White Christian ethno-nationalists like Rubio and Vance are indifferent to the Enlightenment which inspired our Founders- and also- curiously, to St. Paul in the glorious Epistle to the Galatians
The irony of today's effort to topple a theocracy in the Middle East is that conservative Christian Nationalists are desperately trying to create one here.
We all need to believe in what we hope for - the demotic and Christian definition of faith shared by everyone from George Michael to the author of Hebrews 11.1. We just can't let passion for our beliefs and values lead to a lack of humility or the demonization of opposing views.
I can understand why some people see the Enlightenment as the lynchpin of western civilization, even if western civilization was around for thousands of years before the 18th century. It's a sort of secular creation myth, the genesis of progress from superstition and persecution to reason and tolerance. The problem is it's demonstrably untrue, and fetishizing 18th century philosophes who were drinking their own Kool-Aid does nothing to advance universal human rights or liberal ideals around freedom of speech. In othering conservatives who do not share progressive beliefs it can be counterproductive, shutting down rational discourse rather than stimulating it.
Francis' snarky reminder to Marco Rubio that "his particular heritage and ancestry lead back to an authoritarian and Catholic Habsburg Empire, while that of James Monroe and Thomas Jefferson lead to a very different and more liberal Protestant part of Europe" doesn't bear scrutiny. Every European state was authoritarian. Censorship of potentially subversive works was ubiquitous. Francis seems to forget that one reason the Founding Fathers championed freedom of religion was because of Anglican persecution that led Quakers, Catholics and Puritans to flee to the New World. The first Catholic MP wasn't permitted in Westminster until 1829, and Penal Laws in Ireland systematically denied civil and economic rights to Catholics and Presbyterians for centuries.
Nor did adhering to Enlightenment values guarantee that human rights would be prioritised. Excluding nonconformists from polite society may have inadvertently kick-started the Industrial Revolution as they reinvested in commerce rather than chasing ennoblement and lands - two of the big four banks in the UK (Lloyds and Barclays) were founded by Quakers. They went on to become the backbone of the 19th century British Liberal party, champions of progressive values and laissez faire economics under a benign Divine Providence. Despite being the ideological good guys, their reluctance to disrupt market forces during the Great Famine in Ireland saw a million people die and another million flee within four years out of a population of 8 million, in what the Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has described as the largest proportion of famine deaths in recorded history. The one British politician who made a serious attempt to save lives through famine relief was the conservative Robert Peel, a man whose religious bigotry in his youth led to the soubriquet Orange Peel.
In America Enlightenment values were no deterrence against the justification of slavery as profits from cotton, sugar and "Carolina Gold" rice began to soar. The deep south colony of Georgia, which included most of modern-day Alabama and Mississippi, was founded with an absolute ban on slavery that lasted for decades, until cotton planters became "stark mad after negroes" in the 1750s. Less than three decades later the Declaration of Independence declared all men were created equal without removing the stench of hypocrisy from a slave society. Racism was used to salve the consciences of Enlightenment scions who would ultimately argue that slavery was a "moral good" by the 1830s, even if they dared not allow Black people to read or write.
There is plenty of evidence from Yale studies of infants (Just Babies, Paul Bloom) that a "rudimentary moral sense" is innate. We all think we're the good guys, and behaving badly causes us emotional distress. Yet we are still capable of deploying our reason, the most celebrated Enlightenment faculty, to justify the most horrible crimes, including the Social Darwinism of the Holocaust. If we're serious about promoting universal human rights and liberal values, we can't start with ill-informed smears of those who have a different perspective.
Thank you for this insightful comment. It contains many things I've been trying to articulate to myself for a while (and as a child of the 80s who is also Christian, the link between Hebrews and George Michael made me laugh).
The truth is that no institution (government, church/religion, NGO, business) and no movement (the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, communism, the 1960s counterculture era, 21st-century progressivism), however virtuous the philosophies at their origins, will ever be free of the same problem that afflicts individual human beings. That problem is....none of us is perfect. None of us sees everything clearly all the time. And many of us see many things wrongly and are subject to the sad fact that the clarity of our vision is often in inverse proportion to the amount of power and influence that we have. "Through a glass darkly...."
