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Weekly Round-up: Conservatism’s Clash with Evangelicals and Interventionism, Occupy Wall Street Losing Fans

The world is rapidly changing, says Andrew Bacevich, and Americans need to change with it. The “Freedom Agenda” of neoconservatives is unraveling as America is gripped by recession, the Middle East faces an uncertain future, and Europe looks for a lifeline from financial chaos. All the while, Bacevich says, American politicians continue to fiddle obliviously, […]

The world is rapidly changing, says Andrew Bacevich, and Americans need to change with it. The “Freedom Agenda” of neoconservatives is unraveling as America is gripped by recession, the Middle East faces an uncertain future, and Europe looks for a lifeline from financial chaos. All the while, Bacevich says, American politicians continue to fiddle obliviously, chanting mantras of American greatness that will offer no comfort if the populace is lulled into believing America remains the postwar superpower of 1945:

American politicians stubbornly beg to differ, of course, content to recite vapid but reassuring clichés about American global leadership, American exceptionalism, and that never-ending American Century. Everything, they would have us believe, will remain just as it has been — providing the electorate installs the right person in the Oval Office.

Doug Wead and Charity Campbell review Darryl Hart’s new bookFrom Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism. While there has been a convenient alliance between evangelicals and conservatives, the evangelical movement is not always fully grounded in conservative philosophy. Hart nonetheless concludes that evangelicals should embrace traditional conservatism:

What might this look like? Evangelicals should first “reconsider the source of American greatness,” which rests not in what is said to be America’s Christian origins but in her heritage of limited government, religious freedom, and the prioritization of “culture and character formation” to political solutions.

Tom Engelhardt recalls foreign films he watched during his youth in the 1950s and explains how they helped shape his view of the world and America’s wars.

Occupy Wall Street crowds seem to be losing favor with the general populace, including those on the left who may have once been sympathetic to the movement. Rod Dreher says they’ve become a parody of themselves.

Daniel J. Flynn reviews Julia Scheeres’s A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown. He finds the book about Peoples Temple and the Jonestown Massacre to be solid on a factual basis, but it takes the wrong lessons from the incident. The cult was born of the idea that socialism was an enlightening experience that could replace religion.

Such delusions cost more than 900 people their lives in South America. It merely costs the author a more complete understanding of her subjects. She marvels at the paradox of noble ideas unleashing ignoble deeds. But in the aftermath of the Lenin/Stalin/Hitler/Mao-century, socialism manifesting as horror show isn’t ironic. It’s clichéd.

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