Defining Conservatism: The Principles That Will Bring Our Country Back Book

I enjoy the Kahane persona columns on NRO, and therefore I picked up this book for cheap when a local bookstore went under. The premise is that Kahane (the pseudonym for a conservative screenwriter and novelist--Andrew Klavan is my suspect) is a liberal who is revealing to us poor lost conservatives the game plan of the Left and what we might do to thwart it, in the spirit that it's no fun if we don't fight back at all. C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters are referenced outright, and the tone is similar.

The first half of the book "reveals" the plan of the Left to fundamentally remake America. Kahane asserts that we are in a non-violent civil war, and that only the Left realizes this and only they are acting accordingly. They have made a Long March through the institutions, taking over media, Hollywood, the universities, the schools, and most of the government. They use political correctness to control our speech and therefore our very thoughts, and constantly berate America for its faults, especially the Original Sin of our nation: slavery and racism. "The Civil Rights Act was not passed until 1964, therefore everything about America prior to 1964 was evil." This shuts down any nostalgia for any aspect of society before the "liberal revolution of the 1960s."

Kahane sounds much like Rush Limbaugh in these assertions that liberals are bitter enemies, to be defeated, who do not share the same fundamental faith in America's founding ideas, instead of simply politically different. He frames the American political scene as a black-and-white battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil, and naturally the Left are the bad guys. His prescription is that conservatives need to pick up the weapons of their enemies and fight back, just as ruthlessly. He argues for a Long March of our own, to take back Hollywood and the schools. He argues for our own answers to Saturday Night Live and the Daily Show, where we can heap ridicule on the heads of the Left. He argues that conservatives need to live, eat, and breathe politics, the same way the Left does (which to me is the biggest disadvantage--whereas a liberal wants to make everything political, from food to sexuality to the CO2 we exhale, a conservative just wants to be left alone!).

I'm torn in how I feel about this book. I don't view my "progressive" friends as followers of Lucifer who want to destroy America simply because they can, or because they hate it. I don't believe there is a large segment of our society who is actively working to subvert the Constitution, or who has warm feelings for the Soviet Union. I do smile at such turns of phrase as the "criminal organization known as the Democrat Party", and I'm certainly cognizant of the Party of Slavery, Segregation, and Sedition, of Tammany Hall, of the Chicago Daley machine, etc.

I do believe in the universal struggle for liberty, that it is only preserved with eternal vigilance, and I do feel that the modern American left is less interested in liberty than it is in power. I think they are wrong; otherwise I'd be on their side. I want them defeated in elections and I want the Leviathan of the State drastically reduced. What I'm not sure I can absorb is Kahane's Manichean view of the struggle. Perhaps I do not want to see my opponents as being this ruthless and relentness, simply because I doubt the resilience of the American people--I fear we have lost much of the vigor of 1776, and my reading of history shows that the normal course of a society means we will eventually succumb. As Kahane points out, we are always on the defensive, standing athwart history yelling "Stop!"

So while I found Kahane's wit bracing, and his clarion call somewhat energizing, in the final analysis this book depresses me.