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Anti-, Neo-, Post-, and Proto-: Conservative

Hybrids, Ironic Reversals, and Global Terror(ism)

Nancy S. Love

To cite this article: Nancy S. Love (2009) Anti-, Neo-, Post-, and Proto-: Conservative
Hybrids, Ironic Reversals, and Global Terror(ism), New Political Science, 31:4, 443-459, DOI:
10.1080/07393140903322539

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New Political Science,
Volume 31, Number 4, December 2009

Anti-, Neo-, Post-, and Proto-: Conservative Hybrids,

Ironic Reversals, and Global Terror(ism)*
Nancy S. Love
Appalachian State University, NC, USA

Abstract Conservatism has always been a reluctant ideology, more a pragmatic response to
events than a coherent system of fundamental principles. The Newest Right, which has now
emerged with renewed vigor in America, Europe, and beyond, is no exception. It continues to
invoke powerful traditions and deeply rooted identities as the enduring foundations of social
order and political authority. However, conservatives today also refuse to set limits on personal
ambitions, economic programs, government activities, and even leverage their fundamental
values. In America, the “War on Terror”— an undeclared war against an unknown enemy—
has unleashed a global politics, indeed, a global crusade, that is redefining national borders and
constitutional doctrines with astonishing speed. In this article, I draw on four prefixes—”
anti,” “neo,” “post,” and “proto,”—to characterize the implications of this newest
conservatism without limits for the continuing evolution of conservative ideology. I claim that
the Newest Right has invoked an unprecedented concept of national community, a homeland
whose borders they would secure by terror, now on a global scale. This new conservatism gone
global, I argue, poses a greater threat to democracy than its presumed enemies ever could.

Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.

—George W. Bush
There is no hiding place. There is nowhere you can go and
only be with people who are like you. It’s over.
Give it up.
—Bernice Johnson Reagon

Conservatism has always been a reluctant ideology, more a pragmatic response

to events than a coherent system of fundamental principles.1 Not surprisingly,

* My thanks to the editors and an anonymous reviewer for their very helpful comments.
An earlier and simplified discussion of some of this material appears in my Understanding
Dogmas and Dreams: A Text, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2006).
1
Michael Freeden, Ideology, A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003), pp. 87 – 90. Conservatives have long resisted the label “ideology,” a term they
associate with radical philosophies and abstract principles, and preferred to describe
conservatism as a “disposition,” “impulse,” or “persuasion”. See Michael Oakeshott,
“On Being Conservative” in Russell Kirk (ed.), The Portable Conservative Reader (New York:
Viking Penguin, 1982), p. 569; Irving Kristol, Neo-Conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea
(Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 1999), p. ix. Some conservatives seek a middle ground.
William Buckley presents conservative ideology as between “an attitude of mind” and
“a series of all-fulfilling formulae,” and Samuel Huntington calls it a “nonideational
ideology,” characterized by “articulate, systematic, theoretical resistance to change”.
William F. Buckley Jr., “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?” in William F. Buckley and
Charles Kesler (eds), Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought (New York:
Harper and Row, 1988), pp. 22 – 32; and Samuel Huntington, “Conservatism as an
Ideology,” American Political Science Review 51 (June 1957), p. 461.

ISSN 0739-3148 print/ISSN 1469-9931 on-line/09/040443-17 q 2009 Caucus for a New Political Science
DOI: 10.1080/07393140903322539
444 Nancy S. Love

its adherents and proponents have resisted and shifted ideological labels,
sometimes simultaneously, as in the case of neoliberalism.2 What I call the
Newest Right that has emerged in America, Europe, and beyond over the past few
decades is no exception. Scholars date its emergence in different ways, but most
refer to some combination of the fall of Soviet communism, the rise of corporate
power, the accompanying decline of national sovereignty, and especially the 9/11
terrorist attacks. Ongoing processes of cultural, economic, and political
globalization provide the broader context in which contemporary conservatives
respond to these phenomena.3 Although conservatives still invoke powerful
traditions and deeply rooted identities as the enduring foundations of social order
and political authority, today they also refuse to set limits on personal ambitions,
economic progress, government activities, and even leverage their fundamental
values.4 In America, the Bush presidency with its “War on Terror”—an undeclared
war against an unknown enemy—has emphatically challenged the limits that
existed in the past. It has unleashed a global politics, indeed, a global crusade, that is
redefining national borders and constitutional doctrines with astonishing speed.
In this article, I consider the implications of this newest conservatism without
limits for the continuing evolution of conservative ideology. I argue that the
Newest Right has invoked an unprecedented concept of national community, a
homeland whose borders are still “marked by exclusions” and “secured by
terror,” but now on a global scale.5 I organize my argument around four prefixes
prevalent in attempts to characterize the Newest Right: “anti,” “neo,” “post,” and
“proto.” First, although conservatives have long defined themselves in opposition
to political radicalism—especially liberal and socialist revolutionaries—what does
it mean to construct a conservative politics that is anti-terror(ist)? Second, how
have neoconservatives embraced an expansive state dedicated to economic
stability and national security given their longstanding distrust of big
government? Third, to what extent do conservatives today deploy a post-
politics—post-civil rights and post-feminist—in order to sustain ties between
capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy? Fourth, has the Newest Right
blurred the line between conservative and fascist politics, creating a proto-fascist
order that places the future of the very democracy they would defend at risk? If so,

2
Milton Friedman resisted the label “conservatism” for this very reason, claiming that
“the term conservatism has come to cover so wide a range of views, and views so
incompatible with one another, that we shall no doubt see the growth of hyphenated
designations, such as libertarian-conservative and aristocratic-conservative.” Friedman,
Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 6.
3
Manfred Steger makes an important distinction between current processes of
globalization and the neoliberal ideology, “globalism,” which supports them. He regards
the latter as “an impressive repackaging enterprise.” “Inspired by the liberal utopia of
the ‘self-regulating market,’” contemporary neoliberals have “linked their quaint
nineteenth-century ideals to fashionable ‘globalization talk.’” Steger, “Introduction:
Rethinking the Ideological Dimensions of Globalization” in Manfred Steger (ed.)
Rethinking Globalism, (New York: Roman and Littlefield, 2003), p. 5. Since neoliberalism is
the focus of another article, I prioritize other characteristics of conservative ideology here.
4
Anne Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 169– 170.
5
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “What’s Home Got to Do with It? (with Biddy Martin)” in
Feminism Without Borders, Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2003), pp. 85 – 105.
 Conservative Hybrids, Ironic Reversals, and Global Terror(ism) 445

this is perhaps the most ironic reversal: contemporary conservatives’ efforts to

secure the(ir) homeland against global terror(ism) may pose a greater threat to
modern democracy than its presumed enemies ever could. I conclude that only by
moving beyond a political ideology predicated on global terror(ism) can
conservatism hope to sustain its own commitment to a politics informed by
moral principles.

