NY Mag: Andrew Sullivan’s “The Conservative Soul”
Though he calls himself a Catholic, his crisis of conscience, his insistence on the primacy of his personal experience, always has a Protestant ring.
The Conservative Soul is really a kind of bildungsroman of Sullivan in the 9/11 years. For Sullivan, as for so many people, the attack on the towers was a Great Awakening, one that roused the absolutist within. On his blog, he became a poet of outrage, a fiery cheerleader for the war in Iraq, and a fierce attacker of his ideological enemies, searching for doctrinal deviation, barking loudly when he discovered it, dismissing those with whom he disagreed. But his absolutism has dissolved in the past five years—just as it had when he was a schoolboy—and the book contains a mea culpa for his excesses (“In retrospect I find the absolute certainty of my position at the time more than a little worrying,” he writes, before embarking on an exegesis of Bush’s wartime conduct that would warm Howard Dean’s heart).
The political philosophy Sullivan espouses in The Conservative Soul is chastened, based on doubt (as in, say, doubt that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction), desiccated by design. He means to make government a dismal science, so people won’t love it too much. Tradition, he writes, using a metaphor from Michael Oakeshott, the British conservative philosopher about whom he wrote his Ph.D. thesis, is the placement of the pool balls on the table—not exactly a shining city on the hill, or even Mom and apple pie. And Sullivan largely forgoes policy prescription, leaving it up to “political actors, not writers,” in what is liable to be a very short-lived resolution.
.. Sullivan’s conservatism is not a creed anyone currently calling himself a conservative is likely to follow. (Continuing an argument begun in Virtually Normal, Sullivan’s important book on gay rights, he insists that same-sex marriage can come to seem a conservative position. Next up: universal health care?) Which is not to say that he won’t have allies. A humble, ameliorative, tolerant politics of modest ambitions, based on a clear-eyed view of the dangers in the world and pragmatic notions of what can and can’t be accomplished, is what a lot of Democrats now aspire to. The political rhetoric of the past five years seems exhausted, not least on his own blog. He recently announced that he found himself in uneasy alliance with Markos Moulitsas, who, as the Kos behind Daily Kos, has been a favorite target. Both, he says, are approaching libertarianism, but from opposite directions—Goldwater Democrats, he calls them. So the lion lies down with the lamb. Surely some kind of end-time is approaching.