This will be my only post on Sarah Palin.

Let me explain why. Unlike most (political or non-political) celebrities, whose fame is some admixture of gossip and buzz, talent and accomplishment, Palin has no discernable talents (beyond antagonizing coastal elites like myself) and her accomplishments are minimal at most. (Mayor of a small town? Come on. A half-term governor of the most undeveloped state in the union? Please. A mom? Just like tens of millions of unfamous women. Sinking the McCain campaign? Can’t say I disapprove, but so many others deserve to share the credit!) She has no policy views beyond “Drill, Baby, Drill!” and whatever foreign policy position Bill Kristol has whispered in her ear during the past week. And as she showed yet again on Oprah, she can’t even pull off poise. She’s famous because she’s famous. And that is all.

No one who cares about the health of American political culture can be pleased about the emptiness of the whole Palin phenomenon, let alone the prospect of such a cipher running for president. But how to respond? Most Palin critics (from the casual to the obsessive) have done what one would expect: they have hit back, pointing out her lies and deceptions, mocking her mediocrity and unsuitability for high office.

Criticism has its place, of course. And yet, on Palin I've come to favor a different approach—one that refuses to collude with the media-driven farce. To respond to an opponent, even harshly, even rudely, is to accord her a certain respect—to treat her as worthy of a response. But Palin is worthy of no such thing. She stands for nothing beyond her own self-promotion. She craves attention, and negative attention is a form of attention. Even ridicule can be a form of flattery. Better to bow out, to decline the provocation, since responding to her perpetuates and legitimates the illusion that she’s a serious player in our nation’s politics. I, for one, refuse to play that silly little game. And I wish more of her critics felt the same way. Instead of wasting their analytical and polemical talents on the topic, they could work to change the subject to something more substantive and deny Palin what she most greedily craves: the spotlight.

Want to talk about and debate Obama, terrorism, health care, gay marriage, the economy, abortion, climate change, Iran, or dozens of other topics? Go for it. But Palin? No way. All she deserves is silence.

German philosopher Martin Heidegger gets a lot of bad press. And for good reason. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazis, he did and said and wrote some nasty things before and after serving as the rector of Freiburg University from 1933-1934, and though he eventually distanced himself from his earlier enthusiasm for Hitler, he seems never to have ceased believing that there was an "inner truth and greatness" (those are Heidegger's own words, spoken in a lecture from 1935) to the National Socialist movement. That sounds bad, and it is. By now, scholars have demonstrated beyond just about any reasonable doubt that, judged from moral and political standpoints, Heidegger was a pretty despicable human being.

But here's the thing: Heidegger also possessed the most powerful philosophical mind of the twentieth century. If he had written nothing besides Being and Time (1927), he would deserve to be recognized as Europe's greatest philosopher since the death of G.W.F. Hegel in 1831. (I realize that for many philosophy professors trained in the Anglo-American tradition, the judgment contained in the previous sentence is absurd on more than one level.) But Heidegger wrote much more than Being and Time. His collected works--including previously published books, transcripts of university lectures, private notebooks, and much else--will eventually run to over 100 volumes. There's a lot of redundancy in those books, some of it is impenetrable, but there are also frequent flashes of philosophical brilliance that rival the profoundest passages of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant. And that means that rendering a global judgment of Heidegger and his legacy is extremely complicated.

Unless, that is, you're Carlin Romano. I'm referring to Romano's recent essay from the Chronicle of Higher Education in which he uses the sordid evidence of Heidegger's Nazi enthusiasms compiled in a just-translated book by French philosopher Emmanuel Faye to argue that the time has come to excommunicate Heidegger--or rather his writings and ideas--from the university. In Romano's view, "the pretentious old Black Forest babbler," the "provincial Nazi hack," should be considered "a buffoon" whose ideas are "the butt of jokes, not the subject of dissertations."

I've long admired Romano's essays for the Chronicle and the Philadelphia Inquirer. But this column is an intellectual disgrace, and one that the Chronicle should be ashamed for having published. I say this as someone who's very far from being one of the "acolytes" who "bizarrely venerate" Heidegger and his ideas. I've written critically about his thought on a couple of occasions myself and am in complete agreement with Romano about the moral obscenity of Heidegger's actions (and of some of what he taught and wrote) during the 1930s. But moral disgust does not relieve a reader--let alone a critic--of the burden of intellectual engagement.

