The "ruin of their

This is an interesting collection, a big, fat “weekend read.” It concerns the plummet of the Grand Old Party, which is in serious free-fall at this writing. If you watch the comings and goings of Pub presidential candidates, you get a sense of it … Guilianni seems to be leading the pack now, but that’s despite his moral shortcomings [wives and mistress’s,] a problem McCain shares as well. Romney is LDS, not “Christian” to many of the faithful, and has yo-yo’d on his earlier more liberal [and interesting, considering his affiliations] positions on abortion and gay issues. The tradition of the Pubs is to slowly groom a successor to the throne and position to smoothly insert him in as candidate … with the exception of Jeb, nobody is in line today. And even the Pubs have had enough of the Bush family dynasty to last a lifetime.

The various contingents of the Conservative party want less government and less money frittered away, yet Bush has built HUGE government, effective only at frittering. Now that the Dem’s have oversight again, even the big-business agenda is not running smoothly anymore.

Politically, NOT supporting Dubby goes deeply against the [authoritarian] grain of long-standing Republican lock-step … but supporting him aligns them with failure. They’re panicked, and given the mid-terms, should well be.

The bigger picture, of course, interests me. I think we’re in the midst of the last Conservative hoorah for some time to come … there will always be the uptight and fearful to deal with, but the world that’s reforming itself may not have a place for these folks after all’s said and done [unless they move to the Middle East, which will resist moderization to the end … and with their religious preference, they would not be welcome.]

In that regard, I’ve posted a portion of Andrew Sullivan’s book review on the heinous Dinesh D’Souza offering, blaming Liberals for everything except perhaps the Hindenburg. I’ve re-posted the link to Stephen Colbert’s shredding him, to review before you read it.

Sullivan has moved farther away from his own Conservative party year by year [appropriate for a gay man, I’d say] but it’s interesting to see how even-handed he is with Dinesh’s outrageous arguments. This is a man who would rather throw in with the Wahabbi’s than allow America to be “secular.” It’s a Very Long read … but I think it says something important about what Republicanism has become. Dinesh is much admired in the Pub inner circles.

After that, another post about the racism that rears its head in all this, including FOX’s Michelle Malkin. She’s the darling who called Rachel Corrie, the young American woman who was run down by a tractor in Palestine, “pancake girl.”

When an era’s energy signal starts to “close out” and a new one begins to creep in, we get the kind of situation we’re involved in today — the last dramatic wave of biting and scratching to resist change. Who knows how long it will last … but we’re participating in a birthing event, and it might take a generation to accomplish. If that sounds too long for you, remember … we’re already seven years in. It’s all coming along nicely [big picture, big picture — don’t swallow your tongue!]

TIME mag has a new cover format — and they launched it with a piece about Pub decline, complete with a photo-shopped pic of Reagan, a single tear slipping down his cheek. Open the link to see it, it’s probably still posted.

Last, a Liberal review of a book about the Hookup Culture and young women by a very conservative author … my grandmother should have written it. Oy!

Reads on the Red … a pale version of who they hoped to be. But there’s no “going back” … once concepts are outgrown, they never fit comfortably again no matter HOW much you want to “turn back the clock.”

Jude

Protocols of the Elders of the GOP
Sidney Blumenthal
Mar 15 2007
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/6104

QUESTION: What is the one thing you would most like to see happen by this time next year?

What I would like to see, or read, within the next year, are the Protocols of the Elders of the Republican Party. Transcribed as minutes of meetings at various law and lobbyist K Street offices, conference calls linking far-flung participants, and the confidential conversations of such figures as James Baker III, Brent Scowcroft, Kenneth Duberstein (Reagan’s last chief of staff, a Washington attorney), and Vin Weber (a former congressman, now head of a major lobbying firm), these records would reveal utter perplex at the plight of the Grand Old party in the twilight months of the Bush presidency.

Confounded already through their desperate attempt to save Bush through the Iraq Study Group that Baker co-chaired, they must contemplate the ruin of their lives’ work as a consequence of President Bush’s heedlessness.

Only one scenario appears to offer escape from the seemingly inevitable lowering weight of history. The core interests of the party require, somehow miraculously, a Republican succession in the White House. Would Cheney become so ill that he might be compelled to depart from the office to which he clings like life itself?

That would open the vice-presidency for the selection of a de facto Republican nominee, suddenly operating from a position of power and experience. But who? None of the candidates now in the field are trustworthy or plausible. Even with a Cheney vacancy to fill there is no one - no one; not an announced candidate and not anyone unannounced - to insert in the slot.

So goes the discussion. Then it moves on: perhaps it is better for the party to lose and those responsible to wear the badge of ignominious defeat. But who can foretell who will inherit the wind?

The conversations continue along this line of fatalism. The waiter at the Metropolitan Club stands patiently. Another scotch, please, with some soda water.

How the Right Went Wrong
Karen Tumulty
Thursday, Mar. 15, 2007
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1599374,00.html

A generation ago, fresh off the second biggest electoral landslide in American history, Ronald Reagan surveyed the wreckage that had been the opposition and declared victory. Standing before 1,700 true believers at the 1985 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), he proclaimed, “The tide of history is moving irresistibly in our direction. Why? Because the other side is virtually bankrupt of ideas. It has nothing more to say, nothing to add to the debate. It has spent its intellectual capital.” At this year’s conference two weeks ago, Reagan’s name was invoked more than anyone else’s.

But the mood at the most storied annual gathering of conservatives was anything but triumphal. John McCain, the Establishment favorite to win the 2008 Republican nomination, skipped CPAC entirely but did show up on David Letterman the night before, choosing the most aggressively glib venue to semiofficially announce his candidacy.

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney was there to make his pitch for 2008 but had to compete with a man who was working the crowd in a dolphin costume and a T-shirt identifying him as “Flip Romney: Just another flip flopper from Massachusetts.” Ex-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani barely mentioned the social issues on which he parts ways with conservatives, except to joke, “I don’t agree with myself on everything.” And the only memorable sound bite of the whole affair came from right-wing telepundit Ann Coulter, whose idea of an ideological rallying cry was to declare Democratic hopeful John Edwards a “faggot.” The condemnation that followed, in which at least seven newspapers banished her column from their opinion pages, became a ragged coda for the state of a movement that had once been justly proud of its ability to win an argument.

