In 1944 Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, "The preservation of a democratic civilization requires the wisdom of the serpent and the harmlessness of the dove. The children of light must be armed with the wisdom of the children of darkness but remain free from their malice. They must know the power of self-interest in human society without giving it moral justification. They must have this wisdom in order that they may beguile, deflect, harness and restrain self-interest, individual and collective, for the sake of the community."

Today, we who live by a Golden Rule morality strive to be Niebuhr's children of the light. Conversely, our often ruthless opponents of the New Right increasingly fit Niebuhr's description of the children of darkness. They are rude, arrogant and they play dirty. And they do so pursuing an agenda of unrestrained self-indulgence that often disregards the common good.

At the heart of this movement is the will-to-power political philosophy we know as neoconservatism. It is mainstream conservatism's step-child, built upon the Leo Strauss's sense of philosopher-king identity politics with a hefty infusion of Willmoore Kendall's populist notion to use wedge issues as a means to liberal self-destruction; a recipe to transform our liberal democracy into an orthodox theocracy.

Recognizing this threat to our liberties, we now ask ourselves what can be done to refute these folks without losing our souls and without adopting their sense of malice?

The answer is simple: we must become tougher progressives by bluntly, but with dignity, speaking truth to power. And we do so by endless repetition, staying on a common message. We must be both patient as well as persistent. Remember: it took the New Right forty years to reach their pinnacle of power. It may take us and our successors a similar amount of time to restore liberalism's good name.

We should start this reclamation of being the moral voice of our community by hitting the New Right at its most vulnerable point: neoconservatism. It is the real power behind the Religious Right. A weed is not killed simply by cutting off the portion that is above ground, but by pulling out its root. Without the likes of William Kristol and company, their links to the Scaife, Bradley and Coors foundation money, the IRD and others would be severely weakened. Furthermore, if we successfully discredit neoconservatism a domino effect could reverberate throughout the entire extreme Right.

As rough and tumble as neoconservatism is, it is in fact the very vehicle to splinter the New Right. It is so inextricably allied to the fundamentalist religious backlash that both movements have become overly dependent upon each other. Religious radicals such as Michael Novak, George Weigel and Robert H. Bork have direct ties to the very same foundations, think-tanks that propel the neoconservative movement. In fact all three individuals consider themselves to be squarely in both camps. There is a deliberate strategy to cynically cultivate a religious backlash solely in order to further the neoconservative agenda. That is why if we first successfully refute neoconservatism, the Religious Right will then become a more vulnerable target. Essentially, it will become the bully without enforcers.

Currently, the foundations, especially the Scaife "four sisters," Bradley and the Koch Family organizations are betting heavily on the neoconservatives and their religious allies. Such prioritizing is causing resentment and divisiveness on the Right. The non-socialist Left's strategy should be one of isolating the more extreme factions and dealing with them, one by one. If Golden Rule liberals can wage a successful campaign of divide and conquer by first focusing on the neoconservatives' many religious fallacies, then the Right could be seriously wounded for years to come.

Neoconservatives do not deserve the respect we should have for mainstream and libertarian conservatives such as Chuck Hagel, F.A, Hayak or David Gergen.  The former unlike the latter three are not even real conservatives. Neoconservatives want to take the sanctity of religious belief from the individual and replace it by imposing a hollow orthodox morality upon the American nation. It is a "morality" that needlessly paints both the theory of evolution and medical research as sinful. Their thinking is so warped that one of their number, Leon Kass believes that a child licking an ice cream cone is "repugnant" because it is too "cat-like."

Many neoconservatives are closet atheists who would deny others less powerful the freedom of practicing the very same religious philosophy. They infiltrate religious institutions of which they do not belong in order to impose an orthodoxy meant to serve an ancient Greek fantasy of "manliness." Every political relationship is cast in an enemy/friend axis where the grey area thought of either a Jesus or a Hillel has no currency. Many of their movement's founders are either former Trotskyites who have maintained their Soviet sense of centralized authoritarianism or worse, former liberals who did not have either the self-discipline or courage to stay the course. Instead, they surrendered their sense of commutative justice for a corrupted egoism.

They are now being led by William Kristol who often frames issues in very Straussian terms, often assailing "modernity" with charges of "nihilism." They have become the new children of darkness. They gave into an unrestrained self-interest, elitism and belief that contribution to the common good is meant for "little people." They are liberal democracy's greatest threat and they must be treated as such. Neoconservative philosophy must be so identified, isolated and their power diminished.

And they are willing to play fast and loose with the truth. Their distrust and contempt for the common man is so deep that we should not be surprised to hear Irving Kristol state,
"There are different kinds of truth for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and there are truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults and the notion that should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work."

As Niebuhr observed, such a scenario "...fails to provide checks against the inordinate impulses to power, to which all rulers are tempted."

