It is highly significant that two words terrify polite society today: radical and fundamentalist. You can be on the right, but not on the radical right. You can be a Christian, but not a fundamentalist Christian.
 
The two words mean the same thing. Radical comes from Latin radix, meaning “root.” Fundamentalist comes from Latin fundus, meaning “bottom.” The worst thing today is having unshakable conviction all the way down.
 
The implication is that you can be what you want, as long as you don’t take it seriously—as long as you’re not consistent about it. If you’re a gap year communist, that’s fine. It’s when you become Lenin that you’re looking at jail. You can believe in hierarchy and tradition. But when you start actually restoring settlements earlier than liberal modernity, you’re in trouble.
 
At a deeper level, modernity is terrified of downward-oriented things. If you have roots, or if you are a foundationalist, that’s not OK. Where this is leading is that liberalism simply cannot brook anything that is not itself. Any worldview whose foundations lie outside liberal modernity, any worldview that is not an outgrowth of it, is The Greatest Evil in History, and no stone can be left unturned in eradicating its existence.
 
The cardinal sin of modernity is having a space that is not for all. The fundamentalist and the radical create that space. So they must be destroyed.

—Mike