Faye is hardly the first to demonstrate continuities between Heidegger's thought and his political enthusiasms--or even to argue that the philosopher went out of his way in the mid-'30s to collapse the distinction between his philosophy and his public actions. Where Faye, according to Romano, goes further is in his efforts, using unpublished lectures from the Nazi period, to implicate Heidegger's entire philosophical corpus.

But this is absurd. Unlike many other philosophers, Heidegger was relentlessly, obsessively interested in a single question--the question of "Being." And his interest in that question--as well as his characteristic ways of posing it--can be traced back to the period of his first lectures courses (1919 to 1923), which took place well before the rise of National Socialism as a serious political force in Germany. While there can be no denying a striking and deeply troubling convergence between Heidegger's ontological investigations and Hitler's political movement--a convergence that very much deserves to be pondered and probed--those investigations pre-dated Hitler, just as they survived Hitler by several decades, as Heidegger's philosophical project continued on its way through the 1950s, '60s, and '70s.

Yet even if distinguishing between Heidegger's philosophy and his politics were as impossible as Romano (and Faye) would have us believe, that still would not justify excluding Heidegger's thought from serious reflection, study, and a place in the university. On the contrary, it would serve as an additional reason to wrestle with the challenge it poses.

I'm a liberal democrat and a humanist who considers totalitarianism in general, and Nazism in particular, to be moral and political abominations. I believe in the truth of science, and I like many things about technological modernity. I accept logic as a valid means of determining many forms of truth. And I happily accept the vision of Being that has prevailed in the Western world since the time of the ancient Greeks. In other words, I'm not inclined to follow Heidegger in its efforts to prepare the way for a more "primordial" encounter with Being by subverting these and other aspects of our world. But what a breathtakingly exciting experience it is to be forced to think about and make a case for, rather than lazily accept as self-evident, our most fundamental assumptions about the world and ourselves!

That is--or should be--what philosophy is all about. Which is why Heidegger was right at assert in an electrifying lecture course from 1929 that "philosophy is the opposite of all comfort and assurance." What Carlin Romano has advocated in his essay is something altogether different--something tamer, more congenial, more comforting. Fine: By all means, let's offer another seminar on Rawls and the foundations of liberal justice. But surely there should also be a place in the university for a close encounter with a dramatically different style of thinking--with the stunningly radical (and perhaps radically erroneous) thought of Martin Heidegger.

Sorry I’ve been silent (again) for so long. In addition to teaching two writing seminars at Penn, I’ve been busy with book revisions. Those are now done, so I should be back (again) to more regular blogging.

Given the glacial pace of my contributions to TNR in recent months, perhaps it makes sense that I’d return with a post about . . . the pace of writing. Back in late September (an eternity ago in Internet time, I know), Ezra Klein—along with Matthew Yglesias, the boy wonder of high-speed blogging—wrote a post about the new partnership between The Daily Beast and the Perseus Books Group that will publish books on a highly accelerated schedule. Here’s the plan:

On a typical publishing schedule, a writer may take a year or more to deliver a manuscript, after which the publisher takes another nine months to a year to put finished books in stores. At Beast Books, writers would be expected to spend one to three months writing a book, and the publisher would take another month to produce an e-book edition.

This inspired Klein to remark on how much easier it’s gotten to write quickly:

Writing doesn't take very long. Quoting doesn't take very long. But assembling information used to take an awful long time. It required a lot of phone calls and microfiche and faxes and walking over to Brookings and paging through newspaper archives and begging a source at Gallup. Now it doesn't take much time at all. That   allows me to be the equivalent of a very fast columnist, and there's no reason it won't allow others to become very fast book authors.

“Writing doesn’t take very long.” I suppose not. I mean, I’ve written some long emails in the amount of time it takes me to type. Perhaps the next time I’m starting a book I should open my word processing program, imagine it’s an email, start typing, and keep typing until I’ve gone on for two hundred or so pages, taking momentary breaks to surf the Web so I can gather some needed information along the way. I bet at that rate I could finish it in a couple of months.

