The "New Fusionism" vs. the Seamless Garment

Joseph “Jody” Bottum has an article in this month’s First Things on what he calls “the new fusionism” – the alliance between pro-lifers and neoconservative foreign policy hawks. The “old” fusionism, of course, was the alliance between libertarians and traditionalists that formed the core of the post-war conservative movement. National Review theoretician Frank S. Meyer was the most forceful exponent of “fusionism” – the idea that there were good philosophical, not just tactical or strategic, reasons for libertarians and traditionalists to form a political alliance.

Bottum concedes that it’s possible to be a hawk on the war on terrorism and pro-choice (e.g. Rudy Giuliani, Joseph Lieberman) and, conversely, to be anti-abortion and opposed to the “maximalist” view of the war on terror (Pat Buchanan, John Paul II). Nevertheless, he thinks that there are good philosophical (not just political) reasons for opponents of abortion and proponents of a forceful foreign policy aimed at defeating Islamic terrorism and fostering a broader democratic revolution in the Middle East and beyond to be on the same side:

[A]t the level of political theory, there’s a reasonable connection between what we do at home and what we do abroad—or, at least, between the attitudes that cause us to enact certain domestic agendas and the attitudes that drive our foreign policy. A nation that cannot summon the political will to ban even one particularly gruesome form of abortion is unlikely to persevere in the grueling work of building international democracy simply because it seems the moral thing to do. And a nation that cannot bring itself to believe its founding ideals are true for others will probably prove unable to hold those ideals for itself.

The abolition of abortion and the active advance of democracy have more in common, I believe, than is usually thought. But even if they are utterly separate philosophically, this much is true: They both require reversing the failure of nerve that has lingered in America since at least the 1970s, and success in one may well feed success in the other.

The goal in either case is to restore confidence in—well, what, exactly? Not our own infallible rightness, surely. But neither can we live any longer with the notion of our own infallible wrongness. We need to restore belief in the possibility of being right. There’s a reason the leftist Christian magazine Sojourners started life in the 1970s as something called the Post-American. Many religious activists in those days seemed to have reached a point where they couldn’t tell an admirable patriotism from the murderous ideologies of nationalism—and, besides, if you squinted hard enough, social defeatism looked like a secular version of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin. The result was hardly what they hoped for: a cynical policy of Realpolitik abroad and a culture of death at home.

The connection, then, seems to be a desire for a renewed moral confidence, an ability to make judgments, to call evil by its name. And a shared opposition to the enervating moral relativism that (supposedly) infects the Left.

Bottum concludes:

The angry isolationist paleoconservatives are probably right—this isn’t conservatism, in several older senses of the word. But so what? Call it the new moralism, if you like. Call it a masked liberalism or a kind of radicalism that has bizarrely seized the American scene. Mutter darkly, if you want, about the shotgun marriage of ex-socialists and modern puritans, the cynical political joining of imperial adventurers with reactionary Catholics and backwoods Evangelicals. These facts still remain: The sense of national purpose regained by forceful response to the attacks of September 11 could help summon the will to halt the slaughter of a million unborn children a year. And the energy of the pro-life fight—the fundamental moral cause of our time—may revitalize belief in the great American experiment.

There are any number of criticisms that could be offered of Mr. Bottum’s analysis. For starters, some conservatives might (and have) questioned whether a nation that permits the slaughter of millions of unborn children is fit to spread its way of life accross the globe.

More fundamentally, though, Bottum seems to me to be arguing against a strawman. Most people who dissent from the neoconservative project of global democratic “revolution from above” (as ersatz neocon Christopher Hitchens has called it) do not think Islamic terrorism or extremism are good things. And most of them think the U.S. has the right and duty to prosecute a vigorous defense of its citizens against the threat of terrorism. Where they disagree is in thinking that purusing a vast scheme of regime change and nation building is either necessary or possible. Recall that it was the threat of weapons of mass destruction being passed to terrorists that generated the support for the Iraq war. All the talk of liberation and democracy was ancillary and largely after the fact.

I also find it strange that Bottum, who I believe is a Catholic, seems so unconcerned that his own church fails to see the connection between an aggressive moralistic foreign policy and a culture of life:

No one could accuse the Catholic Church, for instance, of being soft on the life issues, but the Vatican was strongly opposed to the United States’ intervention in Iraq—to the point of hosting a state visit in Rome and Assisi by Saddam Hussein’s vicious deputy, Tariq Aziz, in February 2003. Much of the Roman curia seems to have fallen into a functional pacifism that threatens a damaging loss of the traditional Catholic theory of just war. But, even with such confusions set aside, this much is obviously true: Every war, just or not, involves killing. Though the doctrine of what used to be called the “seamless garment of life” has worn threadbare over the years, there is surely a coherent position that insists on opposition to both the culture of death and American intervention in Iraq.

The accusation of “functional pacifism” is a common one. It seems to mean that the Church’s teachings on just war are so stringent that they rule out virtually all modern wars. And this is supposed to count as a criticism of the theory rather than an indictment of modern war! Does Bottum think just war theory is legitimate only if it permits a certain number of wars? Or only if it blesses all American wars?

I don’t deny that there was a good humanitarian case to be made for the removal of Saddam Hussein from power. The arguments from Iraq’s “sovereignty” seemed pretty disingenuous. But can Christians concerned about the sanctity of life brush aside the tens of thousands of casualities that the Iraq war has caused as a mere “side effect”? I think Bottum owes us a critique of just war theory, or at least an account of how the destruction wrought by the war comports with the requirements of proportionality and discrimination.

It’s the refusal to take seriously the relationship between means and ends that I find most troubling about the neoconservative approach to foreign policy. It’s almost as though as long as the ends are exalted enough (democracy! freedom!), we can dispense with worrying about the means we use to acheive them and whether they are morally permissible. One of the reasons that so many Christians are staunchly opposed to abortion and other aspects of the “culture of death” is that they beleive, with St. Paul, that we can never “do evil that good may result.” Some acts, such as torture or the intentional killing of innocents, are always forbidden. They will be rightly skeptical of any foreign policy that asks us to be complicit in the commission of such evils.