These are gloomy and uncertain days for conservatives, who — except for the eight-year Clinton interregnum — have dominated political power and thought in this country since Reagan rode in from the West. Their tradition goes back even further, to Founding Fathers who believed that people should do things for themselves and who shook off a monarchy in their conviction that Big Government is more to be feared than encouraged. The Boston Tea Party, as Reagan used to point out, was an antitax initiative.

But everything that Reagan said in 1985 about “the other side” could easily apply to the conservatives of 2007. They are handcuffed to a political party that looks unsettlingly like the Democrats did in the 1980s, one that is more a collection of interest groups than ideas, recognizable more by its campaign tactics than its philosophy. The principles that propelled the movement have either run their course, or run aground, or been abandoned by Reagan’s legatees. Government is not only bigger and more expensive than it was when George W. Bush took office, but its reach is also longer, thanks to the broad new powers it has claimed as necessary to protect the homeland. It’s true that Reagan didn’t live up to everything he promised: he campaigned on smaller government, fiscal discipline and religious values, while his presidency brought us a larger government and a soaring deficit. But Bush’s apostasies are more extravagant by just about any measure you pick.

Set adrift as it is, the right understandably feels anxious as it contemplates who will carry Reagan’s mantle into November 2008. “We’re in the political equivalent of a world without the law of gravity,” says Republican strategist Ralph Reed. “Nothing we have known in the past seems relevant.” At the top of the Republican field in the latest TIME poll is the pro-choice, pro-gay-rights former mayor of liberal New York City. Giuliani’s lead is as much as 19 points over onetime front runner McCain. But neither Republican manages better than a statistical tie in a hypothetical matchup against the two leading Democrats, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Giuliani’s lead in the early polls doesn’t necessarily mean the Republican race is getting any closer to the kind of early coronation the party usually manages to engineer. A New York Times/CBS News poll out this week found that nearly 6 out of 10 Republican primary voters who responded said they were unsatisfied with the choice of candidates running for the party’s nomination; by comparison, nearly 6 in 10 Democrats pronounced themselves happy with their field. The Democrats were also far more confident in the future. Whereas 40% of Republicans predicted the other party would win the White House next year, whomever it nominates, only 12% of Democrats felt that pessimistic about their chances. Then there is the real worry that the whole exercise might already be a lost cause. “In this environment, nobody looks good if you have an R by your name. It doesn’t matter who you are,” says a Republican campaign consultant in the Midwest. “I don’t see how that changes between now and Election Day. It’s the war; it’s huge. It’s just huge.”

The Iraq war has challenged the conservative movement’s custodianship of America’s place in the world, as well as its claim to competence. Reagan restored a sense of America’s mission as the “city on a hill” that would be a light to the world and helped bring about the defeat of what he very undiplomatically christened “the evil empire.”

After 9/11 Bush found his own evil empire, in fact a whole axis of evil. But he hasn’t produced Reagan’s results: North Korea is nuclear, Iran swaggers across the world stage, Iraq is a morass. “Conservatives are divided on the Iraq war, but there is a growing feeling it was a mistake,” says longtime conservative activist and fund-raiser Richard Viguerie. “It’s not a Ronald Reagan-type of idea to ride on our white horse around the world trying to save it militarily. Ronald Reagan won the cold war by bankrupting the Soviet Union. No planes flew. No tanks rolled. No armies marched.”

Then there are the scandals and the corruption. The dismay that voters expressed in last fall’s midterm election was aimed not so much at conservatism as at the G.O.P’s failure to honor it with a respect for law and order. And now that subpoena power gives the Democrats their first chance to shine a light into the crevices of an Administration and its very unconservative approach to Executive power, the final years of Bush’s presidency are likely to be punctuated by one controversy after another. The past weeks alone have produced a parade of revelations: leftover questions about Vice President Dick Cheney’s role in the I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby case; the betrayal by neglect of the war wounded at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and veterans hospitals across the country; the connected dots showing that the White House and the Justice Department exploited the post-9/11 USA Patriot Act, of all things, to engineer a purge of U.S. attorneys across the country.

Conservatives are in many ways victims of their successes, and there have indeed been big ones. At 35%, the top tax rate is about half what it was when Reagan took office; the Soviet Union broke up; inflation is barely a nuisance; crime is down; and welfare is reformed. But if all that’s true, what is conservatism’s rationale for the next generation?
What set of goals is there to hold together a coalition that has always been more fractious than it seemed to be from the outside, with its realists and its neoconservatives, its religious ground troops and its libertarian intelligentsia, its Pat Buchanan populists and its Milton Friedman free traders? That is why the challenge for Republican conservatives goes far deeper than merely trying to figure out how to win the next election. 2008 is a question with a very clear premise: Does the conservative movement still have what it takes to redeem its grand old traditions — or, better, to chart new territory?

There was a time when John McCain would have seemed the most natural heir to Reagan. It was Reagan who first introduced McCain to a conservative audience — ironically enough, given McCain’s conspicuous no-show this year, at CPAC’s 1974 conference. McCain was one of three former Vietnam POWs in attendance. With their release, Reagan said, “this country had its spirits lifted as they have never been lifted in many years.” Twenty-five years later, McCain was a fiscal conservative and security hawk serving his third term in Barry Goldwater’s old Senate seat when Nancy Reagan picked him to accept the American Conservative Union’s Conservative of the Century Award on behalf of her husband, who was too incapacitated by Alzheimer’s to do it himself.

But the right’s view of McCain changed when he ran for President in 2000. What bothered conservatives wasn’t just the fact that he challenged the Anointed One in a party that treats its primaries like a royal accession. It was also the glee with which he went after all its institutions, from the special interests to the theocrats to Big Business. “Remember that the Establishment is against us,” he exulted after winning the New Hampshire primary. “This is an insurgency campaign, and I’m Luke Skywalker.” Then again, as both Reagan and Goldwater showed, there is nothing more fundamentally conservative than an insurgency.

On his second try, McCain seems to have become much of what he used to fight against. The deficit hawk who had opposed Bush’s tax cuts voted to extend them. The apostate who counted the Rev. Jerry Falwell among the “agents of intolerance” seven years ago delivered the commencement speech at Falwell’s Liberty University last May. Ask the candidate what his message is this time around, and he tells TIME, “Experience, background, record and vision. Who is best capable to address the challenge of the 21st century, which is the threat of radical Islamic fundamentalism?” But what about reform? These days McCain has to be prompted on that one, which he lumps into “all of those things.”