But would it be a book? Or at least what, until quite recently, we understood by the word? You know, a lengthy, sustained argument about, interpretation of, or engagement with a topic, one meant to be of lasting value—would my 200 or so pages of typing be that? Would it be worth reading six months—let alone ten or more years—after it was published? Or would it instead be something very different—merely a 55,000-word blog post, as ephemeral as the latest news cycle?

I like blogging. I enjoy its informality and instantaneousness—the way it provides me an opportunity to spout off publicly about this or that outrage of the moment. Opining is fun, and so is ideological combat.

But a book is, or should be, something different: A chance to slow down. An opportunity to raise one’s sights a little higher. To stop focusing so incessantly on the moment and strive, instead, to step back a bit, to take in a wider view, perhaps even to rise above the fray. To reflect instead of react. To ruminate instead of respond.

And what of style? Klein’s statement implies that the only thing that might keep a writer from producing a book in a couple of months is the time it takes to conduct research. As if writing were a process of compiling and arranging lists of facts and figures. Maybe when blogging about public policy, that’s what it mainly is. (Though surely even Klein has paused for five minutes now and then to make sure he nailed a put-down of George W. Bush?) A book can, and should, strive to be more than a list of information. At its best, a book of non-fiction can even aim to be a form of literature.

What Beast Books is proposing, and what Klein is promoting, is (in Truman Capote’s words) the reduction of writing to typing. The typing might be clever, and witty, and informed, and politically useful. But in most cases, it will also be hurried and harried, merely echoing or negating the conventional wisdom of the moment, not placing it in a wider context or viewing it from a broader perspective. And that will be a incalculable loss to our culture.

One of the best lines in Sam Tanenhaus’s wonderful little book on The Death of Conservatism comes in its opening chapter. Surveying intellectual life on the right in the opening months of the Obama administration, Tanenhaus concludes that too many conservative intellectuals “recognize no distinction between analysis and advocacy, or between the competition of ideas and the naked struggle for power.” Quite so, as one can see from the response (or non-response) of the right to Tanenhaus’s own book.

Tanenhaus is a tough critic of the conservative movement, but he is also a deeply informed one. He knows its history and shows considerable sympathy for some of its ideas. To be sure, his vision of conservatism—like Andrew Sullivan’s—is by contemporary American standards quite heterodox. Tanenhaus believes, for example, that the best and most truly conservative presidents of the modern era are Dwight Eisenhower and Bill Clinton. That hardly places Tanenhaus in the mainstream of conservative thought today.

And yet Tanenhaus makes his counter-intuitive case with elegance and rigor, drawing on the ideas and policies of dozens of writers and public figures—including Edmund Burke, James Burnham, Whittaker Chamber, William F. Buckley, and Michael Oakeshott—whose conservative credentials are unimpeachable. An intellectually serious conservatism would jump at the chance to engage with an author who uses its leading lights to argue that the movement has gone seriously astray. But that’s not what contemporary conservatives are doing. When they aren’t ignoring Tanenhaus’s book, they’re doing what they do best: policing orthodoxy.

Irving Kristol, who died on Friday at the age of 89, was often called the godfather of neoconservatism. And so he was, along with Norman Podhoretz, who has actually done far more to set the (foreign-policy focused) agenda and (insistently combative) tone of recent neocon thinking and writing. Kristol's impact was felt earlier, as he led a group of moderately liberal academics and intellectuals on a rightward migration across the political spectrum during the 1970 and '80s. It's an important story that's been told countless times. What's less often recognized is that while Kristol was growing more conservative he was also undergoing a different sort of transformation--from a dispassionate analyst of American politics and culture to a fully engaged advocate for a comprehensive political ideology. Lamentably, it is this change more than Kristol's gradual drift to the right that may have done more to shape the contemporary conservative mind.   

Highly recommended: My old friend Mark Lilla’s essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education lamenting how academics neglect conservative and/or right-wing ideas. The occasion for Lilla’s article is the opening of a Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements at UC-Berkeley. Even if the center does its job well, Lilla’s point will remain valid for a very long time. Professors in the humanities and social sciences tend to combine indifference to conservative ideas with a self-serving belief that there are no conservative ideas, just the “irritable mental gestures” once dismissed by literary critic Lionel Trilling. And unfortunately, lots of right-wing “intellectuals” today—not to mention their explicitly anti-intellectual minions, some of whom spent Saturday waving asinine placards on the Washington Mall—confirm the prejudice by confusing populist sloganeering with serious thought.

