Secularism

[UPDATE: Salon.com has an article covering similar ground. The evidence is clear...fundamentalist Islam is thriving and moderates are finding it harder and harder to survive]

As Bush tries to convince us that he is winning his Forever War Against Terror, it is increasingly clear that we are losing the REAL war against fundamentalist extremism throughout the world. As the Taliban and al-Qaeda thrive in Pakistan and Afghanistan, even in Iraq, where we are surging merrily ahead, secularism is dying out and fundamentalist extremism of BOTH Shi'ite and Sunni varieties, thrive.

I call this the Republican enabling of a growing fundamentalist Caliphate, a concept I introduced more than a year ago (leading to my being asked by BBC radio to be part of a phone in radio program) and has recently been more openly advocated even in Indonesia.

Recently on Current TV I saw further evidence that we are losing to extremists...even in Iraq where Bush assures us we are winning. Here is a highly disturbing segment from Current TV describing how secular Iraqis are being forced out as refugees, leaving Iraq to be taken over by extremists.

There's a thread downstream featuring one of the oldest, and to me most tedious, tropes of American discourse: the fashionably cynical argument that there's no real difference between the two major parties where average folks are concerned. In normal times, this could be dismissed as a modish affectation, the kind that produces the pleasing feeling of being somehow smarter, more in tune with the Zeitgeist, so desired by those who'd like to keep at bay the tedium of making public choices; but these are not normal times. You're just not paying attention, and your argument is akin to doubting the existence of sharks because you haven't been eaten by one yet.

To put it in very stark terms: the foundations of the Republic are under attack. Simply put, while we may have seen precedents for this or that action taken by the former ruling party, we have never, in two hundred and thirty years, seen a systemic assault, on so many fronts at once, on the basic principles of American governance and the civilizational bedrock that underlies them. Once again: among people paying attention, in the academy, legislatures, the bar, business, even the church, this is not a controversial assessment; you, my friend, just haven't been paying attention. And I get impatient with it, because yours is fundamentally a lazy, solipsistic argument.