Lynne Cheney vs. liberalism
Nick Bromell reminisces about his friendship with Scooter Libby in the latest American Scholar, and criticizes Lynne Cheney’s fundamentalist mindset while defining his own liberalism:
Like Judge Learned Hand, I believe that “the spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.” In short, I am a liberal by temperament, and Cheney is a fundamentalist.A liberal, as I use the term, is someone who never gives up trying to see the other person’s point of view. A liberal never stops doubting himself, for self-doubt is precisely what allow us to make room in our minds for someone else’s views and to keep the possibility of communication between us alive. A fundamentalist, on the other hand, is someone to whom the very idea of point of view is immaterial, or worse—the foundation of relativism. A warrior who pledges fealty to the god of one Truth, a fundamentalist searches for personal conviction, not mutual understanding. So she regards skepticisms as apostasy, hesitations as heresy, and doubts as moral turpitude.