The fact, though, is that there is a rich and varied tradition of conservative ideas that is very much worth reading and studying, both for the sake of our national self-understanding and for the challenge it poses to settled liberal assumptions. That those ideas are rarely read or studied in the nation’s universities is an intellectual and scholarly disgrace that we can only hope will be rectified in the future. Bravo to Berkeley for taking the first tentative step toward doing so.

So Norman Podhoretz has written a book, briefly excerpted in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, in which he poses the age-old question (in the book’s title) Why Are Jews Liberals? Good question. And a deeply personal one for Podhoretz. You see, as one of the original neoconservatives, he moved right four decades ago and has grown rather lonely during his time hanging out with Gentile Republicans. He’s been waiting for the company of his fellow Jews—for vindication of his rightward lurch, for a sign that he was ahead of his time rather than a quirky anomaly. Surely the rest of American Jewry would eventually come to the same conclusions he did and begin voting in the same way. But it hasn’t happened. Not with Reagan. Or Bush I. Or Dole. Or Bush II. Or McCain. Nope, Jews remain liberals, and Norman remains lonely, waiting, “hoping again hope” that despite having given Barack Obama 78 percent of their votes in 2008, American Jews will turn against him and “the political creed he so perfectly personifies and to which they have for so long been so misguidedly loyal.”

Maybe, but I wouldn’t bet on it. I mean, it’s not as if Podhoretz has presented a compelling case in favor of such a development. On the contrary, his argument (at least as summarized in the Journal) amounts to the claim that among Jews liberalism has “for all practical purposes superseded Judaism and become a religion in its own right.” But this is just lazily circular. Why are Jews liberals? Because they really, really believe in liberalism, you know, like people believe in religion. Okay, but why is that, exactly? Norman hasn’t a clue because he can’t manage to enter imaginatively into the mind of his fellow Jews. Liberalism, for him, can be reduced to hatred of the United States and hatred of Israel, and Jews should love America and love Israel. So how could Jews possibly be liberal? The only explanation is collective self-delusion. You know, like people who believe in religion. (What will Norman’s allies on the religious right say about this insinuation that religion is an unquestionable dogma that obscures our view of reality? But I digress. . . .)

Everything Podhoretz has written for the past two decades reeks of self-absorption and self-satisfied certainty, and that’s what this project smells like, too. His work is an abject lesson in what happens to a man’s mind when he values nothing so highly as self-confidence. The animating thought behind his writing has long been, “I know I’m right—about America, about liberalism, about the '60s, about Judaism, about the religious right, about how to fight ‘World War IV,’ about Bush, about the Republican Party, about Israel, about Iran, about Islam—so why the hell doesn’t everyone agree with me??!!” That’s the mystery that sets the man’s mental life in motion.

So by all means read Norman Podhoretz’s new book. Just don’t expect to learn about much of anything besides Norman Podhoretz.

It's been a while. A long while. Even longer than Andrew Sullivan's vacation. Hell, the last time I wrote a blogpost the website looked completely different. I feel a little like I overslept on the first day of school or something.

But seriously, it was a very busy summer for me. My number one priority was going to be finishing a book, which I did. (You'll be hearing more about that in the coming months, I assure you.) But even the book ended up taking a back seat to some unanticipated personal issues in the family. Thankfully, things have now settled down on that front as well, and so I'm ready to re-engage with the world of instantaneous opinion.

And it's a good thing, too. How on earth did you manage without me to guide you through the continued meltdown of the conservative mind? I'm kidding, of course: You did just fine on your own. After all, what's there to say about a car wreck taking place in real-time before your very eyes? Nothing, really. So we just stand back and gawk. And wonder, in dismay, how the GOP has managed to gain some traction in public opinion despite its collective mental collapse. I guess if you jump up and down screaming "fascist!" and "socialist!" at least some people will eventually start to think you have a point. Or something.

I predict I'll have occasion to expand on these preliminary remarks, and venture into lots of other topics (Norman Podhoretz on why the damn Jews are (still) so damn liberal, perhaps; maybe Sam Tanenhaus's book-length version of his old TNR piece on the death of conservatism, which I originally commented on here), in the coming days as I ease myself back into bloggy action.

Don't say you weren't warned.