Traditional Conservatism
The unprecedented character of contemporary conservatism appears most clearly
in contrast to traditional conservatism. Russell Kirk offers the standard definition
of traditional conservatives’ fundamental principles, even though he insists that
with conservatism “the sooner one turns to particular thinkers, the safer ground
he is on.”6 Drawing on Edmund Burke, who is widely regarded as the founding
father of conservative ideology, Kirk identifies six fundamental principles: 1) a
divine being orders society and conscience; 2) everyday life is complex and
mysterious; 3) a civilized society maintains class distinctions; 4) private property
protects individual freedom; 5) ambition and growth have limits and require
restraint; 6) change does not necessarily bring reform or progress. According to
Kirk, the “true” or “intelligent” conservative places these fundamental principles
over the demands of current events and party politics.
Although Kirk is reluctant to define the specific principles of the various
movements that traditional conservatives oppose, he does say that “radicalism”
involves general contempt for traditional values combined with commitments to
human perfectibility, unlimited social progress, and politico-economic leveling, all
supported by a secular state. Most important, conservatives would preserve “the
ancient moral traditions of humanity” as distinct from radicals who are “in love
with change.”7 Writing in 1953, Kirk anticipated a series of challenges that late
20th-century conservatives would later confront. A triumphant liberalism and, it
then seemed, socialism would gradually undermine citizens’ sense of discipline,
order, and rank and create a consumer society unable to maintain its economic
stability. These radical ideologies would also foster a deeply felt need for moral
and spiritual regeneration. As he describes it:

Having lost the spirit of consecration, the modern masses are without expectation of
anything better than a bigger slice of what they possess already. Dante tells us that
damnation is a terribly simple state: the deprivation of hope— . . . . How to restore a
living faith to the routine of existence among the lonely crowd, how to remind men
that life has ends—this conundrum the thinking conservative has to face.8

As we shall see below, however, rather than face this conundrum, the Bush
administration’s “War on Terror” has deflected and deepened it, while at the same
time displacing the blame on the political Left.

6
Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Elliot, 3rd ed. (Chicago, IL: Henry
Regnery Company, 1969), p. 9. Kirk’s choice of Burke also emphasizes the Anglo-American
origins of conservative ideology. To the extent possible, I will follow Kirk’s lead and
emphasize the responses of specific conservative thinkers to each of my opening questions.
7
Ibid., p. 6.
8
Ibid., pp. 542– 543.
446 Nancy S. Love

From Anti-Communism to Anti-Terror(ism)

Anti-communism was a central principle of American conservatives’ pre-9/11
domestic and foreign policy. They portrayed the Cold War era as a protracted
struggle between East and West for control of the world.9 From this perspective,
the liberal rhetoric of peaceful coexistence and later détente, along with the
assumption that the third world war was yet to come, obscured ongoing conflicts
with communists in Vietnam and other “dominoes” in Southeast Asia, Latin
America, and the Middle East. Throughout the world communist insurgents were
destabilizing US allies, including in Eastern Europe, where conservatives thought
NATO security required the containment of Soviet advances. For conservatives,
communist expansionism exemplified the broader dangers of ideological
worldviews. Gerhart Niemeyer describes “the communist mind”: “Tempted by
visions of fancy, bribed by a pseudoscientism, they come to believe the reality of
dreams, submerge themselves in a world of their own intellectual making, and
pretend to be masters of creation. As long as such people are effectively organized
for political action, the world can have no peace.”10 According to Whittaker
Chambers, a loss of faith prompted communists (and other ideologues) to assume
quasi-divine powers: “The mind which has rejected the soul, and marched alone,
has brought the age to the brink of disaster.”11 By implication, the West would be
hard-pressed to defeat an ideology that promised mankind “heaven on earth.”
In our post-Soviet world, these conservatives’ anticommunist views would be
of primarily historical interest, except that the Newest Right’s anti-terrorist
struggles often echo their earlier attacks on communist radicals. In the “War on
Terror,” conservatives similarly construct an opposing and profoundly threaten-
ing “Other” in order to mobilize public support for their ideological positions.
Edward Said depicts this anti-terrorist rhetoric as a continuation of “ ‘Orientalism,’
where the study of the Other has a lot to do with the control and dominance of
Europe and the West generally in the Islamic world.”12 He argues that the average
American’s ignorance about Islam enables such “fantasies about the Other with a
capital O. So that the Muslim is thought of as being what we are not; fanatical,
violent, lustful, irrational, and so on.”13 Conservatives also continue to blame
liberal secularism for the moral bankruptcy that motivates radical insurgencies,
including the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Most important, and echoing Kirk,
conservatives’ anti-terrorist, like their earlier anti-communist, struggles give US
domestic and foreign policy a moral foundation that conflates ideological and
religious worldviews.
In his September 21, 2001 “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the
American People,” then President Bush explicitly links conservatives’ earlier
anti-radicalism—here communist and fascist—with anti-terrorism. He claims the
Islamic terrorists’ attacks on ”the civilized world” are rooted in political ideology,
9
James Burnham, “Communism: The Struggle for the World,” in Buckley and Kesler,
op. cit., pp. 353– 378.
10
Gerhart Niemeyer, “The Communist Mind,” in Buckley and Kesler, op. cit., p. 352.
11
Whittaker Chambers, “The Direct Glance,” in Buckley and Kesler, op. cit., p. 430.
12
Edward W. Said, “Origins of Terrorism,” in David Barsamian and Edward W. Said
(eds), Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said (Cambridge, MA: South End
Press, 2003), p. 110.
13
Ibid., p. 122.
 Conservative Hybrids, Ironic Reversals, and Global Terror(ism) 447

