then moves on to the usual broadsides against “fundamentalists” and an attempt to claim Ronald Reagan for the “conservatives of doubt.” (Christie Todd Whitman, I’ll give him.)

“Advocates for government restraint cannot, in good conscience, keep supporting a party that believes in its own God-given mission to change people’s souls.” I’ve got to start reading those platforms more carefully—I somehow missed that.

He closes with what I don’t think he intends to be a smear but will surely be taken as such by many: “If we are fighting such a conservatism of faith abroad–and that is the core of the war on Islamist terrorism–then why should it be so hard to confront it in much milder forms at home?” But Sullivan has at least as much in common with the Islamists as religious conservatives do. Like the Islamists, he thinks that belief in an objective moral order is incompatible with freedom. They’re wrong.