It has been gratifying to see the largely generous and charitable reactions to Republocrat that have appeared on the web.  Even the critics have provided kind words and a few priceless one-liners, including the positively Trotterskyite opening line of the review to which I link at the very end.

Two related and recurring critiques are of particular interest to me; hence the need for this clarification/self-justification (delete as suits your fancy).  One is the claim that I seem unaware of serious conservative thought and operate solely between polarities determined by Fox News and MSNBC.  The second is that, in hammering the Fox fans, I deal only with straw men.

There is certainly a debate to be had here as to where the Christian Right, as a whole, finds its motivation.  It could well be that reading groups focused on Hayek's The Road to Serfdom are indeed the prime motivating factor in energizing the Christian Right base, as the phrase has it, but I somehow doubt it.   As a good Thatcherite member of the Conservative Party in 1984, I did read the text, along with other related works: yes, it impacted me somewhat profoundly, as this rather embarrassing footage of myself campaigning for the Party in the 1987 election indicates; but it also left me ultimately wondering whether  my own notion of liberty, for which democracy and its concomitant institutions are rather central, was indeed somewhat different from that which the brilliant Austrian economist was advocating.  In short, it was not complete ignorance of sophisticated conservative thinkers that led me to write the way I did; rather, it was simply because I regarded them as essentially irrelevant to the book's central theses.

Republocrat is not, and never was, intended as a scholarly, densely footnoted critique of conservative philosophy.  So much should be self-evident.  Rather, it is a series of journalistic criticisms of the populist culture of the Religious Right, a constituency for which Fox News is a staple, and where terms such as Marxism, socialism, and liberalism are bandied around as if there is nothing to distinguish them, a ploy even used by those who, frankly, should know better.  To argue that, in focusing on this as a cultural problem, I have somehow put forward a straw man is only plausible if you happen to pastor a church where everyone has a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.  For the rest of us, such a claim flies in the face of  our everyday reality, where political allegiances are generally forged much more by non-rational or even irrational factors (and where soundbites, not learned tomes, are decisive), rather than by careful reflection upon the connection between economic structures and human life.   Indeed, my dear friend and colleague, Peter Lillback, who kindly provided the foreword and somewhat playfully started the whole `straw man' thing, can certainly testify to the power of Fox pundits in `energizing the base' and putting a book at the top of the bestseller list.  I somehow doubt that an anchorman on a channel devoted to high-powered discussions of Hayek or Novack would have that kind of populist power.

We should make no mistake: rarefied debates about Hayek and economic philosophy among intellectuals on the Right  are about as relevant to the way most conservative Christians vote as discussions of Stiglitz or Krugman are to those on the Left.   The populist pundits with the clever soundbites and smart put-downs on both sides of the political aisle are more likely candidates for the role of base-energizers.  Yet, as Christians, we need to do better than the world around: we need to demonstrate our Christian commitments not only in our political opinions but also in the intelligent, informed civility of our engagement in the political process, even -- or perhaps especially -- with those with whom we disagree.    If it is the case that such intelligence and civility is, in our churches, the norm rather than the exception, then I rejoice and, indeed, will apologize for my unfounded criticisms; but, as of this moment, I am unconvinced that I am the one who is constructing the straw men on this issue.  Intellectuals like to assume that everyone operates at the same level as they do.  That is an unwarranted  assumption.

In the meantime, while I do not usually link to reviews of my own material, this one is priceless, if only for the honest acknowledgment at the start that the reviewer has not actually read the book, a fact which becomes rather obvious as he then proceeds to disagree with me, and offer helpful correctives, on a number of positions which I never actually advocate and have never held.  Still, if I am ever tempted to change my mind and adopt any of them, I now have a bookmarked webpage to which I can turn for help. Now, about that straw man thing.......