McCain veterans insist their candidate hasn’t changed, just his prospects. “The key difference is, hopefully, this is a winning campaign,” says his chief strategist John Weaver. Trying to rekindle the old magic, they rearranged his schedule to put him back on the Straight Talk Express bus this month. But that could distract him from another goal in this critical period: building up his campaign coffers so that he has the financial muscle of a front-runner when the tallies are released for the first reporting period, which ends March 31.

Certainly, McCain’s operation has an institutional feel, for better or worse. Whereas he ran his 2000 campaign from shabby offices with a single toilet, McCain 2.0 is housed on the 13th floor (superstitiously identified by the building as the “M” floor) of a soulless office high-rise in northern Virginia. McCain’s 2000 campaign was a free-for-all, but his 2008 operation is more conventional, with far more hands on the wheel.

Being embraced by the Establishment isn’t such a good thing when the Establishment is in disrepute. And on the biggest issue on which McCain has shown backbone and hasn’t wavered — his support for the war and Bush’s troop buildup — he happens to find himself on the opposite side of the fence from 72% of Americans in the latest TIME poll.

If McCain is playing up to the right, it’s not working all that well. He is still at odds with the conservative base: flexible on immigration, opposed to a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and dedicated to preserving the Senate’s right to filibuster judicial nominees. “The problem with McCain, and I don’t know how he fixes it,” says evangelical leader Richard Lands, “is that he’s so unpredictable. What makes him appealing to independents makes him worrisome to social conservatives. They say, ‘Yeah, he’s pro-life, but will that have anything to do with who he nominates to the Supreme Court?’ People don’t like unpredictability in candidates.”

But then the only person who beats McCain in the polls is even further out of line with conservatives. Just out on YouTube is a 1989 video, which quickly made its way to the Drudge Report, in which Giuliani declares, “There must be public funding for abortions for poor women. We cannot deny any woman the right to make her own decision about abortion because she lacks resources.” Also getting fresh play are the unsavory details of his second divorce (familiar to anyone who picked up a New York City tabloid at the time): Giuliani’s wife got the news that they were splitting when he announced it at a press conference, and then the couple squabbled over whether she or his mistress would get to stay in Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence. Now there is an additional, painfully raw story line about how his third marriage has left him estranged from his children.

What draws conservatives to Giuliani, though, are his other qualities: the leadership and strength he showed as New York City’s mayor on 9/11; his record transformation of a crumbling, crime-ridden city into a safe and clean one; and the need for that kind of toughness in a dangerous world. Giuliani is talking to conservatives now in a language they want to hear. He promises that whatever his personal views, the judges he appoints as President would be “strict constructionists” in the mold of Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and John Roberts, which is generally understood to mean against abortion and gay marriage.

Romney, meanwhile, has taken a whisk broom to his record in liberal Massachusetts, where he twice ran for statewide office as a pro-choice candidate dedicated to “full equality for America’s gay and lesbian citizens.” He now says he opposes Roe v. Wade and describes himself as “a champion of traditional marriage.” In Massachusetts, he bucked the National Rifle Association by supporting the Brady Bill and an assault-weapons ban, boasting, “I don’t line up with the NRA.” Lately he brags that he has joined the gun-rights organization as a life member. He did that in August.

Romney registers a meager 9% in TIME’s poll of Republicans, but there are plenty of signs that conservatives are trying to overlook his past and fall in love. He won the straw poll at CPAC, and the endorsements are piling up. Romney has also picked up much of the political operation of Jeb Bush, who is the could-have-been candidate most longed for on the right. Money doesn’t seem to be a problem either; Romney raised $6.5 million on a single National Call Day in early January. The campaign is flush enough to be on the air at this early date with ads to introduce Romney to voters as a “business legend” who “rescued the Olympics” and “turned around a Democratic state.” The Mormon in the race also points out — jokingly, but with an edge — that he is the only leading contender who is still with his first wife.

Some on the right have been keeping a light in the window for the last conservative to have led a revolution. Newt Gingrich recently confessed his past marital infidelity on the Christian radio show of James Dobson, admitting he was carrying on with the House aide who became his third wife even as he was lambasting Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In the upside-down leap of reasoning that this campaign season has wrought in the movement, hanging his dirty sheets from the window was enough to convince everyone that Gingrich is running — and landed him an invitation from Falwell to be this year’s Liberty University commencement speaker. “He has admitted his moral shortcomings to me, as well, in private conversations,” Falwell wrote in his weekly newsletter. “And he has also told me that he has, in recent years, come to grips with his personal failures and sought God’s forgiveness.”

It’s no wonder that other potential Republican candidates, Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and former Senator turned television star Fred Thompson, are deciding that they can afford to wait a while before making up their minds. There is a full lineup of conservatives who are already in the race and looking for lightning to strike: Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and California Congressman Duncan Hunter, to name just a few. Many conservatives say a long election season offers the advantage of letting conservatives work through their doubts about their options for 2008, especially when they turn their attention to November.

“When it’s Hillary vs. Giuliani,” asks antitax activist Grover Norquist, “who’s going to vote for Hillary?” But others on the right say they are looking at this election as a write-off.

“I’m not focusing on 2008,” Viguerie says. “Realistically, it will probably take until the year 2016″ before the movement regains anything resembling its former glory.

And where will those new ideas and leaders come from? In this magazine, conservative columnist William Kristol has cited two possible sources, both of which focus on the very middle-class voters that Reagan so successfully peeled away from their Democratic moorings. In a forthcoming book, conservative authors Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam identify these voters as “Sam’s Club Republicans,” who could benefit from market-friendly health-care and tax policies that are aimed at families and especially at at-home parents. Another conservative thinker, Yuval Levin of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, argues along a similar vein with a set of policy proposals that he calls “Putting Parents First.” Bush’s signature approach to domestic policy fell short in that regard, Levin wrote in the Weekly Standard. “Compassionate conservatism, for all its virtues, does not even try to address itself to parents. A conservative agenda that did so would not only cement a relationship with these voters, it would also appeal to many with similar worries who do not share the strong cultural predilections that have drawn middle- and lower-middle-class parents to vote for Republicans.”

The Gipper would probably have had little patience for all the fretting his party is doing over its brand. But he also understood, because he embodied the idea, that progress comes from going up against the status quo. To become “creators of the future,” as he called his compatriots, he might have suggested that they look back to their past.