Subbing for Andrew Sullivan over at The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf poses an important and rarely raised question about abortion. The occasion for his remarks is a deeply disturbing article published by AlterNet last week in which the author describes attending an "abortion party," thrown in order to raise money to pay for Maggie, "a 22-year-old college senior with no intention of bringing a child into the world yet," to terminate her pregnancy. As Conor notes, the essay has come in for harsh criticism from many on the right and some on the left, mostly focused on the offensiveness of portraying an abortion as an occasion for public celebration.

But Conor is interested in focusing on a neglected aspect of the story: the fact that Maggie's boyfriend was largely excluded from the festivities. The proper role for a man in such a situation, at least according to many feminists and progressives, is to support his girlfriend's decision unconditionally while also refraining from attempting to influence it in any way. And this, according to Conor, may be psychologically unrealistic. Support presupposes, after all, that the man senses his "mutual responsibility for the circumstance and investment in the process" of deciding what to do. But this sense of responsibility and investment will tend to increase his desire to have a say in the decision. Likewise, the more freedom he gives his girlfriend to make the decision on her own, without his input, the less he's likely to care about or support her at all. Conor's point thus seems to be that feminists and progressives want, impossibly, to have it all: men who act like they're emotionally engaged while in fact being emotionally disengaged, or vice versa.

I think that's a valid point. And yet, I have to say that this whole way of framing the issues involved in abortion, which Conor accepts uncritically from the feminists and progressives he wants to provoke, is intellectually muddled. Feminists and progressives want abortion to be legal, taken out of the political sphere. Fine. But these goal do not require that abortion be rendered morally unproblematic. And it's a good thing, too, because the decision about whether to terminate a pregnancy is and always will be, among the other things it is, a moral decision, whether or not the decision is legal.

The kind of feminists and progressives who would throw an "abortion party" and insist that the father of a fetus facing possible termination should have no say in its fate are thinking and behaving monstrously, I'm afraid, by applying political and legal considerations to a sphere of life (the private sphere) where morality should set the tone. They believe, perversely, that the best (and perhaps only) way to ensure that abortion remains legal and out of the political sphere is to treat abortion--and demand that men treat abortion--as a matter of moral indifference.

But once again, abortion is not, and will never be, a matter of moral indifference. A man can fiercely defend a woman's (public) right to choose an abortion without state interference while also passionately trying to persuade his girlfriend (in private) to carry their (not her) baby to term. In the end, she should be permitted to abort the child if he fails to convince her, even if he continues to object. (Spousal consent laws move the decision back into the public--legal and political--sphere and thus deserve to be rejected by anyone who defends reproductive rights.) But there will almost certainly be personal consequences from the dispute. The man might break up with his girlfriend over the disagreement, just as she may break up with him. Or maybe they'll move past it as a couple. Whatever the outcome, they will be acting like residents of the human world--a world shot through with moral meaning--and not automatons deadened to moral experience by ideological commitments.

So yes, as Conor implies, feminists and progressives who expect men to be both unconditionally supportive of and indifferent to the reproductive decisions of their girlfriends and spouses have unrealistic expectations. But the deeper problem is that these feminists and progressives have allowed their ideological convictions to distort their vision of the world.

Michelle Cottle responds.

Thirty years ago today, Jimmy Carter delivered the worst major speech of a modern president. The "Crisis of Confidence" speech (often described as the "Malaise" speech) was by turns mawkish, hectoring, self-pitying, maudlin, self-righteous, undisciplined (the address opened with a string of nineteen quotations from critics of his presidency). It wildly exaggerated the nation's problems (the "erosion of confidence in the future" was "a fundamental threat to American democracy," one that would also "destroy the social and the political fabric of America") and proposed a series of absurdly ambitious policies and goals (according to the president, "20 percent of our energy [would come] from solar power by the year 2000"), not one of which was realized. Carter's delivery was halting, awkward, abrasive, excruciating to watch (see for yourself). The editors of this magazine were quite right to comment shortly after the speech, "The past two weeks will be remembered as the period when President Jimmy Carter packed it in, put the finishing touches on a failed presidency." (And this was still four months before the hostages were taken in Tehran.)