You can call this original sin, an evolutionary animal instinct, or a limit on the capacities of the human brain that AI will help us surpass (I do NOT believe the latter will ever happen). But whatever it is, we shouldn't be surprised that it affects our institutions and movements just as it does ourselves individually. Knowing this, one of our duties is to begin all of our endeavors with humility and course-correct when needed. We also must be reminded that this course-correction will be needed often. We need to be brave in calling out our leaders, even those who haven't sunk to Trumpian levels, when they aren't seeing clearly (looking at you, people around Biden in 2024). We and our thought leaders need to be nuanced and kind when stating opinions (what JK Rowling said about trans women isn't wrong and doesn't come from a place of hate, but the way she said it, where she said it (Twitter/X....seriously???), and how she keeps saying it have been). And we have to be less trusting of those who have gained more power over the years (Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Ta-Nehisi Coates (why does he get to write a book about Palestine??), and even self-help gurus like Glennon Doyle).
Some things are black and white, but many things in this world aren't. I appreciate all of the historical examples of this fact in your comment. This is the way of the world and the way of human beings. Persuasion should publish a full essay from you on this subject. Apologies if they already have and I missed it!!
"The truth is that no institution (government, church/religion, NGO, business) and no movement (the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, communism, the 1960s counterculture era, 21st-century progressivism), however virtuous the philosophies at their origins, will ever be free of the same problem that afflicts individual human beings. That problem is....none of us is perfect."
Since you are quoting from the New Testament, Jesus also said, Render unto Caesar what is Casaer's, and unto God what is God's. So, he's making a distinction between the spiritual and the corporal. Similar, if I'm not mistaken, between Buddhism and Shinto in Japan. You can actually recognize two parts to the world we are born into.
There's also nothing in the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, about "human rights." There's nothing in Greek philosophy or myth about this strange invention by 18th century intellectuals. By human rights I mean privilege without obligation. One merely has to be born in order to acquire privilege.
Which even Modern Liberals don't believe in as in what exactly is "hate speech?" Nor do they believe that the haters, bigots, sexists, racists, homophobes, fascists, etc. are equal in any way, shape or form in their system of morality.
The fact is the West has deluded itself with the zany ideas of equlity and human rights. It worked for a while when most Westerners were Christians and genetically similar but we are not living in that world any more and attempting to apply these 18th century concepts to the current culture is insane and suicidal.
According to David Hackett Fischer's Liberty and Freedom, both those concepts are of (for lack of a better word) "pagan" rather than Christian origin. "Liberty" comes from the Romans, "freedom" from Nordic cultures. Christianity would adapt those principles to its own belief system, but they didn't invent them.
This is why I despair. We are probably deadlocked on this. Frank, you make important points. But so does he. What of these irreconcilable differences?
You will no more convince Rubio and Vance (and tens of millions of like minded) that the Enlightenment is core to western values than they will convince you (and tens of millions of like minded) that the Christian faith is.
So - what does history say of empires riven on values? On what’s important? What’s worth fighting for? What’s not?
This seam down the western middle is ripping. And because we believe fundamentally different things.
In marriages - we divorce for irreconcilable differences lest the house descend into domestic violence.
What of these irreconcilable differences in the west?
They're not actually irreconcilable because Vance and Rubio do not actually believe what they say. Or, at least, they don't have the courage of their "post-liberal" convictions. This is a core problem with this movement on the right. It doesn't want to actually do anything very drastic to upset our liberal order. (Thank goodness!) Neither Rubio nor Vance want to institute an actual theocracy, nothing like. If they do, they have no hope of doing so, so entrenched is the liberal idea of freedom of religion.
I don't think Rubio believes in the ethnicity thing either. I think he'd be pretty happy to include Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan in "the west," despite them decidedly not having european ancestry.
Whether you agree with Frank or not is irrelevant. What you cannot dispute is the other side of the argument is well populated and well rehearsed. I’m pointing out that half your country sees the west in civilizational decline due to cultural dilution while the other half (the ones you agree with) see homogenizing around diversity and cosmopolitan values to be the ultimate virtue. These 50/50 arguments on the future of western civilization are mutually exclusive and a systemic risk to an ongoing democracy. And arguing louder on such profoundly different world views fixes nothing.
This essay feels to me as if Mr. Fukuyama’s target is really Vance. There are a lot of words here to argue the difference between « faith » and « heritage. » I would have said heritage in Rubio’s place, but dredging up the Habsburgs because Rubio is Cuban, all to label him a reactionary and a Christian nationalist, is pedantic at best. I agree that Rubio should not have taken the « end of history » cheap shot, but I think that Mr. Fukuyama’s exceptional talents are being wasted in this response.
