Last week, I responded to an item on American Digest titled "There's Something Strange in the Neighborhood." Gerard posted my comment on his site, which was very kind, but I noticed that there were a few typos (not Gerard's fault) and some of the ideas weren't expressed as clearly as they might be. Since I've intended to develop this line of reasoning, I thought I'd try to present a slightly more formal version of the thesis.
First, I should say that I'm not going to address the issues Gerard raises about a new political movement, because I think that's a separate subject, and deserves special treatment. Suffice to say that third parties in the US can usually only hope to adjust the position of whichever major party happens to be closest to their ideological perspective, and they can do that only by playing a spoiler role over several election cycles. There have been a couple of occasions where a third party became a major, and managed to supplant one of the established parties, so that is a possibility, although not a probability. But again, that's a distinct topic. It may tie into the fight against terrorism/totalitarianism if people become sufficiently invested in that struggle, and the major parties fail to come to terms with it.
However this is not a religious war, unless by religion we also mean secular ideological movements. Islamism is not merely "radical Islam," because it includes elements of the European Counter-Enlightenment that had no prior history in Muslim tradition until the 20th Century. As I think Paul Berman argues in Terror and Liberalism, Sayyid Qutb, the author of Al Qaeda's Mein Kampf, modified and adapted a thesis derived from European philosophy that the schism between the "lifeworld" and the "system world," defined "the schizophrenia of modern life." Qutb's formulation diagnosed the source of human strife as the schism between mankind's material and spiritual identity, and he proposed that only submission to Allah through strict adherence to Islamic Law could be offered as a remedy. The details of this complex "problematique" do not derive from the Muslim world view, but from elements of interpretive Western philosophy. And similarly, Counter-Enlightenment philosophy can be found in much of the totalitarian ideological turmoil of the 20th Century.
So, if liberalism is maturing in order to come to terms with the threat, I can see a seismic shift to a new political alignment in the US... one that isn't merely dedicated to Democracy (power of the people), but to Demosophia (wisdom of the people). And I will hope that there is a mature liberal impulse that is expressed in the "blogosphere," and by people like Andrew Sullivan, Chris Hitchens and many others. It does not conform to the old political divisions, and may well match up favorably against Totalitarianism 3.0.
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