Why I'm bothered

I am reading John Keke's new book, The Art of Politics. Kekes is that rare bird, an areligious conservative.

His political philosophy tries to base itself on reason and experience. His fundamental stance is anti-ideological. By ideology he means the privileging of a single value by which political decisions are to be made, regardless of circumstance, and the consequent rationalizing program to organize society. So both the Libertarian stance of making liberty the dominant value and the Communist stance of making equality the dominant value are rejected. To put it in my own demotic way, since the world is messy and people are messy, simple answers in politics make for an even worse mess.

I remember when I was first migrating away from my liberalism around the turn of the century (!), I took on a libertarian stance, but rejected the Libertarian Party as soon as I saw its self-description as "The Party of Principle." I like Jonah Goldberg's wry comment: "As you know, I consider Libertarians to be like Celtic barbarians deployed by British kings in the Middle Ages against the Scots or the French. They are extremely useful for fighting your enemies, but you would never want one to actually sit on the throne." Pretty funny!

Some of Kekes' writing, though clear, is painstakingly careful and abstract, in the way that you expect from philosophers, but which is not always pleasant to read. Oddly, though he is no friend of natural law theory --to him, another ideology-- I often find him sounding like Aquinas. At least in his dialectical mode of argumentation and the careful, step-by-step way in which he proceeds to build up his case.

And a recent review by a religious conservative used exactly the same phrase, "hollow at the core" to reject his work as did a typical liberal professor some years ago. Both find him insufficiently ideological.

It has been his work that has made it clearer to me how a utopian and collectivist egalitarianism lies at the heart of the contemporary left, one which has no ground in either planetary or human nature and which can only be imposed by massive coercion. Its spirit is full of that postmodern contradiction which Stephen Hicks outlined, a militant cultural relativism combined with a highminded absolutist moralism. Puritanical nihilists, the will-to-power disguised as empathy.

He also is very clear and unapologetic in valuing the political order of America as one of the great achievements of mankind. Not because it is perfect but precisely because it has taken into account the inherent imperfection of the world and of human nature and has provided such a wealth of goods of all kinds for us who have the fortune to live in it. For all its ideals, the American Revolution was a conservative and limited one, built on compromise, unlike its high-flying French cousin, from whom all the revolutionary evils of the West has since taken descent.

And the incoming President is the darling precisely of the pomo liberals, those contemporary Copperheads, who have done their level best to supplant the traditional American and messy and imperfect way of proceeding with their own seven-pillared fantasy vision of a better world. Australian John Ray puts in well: "It's the shared hatred of the rest of us that unites Islamists and the Left. American liberals don't love America. They despise it. All they love is their own fantasy of what America could become. They are false patriots."

This is the intellectual background, the proximate context, this morning (!), of "why I'm bothered". The immediate point is discovering that the Muslim woman whom Barak Hussein Obama has invited to take part in his post-inaugural prayer service is president of an organization named as an unindicted co-conspirator in a case involving support of Hamas, etc.

It will be no surprise that the mere participation of a Muslim in this event irks me. And it does not surprise me that he chose a Muslim woman to play the role; politically smart, as usual. But why in the name of God does he choose someone tainted by connections to the very people who would erase us? Giving these people a place on the national horizon is a mistake. Couldn't he find some Sufi imam, whose version of Islam actually does place far more emphasis on the internal jihad against egoism?

Bush was hardly better, so I guess I should not be surprised. But I am upset.

"These people" are completely self-confident and unapologetic and clearly wish to replace our society with their own ideology, and they have found their niche in a gutless liberal West, as the perpetual victims, in order to proceed. Galls me deeply.

And I bet her prayer will not be a self-hating de-racinated blurb like the one we can expect from Rev. Mr. Robinson.

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