It was keeping Rubio's Gold, Glory, God type of Western Civilization peddlers that a Bostonian Lawyer by the name of Jon Adams wrote an essay titled Dissertation on Cannon & Feual Law. Link below. Posted the important part on why Politics & Religion should be kept apart.
>Since the promulgation of Christianity, the two greatest systems of tyranny that have sprung from this original, are the canon and the feudal law. The desire of dominion, that great principle by which we have attempted to account for so much good and so much evil, is, when properly restrained, a very useful and noble movement in the human mind. But when such restraints are taken off, it becomes an encroaching, grasping, restless, and ungovernable power. Numberless have been the systems of iniquity contrived by the great for the gratification of this passion in themselves; but in none of them were they ever more successful than in the invention and establishment of the canon and the feudal law.
By the former of these, the most refined, sublime, extensive, and astonishing constitution of policy that ever was conceived by the mind of man was framed by the Romish clergy for the aggrandizement of their own order. All the epithets I have here given to the Romish policy are just, and will be allowed to be so when it is considered, that they even persuaded mankind to believe, faithfully and undoubtingly, that God Almighty had entrusted them with the keys of heaven, whose gates they might open and close at pleasure; with a power of dispensation over all the rules and obligations of morality; with authority to license all sorts of sins and crimes; with a power of deposing princes and absolving subjects from allegiance; with a power of procuring or withholding the rain of heaven and the beams of the sun; with the management of earthquakes, pestilence, and famine; nay, with the mysterious, awful, incomprehensible power of creating out of bread and wine the flesh and blood of God himself. All these opinions they were enabled to spread and rivet among the people by reducing their minds to a state of sordid ignorance and staring timidity, and by infusing into them a religious horror of letters and knowledge. Thus was human nature chained fast for ages in a cruel, shameful, and deplorable servitude to him, and his subordinate tyrants, who, it was foretold, would exalt himself above all that was called God, and that was worshipped.
In the latter we find another system, similar in many respects to the former;1 which, although it was originally formed, perhaps, for the necessary defense of a barbarous people against the inroads and invasions of her neighboring nations, yet for the same purposes of tyranny, cruelty, and lust, which had dictated the canon law, it was soon adopted by almost all the princes of Europe, and wrought into the constitutions of their government. It was originally a code of laws for a vast army in a perpetual encampment. The general was invested with the sovereign propriety of all the lands within the territory. Of him, as his servants and vassals, the first rank of his great officers held the lands; and in the same manner the other subordinate officers held of them; and all ranks and degrees held their lands by a variety of duties and services, all tending to bind the chains the faster on every order of mankind. In this manner the common people were held together in herds and clans in a state of servile dependence on their lords, bound, even by the tenure of their lands, to follow them, whenever they commanded, to their wars, and in a state of total ignorance of every thing divine and human, excepting the use of arms and the culture of their lands.
But another event still more calamitous to human liberty, was a wicked confederacy between the two systems of tyranny above described. It seems to have been even stipulated between them, that the temporal grandees should contribute every thing in their power to maintain the ascendancy of the priesthood, and that the spiritual grandees in their turn, should employ their ascendancy over the consciences of the people, in impressing on their minds a blind, implicit obedience to civil magistracy.<
I would love you to address the likelihood of conservative Islam adherents adopting liberal values esp. religious tolerance. Perhaps Huntington was more accurate.
Religion corrupts government, and government corrupts religion. The wall of separation is a necessity for both to thrive in a free society, and unfortunately the modern "conservative" fails to appreciate this.
No form of "libertarianism" can see itself as compatible with modern American Christian nationalism, which inescapably drives the modern Republican Party. Those devoted to the ideas of individual rights and freedoms that the Enlightenment claimed for us cannot afford to delude themselves any longer about which party to support.
The Republican establishment is rotten to its core. There is no saving the party without first abandoning it. Attempting to maintain its viability is only feeding its sickness. The fundamentalists must be cast back into the political wilderness where society was mercifully spared their influence in the mid 20th century.
Excellent!! And spot on
White Christian ethno-nationalists like Rubio and Vance are indifferent to the Enlightenment which inspired our Founders- and also- curiously, to St. Paul in the glorious Epistle to the Galatians
The irony of today's effort to topple a theocracy in the Middle East is that conservative Christian Nationalists are desperately trying to create one here.
