Why should we be surprised that all this activity early in the election cycle was effective, not only in shaping the Democratic candidates at whom it was aimed, but in shaping the general public as well? By the end of the primaries, the divisions about Iraq among ordinary voters matched to a startling degree the divisions over abortion. As Midge Decter once quipped, the time eventually comes when you have to join the side you’re on. If the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime must be treated as a battle in the culture wars, then it is a battle whose opponents were defined long before.

But the argument from happenstance—from the flukes of electoral politics—fails to express everything that needs to be said about the recent joining of many of those opposed to abortion and the bulk of those who desire an active, moralist foreign policy. If only as a courtesy to serious figures from the papal biographer George Weigel to the Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, we need to consider the possibility that pure political calculation isn’t the only cause for the recent fusion of social conservatives and neoconservatives.

Down somewhere in the deepest understanding of what America is for—somewhere in the profound awareness of what it will take to reverse the nation’s long drift into social defeatism—there are reasons that one might link the rejection of abortion and the demand for an active and moral foreign policy. Things could have fallen into different patterns; our current liberal-conservative divisions are not the only imaginable ways to cut the political cake. But neither are they merely accidental.

The opponents of abortion and euthanasia insist there are truths about human life and dignity that must not be compromised in domestic politics. The opponents of Islamofascism and rule by terror insist there are truths about human life and dignity that must not be compromised in international politics. Why shouldn’t they grow toward each other? The desire to find intellectual and moral seriousness in one realm can breed the desire to find intellectual and moral seriousness in another. ~Joseph Bottum, First Things

At the risk of beating this particular horse to death, I must contest at least a few more elements from Mr. Bottum’s article. First, I have a very hard time taking anyone seriously who uses the word “Islamofascist.” It occurs to me that anyone who uses this term as if it meant something either knows nothing about fascism and Islam or is simply using the ignorant label to redefine those who are a civilisational and religious foe as a repeat of the only enemy they find acceptable to vilify, namely fascists. (Besides, it is a lazy, leftist trait to see fascism everywhere that it isn’t and define all enemies in terms of being fascist, while simultaneously ignoring the extensive common ground between most leftists and historical fascists.)

It cannot be stated too strongly that there is nothing “serious” intellectually or morally in twisting the foreign policy of the United States to serve utopian projects dressed up under euphemisms of ‘humanitarianism’ and ‘morality’, if we take serious to mean something grave, sober or responsible. Neither is there anything “moralist” about a policy that endorses naked libido dominandi. A moral foreign policy would have some relation to justice, restraint and proportion, all of which are clearly lacking in any neocon-supported foreign policy. If the neocons must have their Machtpolitik, they could at least do us the favour of not covering with dishonest, saccharine claims to righteousness.

‘Moral’ or “moralist” (as Mr. Bottum would have it) interventionism is based in the shoddy moral philosophy that I am obliged by the dictates of universal right, in order to correct some far-flung injustice (real or imagined), to go so far as to kill people who have never troubled me or anyone to whom I might be remotely personally connected, and by extension the government that theoretically represents such a ‘moral’ person as myself is likewise obliged. This entirely unnecessary violence is deemed acceptable by this shoddy philosophy because I am acting to remove the barriers to other nations’ realising their ‘natural’ liberty and rights. Jacobins never murder–they emancipate!

Only servants of revolution believe that America is “for” something, as if it had no other value if it could not be turned to realise some ideological fantasy. America is a historically and culturally constituted reality, whose purpose, if we must speak of it, is known only to God and ordained by Him. She is not an abstraction or the embodiment of a Creed, nor is she is the repository of any ideology in particular. The time may come, indeed it is already upon us, when the quaint liberal faith of eighteenth century notions and its various even more gross perversions will begin to fade away, taking with it the ideological “content” of the terrible simplifiers, and there will still be an America that will be part of a continuity with our earliest history. What the culture of that America will be depends on whether anything of the old traditions will be preserved and transmitted to posterity, and whether our memory of America will outlast that of the people who destroyed so much of her constitutional and Christian heritage.

That should be enough to satisfy serious and moral people; the proper ordering of life requires enough of our energies and attention without imagining how we can use our country for some higher purpose. Without ignoring everyone’s highest priority in the service of the Lord, protecting and preserving our country is part of the natural flourishing of an excellent human life and, in that sense, our “purpose” lies in keeping the good estate of our country and keeping it away from the machinations of wild men who would sacrifice its good for their grimy purposes.

If America is “for” ‘moral’ interventionism, this is also to make our government a government of ends. This is what Oakeshott called a “teleocracy,” as opposed to nomocracy (rule by law), and he associated it with totalitarian and collectivist ideologies. As Kant famously noted, any government with such a purpose (telos) is a tyranny. God save us from governments embodying “national purpose” or that seek to achieve a certain, all-justifying end.