The Enemy at Home:
The Cultural Left
and Its Responsibility
for 9/11,
by Dinesh D’Souza
(Doubleday, 352 pp., $26.95) |
books arts & manners
Fight the Real Enemy
ROGER KIMBALL
Dinesh D’Souza’s new book about the blame for 9/11 begins with a quotation from Abraham Lincoln — one that I did not know but the gravamen of which I heartily endorse. The material advantages of the United States are so great, Lincoln says, that “if destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
“All time” is a long time, but, making due allowances for that hyperbole, I believe Lincoln is right. The United States is blessed with such enormous military, economic, geographical, and political assets that destruction is much more likely to come from within, from a loss of confidence or failure of nerve, than from without. Longtime readers of this magazine will recall that James Burnham made a similar point when discussing the conflict between Communism and America in his brilliant book Suicide of the West.
The curious thing is that although D’Souza presumably agrees with Lincoln (and Burnham) on this point, I very much doubt that either would have agreed with his analysis in The Enemy at Home.
D’Souza does two things in this book. On one hand, he excoriates “the cultural Left,” that motley crew which includes most of academia, most of Hollywood and the entertainment industry, large chunks of the media, feminists tout court, and the Democratic party ex officio. On the other hand, he endeavors to make a case for “traditional” as distinct from “radical” Islam, arguing that conservatives should endeavor to understand and make common cause with the former.
In pursuit of this cause, D’Souza offers a by-now-familiar indictment of America’s latitudinarian excesses. He quotes the trashy lyrics of rap songs; points out that abortion, sexual promiscuity, and homosexuality are common in modern democracies; and notes that many marriages end in divorce even as militant secularism is on the rise.
Again, none of this is news, but D’Souza rehearses it in order to argue that 1) the Left is “secretly allied” with “the movement that bin Laden and Islamic radicals represent” and 2) conservatives deep down have a lot in common with representatives of “traditional” cultures, including Islam, and should therefore battle to clean up American culture, thereby driving “a wedge between Islamic radicals and traditional Muslims.”
D’Souza is nothing if not bold. In his opening sentence, he claims that “the cultural Left in this country is responsible for causing 9/11,” which he describes as “the worst day in American history.” In case we didn’t get it the first time, he provides several variations on the theme: The cultural Left is the “primary cause” of “the volcano of anger” directed by the Islamic world toward the U.S.; “without the cultural Left, 9/11 would not have happened”; “the Left is the primary reason for Islamic anti-Americanism”; “the cultural Left has fostered a decadent American culture that angers and repulses traditional societies, especially those in the Islamic world that are being overwhelmed with this culture”; if not for the seductive spectacle of “decadent culture,” bin Laden “would never have launched the 9/11 attacks.”
D’Souza describes his thesis as “startling.” “Startling” it surely is; but is it also true?
That is a question I found myself often asking when reading this book. A few stumbling blocks: According to D’Souza, the attack on the USS Cole didn’t really count as an act of terrorism because the Cole, after all, is a warship. Come again? D’Souza frequently assures readers that Islam is not against “modernity, science, or democracy” but actually is in favor of those phenomena — and capitalism, too — appearances notwithstanding. Really? That is like saying Islam is a “religion of peace” because the Koran somewhere tells us so. (D’Souza frequently indulges in some alarmingly selective quoting from the Koran to support his argument.) More good news: Wahhabi Islam, far from being a “breeding ground of Islamic radicalism,” as you probably thought, is only “a breeding ground of Islamic obedience.” Oh, well, that’s all right then. It gets better: The aim of 9/11, D’Souza says, was not to kill civilians but merely to “strike out” at “symbols” of American military and economic power. Indeed, 9/11 was “a special kind of ‘reality show’ using martyrdom as a form of advertising and real people in the explosion scenes.” What can one say?
If we “carefully read bin Laden’s statements,” D’Souza writes in one characteristic passage, we would understand that he feels Islam is “threatened by the West.” Sayyid Qutb, a radical propagandist for the Muslim Brotherhood, hanged in the end by Nasser, delivered himself of blistering attacks on the United States for its sexual depravity and other failings (this, by the way, was in the 1940s). D’Souza offers a patient, not to say sympathetic, exposition of Qutb’s brief against modern life. Many American conservatives also think America has become “increasingly vulgar, trivial, and disgusting.” This leads D’Souza to another shocker: “Are the radical Muslims right? Is America a threat to the traditional cultures of the world? Is American culture a worldwide destroyer of morals? Do American values undermine the traditional family and corrupt the innocence of children?”
