105
" Sharia law uses the sacred texts of Islam as the basis for moral behavior, the way Jews are supposed to use the Talmud and Christians the Bible—and, in Muslim countries, it uses the Quran explicitly as the basis for legal codes. Just before we elected our forty-fourth non-Muslim president in a row, people on the right began fantasizing that American Muslims were scheming to supplant U.S. jurisprudence with Islamic jurisprudence. The definitive text is a 2010 book called Shariah: The Threat to America. Its nineteen authors included respectable hard-right conservatives and national security wonks. We’re “infiltrated and deeply influenced,” the book says, “by an enemy within that is openly determined to replace the U.S. Constitution with shariah.” The movement took off, and in short order the specter of sharia became a right-wing catchphrase encompassing suspicion of almost any Islamic involvement in the U.S. civic sphere. The word gave Islamophobia a patina of legitimacy. It was a specific fantasy—not I hate Muslims or I hate Arabs but rather I don’t want to live under Taliban law, and therefore it could pass as not racist but anti-tyranny. It was also a shiny new exotic term, a word nobody in America but a few intellectuals knew. "
― Kurt Andersen , Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
116
" Extreme religious and quasi-religious beliefs and practices, Christian and New Age and otherwise, didn’t subside but grew and thrived—and came to seem unexceptional. Relativism, the idea that nothing is any more correct or true than anything else, became entrenched in academia—tenured, you could say. But it was by no means limited to the ivory tower. The intellectuals’ new outlook was as much a symptom as a cause of the smog of subjectivity that now hung thick over the whole American mindscape. After the 1960s, truth was relative, and criticizing became equal to victimizing, and individual liberty absolute, and everyone was permitted to believe or disbelieve whatever they wished. The distinction between opinion and fact was crumbling on many fronts. As the conservative elite positioned itself as the defenders of rigor against the onslaught of relativism, its members preferred to ignore the unwashed masses on their side, the reactionary hoi polloi activated by America’s extreme new believe-whatever-you-want MO. Anti-Establishment relativism had erupted on the left, but it gave license to everyone—in particular, to the far right and in the Christian fever swamps. "
― Kurt Andersen , Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
117
" Very few people I knew voted for Reagan, but given that he didn't do anything crazy and started making peace with the Soviet Union, affluent college-educated people, liberals and otherwise, didn't disagree very ferociously about politics in the 1980s and '90s, and certainly not about economics. In retrospect, that rough consensus looks like the beginning of an unspoken class solidarity among the bourgeoisie--nearly everyone suspicious of economic populism, but some among us, the Republicans, more suspicious that the rest. Affluent college-educated people, Democrats as well as Republicans, began using the phrase socially liberal but fiscally conservative to describe their politics, which meant low taxes in return for tolerance of ...whatever, as long it didn't cost affluent people anything. It was a libertarianism lite that kept everything nice and clubbable and, unlike Republican conservatism, at least had the virtue of ideological consistency. "
― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America