not religious faith: “We are not deceived by their pretenses to piety. We have seen
their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th
century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions—by abandoning
every value except the will to power—they follow in the path of fascism, and
Nazism, and totalitarianism.”14 In contrast, Bush portrays America’s current “War
on Terror” as a moral and/or religious crusade. His references to an “axis of evil”
echo Ronald Reagan’s (in)famous reference to the former Soviet Union as an “evil
empire” and reaffirm America’s messianic role in global politics.
What shifts from earlier conservatives’ anti-communism to the anti-terrorism of
the Newest Right—and often without comment—are the moral fault lines. This
shift is articulated most clearly in Dinesh D’Souza’s The Enemy at Home, the Cultural
Left and its Responsibility for 9/11.15 D’Souza presents his argument as a critique of
Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis. According to Huntington,
“civilizational” rather than “national” identities are the crucial factors in
contemporary global politics. He recognizes seven or eight major civilizations:
Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American,
and “possibly” African. The major fault lines in American foreign policy appear
between Western and non-Western civilizations—especially between the West and
Islam—over cultural and religious values, as well as economic resources. For
Huntington, the struggle of Western democracies with Soviet-style communism
was a brief historical interlude in a much longer struggle between Western and
Orthodox Christianity and Islam, a battle over “bloody borders” that has recently
reemerged. Huntington argues that “Western civilization is both Western and
modern. Non-Western civilizations have attempted to become modern without
becoming Western.”16 According to Huntington, it is only the modern West that
supports universal principles of human rights. He concludes, “For the relevant
future, there will be no universal civilization, but instead a world of different
civilizations, each of which will have to learn to coexist with the others.”17
D’Souza redraws these fault lines, claiming that neither “the West” nor “the
Rest” is as monolithic as Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis suggests.
Within Western democracies, the decline of Christian faith has undermined
religious opposition to the Islamic East. Ideological divisions also exist between
the United States and Europe, and between Republicans and Democrats, Red and
Blue states, within the US. Islamic society is similarly divided between Sunni and
Shia sects, both of whom encompass radical and traditional Muslims. According
to D’Souza, traditional Muslims and contemporary conservatives have much in
common, beginning with shared critiques of the moral decadence of the American
Left. He calls on the Newest Right to redraw the moral and religious fault lines, to
recognize that “the war on terror and the culture war are related. Indeed they are
two different arenas of the same struggle.”18 D’Souza urges American
14
President George W. Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American
People,” September 20, 2001, available at: , www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/
2001/09/20010920-8.html . .
15
Dinesh D’Souza, The Enemy at Home, The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11
(New York: Doubleday, 2007).
16
Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?,” Foreign Affairs 72 (Summer
1993), p. 49.
17
Ibid., p. 41.
18
D’Souza, op. cit., p. 274.
448 Nancy S. Love

conservatives to ally with traditional Muslims against Islamic radicals and the
global Left, whose decadence fueled the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He writes,

The best way for the right to make such an alliance is to convey to Muslims that we
share common ground with them on traditional values. Conservatives can
communicate this message by challenging and attacking the left and the Europeans
on the international stage. Instead of trying to unify America and the West, the right
should highlight the division between red America and blue America, and also
between traditional America and decadent Europe. By resisting the depravity of the
left and the Europeans, conservatives can win friends among Muslims and other
traditional people around the world.19

Although other prominent conservatives also blame the Left for 9/11, D’Souza’s
“new battle plan”—a global Right allied with traditional cultures against a global
Left—prefigures a new transnational conservatism without borders.20 Here the
feared “Other” is no longer Huntington’s “Rest” against the “West,” but liberals and
leftists around the world who threaten deeply held moral and religious traditions.
With this reversal, D’Souza shifts the blame for globalization-as-Americanization
onto the political Left, while retaining the binary thinking that informs both sides in
the current “War on Terror.” That is, when the Newest Right goes global with its
argument for traditional values only the moral fault lines change. According to
Edward Said, far more is required to end the process of constructing an “Other” he
named “Orientalism”: “The people who think of themselves as us versus them
using that binary opposition, whether Americans or others, have lost touch with
precisely that kind of reality which human beings ought to be protecting, namely its
variety, its diversity, its concreteness, and not these ridiculous—to me—
mythological and religious abstractions, or pseudo-religious abstractions, in
which everybody feels that he or she is an instrument of God.”21 I return to
contemporary conservatives’ binary thinking in the final section, when I discuss ties
between the Newest Right, right-wing extremists, and proto-fascist politics.

From the Neo- to the Newest Conservatives

The prefix “neo” in conservative ideology predates the 9/11 terrorist attacks
and refers to an intellectual elite, many of whom emigrated to America from
19
Ibid., p. 276.
20
For example, William J. Bennett sees 9/11 as “a moment of moral clarity—a moment
when we began to rediscover ourselves as one people even as we began to gird for battle
with a not yet fully defined foe.” Bennett, Why We Fight, Moral Clarity and the War on
Terrorism (New York: Doubleday, 2002), p. 22. He thinks America needed such a moment
because we had become “one nation, two cultures” and abandoned our patriotic loyalties,
religious convictions, and moral traditions for the Left. Ann Coulter makes the point more
sharply: “Whether they are rooting for the atheistic regimes of Stalin and Mao, satanic
suicide bombers and terrorists, or the Central Park rapists, liberals always take the side of
savages against civilization.” Coulter, Treason, Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War
on Terror (New York: Crown Forum, 2003), p. 285. According to Coulter, the Left promotes
the moral bankruptcy of “Islamic fanatics for the same reason they promote the rights of
adulterers, pornographers, abortionists, criminals, and communists. They instinctively root
for anarchy and against civilization. The inevitable logic of the liberal position is to be for
treason” (p. 292).
21
Said, op. cit., p. 116.
 Conservative Hybrids, Ironic Reversals, and Global Terror(ism) 449

