Fundamentalism Hot and Cold: George W. Bush and the "Return of the Sacred"

An American fundamentalist is an evangelical who is militant in opposition to liberal theology in the churches or to changes in cultural values or mores, such as those associated with "secular humanism." . . . Fundamentalists are a subtype of evangelicals and militancy is crucial to their outlook. Fundamentalists are not just religious conservatives, they are conservatives who are willing to take a stand and to Wght.

—George M. Marsden, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism

Not long ago, historians Heinrich August Winkler and Abbott Gleason speculated in Die Zeit and the Boston Review whether the United States currently faces a historical moment that Germany went through on the eve of the Weimar Republic, that is, a "conservative revolution." The term was coined and applied by right-wing intellectuals at the time to attack the liberal "Zeitgeist" of the Weimar Republic. They considered the German chaos of the 1920s as proof of the Hobbesian pandemonium that modern liberal democracies and modernity in general produce. The most influential proponent of this illiberal phalanx was political and legal philosopher Carl Schmitt who, like Martin Heidegger, joined the Nazi Party in May 1933 and became one of its primary philosophical proponents.

In his essay "If Power Administers Justice," Winkler relates Schmitt's famous friend/enemy distinction to the Bush administration's unilateral politics, asserting that it echoes Schmitt's conservative response to modern liberalism's alleged softness. Gleason finds a similar cultural bond in the Bush administration's "imperial foreign policy and its tax cuts, which . . . are deliberately aimed at starving the welfare state." Connecting the nation's social security to imperial politics paved the "hard road to fascism," as Gleason terms it. Mussolini and Hitler, who focused their imperial ideology on ancient Rome and the millennial idea of a "Thousand Year Empire," saw an inevitable connection between militarism, imperialism, and curtailing the state's commitment to popular welfare—and it is this connection that for Gleason resounds in U.S. foreign policy. In other words, Winkler's and Gleason's associations of George W. Bush's "conservative revolution" with that of the Weimar Republic—a revolution that led straight into fascism—insinuate that the United States is historically in a similar situation.¹

And indeed, the Patriot Act, the scandalous practices at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, the debacle about the election of 2000 and the enduring stretching of the facts in the 2004 campaign, not to speak of the media's voluntary subordination to politics and its renunciation of critical distance, bolster the notion that the United States has fallen prey to totalitarian practices. Against this array of incidents, it is difficult to imagine that the "fundamentally un-American" wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib, as George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld termed it, is just the failure of some evil individuals in an otherwise good society. The accumulation of events rather speaks for a structural problem disquieting for a nation so proud of its democracy. But even if the term "un-American" is the euphemism for antidemocratic practices, I wonder whether insinuations of fascism are the appropriate frame to explain the Bush administration's conservative revolution. Apart from the fact that any equation with German Nazism minimizes and sanitizes the Holocaust, I would argue that the underlying teleology of this approach is already misleading. It assumes that conservatism taken to its extreme would always and ultimately lead to fascism. This monistic perspective prevents us from considering the possibility of conservative alternatives. The attempt to associate the current "conservative revolution" in the United States with Italian and German fascism fails to account for the decisive role of religion in America, which in its most extreme form also threatens liberal democracy, but on different grounds than Europe's "hard road to fascism."²

In the following pages I will generate an alternative trajectory of the current "conservative revolution." By way of acknowledging (rather than blurring) the differences between Weimar's leading right-wing intellectual and his U.S.-American counterparts, the fascist-fundamentalist dichotomy becomes a framework for elucidating two different conservative substantiations of politics, which reveal a...