aka Asstard of the Week

Asstard, n. sl. An individual or entity acting in a way indicative of diminished mental capacity, but retaining requisite culpable intent.

Newsweek is taking a beating again, this time from progressive precincts, for printing false information about John Roberts' non-membership in the Federalist Society (he was a member), and his merely-peripheral involvement in the Florida 2000 recount mess (he was integrally involved).

The criticism is well-deserved. But if you keep reading after the Roberts coverage in the most recent issue, you'll soon come across something less sensational but much more insidious, something that can't be addressed via a correction printed in the next issue.

I refer to the often-insightful (but tremendously overrated) Fareed Zakaria's column, "How to Stop the Contagion," which meditates on the need to fight a war of ideas against the barbarism of Islamic extremism. Whatever else it may be, the column is a textbook example of the power, and essentially conservative bent, of liberal ideology. By liberal I don't mean that narrow, historically specific slice of watered-down democratic socialism that we call the New Deal, and that the neocon right has been warring against for the past half-century. Rather, I mean classical liberalism, the liberal individualism that has functioned as the official ideology of capitalism since the days of Adam Smith (whose Wealth of Nations was published in 1776, coincidentally enough).

So here it is, Zakaria's insidious liberalism, in Three Easy Steps:

Step 1: Y'all Crazy
Writing of the recently-identified would-be suicide bombers in London, Zakaria begins by explaining that suicide bombers are not motivated by poverty, deprivation, discrimination or rage. These guys were working class but comfortable. They weren't well assimilated, but they were better off than their immigrant parents (who didn't cause any trouble) and they lived in Britain, one of the wealthiest nations in the world. Zakaria's point is that these were not The Wretched of the Earth, and so their actions are the result of ideology. The operative distinction here isn't simply that their world view is hateful or fundamentalist, but that it's ideological. It's ideological by virtue of being hateful, and it's hateful by virtue of being ideological. QED.

Ideology is here posited as something opposed to reason and common sense. It's the very definition of irrationality. If you have bad or extreme ideas, then you're "ideological" and you "have" an ideology - in other words, when all is said and done, you're nuts. If, by contrast, you have good or moderate ideas, then you're normal and reasonable and you don't have an ideology. In this manner, liberalism posits itself as non-ideological, the logical expression of human nature and human good. Anything liberalism promotes is said to be universal, essential and ultimately natural.

Step 2: It's the "Elites," Stupid
Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with poverty and oppression, Zakaria argues, because the London bombers were all from relatively stable, relatively economically secure working-class English households. "Like all ideologies," he writes, "radical Islam is a phenomenon of the educated class ... almost all suicide bombers have been men who read and write. ... Extremist ideology is a leisure-time pursuit."

And this is liberal ideology's second trick. Ideology is nutty and extreme because it is abstract - abstracted from the everyday world of work and productivity, in which folks don't have time to think about lofty ideas. Ideology is a product of philosophizin', with all the connotations of rigidity and disconnectedness that go with it.

So extremism is a "leisure-time pursuit," i.e. a luxury of the elite. Then the elite get defined as "the educated class," which in turn gets defined as anyone who can read and write, which then thereby includes the marginally assimilated, first-generation, working-class Englishmen of color who've been plotting to blow up the London subway. Nice trick.

I've often written about conservative populism as a political ploy, in which rightwing elites accuse moderate elites of being leftwing elites (see Bush v. Kerry 2004). What we have in Zakaria's article is rightwing populism's kissing cousin: liberal populism, in which moderate elites discredit anyone who believes anything else by accusing them of being elite.

Step 3: You All Look Alike to Me
The final piece of this puzzle comes in a passage I had to read twice because I wasn't sure I could believe my eyes:

Radical ideologies of hate and violence have often seduced disaffected young men searching for some great cause. Forty years ago whey would have embraced Leninist revolutionary dogma, with Che Guevara as the bin Laden of his day.

Now, Che Guevara was no saint. But he was a revolutionary socialist, a true internationalist who undoubtedly left the world better than he found it. And so to call him "the bin Laden of his day" - well, it's the sort of unbelievably stupid, hyper red-baiting nonsense that one might expect from Limbaugh, O'Reilly or some other crypto-fascist gasbag. But it's not what one would normally expect to emit from Zakaria's keyboard.

And yet it makes sense in the larger context here, for the chief way liberalism perpetuates the myth that it, alone among all word views, is not ideological, is to equate all competing world views with one another. Christian fundamentalism, communism, fascism, socialism, Islamic fundamentalism, communalism, social democracy, Hindu fundamentalism, even the great forgotten American alter-ego of civic republicanism - are all denigrated as "ideological" by virtue of being lumped together as "isms." Che's pan-American socialism is no different than Leninism, which is no different than radical Islam - all are "radical ideologies of hate and violence." You disagree? Then you must be some kind of communist - or something.

Like the pre-Copernican view of the universe, Zakaria places liberalism at the center, unmoving, i.e. outside of history and ideology. I wrote above that anything liberalism promotes is said to be universal, essential and ultimately natural - except it isn't said. The word "liberal" doesn't appear in Zakaria's piece, nor does he spend one single sentence articulating what his own view, the Western view, actually is. This is how liberalism - and the capitalism for which it speaks - naturalizes itself.

After all, what better example could there be of leisure-time ideology undertaken by a privileged member of the educated class than Zakaria's own column? The entire piece is structured around hypocrisy.

And finally, it's worth noting that all those hardworking, "non-ideological" people have no leisure time to think hateful thoughts because they spend all their time making money for owners, managers and stockholders, who spend quite a bit of their leisure time promoting the ideology of bootstrapping liberal individualism in order to maintain the status quo of corporate capitalism. Thus has it ever been - the Founding Fathers, who formulated our ruling ideology were themselves elites - financiers, merchant capitalists, landed gentry, slave owning planters.

Now, it's of course true that al Queda and the majority of its suicide-bombing brethren are adherents of one strain or another of Islamofascism (though we don't really know a whole lot about the specific views and motives of all the various factions of the Iraqi insurgents and bombers). And it's equally true that fundamentalism and fascism should be condemned and opposed wherever they rear their ugly heads (Baghdad insurgency, Mumbai communalism, White House senior staff, and so on). But the kind of arrogance that labels all world views but one as insane, extreme and above all indistinguishable from one another, is precisely analogous to the reactionary nationalism, dishonest foreign policy and imperial militarism that many of us - Zakaria included - feel has isolated the U.S. around the world and provided opportunities for the creation of new terrorists and insurgents.

So for reviving the worst aspects of Cold War liberalism and being a colossal hypocrite, Fared Zakaria joins the few, the proud, the Asstards of the Week.