Whether or not the culture war is history, one of its more colorful rhetorical excesses appears to have been retired on September 11. We haven’t heard much lately about the Republican party’s “Taliban wing.” Back in the heady days of impeachment, this was liberal shorthand for the puritanical hordes so ultra as to call for removing a president who had disgraced his office. Dana Milbank in the New Republic fulminated about the “Jihad Republicans” in Congress who would lead the country toward “military theocracy.” Eleanor Clift of Newsweek warned of the fanatics of the “Taliban wing…who are willing to sit in a cold firehouse all weekend to make sure they get their person on the school board.” David Warsh of the Boston Globe applied the label to a full two-thirds of the GOP social conservatives plus economic libertarians. Such hysteria is hard to sustain. (The Taliban, you remember, not only protects terrorists who murder Americans but has installed in Afghanistan a primitive religious state that bars females from education and work outside the home, destroys ancient works of art, reserves the right to execute missionaries, and, according to Amnesty International, enforces its rule with stonings, floggings, amputations, and public executions. Even so radioactive a symbol of right-wingery as Phyllis Schlafly–who during World War II worked her way through college test-firing weapons; who holds a master’s degree from Harvard and got a law degree in her fifties and is the author of 16 books–doesn’t quite have this in mind.) So the phrase largely fell into disuse in the waning days of the decade. Then last winter it got a new lease on life. Mere weeks into the Bush administration, NAACP board chairman Julian Bond delivered himself of a remarkably repellent bit of hate speech. “Instead of uniting us,” Bond told his organization’s annual convention, “the new administration almost daily separates and divides. They selected nominees from the Taliban wing of American politics, appeased the wretched appetites of the extreme right wing and chose Cabinet officials whose devotion to the Confederacy is nearly canine in its uncritical affection.” Well, Bond isn’t talking like that anymore. He recently sent a letter to NAACP members and supporters calling Rudy Giuliani “valiant” and applauding the firefighters’ “heroism.” He actually praised George W. Bush (though only for going to a mosque). On the NAACP website, over a patriotic “Message of Resolve!,” the flag is flying. For the time being, then, the “Taliban” slander is altogether out of fashion. Enjoy the lull while it lasts. To borrow a line from Bond’s letter, “We recoil at how quickly a few yield to mindless prejudice.” Claudia Winkler is a managing editor at The Weekly Standard.