Nazi Germany, and some of whom were former socialists. Neoconservative

ideology emerged in tandem with the New Left and in opposition to the
legacy of the 1960s in American politics.22 In his 1976 article, “What is a
Neo-Conservative?” Irving Kristol outlines the “vague consensus” that
constituted the neoconservatives’ prescription for what they regarded as an
ailing post-1960s America.23 It includes support for a welfare state, but not the
bureaucratic, paternalistic version that constituted the Great Society. Instead,
market mechanisms are invoked to preserve economic freedoms and, more
important, individual responsibility. Kristol affirms neoconservatives’ support for
traditional sources of authority—religious beliefs, family values, and the high
culture of Western civilization—that liberal secularism has undermined. At that
time, he also portrays American democracy as threatened internationally by a
hostile and expansionist Soviet-style communism.
Later, in NeoConservatism: An Autobiography of an Idea, Kristol summarizes the
specific contribution neoconservatism makes to conservative ideology:

Neoconservatism . . . has provided traditional conservatism with an intellectual

dimension that goes beyond economics to reflections on the roots of social and
cultural stability. If the Republican party today is less interested in the business
community than in the pursuit of the happiness of ordinary folk, and if, as I think, is
the case—this has made the party more acceptable and appealing to the average
American, then I believe the work of neoconservative intellectuals has contributed
much to this change.24

Indeed, the relevant question may be to what extent we are experiencing an even
newer conservatism today. For Kristol, the post-1960s “neo” has become
superfluous, since neoconservative intellectuals’ ideas are now “an integral part
of the new language of conservative politics.”25 In his 2003 article, “The
Neoconservative Persuasion: What it Was, and What it Is,” Kristol notes that—
thanks to the Bush administration—“neoconservatism began enjoying a second
life, at a time when its obituaries were still being published.”26 This Newest Right
espouses a distinctly American brand of “conservative politics suitable to
governing a modern democracy.” Unlike European conservatism and an earlier,
more pessimistic, American conservatism, the Newest Right “is hopeful, not
lugubrious, forward-looking, not nostalgic; and its general tone is cheerful, not
grim or dyspeptic. Its 20th-century heroes tend to be TR [Theodore Roosevelt],
FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt], and Ronald Reagan. Such Republican and
conservative worthies as Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower,
and Barry Goldwater are politely overlooked.”27 Presenting itself as “innovative”
and “effective,” contemporary conservatism has ostensibly resolved

22
According to Rebecca Klatch, “the untold story of the 1960s is about the New Right,”
whose history coincides in striking ways with the New Left. Klatch, A Generation Divided,
The New Left, The New Right, and the 1960’s (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1999), p. 1.
23
Irving Kristol, “What Is a Neo-Conservative?,” Newsweek, January 18, 1976, p. 17.
24
Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, op. cit., p. 37.
25
Ibid., p. 40.
26
Irving Kristol, “The NeoConservative Persuasion: What it Was, and What it Is,”
Weekly Standard, 8:47, (August 25, 2003), p. 25.
27
Ibid., p. 23.
450 Nancy S. Love

long-standing tensions between free market economics and moral-religious

principles. Its optimism is fueled by a series of pragmatic adjustments to capitalist
economics and democratic electorates, including the increased use of state power
to provide economic and political stability. Although the Newest Right continues
to articulate a free market ideology, they have made their peace with deficit
spending, state-sponsored cultural projects, and a national security state.
Paralleling the shift from anti-communism to anti-terror(ism), geographic
borders also no longer limit the Newest Right’s conception of the “national
interest.” Although smaller nations may limit their foreign policy to securing
existing borders, large nations and “great powers” often have more “extensive
interests” in global politics. For the contemporary United States and the former
Soviet Union those interests have been ideological as well as material. Writing in
2003, Kristol extols the effects on “our military budget” of “the ‘magic’ of
compound interest over half a century” and affirms the “incredible military
superiority of the United States.” With American military superiority comes the
responsibility to protect American ideological identity by defending democratic
values at home and abroad against all who threaten them. Kristol acknowledges
that “older, traditional elements in the Republican party have difficulty coming to
terms with this new reality in foreign affairs, just as they cannot reconcile
economic conservatism with social and cultural conservatism.”28 Unlike these
traditional conservatives, who thought real hope could not be found in ideology,
even though democracy seemingly required one, the Newest Right has
successfully constructed a global politics of “superheroes” and “superenemies.”29
Another odd reversal has occurred with this removal of economic and military
constraints. Anne Norton describes the recent adventurism of the Newest Right
well:

Appeals to history and memory, the fear of losing old virtues, of failing to keep faith
with the principles of an honored ancestry, came to seem curious and antiquated. In
their place were the very appeals to universal, abstract principles, the very utopian
projects that conservatives once disdained. Conservatives had once called for limits
and restraint; now there were calls to daring and adventurism. Conservatives had
once stood steadfastly for the Constitution and community, for loyalties born of
experience and strengthened in a common life. Now there were global projects, and
crusades.30

In 1976, Kristol raised the question “Is neoconservatism the right label for this
constellation of attitudes? I don’t mind it—but then, if the political spectrum
moved rightward, and we should become ‘neoliberal’ tomorrow, I could accept
that too.”31 Today his earlier response seems oddly prophetic.