Gosh. Something has gone terribly wrong here, but what? The idea that capitalism acts as a solvent on traditional values is hardly a new idea. America, like all modern, economically dynamic societies, puts great pressure on many aspects of traditional and customary society. Walter Bagehot articulated the pattern of this complaint in the 1870s when he distinguished between the “old Eastern and customary civilizations and the new Western and changeable civilizations.” Did the Indians think the British were doing good or evil in their country? Sure, the British brought peace and prosperity. But they also brought greater freedom. And with freedom come the burdens of change and choice. Contemplating this, Bagehot wrote that the Indians did not “believe that the desire to make them comfortable and happy is the root” of British policy in India. They believed, on the contrary, that the British were trying to do something else: to “‘take away their religion.’ . . . The end and object of all these continual changes is to make Indians not what they are and what they like to be, but something new and different from what they are, and what they would not like to be.”
I have no doubt that something like this is an ingredient in radical Islam’s unhappiness with the West. But so what? That compact of greater freedom and greater responsibility is part of the penalty of modernity. D’Souza wants us to enlist “traditional” Muslims in the war against terror. But he then notes that traditional Muslims typically are “not moderates,” that many are “just as zealous in their religious faith and practice as radical Muslims,” and that in the end there are “few” differences, religious or political, between the groups. Every poll I have seen suggests that the mass of Muslims is increasingly in favor of propagating sharia, the veil for women, and other features of “traditional” Islamic practice. So remind me: Why should American conservatives be so enthusiastic about “traditional” Islam?
A critic might point out that D’Souza slights the many positive, wholesome features of American culture. Still, he is right that our society exhibits many troubling features. I deplore many of the same things he does. I also think he is correct that the Left has in certain respects made common cause with radical Islam. Certainly, the Left (and not only the Left) is vociferously hostile to the Bush administration and to the war in Iraq, and is busy prosecuting not a war against terrorism but what D’Souza aptly calls a “war against the war against terrorism.”
D’Souza argues that we have “fundamentally misunderstood the enemy.” In the 1990s, Samuel Huntington warned about a coming “clash of civilizations,” notably between Islam and the rest of the world. D’Souza thinks Huntington was wrong: The important clash, he thinks, is between right-thinking conservatives of whatever religion and decadent elites. To this extent, he seems to believe that the real enemy is . . . us.
But D’Souza has let his battle against the “cultural Left” blur his vision. When we talk about 9/11, the issue is not our failings but their terrorism. That is a fundamental datum we lose sight of at our peril. If we step back and ask “Why?” we see that the real issue is not religion, as many commentators assume, but politics. More precisely it is the usurpation of religion by politics. The Islamic enemies of the West have successfully poached upon the authority of religion in order to prosecute a political or ideological campaign. Like other totalitarians, Islamic radicals skillfully use and abuse democratic freedoms with the ultimate object of abolishing those freedoms. We must do everything we can to thwart their effort. It is not only because women in the West have abortions and premarital sex that bin Laden and his pals are frothing at the mouth. It is also because women in the West learn to read and drive a car, can appear in public without a sack over their head, talk to a man on the street, and decide whom to marry and even have a career of their own. Indeed, the status of women is only one piece of the puzzle. What Islam really finds intolerable is that the West exists as an autonomous power. And that is precisely why the West, if it is to continue to thrive, must find Islam in its current configuration intolerable.
Growing up is a hard business, for civilizations as well as for individuals. Adolescence is a particularly difficult period. Not all achieve the accommodations that define adulthood. Some stay trapped in adolescence, smoldering with hatred and resentment. D’Souza thinks it is “maddeningly difficult” to “make sense of 9/11.” I believe it is pretty straightforward. Shortly after 9/11, when everyone was moaning about the “root cause” of such an enormity, the columnist Jonathan Rauch usefully observed that the root cause of terrorism is terrorists. Quite right. D’Souza wants us to “understand” Islam. I think the primary task is not to understand but to change it.
Mr. Kimball is co-editor and co-publisher of The New Criterion and publisher of Encounter Books.
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