Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dwight Furrow (San Diego, CA), professor of philosophy at San Diego Mesa College, is the author of Ethics: Key Concepts in Philosophy and Against Theory: Continental and Analytic Challenges in Moral Philosophy. He is also the editor of Moral Soundings: Readings on the Crisis of Values in Contemporary Life.

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REVIVING THE LEFT

Prometheus Books

Contents

Acknowledgments.............................................................................9Introduction................................................................................11PART 1 A NATION AT RISK: HOW CONSERVATISM IS DESTROYING AMERICAN VALUES.....................271 Conservatism's Big Idea..................................................................312 Tradition: The Imaginary Fortress........................................................553 Self-Reliance: Conservative Snake Oil....................................................774 Deliver Us from Evil.....................................................................93PART 2 ROOTSTOCK LIBERALISM: A NEW MORAL VISION.............................................1035 How Liberalism Lost Its Mojo.............................................................1056 The Unbearable Lightness of Being Liberal................................................1197 American Dreams..........................................................................1438 You Put the Load Right on Me.............................................................1639 A Culture of Care........................................................................18310 Changing the Moral Paradigm..............................................................203Endnotes....................................................................................233Index.......................................................................................249

Chapter One

Conservatives won elections because they articulated a personal morality that was attractive to many Americans. What is this moral philosophy, and why was it attractive? To many, conservatism may seem like a hash of conflicting ideas held together by self-interest, self-righteousness, and hypocrisy in equal measure. In opposing abortion and embryonic stem-cell research, conservatives support a "culture of life" but lose little sleep over civilian victims of US military adventures or the innocents executed by a flawed judicial system. Conservatives defend freedom but sacrifice the civil liberties required to maintain it. They are tough on crime but oppose gun control. They extol the value of family but seek to prevent gays and lesbians from forming one.

However, the appearance of logical conflict is misleading. Conservative thought is consistent, but only when viewed against the background of the ultimate aim of conservatism-victory in a spiritual battle of good against evil. That this is indeed the aim of contemporary conservatism is apparent from their words; it is also the best explanation of their policy positions and political rhetoric.

Conservatives claim an allegiance to small government and modest reform, skeptical of government's ability to improve lives or induce social change without botching the job. "Getting government off our backs," they call it. Yet this paean to small government belies an agenda devoted to massive social engineering advanced through government power. In his second inaugural address in 2005, President Bush, one of the most consistently conservative presidents in our history, declared, "So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." (The emphasis is mine.) More stunning was the speech that President Bush gave from the pulpit of the National Cathedral shortly after the September 11 attacks in which he proclaimed, "Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil." (Again, the emphasis is mine.) It would seem that big ideas are not the exclusive purview of leftist intellectuals. President Bush and his conservative supporters have taken on the task of the millennia-the eradication of evil and the end of tyranny!

This preoccupation with stamping out evil-conservatism's Big Idea-is not the peculiar obsession of a megalomaniacal president but is a persistent preoccupation of conservative commentators and opinion makers. Conservative news host Sean Hannity's book Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism makes explicit reference to this agenda, as does the offering from David Frum and Richard Perle entitled An End to Evil. Frum, a former presidential speechwriter, coined the term "axis of evil" used by President Bush to describe North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. Both books opine that "absolute evil" is the source of social problems and conflict throughout the world, and only unilateral military action against a variety of foreign powers and the suspension of some civil liberties at home will rid the world of malevolence.

With this rhetoric of evil, Bush and his supporters drew blood from an artery that has nourished the hearts of conservatives throughout much of the twentieth century. A central unifying theme of American conservative rhetoric declares that the United States is perpetually engaged in an apocalyptic, spiritual battle with an implacable foe that can be defeated only by military power and moral spine stiffening. The anticommunist rants of Whittaker Chambers and Joseph McCarthy, the reckless nuclear saber rattling of Barry Goldwater in his 1964 campaign for president, and Ronald Reagan's proclamation of a Soviet "evil empire" are precursors to contemporary rants about Islamic fascism and liberal elites. In each case, accusations that the foe is utterly depraved are accompanied by the declaration of a battle for the fate of humanity, a moral jihad to which Americans must devote their energy and resources. Ronald Reagan's speech at the 1964 Republican Convention in support of Goldwater's bellicose war rhetoric is exemplary of conservatism's past, and it could be aptly inserted into a Bush speech with no loss of currency. Reagan declaimed, "You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness." If these calls for moral crusade were directed only toward external enemies, they might serve as inspirational, though misguided, rallying cries for advancing our strategic interests in the world. But, for conservatives, the moral crusade is not fought exclusively on foreign killing fields but here in sight of the amber waves of grain. McCarthy's anticommunist crusade was not directed at a menacing foreign power with substantial military might, but was instead devoted to ferreting out mythical communist agents who, in McCarthy's fevered imagination, had allegedly infiltrated the institutions of our own government and Hollywood. Goldwater, in his presidential campaign, insisted that the battle against communism would require a moral reformation and the rejection of liberalism because "the moral fiber of the American people is beset by rot and decay." This "rot and decay" can be reversed only through a political movement that reforms the human soul. In The Conscience of a Conservative, Goldwater writes:

The root difference between the Conservatives and the Liberals of today is that Conservatives take account of the whole man, while the Liberals tend to look only at the material side of man's nature. The Conservative believes...