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When Al Gore made Joe Lieberman his VP pick in 2000, it was refreshing that there wasn't much anti-Semitism in evidence. Instead, conservative religious figures made much of their friendship with Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew. It seemed at the time to be evidence that the ground of the religious culture war had shifted somewhat, so that instead of Protestant against Catholic or Christian against Jew, the religious fault line in American politics was now religious vs. non-religious. People started using the term "Judeo-Christian" more often, pulling Jews into the circle of who "us" is. After the 9/11 attacks, it became clear to many on the right that "them" wasn't just those latte-sipping coastal ungodly elitists, but also Muslims. Which is why, as Matt Yglesias notes, Newt Gingrich's much-mocked recent statement that his grandchildren could wind up living "in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American" is perhaps not quite as self-contradictory as it sounds, from his perspective anyway:
This speaks, I think, quite accurately to what the conservative movement in the United States is about—the identity politics of middle aged white suburban conformists...You have to think of "America" in Gingrich’s eyes as constituting not so much a place as a specific tribe of people. The concern is that tribe of people might all go secular, which will leave the country exposed to takeover by radical Islamists. This is what many conservatives appear to believe has happened in Europe.Tribalism has been a constant in American politics -- you could argue that our eternal culture war, which started before the Constitution was written and continues to this day, is at heart about which tribe you belong to, and how the other tribe should be dealt with. But the tribalism has never in my lifetime been as feverish, at least from the right, as it is now. The idea that the enemy is both secular and Islamic makes perfect sense to people who feel themselves under siege from everyone who is taking "their" America away from them. The enemy, it is important to understand, can be a diverse group. It includes immigrants, Muslims, secular elitists -- basically anyone who isn't who they are, and who doesn't believe what they do. And their view of the enemy also includes the idea that the enemy hates them and wants to destroy them. If you think secular elitists are motivated above all by their hatred of white Christians, then it seems reasonable that those secular elitists would be cooperating with Islamists to bring Sharia law to America.