From the Past to the Post-Political Order

For the Newest Right, the feminist and civil rights movements have already
“succeeded” and the price of their gender and racial equality is much too high.
27
Ibid., p. 25.
29
Michael Parenti, Superpatriotism (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2004).
30
Norton, op. cit., pp. 169– 179.
31
Kristol, “What Is a Neo-Conservative?” op. cit., p. 17.
 Conservative Hybrids, Ironic Reversals, and Global Terror(ism) 451

Contemporary conservatives announce the end of sexism and racism with several
related types of “post” narratives. Some focus on “the angry white male” as the
newest victim of discrimination. Others emphasize cultural and genetic
differences between minorities to explain remaining inequalities between
dominant and minority groups. All stress individual responsibility for success
or failure over environmental factors and government programs.
In Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, Susan Faludi, a progressive and,
by some accounts, a feminist, tells the story of how the traditional American
“male paradigm” has contributed to a post-feminist conservative politics.
According to Faludi, white, middle class boys growing up in late 1950s and early
1960s America were promised superhuman powers. Their “mission to
manhood” and what she calls the “national male paradigm” included claiming
the frontier, crushing a “clear, evil enemy,” establishing a brotherhood, and
supporting and protecting their family. Faludi claims “That kind of manhood
required a society in order to prove itself. All of the traditional domains in which
men pursued authority and power—politics, religion, the military, the
community, and the household—were societal.”32 As these white, middle class
men gradually lost control over social institutions, they experienced a sense of
betrayal, loss, and disillusionment. However, this “male paradigm” of
confronting and defeating an external enemy persisted. Faludi concludes that
“In an attempt to employ the old paradigm men have invented antagonists to
make their problems visible, but with the passage of time, these culprits—
scheming feminists, affirmative action proponents, job-grabbing illegal aliens,
the wife of a president—have come to seem increasingly unconvincing as
explanations for their situation.”33
Although feminism and anti-racism are the “enemy” in these backlash
narratives, Faludi claims the deeper problem is an “image-based, commercial-
ruled world,” where the everyday lives of ordinary people—male and female – can
never “measure up.” The old male paradigm still operates, but it no longer works—
even, and perhaps especially, for men. Instead, Faludi rearticulates a vision of
“social responsibility” as “the lifelong work of all citizens in a community where
people are knit together by meaningful and mutual concerns.” She argues that “as
men struggle to free themselves from their crisis, their task is not, in the end, to
figure out how to be masculine—rather, their masculinity lies in figuring out how to
be human.”34 Women and some feminists are men’s potential allies in their ongoing
struggle “to learn to wage a battle against no enemy, to win a frontier of human
liberty, to act in the service of a brotherhood that includes us all.”35
In contrast to Faludi’s arguments, which arguably leave open the possibility of
post-patriarchial, feminist humanism, Dinesh D’Souza explicitly and emphati-
cally announces the end of racism. Arguing that racism should not be reduced to
ignorance or fear, D’Souza (re)defines it as “an opinion that recognizes real
civilizational differences and attributes them to biology.”36 According to D’Souza,

32
Susan Faludi, Stiffed, The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: William Morrow
and Company, 1999), p. 35.
33
Ibid., p. 604.
34
Ibid., p. 607.
35
Ibid.
36
Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism, Principles for a Multiracial Society (New York:
The Free Press, 1995), p. 537.
452 Nancy S. Love

modern Western civilization is clearly superior, but its superiority is culturally

and not biologically based. D’Souza distinguishes his cultural argument from
Herrnstein and Murray’s famous “Bell Curve” thesis that individuals—and
groups—differ in genetic intelligence through no fault of their own.37 According
to Herrnstein and Murray, equal opportunity has made cognitive ability an even
greater determinant of success in American society. “Truly fair” (by which they
mean “color-blind”) hiring and promotion policies actually “produce the racial
disparities that government programs try to prevent.”38 Indeed, cognitive
stratification increasingly pits an affluent, cognitive elite against a cognitively
challenged bottom of American society.39 As an alternative, Herrnstein and Bell
would reaffirm conservatives’ traditional hierarchy, “a society in which people
throughout the functional range of intelligence can find, and feel they have found,
a valued place for themselves.”40
Unlike Herrnstein and Murray, D’Souza opposes biologically based claims for
group difference, though he acknowledges cognitive variations among
individuals. D’Souza’s greatest concern, however, is persistent cultural
differences between racial groups. He writes, “Racism began in the West as a
biological explanation for a large gap of civilizational development separating
blacks from whites. Today racism is reinforced and made plausible by the
reemergence of that gap within the US.”41 D’Souza claims successful African
American individuals have now demonstrated that racism no longer controls
their destiny. However, liberal anti-racist policies continue to make it difficult to
confront the real problem, that is, the cultural pathologies of black communities.
In another stunning reversal, he writes: “If racism is not the main problem for blacks,
what is? Liberal antiracism. By asserting the equality of all cultures, cultural
relativism prevents liberals from dealing with the nation’s contemporary crisis—a
civilizational breakdown that affects all groups, but is especially concentrated
among the black underclass.”42
D’Souza ultimately wants to distinguish the problems of a multiracial society
from black cultural pathologies, arguing that each requires a different set of solutions.
This distinction relies to a great extent on his stance regarding immigration. Unlike
Herrnstein and Murray, who claim cognitive abilities are declining, since fewer
“brave, hardworking, imaginative, self-starting” individuals “with high IQs” now
immigrate to the United States, D’Souza argues that immigration remains a “slight
plus” for the US.43 He nonetheless proposes taking legal steps to “enhance its
benefits,” specifically to “attract more foreigners who would contribute to America
rather than becoming a taxpayer liability.”44 D’Souza distinguishes African
Americans, who have not yet reconstructed their civilization to meet the
requirements of a modern society, from immigrant groups. He specifically calls on
blacks to abandon those aspects of their African past that create what DuBois called
37
Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve, Intelligence and Class
Structure in American Life (New York: The Free Press, 1994).
38
Ibid., p. 479.
39
Ibid., p. 509.
40
Ibid., p. 535.
41
D’Souza, The End of Racism, op. cit., p. 527.
42
Ibid., p. 24.
43
Hernstein and Murray, op. cit., p. 15.
44
D’Souza, The End of Racism, op. cit., p. 551.
 Conservative Hybrids, Ironic Reversals, and Global Terror(ism) 453