And yet, one of Carter's speechwriters (Gordon Stewart) would now have us believe that the "Crisis of Confidence" was a success. Don't believe it for a second. The speech was a "kick me" sign Carter affixed to his own back just as Ronald Reagan was coming up behind him. It provided a perfect set-up to what would be Reagan's most potent line of attack against his opponent during the 1980 campaign -- that the Carter administration was one of "weakness, indecision, mediocrity, and incompetence."

Quite so. And never more so than on the evening of July 15, 1979.

Once an idea is unleashed upon the world, there's no telling where it will lead. That is one lesson to be drawn from studying the astonishing influence of John Calvin's theology on the subsequent history of the world. Born five hundred years ago today, Calvin deepened the Protestant Reformation by building on Martin Luther's break from Rome, formulating a sternly ascetic version of Christian piety that, as Max Weber powerfully argued more than a century ago, inadvertently laid the psychological groundwork for the development of capitalism. Others have noted the surprising ways that Calvinist ideas helped to legitimize representative political institutions. Less widely acknowledged, though no less historically significant, is the profound impact of Calvinist assumptions on the formation of American patriotism -- and in particular on the country's sense of itself as an exceptional nation empowered by providence to bring democracy, liberty, and Christian redemption to the world. It is this persistent theological self-confidence (some would say over-confidence) that distinguishes American patriotism from expressions of communal feeling in any other modern nation -- and that demonstrates our nation's unexpected but nonetheless decisive debt to John Calvin.

Early modern Christians in the Calvinist tradition strongly emphasized the absolute sovereignty of God, insisting that God ultimately controls all events in the natural world and human history. In the exacting language of the Presbyterian Church's Westminster Confession of Faith (1649), "God, the great Creator of all things, doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things, from the greatest to the least, by his most wise and holy providence." The various Protestant groups that affirmed these and other similarly austere Calvinist doctrines longed to establish a purified Christian church independent of existing ecclesiastical institutions. In England, this desire placed these "Puritans" and other Christian separatists at odds with both the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches, resulting at several points during the late-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in civil unrest and violent persecution.

Many of the radical Calvinists who resolved to leave England to establish colonies in the newly discovered continent of North America believed themselves to be reenacting the exodus of the Hebrews from bondage in ancient Egypt. Having freely joined in a covenant with God and resolved to build a purified church and holy city in the New World, the Puritans boarded their ships confident that the Lord would guide and protect them on their "errand into the wilderness." When William Bradford stepped off the Mayflower in 1620, he quoted Jeremiah: "Come let us declare in Zion the word of God." Ten years later, John Winthrop wrote in the midst of his voyage to America, "The work we have in hand, it is by mutual consent through a special overruling providence . . . to seek out a place of cohabitation and consorting under a due form of government both civil and ecclesiastical." Once they established the New England colonies, many of the leading Puritans became more convinced than ever that it was within their communities that the Lord would "create a new heaven, and a new earth, new churches, and a new commonwealth together."

It didn't turn out that way, of course, as conflicts and dissention within the colonies led to numerous schisms, expulsions, and the eventual dilution of the strenuous Puritan ethic. Yet the idea that the original colonists had come, with God's aid and assistance, to establish a new Israel on American shores managed to persist. Late in the seventeenth century, Cotton Mather claimed that John Winthrop had been "picked out for the work" of founding New England "by the provident hand of the most high," while William Bradford was a "Moses" who happily served as "an instrument" of the Almighty in establishing "Israel in America." Minister Thomas Thacher of Boston's Old South Church concurred with the judgment, boldly asserting that "we are the people that do succeed Israel." Clergyman and historian Thomas Prince nicely summed up the theological consensus on the topic when he observed in 1730 that "there never was any people on earth so parallel in their general history to that of the ancient Israelites as this of New England." (This was, of course, more than two centuries before the nefarious "Israel Lobby" set up shop in the nation's capital.)

Having made the basic analogy between Puritan New England and ancient Israel, some extended the comparison even further, to speculate about the perhaps decisive place of the American colonies in sacred history. In Calvinist interpretations of the Hebrew Bible, Israel was usually portrayed as a nation chosen by God to preserve his law until His Son arrived to purify and promulgate it throughout the world. Israel was thus a divine crucible and a providential conduit for the gospels. And so, it seemed, was America -- a nation chosen by God to proclaim the repristinized Christianity of the Protestant Reformation to all peoples.

