On Freedom and its Composing Parts

Not to pull a Sol here, but this:

The silly controversy over the downtown mosque is excellent evidence that the conservative movement has become obsessed to the point of derangement with a right-wing version of identity politics that sees everything through the lens of the assumption that American identity is under seige. The modus operandi of the populist right is patriotic semiotics gone wild. 9/11 was a Great Awakening and Ground Zero is a sacred scar representing the sacrifice of those thousands who died in fire in order to shake the rest of us into recognition of the great existential threat to the American Way of Life. To refuse to resist the placement of a mosque next to the grave of those martyred in the Great Awakening is to fail to have heard the call, to fail to understand the battle now underway, to complacently acquiesce to the forces slowly transforming America into something else, into something unAmerican, a place for some other kind of people, a place not worth fighting for. It is to, as they say, “let the terrorists win.”

As Wilkinson notes, this mosque debate (which I assume we are all at least somewhat aware of) is more revealing of Culture War pathologies than it is informative or rationally constructed. More than any other part of the Culture Wars of the last two decades, except maybe the Prop 8 battle, the whole uproar shows that modern American conservatism is much more an identity than an ideology, an identity that worships and fears for a romanticized idea of American liberty. The tenets of religious liberty and property ownership are supposedly uncontroversial parts of American civic thinking, but to conservatives they are actually subservient to this concept. Liberals see these things as fundamental building blocks, without which American freedom doesn't exist, and therefore as important as the "freedom" itself. Conservatives are much more concerned with American freedom as a thing under attack, that needs defending, that cannot possibly flourish without vigilance, the kind of vigilance that may actually require subversion of those underlying principles. While someone who saw religious freedom as a core part of American liberty would be forced to cede that, even if they found Muslims repellent, they simply could not deny them a right to pray where they want, there is no such deference to principles within mainstream conservatism on this issue. Instead, it is the thing itself that is of utmost importance, not the things necessary to make and sustain it.

The same principle is in play in the gay marriage debate. Individual liberty and the right to pursue one's happiness are fundamental building blocks of the American system. The right to marry who you love, especially when it won't affect any other person in your community, is in accordance with these principles. But gay marriage seems to strike at a fundamental part of Americanness, as identified by social conservatives, this thing which is perpetually under assault.

What's truly frustrating, to me, is that opponents of either Lower Manhattan-based mosques or of gay marriage must then reach out to logically incoherent arguments to put some window dressing on their otherwise emotional reactions. I had dinner a few nights back with some folks, just after Prop 8 was overturned, and one of the people there said she opposed the repeal because she expected a future in which churches would be routinely sued by gay couples for refusing to marry them. When I pointed out to her that, like straight people, gay people probably don't want to force someone to marry them, and would rather have a nice, voluntary set-up, she told me that "Americans sue over everything", like "hot coffee on their laps", and that this would be no different. Now, I don't know how conservative she may be in all things, and we didn't really go far enough in the conversation, but there really isn't a lot of sense in this point. Churches that are hostile to gay people are highly unlikely to have gay people in them. I know that were I gay, I wouldn't want my officiant to sulk through the whole proceeding, under threat of lawsuit. Alternatively, the implication may have been that conniving heterosexual people could manipulate their rights to squeeze money out of churches that don't want to marry them, but there's a good chance that they would just be married anyway, and their elaborate plan would backfire.

I realize that, as a liberal person, it's very tempting for me to dismiss opposing arguments as pathological, or emotional, rather than rational. I usually try to avoid that kind of thing because it can just as easily be leveled at me: I know and like Muslims, I know and like gay people, and I want them to have the freedoms I have. But it's been hard, in the last, oh, let's say 7 years, to look at the Culture War and not come away profoundly cynical about the depth and philosophical rigour of social conservatism. Everything always boils down to a variation on the same theme: Here's America, here's freedom, here's a threat, and here's how we must defend freedom from itself. No matter that the threat itself is a feature, not a bug or a foreign virus, of the democratic system, and no matter that by considering it a threat, you're actually being threatened by what you seek to protect.