“double-consciousness”: “What blacks need to do is to ‘act white,’ which is to say, to

abandon idiotic Back-to-Africa schemes and embrace mainstream cultural norms, so
that they can effectively compete with other groups.”45 Ultimately, D’Souza
concludes, only African Americans themselves can carry out the project of
reconstructing their civilization in a manner that will discredit racism.
These post-racism and post-sexism narratives are thinly veiled forms of
conservative backlash, at best.46 What the Newest Right fails to recognize here is
the structural character of racism and sexism, including its own. Most important,
these post-narratives allow contemporary conservatives to continually (re)create
an “Other” as “Enemy.” Although the paradigms of masculinity and racial-cum-
civilizational hierarchy discussed here predate the 9/11 terrorist attacks, both
remained readily available when the Bush administration needed to mobilize
support for its “War on Terror.” Manning Marable draws out the connection: “In a
time of political terror, the ‘terrorist’ becomes the most dangerous Other, and is
recognized by certain subhuman qualities and vague characteristics—language,
strange religious rituals, unusual clothing, and so forth. The ‘terrorist Other’ is
presented to the white public as an uncivilized savage who has richly merited our
hatred and must be destroyed to ensure our safety and the preservation of the
‘American Way of Life.’”47
The tragic paradox for African Americans, then, becomes whether to capitalize on
their dubious identity as inferior members of the American “national household” or
continue to struggle against a broader, indeed, global, structural racism. For Marable,
the choice is clear: “We can end the threat of terrorism only by addressing
constructively the routine violence of poverty, hunger, and exploitation that
characterizes the daily existence of several billion people on the planet. Racism is, in
the final analysis, only another form of violence.”48 The post-politics of the Newest
Right obscures these links conservatives have forged between capitalism, patriarchy,
and white supremacy, and does so in order to sustain their concept of social hierarchy.
Marable urges African Americans to break the chain and to join Congresswoman
Barbara Lee, who opposed the use of military force in Afghanistan, saying, “As we
act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.”49

45
Ibid., p. 556.
46
Mansbridge and Shames offer a non-ideological definition of “backlash” as “the use of
coercive power to regain lost power as capacity.” This“power as capacity” was often
“naturalized” as the exclusive and exclusionary rights of a once dominant group. Social
movements, they argue, tend to provoke “backlash” when they move too far, too fast or
neglect deep-seated concerns of their opponents and the general public. Non-ideological and
colloquial forms of “backlash” often converge, for example, “the reaction of the Right to the
feminist movement undoubtedly included not only a response with coercive power to loss of
capacity but also a simple conviction that the feminist movement was wrong.” Jane
Mansbridge and Shauna L. Shames, “Toward a Theory of Backlash: Dynamic Resistance and
the Central Role of Power,” Politics & Gender 4:4 (December 2008), pp. 624, 627.
47
Manning Marable, “9/11, Racism in a Time of Terror,” in Stanley Aronowitz and
Heather Gautney (eds), Implicating Empire, Globalization & Resistance in the 21st Century
World Order (New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. 11.
48
Ibid., p. 14.
49
Quoted in Ibid., p. 14.
454 Nancy S. Love

From Classical to Proto-Fascism

In Democracy Inc., Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism,
Sheldon Wolin argues that American democracy is currently experiencing a
new—and inverted—form of totalitarianism.50 Unlike classical totalitarianism,
which resulted from conscious, deliberate decisions, mobilized the masses,
advocated public unity, celebrated central leadership, enhanced state power,
distinguished Homeland from Ausland (foreign land), and invoked a collective
identity against known enemies, “inverted totalitarianism” is best characterized
by the inability to distinguish political leaders from corporate managers and
democratic citizens from consumers/clients. It is also marked by pervasive
tendencies toward pragmatic decisions, fragmented publics, privatized services,
suspended rights, collective amnesia, and civic compliance—all ostensibly
necessitated by an endless war against an unknown enemy, called terror/ism.
“Primarily, it represents the political coming of age of corporate power and the
political demobilization of the citizenry.”51
Wolin’s analysis of this ongoing inversion of democratic practices and
principles is both compelling and chilling. However, Wolin, who focuses on
neoliberalism, bypasses an important phenomenon occurring within this inverted
totalitarian order: the remobilization of the political right in response to the
challenges globalization poses to the economic stability and political identity of
Western democratic nation-states.52 In the United States, the Bush adminis-
tration’s “War on Terror” has played a major role in remobilizing the political right
within the Republican Party as well as the social movement politics of right-wing
extremists who to varying extents align with it.53 Then President Bush also
articulated the logic behind this call to action in his September 21, 2001 “Address
to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People.” Labeling the enemies of

50
Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Inc., Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted
Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). For other discussions of
contemporary conservatism as proto-fascist politics, see: Henry A. Giroux, The Terror of Neo-
Liberalism, Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers,
2004); Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America (New York:
M. Evans, 1980); Martin A. Lee, The Beast Reawakens (New York: Routledge, 2000); Norton,
op. cit.; Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2004); and
Arundhati Roy, War Talk (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2003).
51
Wolin, op. cit., p. x.
52
For discussions of these trends, see: Hans-Georg Betz, “The Growing Threat of
the Radical Right” and Piero Ignazi, “The Development of the Extreme Right at the End
of the Century” in Peter H. Markl and Leonard Weinberg (eds), Right-Wing Extremism in the
Twenty-First Century (London: Frank Cass Publisher, 2003), pp. 74-93, 143-158. More
specifically, the number of active hate groups in the United States rose to 888 in 2007, up 5%
from 844 in 2006 and an increase of 48% since 2000. Hate crimes linked to xenophobia also
increased, including a 35% rise in crimes against Latinos, who are often perceived as
immigrants (Southern Poverty Law Center, “The Year in Hate: Active U.S. Hate Groups
Rise to 888 in 2007,” Intelligence Report (Spring). At , http://www.splcenter.org/intel/
intelreport/article. .
53
Martin A. Lee argues that right-wing extremists may actually deflect attention from “a
more insidious and far-reaching danger. Radical right-wing populist movements with
openly fascist roots have made significant inroads into mainstream politics and are now a
serious force to be reckoned with in several countries around the world.” Lee, op. cit., p. xix.
For a discussion of this political history, see: Russ Bellant, Old Nazis, the New Right, and the
Republican Party (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1991).
 Conservative Hybrids, Ironic Reversals, and Global Terror(ism) 455

the United States “enemies of freedom,” he said, “Americans are asking why do
they hate us? They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of
speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” The
“War on Terror” was necessary not only to eliminate the purportedly evil
terror(ists) but also to create a divinely inspired world order of universal justice:

Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that
God is not neutral between them . . . Fellow citizens, We’ll meet violence with
patient justice—assured of the rightness of our cause, and confident of the victories
to come.54