Early in the eighteenth century, the vision of America as a new Israel specially chosen by God to perform a divine mission was primarily limited to the Puritan and post-Puritan elite of New England. But by the middle of the century, the more modest views of providence that until that time had dominated throughout the mid-Atlantic and Southern colonies had been supplanted by the stringent Calvinism of Massachusetts and Connecticut. America was New Englandized. According to historian John F. Berens, the motor behind this extraordinary transformation was the Great Awakening of the 1740s, which helped to spread theological concepts throughout the colonies. In the electrifying sermons of George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, Gilbert Tennent, Samuel Davies, and many other preachers, colonists from New York to South Carolina encountered for the first time the potent providential ideas that had previously transfixed the minds of the Puritan settlers of New England.

Not that these ideas were identical to the ones that originally inspired John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, and other seventeenth-century writers. On the contrary, American providential thinking evolved dramatically as it circulated throughout the colonies. As Berens notes, the French and Indian War (1754-1763), which followed immediately on the heels of the Great Awakening, contributed decisively to the transformation. For the first time, Americans began to define themselves in contrast to a vision of tyranny -- namely, the (political and religious) absolutism of Catholic France. Unlike France, they concluded, the American colonies were a bastion of political and religious freedom. This freedom had been won, moreover, with the help of God's providence, which would continue to protect the colonies in times of danger, provided the colonists proved themselves worthy of it by maintaining their divinely favored civil and religious institutions. In Berens's words, by 1763 -- a full thirteen years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the outbreak of war with Great Britain over the supposedly tyrannical usurpations of King George III -- the "ever-increasing intercolonial conviction that America was the New Israel" had come to mean that the colonies "had been assigned a providential mission somehow connected to the advancement of civil and religious freedom."

Through the Revolutionary War, the years surrounding the ratification of the federal Constitution, and the early national period, pastors and presidents repeatedly praised the "great design of providence" that had led to the creation of a country dedicated to protecting and preserving political and religious liberty. Call it the consolidation of America's Calvinist consensus. What were once the rather extreme theological convictions dominating a handful of rustic outposts on the edge of a wholly undeveloped continent were now the unifying and motivating ideology of a rapidly expanding and industrializing nation. Whatever difficulties the new nation faced -- from the traumas of the War of 1812 to the gradual escalation of regional hostilities that ultimately issued in the Civil War -- Americans remained remarkably confident that God was committed to the survival and success of its experiment in free government and would continue to intervene providentially in its affairs to ensure that outcome.

This confidence received an additional boost from the Second Great Awakening that swept through wide swaths of the new nation in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Many of those caught up in the intense revivalistic fervor of the time became convinced that they were living through the last days of human history prior to the advent of a thousand-year reign of Christian peace and prosperity on earth. Millennial hopes and fears left long-lasting marks on older Protestant sects (like the Baptists and Methodists) and inspired the founding of eccentric new ones (like the Mormons and Seventh-Day Adventists). But they also added an eschatological dimension to American thinking about providence. What if God had created the United States to serve as the model for millennial perfection that would prefigure the second coming of Christ? Such questions had titillated the minds of American Christians since the time of the Puritans, but they began to be posed with renewed vigor as millennial passions reached unprecedented heights in the 1810s and ‘20s.

The ideology of "manifest destiny" that emerged in the 1840s and inspired the policy of westward expansion through the remainder of the century was an outgrowth of this newly millenarian form of Calvinist providentialism. The man who coined the term, journalist John L. O'Sullivan, insisted that it was "by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which providence has given us for the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government." Decades later, after the closing of the frontier, writer Robert Ellis Thompson penned a study of The Hand of God in American History, which likewise proclaimed that from the time of the first settlements to the Spanish-American War God had "shaped the course of our national history for his own ends." It was a sentiment amplified by statesman-historian Albert J. Beveridge in a speech before the U.S. Senate in which he voiced unambiguous support for American annexation of the Philippines. As far as Senator Beveridge was concerned, God

has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adept at government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples. Were it not for such a force as this the world would relapse into barbarism and night. And of all our race he has marked the American people as his chosen nation to finally lead in the redemption of the world.