We all need to believe in what we hope for - the demotic and Christian definition of faith shared by everyone from George Michael to the author of Hebrews 11.1. We just can't let passion for our beliefs and values lead to a lack of humility or the demonization of opposing views.
I can understand why some people see the Enlightenment as the lynchpin of western civilization, even if western civilization was around for thousands of years before the 18th century. It's a sort of secular creation myth, the genesis of progress from superstition and persecution to reason and tolerance. The problem is it's demonstrably untrue, and fetishizing 18th century philosophes who were drinking their own Kool-Aid does nothing to advance universal human rights or liberal ideals around freedom of speech. In othering conservatives who do not share progressive beliefs it can be counterproductive, shutting down rational discourse rather than stimulating it.
Francis' snarky reminder to Marco Rubio that "his particular heritage and ancestry lead back to an authoritarian and Catholic Habsburg Empire, while that of James Monroe and Thomas Jefferson lead to a very different and more liberal Protestant part of Europe" doesn't bear scrutiny. Every European state was authoritarian. Censorship of potentially subversive works was ubiquitous. Francis seems to forget that one reason the Founding Fathers championed freedom of religion was because of Anglican persecution that led Quakers, Catholics and Puritans to flee to the New World. The first Catholic MP wasn't permitted in Westminster until 1829, and Penal Laws in Ireland systematically denied civil and economic rights to Catholics and Presbyterians for centuries.
Nor did adhering to Enlightenment values guarantee that human rights would be prioritised. Excluding nonconformists from polite society may have inadvertently kick-started the Industrial Revolution as they reinvested in commerce rather than chasing ennoblement and lands - two of the big four banks in the UK (Lloyds and Barclays) were founded by Quakers. They went on to become the backbone of the 19th century British Liberal party, champions of progressive values and laissez faire economics under a benign Divine Providence. Despite being the ideological good guys, their reluctance to disrupt market forces during the Great Famine in Ireland saw a million people die and another million flee within four years out of a population of 8 million, in what the Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has described as the largest proportion of famine deaths in recorded history. The one British politician who made a serious attempt to save lives through famine relief was the conservative Robert Peel, a man whose religious bigotry in his youth led to the soubriquet Orange Peel.
In America Enlightenment values were no deterrence against the justification of slavery as profits from cotton, sugar and "Carolina Gold" rice began to soar. The deep south colony of Georgia, which included most of modern-day Alabama and Mississippi, was founded with an absolute ban on slavery that lasted for decades, until cotton planters became "stark mad after negroes" in the 1750s. Less than three decades later the Declaration of Independence declared all men were created equal without removing the stench of hypocrisy from a slave society. Racism was used to salve the consciences of Enlightenment scions who would ultimately argue that slavery was a "moral good" by the 1830s, even if they dared not allow Black people to read or write.
There is plenty of evidence from Yale studies of infants (Just Babies, Paul Bloom) that a "rudimentary moral sense" is innate. We all think we're the good guys, and behaving badly causes us emotional distress. Yet we are still capable of deploying our reason, the most celebrated Enlightenment faculty, to justify the most horrible crimes, including the Social Darwinism of the Holocaust. If we're serious about promoting universal human rights and liberal values, we can't start with ill-informed smears of those who have a different perspective.
Thank you for this insightful comment. It contains many things I've been trying to articulate to myself for a while (and as a child of the 80s who is also Christian, the link between Hebrews and George Michael made me laugh).
The truth is that no institution (government, church/religion, NGO, business) and no movement (the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, communism, the 1960s counterculture era, 21st-century progressivism), however virtuous the philosophies at their origins, will ever be free of the same problem that afflicts individual human beings. That problem is....none of us is perfect. None of us sees everything clearly all the time. And many of us see many things wrongly and are subject to the sad fact that the clarity of our vision is often in inverse proportion to the amount of power and influence that we have. "Through a glass darkly...."