Of course, this victory would not come without sacrifice. Indeed, the false security
of the American homeland now ironically seemed to depend on the sacrifice of its
citizens’ basic freedoms. Bush’s famous phrase, “Either you are with us or you are
with the terrorists,” precluded the very possibility of democratic dissent or loyal
opposition, and joined a cultural politics of fear and hate to what Henry Giroux
has called, “patriotic correctness.”55 The USA PATRIOT Act continues to give the
government of the United States unprecedented powers to invade the privacy of
its citizens, to suspend their right to due process, and even to incarcerate suspects
without filing charges. This rhetoric of “security” was also deployed to justify the
use of torture in interrogations of suspected “terrorists” at Abu Ghraib,
Guantanamo, and other undisclosed locations.
Although the Department of Homeland Security gives both terms new
meaning, the linkage of “home” and “security” is not itself a new phenomenon.
The ideal—white, middle-class, heterosexual, patriarchal—family of traditional
conservatism has a “home,” a privatized, protected space distinguished from a
larger, less safe public sphere. The homeland has also long functioned as a
metaphor for native—or mother—country in efforts to maintain geographic
boundaries, often as gendered and racialized spaces. This rhetoric of home may
even contribute to a more generalized perception of the need to maintain other
kinds of borders. As Patricia Hill Collins puts the point, “In this logic that
everything has its place, maintaining borders of all sorts becomes vitally
important. Preserving the logic of segregated home spaces requires strict rules
that distinguish insiders from outsiders.”56 Indeed, the combination—“homeland
security”—may only be the latest iteration of what Mohanty and Martin call the
“underside of the rhetoric of home, protection, and threatening others.” Such
rhetoric has been used historically from the Ku Klux Klan to the Nazi Party to the
New Right to consolidate “the white home in response to a threatening outside . . .
an ‘outside’ in which the family is already implicated.”57 In this story, white men
are heroic warriors, who protect the sexuality of white women, the breeders of the
racially pure nation, from unknown—alien, dark, foreign, strange—predators.58

54
Bush, op. cit.
55
Giroux, op. cit., pp. 19 – 20.
56
Patricia Hill Collins, “It’s All In the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and
Nation,” Hypatia, A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 13:3 (1998), p. 69.
57
Mohanty, op. cit., pp. 98 – 99.
58
Angela Y. Davis, “Rape, Racism, and the Myth of the Black Rapist” in Angela Y. Davis
(ed.), Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1983), pp. 172– 201.
456 Nancy S. Love

While many mainstream conservatives still cling to this white, middle-class

American national identity, right-wing extremist groups increasingly would build
a local/global white supremacist movement. According to Mattias Gardell,
“Transcending national borders, music and electronic communication have
facilitated a global flow of ideas, engaging racist radicals across the world in the
vision of a future in which race will define nation in a transatlantic white
homeland.”59 Kathleen Blee identifies four new tactics these contemporary
right-wing extremists employ: 1) reliance on apocalyptic or millennial images of a
global race war; 2) international alliances between neo-Nazi, white-supremacists,
and Christian Identity organizations; 3) sophisticated use of mass communi-
cations technology, including Internet sites and short-wave radio;
and, 4) recruitment efforts that focus on so-called vulnerable populations, such
as prisoners, teenagers, and women.60 So far, these white supremacist groups have
been conspicuously absent from Homeland Security protocols, which only list
radical environmentalists as domestic terrorist threats. Timothy Baysinger asks
the relevant question: “While our collective consciousness prioritizes radical
Islamists as the preeminent threat, should individuals and groups that encompass
the radical right be viewed as having a reduced capacity to perform acts of
terrorism?” Given parallels between the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the 1995
Oklahoma City bombing, he concludes, “To safeguard our nation from future acts
of terrorism, a constant awareness of right-wing extremist beliefs, activities, and
adherents must be maintained.”61
Of course, any identity—national and/or transnational—that can only be
“marked by exclusions” and “secured by terror” will by definition remain very
insecure.62 Arundhati Roy exposes the vulnerability of the former Bush
administration’s homeland security rhetoric: “When George Bush says, ’You’re
either with us, or you are with the terrorists,’ we can say ‘No thank you.’ We can
let him know that the people of the world do not need to choose between a
Malevolent Mickey Mouse and the Mad Mullahs.”63 According to Roy, such false
choices forced upon ordinary citizens by powerful leaders have once again put
democracy at risk around the globe. Roy also draws a parallel to earlier struggles
against Soviet communism, but she does so to challenge the imperialist project
motivating the Newest Right’s binary language of “Us” versus “Them”: “Soviet
style communism failed, not because it was intrinsically evil, but because it was
flawed. It allowed too few people to usurp too much power. Twenty-first century
market capitalism, American-style, will fail for the same reasons.”64 Real
democracy, she argues, requires a greater measure of freedom.
59
Mattias Gardell, Gods of the Blood, The Pagan Revival and White Separatism (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 70.
60
Kathleen Blee, Inside Organized Racism: Women in the Hate Movement (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2002), pp. 189– 191. Also, see my “Privileged Intersections:
The Race, Class, and Gender Politics of ‘Prussian Blue,’” paper presented at the annual
meeting of the Western Political Science Association, Vancouver, March 2009.
61
Timothy G., Baysinger, “Right-wing Group Characteristics and Ideology,” Homeland
Security Affairs (2006). Available at: ,http://www.hsaj.org. .
62
Mohanty, op. cit., p. 91.
63
Roy, op. cit., p. 112.
64
Ibid., p. 73.
 Conservative Hybrids, Ironic Reversals, and Global Terror(ism) 457