Economic and scientific progress directed by God and actualized by Americans, divinely ordained political accomplishments issuing in divinely sanctioned global hegemony by the United States, and God's election of America to redeem the world -- these were the essential elements of American providence at the dawn of the twentieth century.Over subsequent decades, as the political, economic, military, and cultural power of the United States expanded beyond anyone's expectations, providential thinking continued to play an important role in defining American national identity and in setting the terms of public debate. Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy outlook, including his proposal for a League of Nations that would make possible an era of global perpetual peace, grew out of his strong faith America's providential role in the world. The World War II propaganda campaign frequently appealed to identical convictions. And politicians from both political parties regularly cast the Cold War as a quasi-eschatological conflict between forces of darkness and light -- with God clearly standing on America's side of the battle. Even Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic Party's answer to the "anti-intellectualism" of Dwight D. Eisenhower, spoke unapologetically in 1952 about the "awesome mission" that "God has set for us," which was nothing less than "the leadership of the free world." In more recent years, the cadences of the Calvinist consensus could be heard in Ronald Reagan's rhetorical evocations of America as a "city on a hill" and George W. Bush's frequent assurances that history moves in a "visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of liberty."

No commemoration of John Calvin's birth can be complete without recognizing this momentous American legacy. Whatever our views of American exceptionalism and its complicated human consequences, it is Calvin who deserves to be recognized as its unintended instigator.

This week's shooting at the Holocaust Museum has sparked some discussion about whether it's accurate to describe the raving anti-Semite who opened fire at the museum (James Von Brunn) as a "right-wing extremist." That discussion has now taken an odd turn by the news that Von Brunn may have also targeted the offices of The Weekly Standard, a magazine associated with the neoconservative movement. How could Von Brunn be a right-winger, extreme or otherwise, when the Weekly Standard is a magazine of the right? Shouldn't we just call him a deranged all-purpose hater and be done with it?

For the sake of political and intellectual clarity, it's crucially important that we don't do anything of the sort.

The American political spectrum is extremely narrow. For all the seriousness of the differences that separate Democrats and Republicans, both parties are thoroughly persuaded of the legitimacy of liberal democratic government. That's a wonderful thing, since it's produced long-lasting civil peace and stability.

But that very peace and stability, and the ideological narrowness that makes it possible, can also lead us to forget the persistent character of the anti-liberal left and anti-liberal right, with which we (unlike citizens in less fortunate regions of the world) have very little acquaintance. The anti-liberal left has historically been defined by the radical universalism of its principles, the anti-liberal right by its exclusionary (racial, ethnic, national) particularism. That is the primary difference between them. And that's why Von Brunn is unmistakably a man of the anti-liberal right: he believes in a particularistic vision of the world in which Jews, blacks, neocons, people with low IQs, and sundry other classes and groups of people have been eliminated; on Wednesday, he made a small contribution to realizing this distinctively right-wing ideal.

This is also why I think Jamie Kirchick confuses matters by invoking the anti-Semitism of the left, which (though it may have similar psychological sources) is linked to very different ideas. For the far-left, Judaism (and especially Zionism) is offensive because of its particularism, its affirmation of ties to family, tradition, heritage, and nation. I'd say that this is even true for most of the anti-liberal leftists who have embraced the pseudo-particularism of radical multiculturalism. In the end, they take the side of the "other" mainly for the sake of undermining the authority of those currently in positions of political, economic, and military power -- not because they actually want to "go native" and affirm the particularism of the downtrodden as if it were their own. (How many admirers of Edward Said actually go off and become strictly observant Muslims?) On the contrary, the ideal world of the radical multiculturalist would be one of complete cosmopolitan egalitarianism in which every group affirms its own beliefs while (somehow) equally affirming everyone else's too. As for the few who take these ideas so far that they actually do "go native," well, they've moved so far left that they've ended up on the right.

This analysis also helps us to understand some of our confusion in placing neoconservatives on the political spectrum. Neocons tend to be staunch American nationalists (making them right-wing), but their vision of Americanism consists of universalistic ideals and principles (placing them somewhere on the left -- which is why left-leaning writers like Paul Berman and Christopher Hitchens have expressed sympathy for some neocon ideas and policies). In this, and perhaps only in this, neoconservatism resembles the ideology of French republicanism, which also asserts the universalism of a particular nation's ideals. 

So, yes: Von Brunn is unambiguously a right-wing extremist. 

Jonathan Chait Responds: "Liberal Fascism Reductio Ad Absurdum"