Author: Andrew Sullivan

This is a defining moment – not just for America but for conservatism as a political philosophy. The campaign to prevent the construction of a Muslim interfaith center two blocks from Ground Zero strikes me as so dangerous in its assumptions, so pernicious in its bigotry, and so dangerous in the war on terror that it needs to be repudiated as swiftly and as powerfully as possible. It is as antithetical to the principles on which this country was founded as the importation of torture into the government of the U.S. Alan Jacobs:

It’s remarkable that people who invoke the Founders so regularly and in such tones of devotion could be utterly deaf to the Founders’ concern to ensure freedom for mistrusted minority religions. They might start by reading George Washington’s once-famous letter to the Newport synagogue, paying special attention to this sentence: “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent national gifts.” In Washington’s understanding, it is misbegotten even to ask the question, “Should we tolerate this?” …

In its origins, with Burke, conservatism was supposed to be about taking the long view, having proper deference to the wisdom of our ancestors and taking proper care for the flourishing of our descendants. This is also what Chesterton meant when he said that tradition is “the democracy of the dead.” Burke thought this long view was most likely to be taken by the aristocracy, but in a society without an aristocracy there needs to be a body of intellectuals who take it as their special mission to meditate on the “first things”, one might say, that link us to those who went before us and those who will come after.

The approach Gingrich and Palin take to the proposed lower Manhattan mosque has nothing to do with conservatism in this sense. It is neither conservative, nor liberal, nor anything else worthy to be called “political thought.” It is an infantile grasping after a fleeting and elusive cultural dominance.

And that, one fears, is what conservatism has become in the new millennium: a paranoid, infantile grasping for cultural dominance – white, evangelical, rural – that is only one part of America, and not the whole, and a minuscule part of the wider world, not its defining hegemon.

A despairing Kevin Drum wonders why some conservatives behave this way. Will Wilkinson has an explanation:

[T]he conservative movement has become obsessed to the point of derangement with a right-wing version of identity politics that sees everything through the lens of the assumption that American identity is under seige. The modus operandi of the populist right is patriotic semiotics gone wild.

It is Reaganism revisited as farce. Conor:

Candidates like Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin aren’t going to alienate the corporate interests that bankroll so many GOP campaigns, even if certain anti-corporate stances would be popular among Tea Partiers. In order to compensate, they’re going to earn their populist credentials by setting themselves up in opposition to an unpopular religious minority and railing against the mainstream media. Put another way, they’re going to garner the kind of support that won’t require them to actually act against entrenched interests should they be elected. Anyone on the right upset by “politics as usual” should wise up and understand that the candidate who most adeptly exploits culture war issues is going to continue doing so once elected. Can’t we find someone capable of directing ire at unsustainable entitlements instead of Muslim Americans?

Not yet, Conor, not yet.

Hitch writes about his cancer:

In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read—if not indeed write—the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?

But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity. Of course my book hit the best-seller list on the day that I received the grimmest of news bulletins, and for that matter the last flight I took as a healthy-feeling person (to a fine, big audience at the Chicago Book Fair) was the one that made me a million-miler on United Airlines, with a lifetime of free upgrades to look forward to. But irony is my business and I just can’t see any ironies here: would it be less poignant to get cancer on the day that my memoirs were remaindered as a box-office turkey, or that I was bounced from a coach-class flight and left on the tarmac? To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?

A revealing, if slightly chilling, review of how Sarah Palin curates her Facebook comments.

Arianna Huffington psychoanalyzes Palin:

It's not Palin's positions people respond to — it's her use of symbols. Mama grizzlies rearing up to protect their young? That's straight out of Jung's "collective unconscious" — the term Jung used to describe the part of the unconscious mind that, unlike the personal unconscious, is shared by all human beings, made up of archetypes, or, in Jung's words, "universal images that have existed since the remotest times." Unlike personal experiences, these archetypes are inherited, not acquired. They are "inborn forms… of perception and apprehension," the "deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of

humanity."