—with reporting by Jay Carney and Michael Duffy/Washington and Nancy Gibbs/New York

Stephen Colbert interviews Dinesh D’Souza
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/46901/

Today’s Review From The New Republic Online
The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11
by Dinesh D’Souza
http://www.powells.com/tnr/review/2007_03_15

The Mullah
A review by Andrew Sullivan

American conservatism is in crisis. That much is almost universally clear. But the next period in American politics will be determined not least by how clearly we understand the crisis of the right.

For it may be that the remarkably successful Republican coalition of the last three decades is not at all doomed at the polls. A Giuliani or Romney candidacy, especially up against a Clinton candidacy, could well eke out a victory in 2008. Nor is it quite the case that the familiar fault lines within the movement — libertarians versus social conservatives, neoconservatives versus realists, economic internationalists versus populists — have somehow come to a head all at once. The strains are there, all right, and they have been made much more acute in the Bush years under the weight of massive spending increases, evangelical overreach, abuse of executive power, conventional corruption, and (most disastrously) a mismanaged war. But the reflexive sense of cohesion on the right still manages to keep the rickety coalition together — if only because of the palpable weakness of the alternatives, at least so far.

The crisis, rather, is of a different kind. It is intellectual, and it is deeper than anything captured by the conventional categories. The sole merit of Dinesh D’Souza’s new book is that it acknowledges this intellectual collapse, even as it is itself a document of that collapse; and it proposes a new way forward. Whatever else may be said about The Enemy at Home — and the maledictions from left and right have been ferocious — it has at least the courage to pursue the logic of Bush-era conservatism all the way to its end. In this sense, it is a mainstream conservative book, in its own way even a visionary one, expanding on the direction that American conservatism has taken and daring it to continue aggressively on that very path.

What is that path? At its core is a deepening rejection of cultural and philosophical modernity. D’Souza believes that the defining new distinction in American politics is no longer between the economic right and the economic left. The size of government and its role as a guardian of the public welfare are increasingly dead issues, or issues where no vital energy crackles. D’Souza rightly holds that the real divide in the new century is between authority and autonomy, between faith-based politics and individual freedom.

And in this struggle at the level of first principles, D’Souza chooses his own side. He is at war with the modern West. If forced to choose between a theocratic order that upheld traditional morality and a secular order that saw such morality marginalized, D’Souza is with the former. He puts it more graphically himself: “Yes, I would rather go to a baseball game or have a drink with Michael Moore than with the grand mufti of Egypt. But when it comes to core beliefs, I’d have to confess that I’m closer to the dignified fellow in the long robe and prayer beads than to the slovenly fellow with the baseball cap.”

* * *

The Enemy at Home is essentially an unpacking of that extraordinary confession. D’Souza argues that there are only two choices for a human being to make in the twenty-first century with respect to “core beliefs”: “traditional morality” and what he calls “liberal morality.” Traditional morality, in D’Souza’s view, “is based on the notion that there is a moral order in the universe, which establishes an enduring standard of right and wrong. All the major religions of the world agree on the existence of this moral order. There is also a surprising degree of unanimity about the content of this moral order.” Liberal morality, by contrast, consists first of all in the right of the individual to choose for him- or herself what morality is. It is about “autonomy, individuality, and self-fulfillment as moral ideals.” Its essence is the notion that “each person must decide for himself or herself what is right in a particular situation.” D’Souza argues that the shift in America over the past few decades from traditional morality to liberal morality is “the most important fact of the past half-century.”

It is crucial to remember that, for all the conservative criticism of The Enemy at Home, this argument is just as central to the base of the current Republican Party as it is to this book. In this respect, The Enemy at Home is an utterly unremarkable exploration of what theoconservatism really requires. It demands that individual autonomy be sacrificed for obedience to the external moral order. Theoconservatism refuses to accept the notion that government can ever aspire to be neutral with respect to competing visions of morality. One of D’Souza’s mentors in this view, Richard John Neuhaus, has written that theoconservatism is designed to create an ideological “alternative both to Marxism and secularized liberalism” that would give America “a definition of reality, an ideology, based on Jewish-Christian religion, that [is] as creative, comprehensive, and compelling as was Marx’s definition of reality.” Robert P. George, another of D’Souza’s ideological allies, insists that “there can be no legitimate claim for secularism to be a neutral doctrine that deserves privileged status as the national public philosophy.” Given the existence of an external moral order, the duty of the state is therefore to reflect that external order, and the duty of citizens is to obey it. In the words of former Senator Rick Santorum, “I don’t want a government that is neutral between virtue and vice.”

Neither does D’Souza. And when he sees the results of individual autonomy, choice, and freedom in modernity, he is appalled. The picture of America that emerges from these pages is as deep an indictment of America, as much an exercise in “America-bashing,” as anything produced on the far left. For D’Souza, America has become a country edicated to the values of “secularism, feminism, homosexuality, prostitution, and pornography.” Guided by the cultural left, America is increasingly seen as “a shining beacon of global depravity, a kind of Gomorrah on a Hill.” For good measure, he does not exculpate Republican or “red” America in this indictment.

He is aware that the red states consume as much pornography as the blue ones, and have, in some cases, higher divorce, abortion, crime, and illegitimacy rates. He is also aware that red-staters consume Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives just as avidly as the denizens of the Upper East Side and Dupont Circle. “The contrast that some on the right draw between a decadent liberal coastline and a virtuous conservative heartland seems to be invalid,” D’Souza laments. “Liberal values have penetrated the heartland.”

All of this is enough to make a theoconservative despair. And the omens are not good. On their key issues — abortion and gay marriage — the religious right (which D’Souza ardently supports) has seen little progress after a generation in positions of power.

Despite eighteen years of Republican presidencies, Roe is still the law of the land. Despite massive political organization, same-sex marriage is now part of the fabric in Massachusetts, and is poised to become law in California, and has swept much of the rest of the Western world. Even more worryingly, no serious Republican candidate for the presidency in 2008 adequately expresses the worldview of the religious right. Their best hope is a Mormon who was solidly pro-choice and pro-gay only a few years ago. And the Iraq war is the coup de grâce. By robbing Republicans of national security as an issue, it makes a left-liberal triumph dangerously close to reality.

D’Souza is admirably more candid about the precarious state of American conservatism than many others. “If the left can convert national security — usually a source of political strength for the right — into a liability, then it has vastly improved its chances for winning future elections….The entire conservative agenda, from tax cuts to school choice to restricting abortion, would be stalled,” he writes. “Moreover, the right’s political loss would be followed by a cultural assault seeking to demonize Bush as another Nixon and conservatives as dangerous fanatics who cannot again be trusted with power. At a time when the right is within sight of complete victory, it risks losing everything and returning to the minority status it held in the years before Reagan.”

