Friday, June 16, 2006

Andrew Sullivan | The Daily Dish: Baptists and Booze:

It's astonishing that liberalism now has a built-in theological meaning, i.e. "Godless." That's the point of Coulter's latest best-seller, as it was Hannity's in his repulsively titled book, "Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism." The point is to portray your political opponents as part of a Manichean struggle against existential evil. And so "liberalism" is literally demonized. In this way, politics collapses into religion, and the political debate becomes the hunt to expose and punish heresy. That hunt has been around for centuries; and people love it.

1:39 PM