Sulky Sullivan
JONAH GOLDBERG
I’m asked few questions more than “What happened to Andrew Sullivan?”
Why did one of the clearest conservative voices after 9/11 go so far off his feed? In 2001, Sullivan spoke passionately against the fetid moral equivalence that saw no difference between Islamism and an America rightfully aroused to defend itself. President Bush was once the right man at the right time. Today, he’s the idiot-savant godhead to a fanatical cult of “Christianists” — indistinguishable from Islamists in the ways that matter — who may have already established a “thinly veiled military dictatorship” in the United States. Once a voice of restraint and reason, Sullivan now specializes in shrill panic: mercurial ranting full of operatic arguments, steeped in bad faith, aimed at people he once praised (including yours truly). Agreement with Sullivan bespeaks courageous enlightenment, disagreement advertises that you are a knave or ideological lickspittle.
There are many theories about what “happened” to Sullivan. They vary wildly in charity. But it’s fair to say that for many conservatives, Sullivan has become the intellectual equivalent of a write-off. He has not quite reached Kevin Phillips or John Dean territory — where only the New York Times takes it on faith that he is a conservative — but for many conservatives the chaff long ago swamped the wheat. Which is why most conservatives won’t buy, or read, his book; it will instead be read and lionized by liberals eager to paint Sullivan as a maverick-martyr to a “real” conservatism that has never existed, and could never exist, in the U.S.
To a certain extent, this is a shame, because the book has merits: It’s often elegantly written, and contains moments of impressive lucidity. Many conservatives — particularly younger ones with a shallow appreciation of the important distinctions between conservatism and Republican politics — could benefit from reading the best parts. Self-described members of the Christian Right could also stand to take a swig or two from Sullivan’s tonic. Though there should be a warning label: Don’t gulp too much, because beyond small doses The Conservative Soul transmogrifies from tonic to snake oil.
According to Sullivan, the benighted American Right has misplaced the epistemological savoir-faire that comes with skepticism. We’ve lost the sense that we are fallible, that God’s will is never truly known. Conservatism has become shot through with a theological and political absolutism he calls fundamentalism, theoconservatism, and sometimes “Christianism.” To demonstrate this, he unleashes the usual parade of horribles one can find in dozens of left-wing polemics: Pat Robertson, James Dobson, et al. He pastes these bits and pieces of flesh upon a grand effigy, a towering straw man he calls American conservatism.
The Conservative Soul is something of an homage to Sullivan’s second favorite thinker, political philosopher Michael Oakeshott (his favorite: Andrew Sullivan). Oakeshott was a brilliant advocate for a small-c conservatism of temperament, one that placed trust in institutions, trial-and-error, and muddling-through without iron-clad dogma. This was hardly a unique contribution. Burke, Hayek, and Kirk all made similar or related arguments — indeed, Kirk liked to quote H. Stuart Hughes’s aphorism that “conservatism is the negation of ideology.” But Sullivan loves Oakeshott’s emphasis that we cannot rely on books and theories to guide us. One cannot walk upright as a human being while constantly looking down to read a book, goes the Oakeshottian line.
One of the things that lent panache to Sullivan’s writings is that he has something of an outsider’s perspective (cultivated to a high sheen). A gay, Catholic, British expat who was the in-house conservative at The New Republic, Sullivan often has a certain visitor-from-Mars credibility. Because he sees things from outside, his approach can be the source of fresh and interesting observations. But it can also be the source of much silliness. A visiting Martian might spot some underappreciated social dynamics; he also might think humans are slaves to dogs because we pick up their scat.
Sullivan sees religiously motivated political activists running around Washington and a president — “the most powerful Christian fundamentalist in the world” — fighting a war against a demonized enemy and thinks that because he has never seen such a thing before it must be unprecedented. “Until recently,” Sullivan writes, “American evangelicalism tended to keep some distance from government power.” Many on the left work from a similar assumption. All of them would be well served by studying the “Christianist” roots of American Progressivism, which make President Bush’s compassionate conservatism seem like the weekend hobby of a lapsed Unitarian. Woodrow Wilson proclaimed that every public servant must make Jesus his model, telling one youth group, “There is a mighty task before us and it welds us together. It is to make the United States a mighty Christian Nation, and to Christianize the world.”
