In American Fascists, Hedges wastes no time establishing his faith-based bona fides. He grew up in a family heavily involved with the Presbyterian Church. He attended Harvard Divinity School with the intention of becoming a preacher. But his faith, he explains, is tempered by the conviction that there are other values than his own that must be respected. In contrast, today's radical Christians—or Dominionists, as Hedges refers to them—believe there is "only one way to be a Christian and only one way to be an American." According to Hedges, they want to establish a country where the Ten Commandments are the law of the land; women's rights, unions, public schools and Darwin's theory of evolution are fast-tracked to extinction; and those of little faith are denied citizenship. Hedges organizes his book around the various ways in which he believes the Dominionists resemble fascists. Chapter 5, for example, documents their scapegoating and persecution of homosexuals. Chapter 6 focuses on how they replace truth (aka science) with propaganda (aka creationism). But while Hedges offers up some startling facts throughout his narrative and paints some memorable portraits of radical Christians in action, the sense of bleak foreboding that pervades American Fascists is more the result of his efforts to evoke that mood through writerly style than the actual information he conveys. Yes, it's disturbing that Senator Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) wants to make it illegal for single moms to be teachers. And that Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) would like to execute doctors who perform abortions. And no doubt there are many others out there who share their perspective. But how close are they to actually achieving these goals? And what specific criminal acts are they committing to achieve them? At one point, as Hedges attends a seminar on how to convert people, he receives instruction on preaching the Gospel to Alzheimer's patients. Outrageously intrusive? Sure. Manipulative? No doubt. But also reassuringly hapless—will having a bunch of cognitively incapacitated seniors in their ranks somehow increase their ability to make school prayer mandatory?
Which is not to say that liberals and others whose beliefs don't conform to those of the Dominionists should not take them seriously, or keep abreast of their efforts. But Hedges counsels going further than that. Ideally, he'd like to apply limits to their freedom of expression. "The radical Christian Right must be forced to include other points of view to counter their hate talk in their own broadcasts ..." he urges. "They must be denied the right to demonize whole segments of American society, saying they are manipulated by Satan and worthy only of conversion or eradication."
In other words, he'd like to apply the Bush administration's doctrine of anticipatory self-defense on the domestic front. Because some radical Christians would clearly like to attack the Great Satan, we must act before they actually attack.
Still, Hedges' limber contortions are nothing compared to the rhetorical pretzels Dinesh D'Souza twists himself into in The Enemy at Home, as he attempts to prove that the Twin Towers would still be standing if Bill Moyers, the ACLU and Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler had kept their grubby liberal hands off the caves of Afghanistan. According to D'Souza, radical Muslims are surprisingly okay with our occupation of Saudi Arabia, our support of Israel, our interest in Middle East oil. "What disgusts them," he reveals, "is not free elections but the sights of hundreds of homosexuals kissing one another and taking marriage vows."
True, the 9/11 terrorists targeted symbols you don't typically associate with homosexuals kissing each other, but apparently they were really aiming for a gay disco in Greenwich Village and the World Trade Center simply got in the way. But why the White House? Did bin Laden mistakenly believe that outspoken liberal activist Martin Sheen really lived there? And how about the Pentagon? Is there some secret condom distribution program at the Department of Defense that only radical Muslim terrorists know about?
Another mystery D'Souza doesn't explain is why, if al Qaeda simply wanted to alert the world to their new zero-tolerance policy toward pop culture and godless secularism, they felt the need to travel all the way to America? Couldn't they have hit say, Amsterdam, or even D'Souza's native India, where a homegrown porn industry has been thriving since at least the early 1990s? China would have been another good choice—it is home to eight million Muslims who are regularly subjected to arrest, torture and even execution by the Communist atheists who run the country.
To make his theories work, D'Souza has to flip-flop like a pancake doing a John Kerry impression. When it serves his purposes to characterize America as a fundamentally secular nation that traditional Muslims might reasonably have a legitimate beef with, he does. When he wants to marginalize secularists, he insists America is fundamentally Christian. At one point, he explains that radical Muslims decided they could never seize power in countries like Saudia Arabia or Syria because the support they received from the U.S. made them unbeatable. Then, he insists that al Qaeda decided to strike the U.S. because President Clinton's responses to early attacks abroad left a "strong impression of American vacillation, weakness, and even cowardice."
Never does D'Souza explain why, way back in the late 1970s, a good two decades before Eve Ensler's vagina learned to talk, Iranians were already chanting "Death to the Great Satan!" Nor does he ever quantify how much American pop culture was reaching the Middle East in the formative years of al Qaeda, or when exactly the ACLU established a satellite office in Kabul. And perhaps most importantly, he completely fails to address the fact that it might not be such a good idea to let people who outlawed kite-flying set our cultural standards for us.
Instead, he casts the polygamous bin Laden as an advocate of traditional family values, and in the book's comic high point, explains what Muslims really found offensive about Abu Ghraib. "For many Muslims, Abu Ghraib demonstrated the casualness with which married Americans have affairs, walk out on their spouses and produce children without bothering to take responsibility for the care of their offspring." How these Muslims deciphered all this from those photos of Lynndie England grinning at naked, hooded Iraqis D'Souza doesn't divulge, but maybe they have much better resolution on their computer monitors over there.
Ultimately D'Souza suggests that the only way to win the war against radical Muslims is to "openly ally with traditional Muslims." (Who, he's explained earlier, are huge fans of Osama bin Laden.) If we can make New York look enough like, say, Tehran, he seems to believe, we'll win two wars at once: The one against terrorists abroad, and the one against "domestic insurgents" at home. And we won't even have to remove any troops from Saudi Arabia or limit McDonald's franchise opportunities in Fallujah. All that's really necessary, he says, is a willingness to "attack Hollywood" on occasion.
I'm pretty sure he means "attack" in a less-than-lethal sense. As vigorously as pundits on both sides of the political spectrum reject pluralism these days, they need it: Without enemies at home to attack, or indigenous fascists to fret over, what would they write about? Even more than them, however, the rest of us need it, too. Indeed, as seductive as fantasies of a uniformly Blue or Red America may be, do we really want the sort of monoculture that makes life so vibrant in North Korea, or the religious heterodoxy that makes Iraq so tranquil? Here in America, our differences may divide us, but they also seem to be what keep us relatively civil.