You can call this original sin, an evolutionary animal instinct, or a limit on the capacities of the human brain that AI will help us surpass (I do NOT believe the latter will ever happen). But whatever it is, we shouldn't be surprised that it affects our institutions and movements just as it does ourselves individually. Knowing this, one of our duties is to begin all of our endeavors with humility and course-correct when needed. We also must be reminded that this course-correction will be needed often. We need to be brave in calling out our leaders, even those who haven't sunk to Trumpian levels, when they aren't seeing clearly (looking at you, people around Biden in 2024). We and our thought leaders need to be nuanced and kind when stating opinions (what JK Rowling said about trans women isn't wrong and doesn't come from a place of hate, but the way she said it, where she said it (Twitter/X....seriously???), and how she keeps saying it have been). And we have to be less trusting of those who have gained more power over the years (Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Ta-Nehisi Coates (why does he get to write a book about Palestine??), and even self-help gurus like Glennon Doyle).
Some things are black and white, but many things in this world aren't. I appreciate all of the historical examples of this fact in your comment. This is the way of the world and the way of human beings. Persuasion should publish a full essay from you on this subject. Apologies if they already have and I missed it!!
Thanks Terzah you're too kind!
"The truth is that no institution (government, church/religion, NGO, business) and no movement (the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, communism, the 1960s counterculture era, 21st-century progressivism), however virtuous the philosophies at their origins, will ever be free of the same problem that afflicts individual human beings. That problem is....none of us is perfect."
I think you said it better than me!
Since you are quoting from the New Testament, Jesus also said, Render unto Caesar what is Casaer's, and unto God what is God's. So, he's making a distinction between the spiritual and the corporal. Similar, if I'm not mistaken, between Buddhism and Shinto in Japan. You can actually recognize two parts to the world we are born into.
There's also nothing in the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, about "human rights." There's nothing in Greek philosophy or myth about this strange invention by 18th century intellectuals. By human rights I mean privilege without obligation. One merely has to be born in order to acquire privilege.
Which even Modern Liberals don't believe in as in what exactly is "hate speech?" Nor do they believe that the haters, bigots, sexists, racists, homophobes, fascists, etc. are equal in any way, shape or form in their system of morality.
The fact is the West has deluded itself with the zany ideas of equlity and human rights. It worked for a while when most Westerners were Christians and genetically similar but we are not living in that world any more and attempting to apply these 18th century concepts to the current culture is insane and suicidal.
According to David Hackett Fischer's Liberty and Freedom, both those concepts are of (for lack of a better word) "pagan" rather than Christian origin. "Liberty" comes from the Romans, "freedom" from Nordic cultures. Christianity would adapt those principles to its own belief system, but they didn't invent them.
This is why I despair. We are probably deadlocked on this. Frank, you make important points. But so does he. What of these irreconcilable differences?
You will no more convince Rubio and Vance (and tens of millions of like minded) that the Enlightenment is core to western values than they will convince you (and tens of millions of like minded) that the Christian faith is.
So - what does history say of empires riven on values? On what’s important? What’s worth fighting for? What’s not?
This seam down the western middle is ripping. And because we believe fundamentally different things.
In marriages - we divorce for irreconcilable differences lest the house descend into domestic violence.
What of these irreconcilable differences in the west?
They're not actually irreconcilable because Vance and Rubio do not actually believe what they say. Or, at least, they don't have the courage of their "post-liberal" convictions. This is a core problem with this movement on the right. It doesn't want to actually do anything very drastic to upset our liberal order. (Thank goodness!) Neither Rubio nor Vance want to institute an actual theocracy, nothing like. If they do, they have no hope of doing so, so entrenched is the liberal idea of freedom of religion.
I don't think Rubio believes in the ethnicity thing either. I think he'd be pretty happy to include Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan in "the west," despite them decidedly not having european ancestry.
Whether you agree with Frank or not is irrelevant. What you cannot dispute is the other side of the argument is well populated and well rehearsed. I’m pointing out that half your country sees the west in civilizational decline due to cultural dilution while the other half (the ones you agree with) see homogenizing around diversity and cosmopolitan values to be the ultimate virtue. These 50/50 arguments on the future of western civilization are mutually exclusive and a systemic risk to an ongoing democracy. And arguing louder on such profoundly different world views fixes nothing.
How does anyone define Western Civilization without any reference to the Greek philosophers from Thales to Aristotle who initiated it?
This essay feels to me as if Mr. Fukuyama’s target is really Vance. There are a lot of words here to argue the difference between « faith » and « heritage. » I would have said heritage in Rubio’s place, but dredging up the Habsburgs because Rubio is Cuban, all to label him a reactionary and a Christian nationalist, is pedantic at best. I agree that Rubio should not have taken the « end of history » cheap shot, but I think that Mr. Fukuyama’s exceptional talents are being wasted in this response.
