If progressives have learned anything about conservatives, it's that conservative attacks on liberals are near-perfect predictors of what conservatives themselves are up to. Conservative projection is highly reliable. So it's hardly surprising that almost 80 years of accusing liberals of trying to destroy America is a tip-off that destroying America has been what conservatives have been up to all along.
He notes that American conservatives have more in common with Islamic Fundamentalists than with American liberals.
While Publishers Weekly dryly noted:
Charging that liberals aid terrorists while sympathizing with the terrorists' culturally conservative worldview, D'Souza's critique of American cultural excess trips over its own inconsistencies.
A recent article in Grist by David Roberts, "The right's climate denialism is part of something much larger", provides another perspective on this same phenomena. He begins by citing another piece at Grist, "Stupid goes viral: The Climate Zombies of the new GOP" by RL Miller, which gives a rundown of some of the GOP's latest crop of climate-denying candidates for Congress. And he cited a Gallup poll showing the sharp ideological slant of recent growth in "climate skepticism" in the public:
After which he proceeded to broaden his scope to encompass a wide-ranging attack on reality-based institutions:
It does seem to me that the right's climate denialism hasn't been properly linked to the larger phenomenon of epistemic closure on the right. When Jim Manzi, everyone's favorite sensible conservative, criticized fellow conservative Mark Levin for peddling intellectually shoddy skeptic arguments in his bestselling book Liberty and Tyranny, Levin went nuts, joined by a half-dozen other NRO writers. How could they not? The very same skeptic talking points in Levin's book appear in thousands of blogs and comment sections across the interwebs. If they are intellectually bankrupt, a whole lot of people are going to look stupid.
Regardless, to restrict discussion to climate science -- how many scientists say what, who signed what statement, how many peer-reviewed papers say what -- misses the forest for the trees. Climate denialism is part of something much broader and scarier on the right. The core idea is most clearly expressed by Rush Limbaugh:
We really live, folks, in two worlds. There are two worlds. We live in two universes. One universe is a lie. One universe is an entire lie. Everything run, dominated, and controlled by the left here and around the world is a lie. The other universe is where we are, and that's where reality reigns supreme and we deal with it. And seldom do these two universes ever overlap. ...
The Four Corners of Deceit: Government, academia, science, and media. Those institutions are now corrupt and exist by virtue of deceit. That's how they promulgate themselves; it is how they prosper.
The right's project over the last 30 years has been to dismantle the post-war liberal consensus by undermining trust in society's leading institutions. Experts are made elites; their presumption of expertise becomes self-damning. They think they're better than you. They talk down to you. They don't respect people like us, real Americans. Here's Americans' trust in institutions, also from Gallup data (click for larger version):
The sole exceptions to this general decline in trust are the military and the police:
This is what the real "culture war" in America is all about. It's not some "distraction" fomented by the Baby Boom generation as Obama argued in his primary campaign against Hillary Clinton. It's not "just" about abortion or gay rights. It's about the conservative war on modernism--secularism (as opposed to theocracy), democracy (again, as opposed to theocracy), science (as opposed to theology-based dogma) and, more broadly, empiricism (as opposed to purely faith-based belief). All these are important core values, practices and fundamntal sources of strength on which America is based. And all of them are under sustained attack by the right.
This is the real clash of civilizations. And movement conservatives are clearly on the side that's dedicated to destroying America.
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