Community Values

I'm just old enough and haute enough to have been taught that middle-class liberals were all that stood between democracy and Orwellian tyranny. Suspected as fascists in utero was the "uneducated lower middle class," which sought stability in things like unions (and possibly the Communist Party), and teen-agers, who were susceptible to silly trends and thus would be easy pickings for charismatic authority figures.

With the end of the cold war, the true believer as bourgeois folk demon fell into disuse like an action figure from last summer's blockbuster. Since September 11, however, true-believerism has been staging a comeback as experts falter in explaining the mindset of the terrorists: They are desperate men from oppressed and dispossessed nations with nothing to live for. They are "fundamentalists" who believe that God sanctions their deeds. They are in the thrall of a charismatic leader. They are insane.

This child of the 1970s has heard this before (see: Iranian revolutionaries, the Baader-Meinhof gang, the People's Temple). In fact, Westerners, Americans especially, have not made peace with the moment when our great romance with utopianism went sour, when some communities of high principle violated their own precepts and harmed their own members or outsiders.

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