The importance of “Islamism” to the neoconservatives

The significance and danger of the liberals’ and neoconservatives’ use of “Islamism” instead of “Islam” is apparent: as long as we tell ourselves that only a small ideological faction of “Islamists” is our problem, rather than Islam itself, we will fail to see who our real adversary is, and we will fail to defend ourselves from him.

Many of us understand that point. What we don’t yet fully appreciate is how important the “Islamist” construction—or its ridiculous variant, “Islamofascist”—is to the neoconservatives themselves. The essence of neoconservatism is the view that our nation and civilization are nothing but a universalist democratic ideology, equally accessible to every person on the planet. To the neocons, all the substantive realities that constitute our shared existence—religion, history, tradition, culture, constitutionalism, nationhood, peoplehood, our way of life, our way of being—are as nothing. To the neocons, the only real thing is the universalist ideology, plus money (the latter being the theme of Norman Podhoretz’s incredibly vulgar book My Love Affair with America). Since the neocons see our nation as only an ideology, they can only conceive of a threat to our country in ideological terms, that is, as a false ideology that is opposing our true ideology. They cannot conceive that a people or a culture or a religion could be a threat to us, because people, culture, religion and other such substantive realities are not real to the neocons; only ideology is real. And this is why they call our enemy “Islamism” (which is an ideology) instead of Islam (which a religion and, according to the teachings of Islam itself, a nation).

The neocons’ ideological view of reality served America well during the Cold War, when our adversary was indeed an ideology. But it does not serve America, indeed it puts us at mortal risk, in the civilizational and demographic war of Islam against the West.

And this is why our argument that the neocons should say “Islam” instead of “Islamism” falls on deaf ears. For the neocons to hear what we are saying, they would have to let go of their most fundamental philosophical orientation toward the world and admit the possibility that the world consists of peoples and religions and civilizations that are profoundly, often irreconcilably, different from each other; they would have to admit that the universalist idea is false. Thus the neocons’ use of the word “Islamism” is not simply an intellectual mistake on their part; it is, at present, the linchpin of their political being, their life-jacket in the stormy seas of reality.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 25, 2006 01:51 PM | Send