Unless you understand this critical philosophical and political context, D’Souza’s book makes no sense. D’Souza believes that his side is losing the culture war at home, and may soon be losing the political one as well. The 2006 elections proved the severe fragility of a political strategy dependent on a base of evangelical believers corralled into supporting a theoconservative social policy and a neo-conservative foreign policy. D’Souza runs the numbers at home and, with the war in Iraq coming undone, senses he cannot win. So what to do? As with many generals who find themselves losing a war, D’Souza has decided to widen it.

II.

Widen it how? By globalizing theoconservatism. This is the central argument of D’Souza’s book: that cultural globalization is the last chance for theoconservatism in its death match with liberal modernity. If a majority of Americans do not support a system of government resting on an external and divine moral order, thenthe obvious next move is to enlist the billions of fundamentalist believers in the developing world to forge a global alliance. If you combine the premodern patriarchs among the Christians of Africa and Asia and the Muslims of the Middle East and pit them against the degenerate, declining individualists in the West, a global theoconservative victory is possible.

That is D’Souza’s vision, and he is not shy about it. The test case for this strategy can be seen most graphically in the Anglican Church. Theoconservative Episcopalians in Northern Virginia have sought protection under a Nigerian prelate who believes that even speech about homosexuality should be criminalized. If theoconservatism cannot work as a governing majority in the First World, then it is time to forge an alliance between half of America with the Third World.

One has to admire at least the frankness with which this secessionist strategy for conservatism is laid out. “How can we use the war on terror to win the culture war?” D’Souza asks in a final chapter called “Battle Plan for the Right.” Notice here that defeating the forces of Islamist terror is merely instrumental to the deeper struggle to defeat modern individualism and autonomy. The idea of a common American commitment to the Constitution’s guarantees of individual freedom and autonomy is secondary to the global battle for the “external moral order.” Loyalty is not to country, but to a worldwide theoconservative ideology. Like the Marxists of old, the theoconservatives see their movement increasingly as global, resting on eternal truths, and not compatible with the “liberal morality” of their autonomous bourgeois fellow Westerners.

It is in such a context that D’Souza praises Islamism as a global ideology. Wahhabi Islam, the kind that animated Osama bin Laden, “is not a breeding ground of Islamic radicalism,” he instructs. “It is a breeding ground of Islamic obedience. The essence of the Wahhabi doctrine is doctrinal and social conservatism.” From D’Souza’s point of view, what’s not to like? No, he is not a supporter of terrorism. But wait. Bin Laden, it turns out, is not simply a terrorist. “For many Muslims,” D’Souza explains, “it is remarkable that a man born into a multimillion-dollar empire, a man who could be on a yacht in San Tropez with a blonde on one arm and a brunette on the other, has chosen to live in a cave in Afghanistan and risk his life for his beliefs.” The founder of Islamist thought, Sayyid Qutb, has “developed a critique of America and the West that is far more sophisticated and comprehensive than anything produced by the Marxists and the communists.” (Is there anybody in America after September 11 who is not an expert on Sayyid Qutb?) Bin Laden, moreover, correctly diagnoses the core problem with modern America. D’Souza explains that bin Laden “calls America a civilization in rebellion against God because you separate religion from your policies’ and thus contradict the absolute authority of the Lord and Creator.’” Seen in this philosophical context, the overlap between the grand mufti of Egypt and James Dobson is considerable. Why not a global merger?

D’Souza finds much to admire in the Islamist critique of the West. Islamists “stress that if the West has solved the economic problem, it has not solved the moral problem.

Although Islam may not be relevant in creating prosperity or military success, it is relevant in showing human nature the way to justice, goodness, and happiness.” Islam, after all, began by outlawing “bedouin practices such as rape, adultery, and homosexuality, as well as the bedouin custom of killing infant girls.” He cites Islamists as arguing that “Islam is best understood not in terms of obedience but rather in terms of voluntary submission to a divinely established moral order.” How different is this from the worldview of, say, Sam Brownback or Ted Haggard (the latter of whom D’Souza thanks in his acknowledgments)? Isn’t “voluntary submission to a divinely established moral order” another way of saying “born again”? D’Souza even enlists the Ayatollah Khomeini in the pro-life cause: “Khomeini writes that Allah has laid down injunctions for man extending from before the embryo is formed until after man is placed in the tomb….There is not a single topic in human life for which Islam has not provided instruction and established a norm.’” Meet the Global Moral Majority.

The separation of church and state is particularly vexing for D’Souza, as it is for the Christianist right in general. And when he looks at traditional Islamic societies, he sees a model for how America should be properly understood. As Qutb lamented about even a dry county in Colorado in the 1940s, “God’s existence is not denied, but His domain is restricted to the heavens and his rule on earth is suspended.” The result is a society best described, in one Islamist’s words (cited by D’Souza), as “a collection of casinos, supermarkets, and whorehouses linked together by endless highways passing through nowhere.” “Where,” D’Souza asks, “are the moral standards in American popular culture? It seems that there are none, just as the Muslims allege.” Compared with Islamic society, the West is profoundly immoral: “The distinguished Muslim scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr writes, The most basic right of a child is to have two parents, and this right is taken away from nearly half of the children in Western society.’” Such are the consequences of abandoning patriarchy. “If children had the vote,” D’Souza adds for good measure, “there would be no such thing as divorce. Children are to the right of even the Muslims on this issue.”

* * *

There is more. Islamist societies are paragons of social meaning and cohesion. Women know their place; homosexuals are invisible; blasphemy is illegal; pornography is banned; modesty is enforced. “My two grandmothers,” D’Souza assures his possibly nervous female readers, “were both tyrants who ruled over their husbands. Patriarchy doesn’t make women less powerful — it merely diverts their power to the domain of the household.” Criticizing Muslim countries for forcing women to wear a veil or a burka in public is to put on the “blinders of ethnocentrism,” even to indulge in “Islamophobia.” Here is a bigotry that the religious right and the politically correct left may together despise. But D’Souza drives the point home for the sake of the right, not the left: “Many Muslims are convinced that women’s liberation and sexual liberation, of the kind promoted by the cultural left, would be a disaster for their society…would undermine their religion, overturn their moral beliefs, and destroy their traditional families. In believing these things, of course, the Muslims are absolutely correct.”

