If there is a crisis of modernity, it appears to be more a function of the faithful – some whom are getting awfully violent for a bunch of opium addicts. When the 9/11 terrorists flew their planes into the World Trade Center, I can guarantee you they weren’t reciting passages from Mill’s On Liberty. The real crisis may be the lack of modernity, not a surplus of the stuff – an argument the neocons themselves are now making, at least about the religious fanatics in the Middle East.

The ones in Midwest, on the other hand, are another story. To the Straussians, it apparently doesn’t matter what kind of religious orthodoxy America has – as long as it has one. And so the highly educated followers of a Jewish refugee from demented old Europe have allied themselves with some of the most ignorant, racist and xenophobic people in modern crazy America.

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...Maybe modernity isn’t in crisis, but classic liberalism – and the political institutions it created – is trapped in a dire one. It, too, seems increasingly incompatible with the demands of imperial globalization. And the “parchment regime” that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison gave us is being subverted by the very forces – the executive branch, the corporate media, one and a half of the two major political parties – that are supposed to defend it.

As I’ve said before, the American constitutional edifice reminds me of a house riddled by termites – it looks solid enough from the outside, but lean too hard against a wall and big pieces might start toppling over. And right now, the neocons and their Bible Belt allies are leaning pretty damned hard. There are days (like “Justice Sunday”) when the Weimar analogy no longer seems so far fetched.

If we’re fortunate – as fortunate as America has been through most of its history – the center will hold. Things won’t fall apart. The neocons, having overreached, will be thrown for a big loss and forced to punt. But I’m not as confident as I used to be that the game still works that way.

What’s more, if the neocons did succeed in tearing up the liberal parchment regime, I seriously doubt they could control the forces they’ve helped unleash. The Bible fedayeen aren’t exactly yearning for a little recycled Plato from the philosophical elite. Their version of the city on the hill might not have room for a philosophical elite – not unless it’s a fundamentalist Protestant one, which is a contradiction in terms.

The risk, then, is that by unleashing the forces of religious populism to save America from the inevitable consequences of liberal nihilism, the Straussians conceivably could end up assisting the very catastrophe they claim they’re trying to avoid.