Allahpundit shrugs:

The point, as always, is to reassure fellow hyperpartisans that it’s not the opposition’s policies that voters find appealing but something (anything!) else … You’re going to see a lot of this if she’s the nominee, and it’ll all run along the same lines: Palin’s practicing some sort of witchcraft or hypnosis or unleashing America’s “id,” etc etc, all geared towards insisting that her appeal is, and can only be, operating on a sub-cerebral level. That’s the goal here — to suggest that, because no thinking person could vote for her, this is all playing out somehow in America’s subconscious. Credit to Arianna for framing it in terms of Jung, at least. Most of the lazier pieces you’ll see in this vein, and there’ll be many more, will stick with Freud.

What policies? The point here is that Palin's incoherent, whatever-sounds-good-right-now, whatever-hurts-Obama streams of consciousness have nothing to do with policy. They have to do with identity, with visceral issues of national meaning, and with the starbursts factor of a beauty queen as war-leader. Her appeal is sub-rational in a party that is irrational.

Cincinnati, Ohio, 7 pm

Fallows' judgment:

Apart from the lofty sentiments, I love the plain "That's life" — part of the thick-skinned, no-nonsense realism that Americans like to think exemplifies our culture, but doesn't always. Nothing is more admirable about this country in the rest of the world's eyes than the big-shouldered unflappable confidence demonstrated in that speech. Nothing is more contemptible than the touchy, nervous, intolerant defensiveness we sometimes show. 

Clive Crook's succinct summary:

Paul Ryan is a good thing, and his Roadmap is very interesting. He is grappling with specific proposals, and his plan for long-term entitlement reform deserves a serious look. Note, though, that on plausible assumptions, it is not a deficit-reducing proposal: revenues would fall even more than spending.

More to the point, the party is not backing Ryan's proposals. If conservatives who say, "Don't raise taxes, cut spending," were willing to contemplate Ryan's approach to entitlement reform, well and good. Few are. The party as a whole is scared of it. Republicans in Congress understand how difficult it would be to get the country behind it. (If George Bush's plan for Social Security privatisation, timid by comparison, got shot down, what hope is there for Ryan's ideas?) Right now the party's position is to reject every meaningful spending cut and any and all tax increases. That is not fiscal responsibility. It is complete nonsense.

“In the mid-1650s, the small Jewish community living in lower Manhattan petitioned Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant for the right to build a synagogue, and they were turned down. In 1657, when Stuyvesant also prohibited Quakers from holding meetings, a group of non-Quakers in Queens signed the Flushing Remonstrance, a petition in defense of the right of Quakers and others to freely practice their religion. It was perhaps the first formal political petition for religious freedom in the American colonies, and the organizer was thrown in jail and then banished from New Amsterdam.

“In the 1700s, even as religious freedom took hold in America, Catholics in New York were effectively prohibited from practicing their religion, and priests could be arrested. Largely as a result, the first Catholic parish in New York City was not established until the 1780s, St. Peter's on Barclay Street, which still stands just one block north of the World Trade Center site, and one block south of the proposed mosque and community center….

Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question: Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here.

This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions or favor one over another. The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan.

Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11, and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans. We would betray our values and play into our enemies' hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists, and we should not stand for that," – mayor Mike Bloomberg, fighting back against the disgraceful Republican efforts to exploit and foment restrictions on religious liberty.

(Photo: A man climbs a ladder as workers continue construction on the World Trade Center site in July 15, 2010 New York City. Construction at the site is expected to be completed by 2013. By Eric Thayer/Getty Images.)

Bmaz at Emptywheel is expecting a win for the plaintiffs:

Walker is very detailed and very smart and crafty. He will lock in and protect his decision to every extent he can, and trust me Walker is very good at this. One of the best I have ever seen. Ted Olson, David Boies, Plaintiffs Perry et. al and fans of Constitutional equality everywhere could not ask for anything more.

We'll know this afternoon.