What D’Souza admires in particular is the absence of any space between the individual and the community’s religious faith. He objects to the notion of a conscience that is somehow independent of an externally imposed moral code — that is more than a means for obedience. He quotes Bernard Lewis favorably: “Most Muslim countries are still profoundly Muslim in a way and in a sense that most Christian countries are no longer Christian.” D’Souza goes on: “Unlike many Christians, who have multiple identities, only one of which is that they happen to be Christian, Muslims typically regard their religion as central to both their private and public identity, and consider all other affiliations as secondary or derivative.” This premodern sense of the self — it is nothing other than that — is the one to which D’Souza aspires. He even sees a restorative theocon residue in suicide bombing: “There are plenty of losers in America: how many of them could be persuaded to blow themselves up for a little money and the prospect of six dozen virgins in heaven?” D’Souza’s book is the first defense I have ever read of suicide bombing as a sign of underlying cultural health.

The great blessing of Islamic society is, in D’Souza’s words, that “liberalism as a political force simply does not exist.” By liberalism, he means “doctrines such as Men and women should have the same roles in society,’ Freedom of expression includes the right to publish material that is sexually explicit or blasphemous,’ or Government should not seek to promote religion or legislate morality.’” D’Souza takes particular pleasure in letting us know that one celebrated victim of jihadism, Salman Rushdie, “has no constituency in the Muslim world.” He takes even more pleasure in informing us that “in America, a fundamentalist is one who believes the Bible is the literal, unadulterated word of God. By this definition, however, all Muslims are fundamentalists’ because all Muslims believe that the Koran is the literal, unadulterated word of God given in the Arabic language by the angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad.” Never mind that the Islamic tradition helped to pioneer the figurative reading of biblical texts. It is on such shared worldviews that alliances are most sturdily built.

There is no mention in the book of the pathological anti-Semitism that currently accompanies these traditional Islamic societies. But D’Souza goes out of his way to draw a distinction between Islamist terrorism undertaken purely in the name of jihad — September 11, the Bali bombing, the London and Madrid massacres — and terrorism that he regards as legitimate self-defense. He puts “the conflicts in Palestine, Chechnya and Kashmir” in the latter category: “No one can deny the horror of Palestinian and Chechen attacks upon civilians, but these have to be measured against the state-sponsored terror on the other side: the bulldozing of Palestinian homes, the shooting of stone-throwing teenagers, the obliteration of the Chechen capital of Grozny…by Russian troops.”

D’Souza is equally unperturbed by the fanatical hatred of homosexuality in traditional Islam. “The Koran describes homosexuals as people of the wrath of Allah,’ and most Muslims find the notion of legitimizing what they perceive as sinful conduct to be disgusting and unspeakable,” he writes. And he seems to believe that the advance of gay equality in the West is an unnecessary provocation to the allies whom he wishes to recruit. Throughout the book, he expresses revulsion for what he calls “the practice.” “Shortly after the fall of Baghdad,” he remarks, “graffiti began to appear on the walls of the city and its environs. The following scrawl caught my attention. Marriage of the same sex became legal in America. Is this, with the mafia and drugs, what you want to bring to Iraq, America? Is this the freedom you promised?’” He does find the dehumanization of gays in Islamic societies “uncharitable,” even “appallingly” so, but still quotes one scholar thus: “What human? What rights?” D’Souza’s only deviance from Muslim doctrine on the question of homosexuality is this: “There may be good reasons to leave them alone.” (May? Them?) The hangings and stonings and lynchings of gays in the Middle East are passed over in silence. D’Souza routinely lists homosexual orientation alongside such acts as rape, adultery, and abortion.

III.

In all of this, D’Souza is saying nothing that has not already been said on the theoconservative right. The Christianist base of the Republican Party strongly believes that the law can never attempt to be morally neutral; it believes passionately in fixed gender roles and the patriarchy of the traditional family; it opposes blasphemy and legal pornography; it wants no legal protections for gay couples (Santorum and Bush even supported keeping private, adult gay sex illegal in their respective states). For them, gay promiscuity and gay monogamy are equally abhorrent. In all of this, there is considerable overlap with traditional Islam. In an Islamic society, for example, there would have been no debate about Bill Clinton’s behavior in office, no distinction between his public role and his private life: “It is only in the liberal universe that Clinton’s conduct — which all traditional cultures revile, and which the Muslims would punish by stoning or flogging — becomes a minor peccadillo that is of no public concern.”

Moreover, Islamism removes the separation of church and state that D’Souza sees as the fons et origo of America’s moral pollution. He quotes Khaled Abou El Fadl, a distinguished Islamic thinker in Los Angeles: “A case for democracy presented from within Islam must accept the idea of God’s sovereignty. It cannot substitute popular sovereignty for divine sovereignty but must instead show how popular sovereignty…expresses God’s authority, properly understood.” In case we haven’t absorbed the proper lesson for the United States, D’Souza adds: “This mirrors the Declaration of Independence’s argument that it is the Creator who endows us with our inalienable rights, and thus it is a perfect expression of the conservative understanding of American democracy.”

Just to be clear: D’Souza is arguing that a democracy under divine authority and subject to theological truth is “a perfect expression of the conservative understanding of American democracy.” Why should we be surprised that he wants an alliance with theocratic autocracies in the developing world? In D’Souza’s eyes, both the American Constitution and traditional Islam have a common foe. “Secularism is the common enemy,” D’Souza quotes a Muslim scholar as saying. “Men and women in the West who are still devoted to the life of faith should know that those closest to them in this world are Muslims.” In a spectacular attempt to prove he means exactly this, D’Souza throws into the mix an excoriation of Turkey as excessively secular. Atatürk’s “militant secularization of Turkey is being reversed,” D’Souza notes, “and on balance it is a good thing. Muslims have the right to live in Islamic states under Muslim law if they wish.”

D’Souza is rehearsing the mainstream view of the religious right with respect to the notion of separating church and state. They oppose it, and so does he. But with what a twist! Where he differs from the religious right is in his willingness to find the proper political authority, the proper models of political virtue, in Islam. Islam and Christianity together: that is D’Souza’s dream. He does not seem especially interested in God. He writes nothing about his own faith, whatever it is. His interest is not in the metaphysics or the mysteries of religion, but in the uses of religion for social control. (Somewhere Machiavelli is smiling.) In the goal of maintaining patriarchy, banning divorce, outlawing homosexuality, and policing blasphemy, any orthodoxy will do. D’Souza’s religion, in a sense, is social conservatism. He is not going to let a minor matter such as the meanings of God get in the way of his religion.

