Thane Rosenbaum’s confessional lament Red State Jews aroused my sympathy and recognition.  Like him, I have served as an editor at Tikkun - Jewish book editor - for the past several years, though unlike Rosenbaum, I remain on board.  As with him, the events of the last few years have struck my progressive Jewish values like a series of earthquakes, producing dramatic changes and rifts deep beneath the surface.  Even so, I would urge Mr. Rosenbaum, and all Jewish liberals, to remain calm, even if confused, and avoid going conservative red.
    Two words he used -- “naïve” and “cynical” -- comprise the reason why.  Let me explain (with gross generalization, as demanded for the sake of brevity).  It makes sense that conservatives better understand that enemies are often not to be trusted and are often belligerent, implacable, perhaps even simply evil. The conservative worldview, after all, is built on the assumption that everyone acts out of self-interest.  (In the world in general this supposedly leads to the war of all against all, though in the marketplace it allegedly leads to the common good!)  The problem is that this is pretty much all conservatives understand.  While in war and in the fight against certain kinds of crime this perhaps makes them more realistic (or at least able to generate the kind of unity and zealousness needed to fight), on nearly every other front they remain woefully, dangerously out of touch.  Like the Western left that today disappoints and repulses in its inability to accept that unreasonable, implacable foes exist (and to appreciate the good aspects of western liberal democracy), conservatism represents a faith-based ideology just as inflexible, unable to accept that individualism cannot healthily negate all other values yet simultaneously holding that government’s only function is to wage war against external enemies.
    If it was naïve to believe, as a progressive, that all of Israel’s enemies would come to accept Israel, or that the liberal West’s enemies would give up their fanaticism, it is no less naïve to believe that military might can force acceptance, “democracy” or even merely “good behavior” upon them.  While the belief in righteous warfare may be comforting and even therapeutic to some degree, this does not guarantee its success.  Israel’s history shows this clearly, as does the war in Iraq (and most of the geo-political games throughout 20th-century American history).  Yes, Israel and the West need to defend themselves with all reasonable means.  But both al-Qaeda-type terrorists and Western (neo)-conservatives fail to appreciate the Koranic injunction that, ultimately, there is no coercion in religion -- or politics. The recent history of the war on terror reveals a depressingly inept endeavor, lacking in self-consciousness, tending toward conceptual extremism, adulating and implementing the very authoritarianism against which it is supposedly battling.  Even on its own terms, the (neo)-conservative response so far has little to show for its efforts, and might well be exacerbating the problem.
    The reason is the second word, “cynicism.”  While it is comforting and perhaps accurate to think that western liberal democracy (yes, liberal; ironic, isn’t it?) is fighting for its life against primitive, superstition-based, destructionism, (neo)-conservatism has also shown itself to be a bankrupt, incompetent ideology.  This is precisely because, understanding only the combative posture, it shirks coöperation and compromise as unmanly weakness.  This failure has had horrific repercussions both domestically and internationally. Much of the world despises the United States for its haughty unilateralism. Policy-making has in too many cases become the handmaiden of ideology, partisan politics and religion (think of issues such as birth control, the frenzied but failed war on drugs, environmental science, education, taxes). Wielding their own brand of apocalyticism, all too many citizens and even governing officials seek to make the U.S. a Christian theocracy, while corporate-run globalization is wreaking havoc with the world’s poorer peoples and natural resources.  It is telling that George W. Bush and his supporters had to concoct a marketing scheme labeling conservatism as compassionate (a slogan none too quickly dropped). While Republicans hardly have a historical monopoly on corruption, it is not coincidental that under the two most ideologically (neo)-conservative administrations -- Reagan and Bush, Jr. -- corruption has become one of the nation’s strongest growth industries.
    Jews should only note how Israel has become a morass of individualist competitiveness and materialism. American-style capitalism is destroying the agricultural sector, creating a permanent class of poor, gradually but inexorably evacuating the soul of the nation through crassness, glitz and endless self-stimulation. The number of Israelis fleeing abroad, the diminishing interest in military service, terrible government corruption, epidemic sexual abuse and violence, a palpable national complacence -- these are but some of the indicators that a “normal country” is not only undesirable but suicidal.  This is what free-market worshipping (neo)-conservatism leads to, not because it likes this situation, but because it refuses to address the structural causes that bring it about. Zionism isn’t dying because of criticism but because of market-driven individualism.  An article in Haaretz last week announced that several ultra-orthodox rabbis will seek to dialogue with their Islamicist Palestinian counterparts, since both face and fear the threat of multicultural liberal democracy.  If the response to anti-modern terrorism is to become more and more like the anti-modern terrorists, we have lost all our advantages.  “For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”
    If this is indeed, despite all denial, a clash of civilizations, a West fighting under the banner of a New Testament rewritten by Ayn Rand and Adam Smith (with John Locke a distant third) is hardly worth getting behind uncritically.  It is worth recalling that Smith penned the following, most un-Christian, lines: “The only legitimate function of government is the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”  Is it possible that much of the world already suspects that (neo)-conservative values such as Smith’s motivate globalization and the war on terror?  Progressivism, for all its flaws, upholds as so few today do, the values of an Enlightenment whose idealism remains the only realistic rhetorical bulwark we have against the corrosive selfishness and cynicism of libertarians and theocrats alike.
    If walking with two left feet leads to lots of stumbling, remember that walking with two right feet is no more effective.

Jonathan Schorsch is professor of Jewish studies in Columbia University’s Department of Religion and Jewish Book Editor for Tikkun. He is the author of Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World.