Conclusion
Four prefixes—“anti,” “neo,” “post,” and “proto”—are prevalent in attempts to
situate the political ideas of the Newest Right in the larger context of conservative
ideology. Drawing on the writings of specific conservative thinkers and their
critics, I have explored how the Newest Right has tried to shift the blame for the
9/11 terrorist attacks to the political Left (anti-), embraced an expansive economic
and military state to fight the “War on Terror” (neo-), held individual members of
minoritized groups, especially recent immigrants, responsible for their oppressed
status (post-), and justified the suspension of constitutional rights and
responsibilities in the name of Homeland Security (proto-). In the process, the
Newest Right has invoked an unprecedented concept of national community, a
homeland whose borders they would secure by global terror, which arguably
poses a greater threat to democracy than its presumed enemies ever could.65
The common thread running through this contemporary conservatism is an
ongoing and increasing tendency to construct its political identity in opposition to
a presumably threatening “Other.” This tendency was especially pronounced in
right-wing extremist reactions to the recent election of Barack Hussein Obama as
the current President of the United States. While many journalists across the
country responded to his election by asking “Is Conservatism Dead?,” the radical
right instead declared “that America was now ’OFFICIALLY DEAD.’”66 On his
radio show, David Duke announced “I really believe tonight is a night of tragedy
and sadness for our people in many ways . . . [We’ve lost] the fundamental values
of the United States of America . . . The country is not recognizable any more.”67
These, of course, are not the public views of mainstream conservatives, who have
already participated in another orderly transfer of constitutional power.
Nonetheless, such statements tell a cautionary tale.
Writing in 1953, Russell Kirk anticipated the challenges conservatives would
face at the turn of the 20th century. Although he mentions problems of leadership,
the proletariat, and economic stability, it is “the problem of spiritual and moral
regeneration; the restoration of the ethical system and the religious sanction upon
which any life worth living is founded” which he thinks faces “conservatism at its
highest.”68 Problems of war and peace, he thinks, would resolve themselves as
long as these conservative ethical commitments remained strong and secure.
Critics of the Newest Right have urged the political Left not to surrender the
rhetoric of “home” and “security” to conservative politicians, and instead to
reconceptualize political identity in ways that move beyond the rigid oppositions
of binary thinking and the safety zones of homogenous community. Globalization,
they argue, not only provides the opportunity to do so, but also creates the

65
At this juncture, one might reasonably ask whether the Newest Right has strayed so
far from conservative principles that it is no longer recognizably conservative and, hence,
requires a new label. To simply call the politics of the Newest Right “fascistic,” however, is
to neglect similarly significant transformations of fascist ideology. It also absolves
conservatives of any responsibility for their self-proclaimed moral and religious
commitments.
66
Anti-Defamation League, “White Supremacists Vent Rage Over Obama’s Win, Obama
Election a Tragedy for America,” November 8, 2008. Available at: , http://www.adl.org. .
67
Ibid.
68
Kirk, op. cit., p. 539.
458 Nancy S. Love

necessity. As Bernice Johnson Reagon puts it in the opening epigraph, “There is no

hiding place. There is nowhere you can go and only be with people who are like
you. It’s over. Give it up.”69
Although the Newest Right has thus far experienced this new global reality as
a threat to its traditional values and political identity, I want to conclude with the
suggestion that Kirk’s “conservatism at its highest” is animated by moral and
religious commitments to peace and justice shared by many of its presumed
opponents, including and especially the global Left. In “Globalization: Curse or
Promise?” Fred Dallmayr has proposed “an alternative global path leading
between and beyond culture clashes and global domination.” It is a path of
dialogue, an “attempt to forge or build up the global city through the interaction of
culture and peoples around the world.”70 On this path—and contra Huntington—
democratic universalism is not the province of the European Enlightenment,
Western civilization, the political Left or Right, or Buddhism, Christianity, Islam,
or Judaism. Instead, Dallmayr proposes an “intercivilizational dialogue” that
begins with the humble question: “Who or which human agency genuinely
embodies universalism, or who can legitimately speak ‘in the name of’ the
universal (that is, Who is universal)?”71
To begin this dialogue, all parties would need to move beyond existing
tensions between universal human rights and particular cultural identities
enshrined in the nation-state system and, more generally, Western civilization.
Conservatives’ commitments to deeply rooted cultural traditions may prevent
them from articulating and embracing a fully global imaginary.72 However, the
Newest Right could choose not to recreate on a global scale the tensions between
human rights, market freedoms, and traditional values that continue to haunt the
history of conservative ideology. That is, contemporary conservatives could offer
the nations and peoples of the world more than capital and terror gone global. At
its highest, conservatism espouses a profound understanding of moral and
religious principles that could play a role in motivating the intercivilizational
dialogue Dallmayr advocates. Through such a dialogue the Newest Right could
reconceptualize the relationship between homeland and security, and recognize
that borders “marked by exclusions” and “secured by terror” increase—not
decrease—the risk to our shared humanity. At its highest, conservatism could
provide the basis for what might be better described as a “mobile” rather than a
“global” imaginary. This mobile imaginary could mirror already familiar flows of
capital to create an ethics across borders, possibly even an ethics without
borders.73 I conclude with the words of Judith McDaniel, member of the Witness

69
Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century,” in Barbara Smith
(ed.), Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (Lanthan, NY: Kitchen Table/Women of Color
Press, 1983), p. 357.
70
Fred R. Dallmayr, “Globalization: Curse or Promise?” in Fred R. Dallmayr (ed.),
Achieving Our World: Toward a Global and Plural Democracy (New York: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2001), p. 27.
71
Ibid., pp. 29 – 30.
72
Manfred Steger, The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French
Revolution to the Global War on Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
73
Mohanty offers the following suggestion: “Our minds must be as ready to move as
capital is, to trace its paths and to imagine alternative destinations.” Mohanty, op.cit, p. 251.
I am also indebted to ongoing conversations with Sushmita Chatterjee regarding
conceptions of a mobile imaginary.
 Conservative Hybrids, Ironic Reversals, and Global Terror(ism) 459

for Peace delegation captured by the contras in Nicaragua in 1985, who offers a
redefinition of sanctuary suitable for this new “world without terror”:

For sanctuary is about crossing lines, about creating connections rather than
exclusions. If I choose to create my own safe place by closing my eyes and my heart,
then I will not be safe for long.
It is ironic. Sanctuary is about living dangerously. Sanctuary is about taking risks
beyond the ordinary. Risks of class security or race security. Risks of the heart.
Physical risks.74

74
Judith McDaniel, Sanctuary, A Journey (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1987), p. 147.