In this regard, of course, he runs the risk of isolation. He is going to have a hard time keeping his coalition of the holy together. The members of the Christianist right in America believe that Islam is a false faith, opposed to their own. And this actual faith of theirs, their awkward belief in the exclusive truth of their own revelation, will certainly get in the way of their supporting an alliance of moral parity, or even an alliance of convenience, with a rival faith. Even the Republican Episcopalians in Falls Church eager to be run by Nigerians draw the line at Nigerian Muslims (with whom Nigerian Christians are actually at war).

Similarly, most secular conservatives have understood the war on terror as in part a war against the more violent rigidities of Islam. Many such conservatives see the way in which women are treated in Muslim society as repulsive; they find the Nazi-like anti-Semitism evil, and the reflexive comfort with violence and lack of religious freedom in much of the Muslim world appalling. The notion of actually seeing the world sympathetically through Islamist eyes — of agreeing with them on the need to keep women in burkas, gays hidden, and religious faith as the arbiter of public policy — is, well, very difficult. That explains why many conservatives have criticized this book severely. Islamism is not their idea of how to fix the crisis of conservatism.

D’Souza’s thesis was indeed described as “regrettable” and “nonsensical” by Victor Davis Hanson, and as “intellectually obtuse, poorly informed and, most importantly, an irresponsible exercise in putatively conservative bomb-throwing” by the influential Republican blogger Dean Barnett. Scott Johnson, of the popular Republican blog Powerline, had this to say about the book in The New Criterion: “Having engaged in the effort to understand the Muslims as they understand themselves…D’Souza generally does not seek to judge them by a standard above or beyond Islam.” But this is somewhat unfair to D’Souza. His standard for Islam is its effectiveness at maintaining a conservative social order. He doesn’t care if the religion is Islam or Christianity, or if its adherents are black, brown, or white — as long as it performs the necessary social task.

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The Profits of Self-Hatred
Malkin and D’Souza, Incorporated
MARGARET KIMBERLY
March 15, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/kimberly03152007.html

White supremacy, sensing the need of repackaging itself for consumption in polite company, partially fills the demand for racist bile by outsourcing to mercenary writers of color. Michelle Malkin and Dinesh D’Souza–of Filipino and Indian descent, respectively–are top guns of the genre, ever eager to slander non-whites, especially Blacks, as threats to Euro-American white “civilization.” For premium fees, Malkin and D’Souza act as trusted Gunga Dins and shock troops for fascism.

The corporate media makes advocates of racism and white American supremacy very rich. American racism also gives certain non-white people advantages. They are able to escape the indignity that black Americans face. They are then able to disassociate themselves and become allies with the very worst and most dangerous aspects of political life in this country.

Michelle Malkin, born Michelle Maglalang, is a dark skinned Filipino-American who loves the worst that white American civilization has to offer. Malkin is a darling of the right wing, a blogger and author who is eager to advocate invading other nations, and spewing hatred of immigrants in general and of Muslims in particular.

Malkin constantly rails against immigration, complaining about “drive by” and “accidental” citizenship attained by the children of immigrants who she and others label “anchor” and “jackpot” babies.

Malkin never told her loyal readership that her father came to the United States in 1970 on a temporary work visa. She was born in October 1970. Malkin is herself a jackpot baby, given automatic citizenship when her parents were not even permanent residents. The truth may set you free, but it doesn’t get you on Fox news.

In 2002 Malkin wrote that the internment of thousands of Japanese-Americans was “wrong and abhorrent.” Who knows if she ever believed those words, but times changed quickly and there was a book deal waiting for an Asian who would approve past and future efforts to profile and then incarcerate non-white people.

Malkin is not just a self-hating Asian. She is a two-faced liar, having condemned Japanese internment just two years before defending it in print. In 2004 she wrote In Defense of Internment: The Case for “Racial Profiling” in World War II and the War on Terror. When racists fantasized about interning Arabs, she helped provide ammunition:

“Make no mistake: I am not advocating rounding up all Arabs or Muslims and tossing them into camps, but when we are under attack, ‘racial profiling’–or more precisely, threat profiling–is justified. It is unfortunate that well-intentioned Arabs and Muslims might be burdened because of terrorists who share their race, nationality or religion. But any inconvenience, no matter how bothersome or offensive, is preferable to being incinerated at your office desk by a flaming hijacked plane.”

White people are never “inconvenienced” by raced based incarceration, even though there are white domestic terrorists, serial killers, and shooters in schools. Apparently Malkin thinks that is just fine.

Common sense makes it obvious that Malkin’s dark skin has been problematic for her and she admits as much. “Here are some of the racial epithets I’ve been called in my lifetime: Chink. Gook. Jap. Nigger. Slant eyes. Dog-eater.” She also suffered the color consciousness created by European colonialism:

“Back in the Philippines, upscale restaurants refuse to hire natives with skin darker than sand. The movie industry promotes model ‘mestizos’ and ‘Maria Claras’–pale as paper due to the blanching effect of Spanish blood. Lighter-skinned cousins mocked me as ‘The Brownie.’ Pitying aunties suggested rubbing my skin with pumice stones for a more desirable complexion.”

Malkin could have used these painful experiences to fight against racism, but that is a much tougher way to live and to get paid. Being a mouth piece for white/right America is a more certain path to a fat bank account.

Malkin has partners in crime, people who have either bought the supremacy myth or who just want to be on the winning, money making team. Dinesh D’Souza was one of the founders of the racist Dartmouth Review and the author of books such as The End of Racism, published in 1995. The demise of racism was news to everyone else, but it was a convenient notion for the Indian-born D’Souza to sell. It was also a direct attack on black America. D’Souza’s thesis came straight from Racism 101. Racism is gone and black people do badly only because of their “pathologies.” D’Souza also thinks the Civil Rights Act should be repealed.

Like Malkin, the Indian-born D’Souza comes from a country whose darker citizens get the cold shoulder. Try finding an Indian movie star who isn’t light skinned. Imagine D’Souza’s delight upon arriving in the United States. He was now part of a so-called model minority that was given certain advantages, even if the “n word” was hurled in his direction. All he had to do was sign up for the right wing propaganda machine of racism and aggression and he was home free.

