PLURALISM AND FAITHsurveillance states. New patterns of surveillance can easily be installed. But every time you
make progress on one front without addressing Muslim grievances abroad and at home,
new holes, cracks, border porosities, and potential targets automatically emerge elsewhere.
If the border between the U.S. and Mexico is secured, that between it and Canada be-
comes more porous; if air travel is tightened, the food-supply system, trains, the computer
network, and urban targets of dirty bombs become available. Airport surveillance, In-
ternet filters, passport-tracking devices, legal detention without criminal charges, security
internment camps, secret trials, ‘‘free speech zones,’’ DNA profiles, border walls and
fences, erosion of the line between internal security and external military action, and
translation of large sections of the electronic news media into embedded conduits of mass
mobilization—these security activities resonate together, engendering a national-security
machine that pushes numerous issues outside the range of legitimate dissent and mobi-
lizes the populace to provide abstract readiness to support new security and surveillance
practices against under-specified enemies.
Bennett is a publicist who has lost touch with subtle elements in the thought of the
master who inspires him, even as he applies the master’s rhetoric of relativism, rootless-
ness, self-indulgence, misguided tolerance, and superficiality against Democrats, liberals,
and pluralists in his own state.
A Special Minority
Strauss is insightful about the predicament of Jews in Europe before the Second World
War. He sees that prewar, secular responses to Judaism promoted legal equality without
becoming deeply embedded in public culture. Judgments about who belongs and does
not belong are not inscribed in law alone. They also reside in the daily practices of the
majority, in how it responds in public places, the workplace, the stage, in commercial life,
at dinner parties, in the courtroom, at the police station, and so on. Strauss quotes
Theodor Herzl, who said, ‘‘We are a nation—the enemy makes us a nation whether we
like it or not.’’^20 The enemy defined Jews as a nonterritorial nation within a territorial
state, guaranteeing in so doing that Jews would be treated as a special minority unlike
other minorities. Strauss does not think that early Zionism was capable of resolving ‘‘the
Jewish problem’’ either.
It is not clear to me how Strauss would extrapolate from these insights today. But the
condition of the Jew in Europe prior to the Second World War parallels in one respect
the condition of Muslims in Europe and the United States today. There are differences.
The Muslim minority here and now, unlike the Jewish minority there and then, has
another region to turn to, where its faith is in charge. The similarity, however, is that
many Europeans and Americans today define Muslims as a special minority, as the minor-
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