Beinert's question: What is more dangerous to liberalism?

Islamism or the American right?

Andrew O'Hehir brings this question to the fore in his review of Beinert's "The Good Fight" on salon.com (need sub or day pass to read in its entirety):

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/06/16/beinart/print.html

Besides courtesy, Beinart's other great virtue is concision. When he finally gets around to discussing the problem facing contemporary liberals in the wake of 9/11 -- admittedly, that takes a while -- he dispenses with it in one sentence. "The central question dividing liberals today," he writes, "is whether they believe liberal values are as imperiled by the new totalitarianism rising from the Islamic world as they are by the American right."

The spirit of this question, as I grasp it, is certainly worth discussing. But at the risk of violating our new spirit of intra-liberal amity, isn't this just a kinder, gentler version of Bush-speak? Notice that as Beinart frames the question, it's so loaded with assumptions that it can only be answered in one direction. Do we in fact know, beyond Berman's bizarre pronouncements, that there is a "new totalitarianism" in the Islamic world? Doesn't that imply a movement with leadership and something approaching a coherent ideology? If so, where is that to be found today? And is it "rising"? Or are we talking about a diffuse, decentered meme, a violent revenge fantasy that appeals to disparate bands of losers all over the world?

I'm going to sound like a jerk if I reply, "No, I think Rick Santorum is more of a threat to liberal values than the New Totalitarianism Rising From the Islamic World." But what if the NTRFIW is more or less a paranoid fantasy, projected onto a few hundred cave-dwelling crackpots who've staged a couple of ingenious attacks and inspired a few copycat crimes? And what if Sen. Santorum -- who believes, by the way, that the earth was created 6,000 years ago, in exactly six days -- represented the leading edge of a not-so-secret plan to take over the greatest military power in world history and turn it into a Christian theocracy? I'm only saying: Frame the question that way and you might point toward a different answer.

Beinart is a believer in the NTRFIW, or so one gathers. He doesn't really have much to say about it, beyond a few obligatory pages about Sayyid Qutb, the father of the especially puritanical strain of Islamic fundamentalism known as Salafism, and the chain of association by which Qutb's ideology was conveyed to Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, founders of al-Qaida. He provides a brief history of the Taliban, which was indeed a totalitarian regime based in Salafism (if a short-lived, backward and isolated one) that sheltered bin Laden's messianic moondreams, and then expends several more pages wondering what might happen if al-Qaida or some similar group got ahold of a biological weapon or a nuclear bomb.

On this issue, Beinart is clearly correct: Very bad things would happen, and the worst of them wouldn't be the damage caused by the weapon itself, but the pell-mell rush to abandon every remaining American constitutional right and liberty that would follow. Remember the never-proposed "Patriot II" law, which the Bush administration briefly floated in 2003? Among many other exciting provisions, it would have permitted the government to strip American citizens of all their rights and imprison them indefinitely if they were found (under some unspecified process) to have supported terrorism. In the wake of another major terrorist attack, Beinart speculates, the government could claim police powers that would make John Ashcroft look like Mister Rogers.