It was keeping Rubio's Gold, Glory, God type of Western Civilization peddlers that a Bostonian Lawyer by the name of Jon Adams wrote an essay titled Dissertation on Cannon & Feual Law. Link below. Posted the important part on why Politics & Religion should be kept apart.
>Since the promulgation of Christianity, the two greatest systems of tyranny that have sprung from this original, are the canon and the feudal law. The desire of dominion, that great principle by which we have attempted to account for so much good and so much evil, is, when properly restrained, a very useful and noble movement in the human mind. But when such restraints are taken off, it becomes an encroaching, grasping, restless, and ungovernable power. Numberless have been the systems of iniquity contrived by the great for the gratification of this passion in themselves; but in none of them were they ever more successful than in the invention and establishment of the canon and the feudal law.
By the former of these, the most refined, sublime, extensive, and astonishing constitution of policy that ever was conceived by the mind of man was framed by the Romish clergy for the aggrandizement of their own order. All the epithets I have here given to the Romish policy are just, and will be allowed to be so when it is considered, that they even persuaded mankind to believe, faithfully and undoubtingly, that God Almighty had entrusted them with the keys of heaven, whose gates they might open and close at pleasure; with a power of dispensation over all the rules and obligations of morality; with authority to license all sorts of sins and crimes; with a power of deposing princes and absolving subjects from allegiance; with a power of procuring or withholding the rain of heaven and the beams of the sun; with the management of earthquakes, pestilence, and famine; nay, with the mysterious, awful, incomprehensible power of creating out of bread and wine the flesh and blood of God himself. All these opinions they were enabled to spread and rivet among the people by reducing their minds to a state of sordid ignorance and staring timidity, and by infusing into them a religious horror of letters and knowledge. Thus was human nature chained fast for ages in a cruel, shameful, and deplorable servitude to him, and his subordinate tyrants, who, it was foretold, would exalt himself above all that was called God, and that was worshipped.
In the latter we find another system, similar in many respects to the former;1 which, although it was originally formed, perhaps, for the necessary defense of a barbarous people against the inroads and invasions of her neighboring nations, yet for the same purposes of tyranny, cruelty, and lust, which had dictated the canon law, it was soon adopted by almost all the princes of Europe, and wrought into the constitutions of their government. It was originally a code of laws for a vast army in a perpetual encampment. The general was invested with the sovereign propriety of all the lands within the territory. Of him, as his servants and vassals, the first rank of his great officers held the lands; and in the same manner the other subordinate officers held of them; and all ranks and degrees held their lands by a variety of duties and services, all tending to bind the chains the faster on every order of mankind. In this manner the common people were held together in herds and clans in a state of servile dependence on their lords, bound, even by the tenure of their lands, to follow them, whenever they commanded, to their wars, and in a state of total ignorance of every thing divine and human, excepting the use of arms and the culture of their lands.
But another event still more calamitous to human liberty, was a wicked confederacy between the two systems of tyranny above described. It seems to have been even stipulated between them, that the temporal grandees should contribute every thing in their power to maintain the ascendancy of the priesthood, and that the spiritual grandees in their turn, should employ their ascendancy over the consciences of the people, in impressing on their minds a blind, implicit obedience to civil magistracy.<
- Jon Adams.
https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/a-dissertation-on-the-canon-and-feudal-law/
The notion that Rubio who is at absolute best an empty suit knows anything about western civilization or has anything useful to say about it is nuts.
I would love you to address the likelihood of conservative Islam adherents adopting liberal values esp. religious tolerance. Perhaps Huntington was more accurate.
Religion corrupts government, and government corrupts religion. The wall of separation is a necessity for both to thrive in a free society, and unfortunately the modern "conservative" fails to appreciate this.
No form of "libertarianism" can see itself as compatible with modern American Christian nationalism, which inescapably drives the modern Republican Party. Those devoted to the ideas of individual rights and freedoms that the Enlightenment claimed for us cannot afford to delude themselves any longer about which party to support.
The Republican establishment is rotten to its core. There is no saving the party without first abandoning it. Attempting to maintain its viability is only feeding its sickness. The fundamentalists must be cast back into the political wilderness where society was mercifully spared their influence in the mid 20th century.