11, 1998.]

From this we can infer that both of these freakshows supported Jerry Foulwell and other religious fanatics like him. According to Parry, Judge Sentelle played a role in the hunting of President Clinton by voting to remove Robert Fiske and replace him with ideologue Ken Starr.

Lefarkins links to a review by Ronald Dworkin of 2 books by another prominent conservative judge, Richard A. Posner and here's an excerpt that shows the dangerous hypocrisy of these people:

The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory is an academic work based on various lectures given in recent years. It endorses moral relativism, declares that if someone sincerely claimed that it is right to kill infants, "I would hesitate to call him immoral," advises that we should not call slavery, Nazism, and Stalinism immoral ("that is just an epithet") but rather "not adaptive," and insists that moralizing is useless except as a rhetorical tool for charlatans and charismatic leaders.^[5]

An Affair of State is an account of President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky and his impeachment and trial; it is, on the contrary, drenched in moral indignation and chastises academics and intellectuals who opposed impeachment for not denouncing Clinton's moral flaws often or ferociously enough.

Posner seems to be playing the role of the modern conservative high priest that Leo Strauss both described and promoted. The high priest can say one thing to the masses (the Lewinsky book) and something entirely different to his fellow high priests (the Theory book). In the end, the only thing that matters for these extremists is gaining enough political power to destroy the America that was founded on The Enlightenment.