As VDH breaks skin with Dinesh D'Souza, his approach reminds me that one of the problems is that D'Souza has a constantly shifting frame of reference for his arguments, and I can think of no systematic thinker better equipped than VDH to upbraid him.
Of course, the Conservative echo chamber going on over there speaks volumes about how the Right may not see itself in relationship to the Left, whatsoever, IMO.
Meanwhile, there was something else from AS's own review that I meant to comment on. Come back here - I'll update this post when it comes back to me.
BERKOWTIZ
PB ought to have stopped talking, and hopefully Wolfe will say no more in his defense.
PB grossly misrepresents Wolfe, a new problem for PB, one that goes beyond just the poor logical construct of his last piece:
In the process, I noted the irony that in a post-9/11 essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Wolfe himself, like D’Souza, had declared that America was endangered by an enemy at home, except that for Wolfe the enemy within was not the cultural Left but the fascist Right.
Wolfe didn't phrase his comments in terms of national security at all. He put them squarely in the framework of using a theory to help understand contemporary politics, convervatives talking past liberals, as follows:
But there are, I venture to say, no seminars on Schmitt taking place anywhere in the Republican Party and, even if any important conservative political activists have heard of Schmitt, which is unlikely, they would surely distance themselves from his totalitarian sympathies. Still, Schmitt's way of thinking about politics pervades the contemporary zeitgeist in which Republican conservatism has flourished, often in ways so prescient as to be eerie. In particular, his
analysis helps explain the ways in which conservatives attack liberals and liberals, often reluctantly, defend themselves.
Given that these preliminaries cannot be gotten right, I didn't bother with the rest of Berkowitz's writing.
link: Bootstrapping Andrew Sullivan