D’Souza’s latest homage to foolishness is called The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11:

“In this book I make a claim that will seem startling at the outset. The cultural left in this country (such people as Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, George Soros, Michael Moore, Bill Moyers, and Noam Chomsky) is responsible for causing 9/11.”

Like Malkin, D’Souza lies at the drop of a hat. When he was called on his bizarre hate speech, he began to back pedal furiously. “I argue that the American left bears a measure of responsibility for the volcano of anger from the Muslim world that produced the 9/11 attacks.”

D’Souza apparently forgot what he wrote. The word “measured” is no where to be found, in the title or in the text:

“I am saying that the cultural left and its allies in Congress, the media, Hollywood, the nonprofit sector and the universities are the primary cause of the volcano of anger toward America that is erupting from the Islamic world….the left is the primary reason for Islamic anti-Americanism as well as the anti-Americanism of other traditional cultures around the world. I intend to show that the left has actively fostered the intense hatred of America that has led to murderous attacks such as 9/11.”

D’Souza’s book is a cynical obscenity, meant to silence the left and promote the Bush administration’s efforts to dominate as much of the world as possible. He just makes things up as he goes along and then pretends he didn’t write what is clear for all to see.

Bin Laden said on many occasions that he is angry about America’s support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine. He was angry with the Saudi regime and its decision to allow American troops on their soil. Michael Moore, abortion and gay marriage were never on the bin Laden list of pet peeves. What are facts when there is money to be made and an ideology to support?

D’Souza’s true purpose in writing this screed is to provoke hatred and legitimize violence against anyone who opposes the white/right wing agenda. His assertion that people who disagree with him are the nation’s enemies is offensive and dangerous but it hasn’t hurt D’Souza’s career at all.

There will be more Malkins and D’Souzas as long as hatred is profitable and anti-black racist rules apply. They are just the latest in a long line of openly racist and fascist opinion makers. A quick glance at the television screen might lead one to believe that they would be on the side of the oppressed, when nothing could be further from the truth.

Margaret Kimberley is an editor and senior columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Her Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR.

Moral Panic Comes ‘Unhooked’
Book Review: Laura Sessions Stepp’s unnecessary alarm over college “hookup culture.”
Ann Friedman, March 12, 2007
(Editor’s Note: This story appeared originally on CampusProgress.org.)
http://www.wiretapmag.org/sex/43034/

This Valentine’s Day, as conservative groups lamented the supposed death of romance on college campuses due to the popularity of The Vagina Monologues, they found an ally in the mainstream media. In the Washington Post Style section, reporter Laura Sessions Stepp weighed in with a lengthy piece about how women just don’t care about finding love anymore.

It was an excerpt from her new book, Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both, which explains the purportedly disastrous effects of the “hookup” on high school and college women.

According to Stepp, a hookup is anything from making out to sex to passing out partially clothed in the same bed. For the past 10 years, Stepp has taken a shocked-and-appalled “kids these days!” tone in explaining the youth dating scene to the Post’s baby-boomer (and older) readership. (She penned a cutting-edge expose of the “wingman” phenomenon last year, as if friends haven’t been helping friends get dates for millennia.) After mining some of her contacts from reporting that story and sending letters to campus administrators, Stepp found a handful of high school- and college-aged girls who were willing to share with her the details of their sex lives for the better part of a year. Their stories make up the bulk of the book.

While this type of in-depth interviewing doesn’t really allow for a representative sample under even the best circumstances, Stepp doesn’t even make a minimal effort at statistical integrity. She interviewed six college students who attend two primarily white, upper-class, Greek-heavy private schools: Duke University in Durham, N.C., and George Washington University in Washington, D.C. These girls aren’t just “privileged” in the sense that they can afford to attend private universities. One drove to school in a brand-new Lincoln Navigator, a high school graduation present from her father. Another girl’s mother took her on a Caribbean vacation when she was feeling a bit down after a breakup.

These are women who have been told they can do and have it all, who have grand career ambitions, who work hard in school and play even harder on the weekends. They like to get drunk at bars called Shooters and Charlie’s, and maybe go home with the occasional lacrosse player. In the course of Stepp’s year with them, most have a series of unfulfilling hookups, as well as at least one more important relationship.

Although she self-identifies as a feminist, many of Stepp’s conclusions are soaked in conservative rhetoric. She tells women they don’t really like going out and getting drunk, they just think they do. (”Admit it, the bar scene is a guy thing.”) She goes on to explain that unlike men, when women have sex their bodies produce oxytocin, a chemical that makes them bond with their partner. And women who have engaged in multiple hookups have trouble settling down with one man later in life because their bodies stop producing oxytocin, so they can no longer form bonds as easily. This is a widely debunked theory, also espoused by many abstinence-only education curricula and by Eric Keroack, an anti-choice advocate recently appointed by President Bush to oversee federal family planning programs.

Stepp says women aren’t naturally inclined to initiate sex; they just think they have to because they’re encouraged to pursue what they want in other areas of life. Rather than sit demurely and wait for men to come calling, they’d rather enjoy the thrill of making the first move, kissing a guy in the corner of a bar, grinding against a stranger on the dance floor, and taking him home.

They’re fooling themselves, Stepp says. She calls for reinstating the sexual double-standard (men pursue, women are pursued) for feminist reasons: It wasn’t fair, but it was better for girls because it kept them from getting hurt, and it ensured that loving relationships developed later in life. Back in the good old days “there were generally accepted rules back then about what to do and not do sexually,” she writes. “These standards restricted young women more than young men, by no means a fair deal, but they at least allowed women time and space to consider what kind of partners they wanted to love and what that love should look like.” Because for Stepp, love, not academic or career ambitions, should be the focus of young women’s energies.

Stepp makes at least one valid point. If women aren’t finding hookups sexually pleasurable (and indeed, many women go as far as to say they are emotionally damaging), then something needs to change. But Stepp never proves destructive hookups are as widespread as she believes. She argues that all hookups are problematic in and of themselves, regardless of how women feel about them at the time. In other words, Stepp’s subjects feel unfulfilled because they’re having casual sex, not just because they’re having bad sex. Her solution is for women to exit the bar scene altogether, go home, and attract a loving boyfriend by honing their baking skills. “Guys will do anything for homemade baked goods,” she chirps.

This is exactly what many young women want to avoid, and rightfully so. It’s their ambition to have a successful career–not their ambition to bed the cutest guy at a party–that’s keeping them from forming lengthy, serious relationships in college. For amb