As mentioned above, neoconservatism's strategy is to harness ultra-orthodox religious "myths" (Leo Strauss's term) so as to incorporate its most authoritarian characteristics into the doctrine of America's mainstream denominations. Many neoconservatives begin with the premise that that Founding Fathers erred by inserting the Establishment Clause into the Bill of Rights. Irving Kristol is in the forefront of this Strauss inspired argument. Like Strauss, Kristol believes that a strict, orthodox religion is vital to national cohesion. Not only is the "myth" of religious belief necessary to maintain societal order, but the "myth" to be imposed must be one that calls for a vengeful, furious deity that inspires fear into the governed. The "myth" should also inspire a citizenry to become more willing to die for its religious orthodoxy. The neoconservative elite "know" that the citizenry are dying for a false religious belief, but in their minds, that is how society is to be defended.

It is indeed a pernicious and vile philosophy.

In this battle to smash neoconservatism, a religious Left is indispensable. We who live by the Golden Rule bring to the liberal table much of the moral muscle necessary to outflank the New Right and recapture the Vital Center that is so necessary to win national elections. It is progressives such ourselves that can best effectively expose the myth of liberal "secularism."

And that is crucial. Many Americans often accept the Right's stilted version of morality simply because the non-socialist Left almost fails to offer an alternative to people of faith. A void has been made that many Americans fill with anything that seems to resemble a sense of right and wrong. This should not be the case. Morality does matter. Let us step up and give our American community a better choice.

It is up to us to help our fellow Liberals how to address issues of individual morality. New Right pundits love to call liberals hypocrites for certain "moral lapses." And sometimes liberals provide them with all the necessary ammunition they need--say by excluding religious authority on issues such as poverty and social justice, areas where many faith agendas overlap with liberal agendas. The two great neoconservative lies that liberals are "nihilists" who practice "moral relativism" reverberate simply because they go unchallenged. These lies must be refuted if liberalism is ever to have any identification with commonly held notions of morality.

There would be no modern liberalism without the Social Gospel movement of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries. It was as important an influence as the labor movement, the intellectuals and the Enlightenment principles of reason. The Thomistic thought of John A. Ryan fortified the crusade for a just wage.  Martin Luther King Jr. used the power of his pulpit to make America a more racially just society. And on that terribly sad night of Dr. King's assassination, Robert F. Kennedy asked a campaign crowd to go home and pray not only for the slain civil rights leader's family, "...but more importantly, [to] say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love--a prayer for understanding and that of compassion which I spoke"

But before we commit ourselves to concentrating on the fighting the power behind the power, there are certain issues that require a unified response.

We must begin constantly pointing out how many neoconservatives are closet atheists who seem intent on forcing other Americans into their nationalistically-tinged orthodoxies--all while hypocritically denying honest atheists their right not to believe in a deity.

Let us also talk about their movement's founder Irving Kristol and some of his non-mainstream ideas.  In his book NeoConservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, Kristol displays a concept of religion that at best can be described as masochistic towards his own Judaism. A case in point is his belief that the Church should return to mindset of the Middle Ages. In a Straussian-inspired attack on modernity at page 434, he makes a very odd choice for a model of moral authority in Pope Pius IX. Kristol cites the Pontiff's Syllabus of Errors which included attacks on reason, Protestantism and the separation of church and state. Pius IX, also known as Pio Nono, was a well-known authoritarian who led a virtual one-man war on the modern science and democracy, something readily apparent in the document's content.

We need to educate a lazy press corps how neoconservatives and their Religious Right allies use Straussian code words such as "moral relativism," "nihilism" and "virtue" and explain to them and the public at large how this is a blatant attempt to create confusion about our cherished liberal democratic tradition of value pluralism (i.e., which while allowing for some diversity of morality, still acknowledges limits to such differences especially when individual rights begin to be trampled upon). It is they who actually practice moral relativism (i.e., that certain moral choices do not arise from universal truths, but from opinion or personal preferences). It is neoconservatism that fails to adhere to universal truths, often making exceptions for those born of wealth and privilege. Whenever these neocon terms are used against us, we must immediately make the correction by emphasizing value pluralism.

Refuting the obfuscating charge of moral relativism further exposes the charade of attacking modernity as nihilistic. While many of the faiths that flow from Abraham, as well as Hinduism, Buddhism and even non-deistic beliefs disagree about specific names, ways of worship or conceptions of when human life actually begins, they all share the same basic universal truths about the Golden Rule.

This is just the beginning of a proactive dialogue. There are clearly many other things that need to be done. This but a first step designed to begin coalescing a common vocabulary so necessary to refute the New Right's numerous talking points.

The next step would then be for us to have our own  direct mailings, our ow media campaign and even our own Justice Sundays, going directly to the people and explaining why religious people believe in no prayer in public schools, stem cell research and value pluralism.

This would take both money and organization, perhaps something the millionaires of the new Democracy Alliance could bankroll.

I put this out there because like many of you I am tired of liberalism being denigrated by the new children of the darkness, so spoiled, so corrupt that they would use the sanctity of faith to destroy the institutions that protect the common good. Let us be as tough and as wise as them, but without adopting their malice. But it is now time that we take the fight to them.

For the sake of our community, it is our duty to do so. It must be done and we are the people to do it.