It's an old trope that keeps appearing in new guises. What roils our republic? Those characters on the lunatic fringe: the extremists, the zealots, the whatever you want to call them. Reasonable folk sound the alarm, as Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke do in The Silence of the Rational Center: Why American Foreign Policy Is Failing. Sometimes, of course, the storyline gets a bit muddled. Consider Dan Gilgoff's just–published book, The Jesus Machine: How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America Are Winning the Culture War, which we'll return to in a later column. Here and elsewhere, evangelicals are both fringe and center, one moment a "radical" cadre on the far Right, the next moment a vast horde. It gets confusing. (By the way, if this is "winning," what would "losing" look like?)

Ah, the lunatic fringe. So useful for rhetorical purposes. But what about the lunatic center?

Chris Hedges was for many years a correspondent for the New York Times. He is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, and he is currently teaching at Princeton. His book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America is published by Free Press, a very reputable house, a division of Simon & Schuster. More "center" than Chris Hedges you cannot get.

So here is Hedges telling us about the prophetic words of Dr. James Luther Adams, his ethics professor at Harvard Div, who on "a lazy spring afternoon nearly 25 years ago" looked into the future and warned "that when we were his age—he was then close to 80—we would all be fighting the 'Christian fascists.' "

Hedges adds that "Adams was not a man to use the word 'fascist' lightly. He was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti–Nazi church," and he was "eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested that he might want to consider returning to the United States."

Decades later, Adams "saw in the Christian Right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities, he said [sic] that would, in the event of prolonged social instability, catastrophe, or national crisis, see American fascists, under the guise of Christianity, rise to dismantle the open society."

Well, there's a certain elasticity there. Prolonged social instability? Catastrophe? National crisis? Like the Great Depression? World War II? 9/11? Or what? Hedges isn't too specific, yet he suggests that even now conditions are ripe for the "Christo–fascists."

Perhaps I am simply obtuse. I share Hedge's distaste for the methods of Dr. D. James Kennedy, for example, but I have a hard time seeing Kennedy as a proto–Goebbels. "Debate with the radical Christian Right is useless," Hedges writes. "We cannot reach this movement. It does not want dialogue. It is a movement based on emotion and cares nothing for rational thought and discussion." Really? So all Those People—whoever exactly They are, however many millions of Them await the call to battle—are beyond the pale. And this is a liberal vision of America?

Hedges' book was already in galleys when the November 2006 elections suggested to the "reality–based world" that the Christo–fascists will have to bide their time for a while yet. But American Fascists, as ludicrous as it is, takes second place in the loony sweepstakes, where the winner is Dinesh D'Souza's The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11.

Wait a minute, you say. I thought we were talking about the center. D'Souza hardly fits that description. Nonsense. He's Rishwain Research Scholar at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, not some underfunded, uncredentialed maverick. Since his college days at Dartmouth, D'Souza probably hasn't had a thought that didn't end up in print between hard covers. He's a conservative, yes, as Hedges is a liberal, and like Hedges he represents a large swath of educated opinion in the United States.

Like Hedges, many Americans look at their country and see on every hand religious fanatics "slowly dismantling democratic institutions to establish a religious tyranny, the springboard to an American fascism." They see nothing ludicrous about Hedges' dire warnings.

By the same token, many Americans agree with what D'Souza describes as "the heart of the radical Muslims' case against America and the West. Fundamentalists [Muslim fundamentalists, that is] portray America as a nominally Christian but de facto atheist society. Although people in America call themselves Christian, [radical Islamic thinker Sayyid] Qutb writes, their actions prove that they are indifferent to God and that their real religion is materialism."

So even though the attacks of 9/11 are regrettable, the Muslim rage that drove them was in some ways a righteous anger. And since it is above all the "cultural left" that is responsible for America's atheistic, materialistic, feminist depravity, it follows that the cultural left is ultimately responsible for 9/11.

Just as Hedges consigns to outer darkness the benighted souls who read Tim LaHaye and listen faithfully to James Dobson—there's no point in talking to those folks—so D'Souza ridicules conservatives who "attempt to persuade leftists to wake up to the threat of the radical Muslims and join a united American war on terror." Waste time trying to find common cause with leftists? How absurd. No, we should ally ourselves with "traditional Muslims" (presumably of the sort who find congenial Qutb's violent denunciations of American society at the middle of the 20th century).

Perhaps it's time to acknowledge that talk of extremists and zealots is mostly hot air. Is Hedges an extremist? Is D'Souza a zealot? Not at all. Both are products of the American center, and unless—God forbid—a truck runs them over, we can expect a steady stream of books continuing from both. What a great country this is.

John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture.

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