No less troubling is the almost glowing tone in which anti-liberal conservatives often write about the Taliban. Take Hazony’s August 19 tweet linking to a Tablet article by Lee Smith which argues that it was the Taliban’s “group solidarity”—and America’s lack of same—that led to America’s failure. “Cohesion is what the Taliban have. Cohesion is what America has lost. That’s why the Taliban won the war,” Hazony’s wrote.

Smith’s essay has some valid criticisms of the American progressive “elites’” embrace of divisive ideologies. But let’s face it: authoritarian/totalitarian movements based on religious or ideological fanaticism are always going to have more “cohesion” or “group solidarity” than liberal democracies, if only because they have no compunction about terrorizing solidarity-deficient members of the group into submission or killing them if they still refuse to get back in line. When you start to sound like a fanboy about the Taliban’s “cohesion,” perhaps it’s time to step back and reassess your position. (Here, the famous @dril tweet comes to mind about “issuing [a] correction” on a post about ISIS: “you do not, under any circumstances, ‘gotta hand it to them.’”)

Hazony is hardly alone. Here, for instance, is liberalism’s foremost critic Sohrab Amari sounding positively euphoric about the defeat of “liberal aspiration” in Afghanistan and about its presumed helplessness in Iran…