What makes this history especially ironic is that Sullivan’s own project is basically Progressive. To understand why this is so, we must examine his argument in detail. Sullivan holds that “fundamentalism” — a term that includes the pope, most Republicans, the Taliban, and tens of millions of ordinary Americans — is sinful, inorganic, and an illness of the mind. In this, Sullivan sounds very much like self-parodying liberal Anthony Lewis, who has explained that the primary lesson of his career is that “certainty is the enemy of decency and humanity in people who are sure they are right, like Osama bin Laden and John Ashcroft.” Of this principle, both Sullivan and Lewis are as certain as any “Christianist” is about the Resurrection.
The fact that evil is rarely defeated by people who are unsure they are right is lost on Sullivan. FDR was certain we needed to defeat Hitler; the civil-rights movement, too, was driven by religious certainty. Were FDR and Martin Luther King enemies of decency and humanity? Please.
Obviously, Sullivan would object to this because he believes nothing if not the moral superiority of his own position. But how to determine moral superiority? To answer this question, Sullivan takes us through feats of rhetorical prestidigitation — with his magician’s assistants Oakeshott and Montaigne. At the end of the magic show we are left with the assertion that conscience, rooted in every manner of skepticism, is our only guide. Fundamentalist “diktats” from the pope or The 700 Club are ultimately forms of spiritual oppression. The individual can either be guided by conscience or slavishly submit to fundamentalist overlords. If the former, you are like Sullivan himself, a decent person bravely struggling to reconcile the world with your beliefs. If the latter, you’ve outsourced your humanity to a bunch of priests and preachers.
There are many rooms in this mansion of nonsense. Sullivan, for example, dismisses the possibility that “fundamentalists” actually do grapple with their consciences — because such a concession would explode the entire book. So, the question “What Would Jesus Do?” is one that is never seriously asked by anyone Sullivan calls a fundamentalist. Judging from the “fundamentalists” I know, this smacks of pure bigotry. Also, Sullivan would have us believe in an either/or choice: conscience or fundamentalist servitude. This is a false choice, one not found in American conservatism. Conscience is important, but conscience must be informed — not dictated to — by institutions, religion, tradition, and, of course, reason.
Which brings us to Progressivism. The Progressive ideology was born of Pragmatism — the idea that truths are subjective, and measured by their utility. Pragmatism, explained Horace Kallen in a proclamation Sullivan could have written, “dissolves dogmas into beliefs, eternities and necessities into change and chance, conclusions and finalities into processes. But men have invented philosophy precisely because they find change, chance and process too much for them, and desire infallible security and certainty.” But, for these early liberals, Pragmatism was a one-way street: a tool for destroying the dogma of the enemy, while enshrining their own unimpeachable authority. Certainty wasn’t the real enemy. The forces of certainty standing in progress’s path were.
Oakeshott stood against this sort of corrosive rationalism, famously denouncing “the pursuit of perfection as the crow flies.” Sullivan turns Oakeshott’s reverence for tradition and custom on its head: He enthrones the all-justifying righteousness of conscience, in particular his own, in a moral pragmatism that says that orthodoxies have no binding authority. Pragmatism was built on the arrogance of intellectuals who believed they were smarter than anyone who lived before; Sullivan’s divinization of conscience performs a similar task, with similar vanity. He dedicates page after page to illuminating the grandest mysteries of existence with the only lantern Sullivan trusts: his own conscience. Without this, we would all be lost. Indeed, he seems to believe that his own intense internal struggles (Sullivan always wins these fights, by the way) are mirrored in the struggles of the Republican party — indeed, the nation itself. The cover of the book depicts two elephants tied at the tail, presumably fighting for the soul of conservatism. This is, among other things, evidence of an enormous category error in which Sullivan endeavors to make the conservative temperament the foundation of a political program.
And it is here that the mansion of nonsense most obviously implodes. The notion that certainty is at odds with a just constitutional order, decency, and All Good Things founders on Sullivan’s own hypocrisy. Not only is it a Monty Pythonesque absurdity to imagine a serious political movement founded on such bumper-sticker slogans as “We’re not sure!” and “Hey, hey, ho, ho, certainty has got to go!” Sullivan himself proves that a politics based solely on one’s own glorious conscience is just as capable of the sort of rigid, moralistic, self-righteous preening and us-versus-them logic that Sullivan’s conservatism of doubt claims to stand against.
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