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A THINKING CONSERVATIVE
Several months ago, comedian Sill Maher hosted one of his typ
ically implausible panels on “Real Time." The cast included Salman
Rushdie, Ben Affleck and writer and blogger Andrew Sullivan. While
Rushdie was soft-spoken and Affleck proved smarter than "South
Park" would have you believe, it was the token conservative that
unsuspecting viewers might've gotten confused for the Angry
Liberal. So inflamed was he about the current administration's po
sitions on torture, Iraq and gay marriage, he preempted any sort of
left-right shout downs.
Sullivan was one of a small core of early bloggers who posted
before blogs became a constituency unto themselves. Sullivan is a
gay. Catholic conservative and British ex-pat, so he's got plenty of
material. Adding to this bag is his two-year-long transition from a
Bush supporter, especially on Iraq, to one of his angriest critics.
Sullivan used to write for The New York Times Magazine; he also
edited The New Republic, where he still contributes. The man is
nothing if not prolific. Scratch that. The man is nothing if not pro
lific and a very skilled polemicist His new book, The Conservative
Soul: How We Lost It, How To Get
It Back (HarperCollins, New York,
2006), bears that out more than
readers of his blog, “The Da ;, .y
Dish," might imagine. For one
thing, it's not about blogging
and how bloggers are Changing
The Media/ Democratic Party/
The World. Rather, this is a per
sonal book of political philosophy,
grounded in previous thinkers,
contextualized to the present mo
ment. It's feisty and at times fun
and remarkably readable.
Much of the book is spent mak
ing the case for what Sullivan calls
a “conservatism of doubt." This de
clining political strain is uncomfortable with ideological certainty
that pops up everywhere from the pulpits of mega churches and
mosques, to the editorial board of The Weekly Standard. Any move
ment that boasts its ideas will surely change the world should be
suspect, our author notes, and illustrates at length in a variety of
different contexts.
Conservatives still loyal to the Bush administration and
its "with us or against us" mores, will have a tough time with
Sullivan's political resume. He supported Clinton in '92, Bush in '00
and Kerry in '04. A flip-fTopper? Not as he sees it: more of a free
thinker and surely a walking testament to the rightward tilt in the
political center, at least as far as the economy and foreign policy
goes. Liberals, on the other hand, will surely bristle at Sullivan's
occasionally smug support for globalization and anti-unionism of
the Thatcher-Reagan school. But this very same camp will have a
blast with his dissection of social conservative teaching on sexu
ality. Because, really, who better than a gay Catholic steeped in
conservative political and Christian theology to dismantle its own
dogma?
Specifically, Sullivan devotes many delightful pages puncturing,
nay, body-slamming Catholic "natural law" philosophy, which seeks
to find in the natural world a proof positive that human nature
is indeed synonymous with conservative edicts on sexuality. "The
very existence of the clitoris is therefore a living rebuke to those
who argue that nature—way our bodies have been constructed—
dictates a certain and necessarily procreative sexual morality."
On fundamentalist art, he's equally delightful. A brief takedown
of Mel Gibson's The Passion of The Christ illustrates as efficiently as
any blog or film review, how fundie art serves one exclusive, anti
intellectual goal. "...All the richness and subtlety and grace of
centuries of Christian art is literally hammered into an inarguable,
uncontestable demand that the viewer be emotionally brutalized
into the sublime self-surrender of the fundamentalist faith."
Because he's so clearly capable of much nuanced analysis,
when Sullivan delves into disingenuous or intellectually lazy asser
tions, it's painfully obvious. For example, one need not be a fan of
academic leftists to dispute Sullivan's contention that this entire
professional class believes the only moral absolute is a woman's
right to abort a fetus. Fortunately these kind of barbs are few and
far between. It's clear that while America isn't necessarily em
bracing Sullivan's "conservatism of doubt," it is rejecting one of
“certainty." That's the certainty of a “decider" whose rhetoric does
not keep pace with the competence of his administration in mak
ing things on the qround, be it hurricane relief or Humvee armor
in Iraq, actually work. Political campaigns can't be constructed on
the premise of doubt, but surely many conservatives might wish,
if only in private, that their Great Decider had spent more time
douoting and less time swaggering.
andrew
Sullivan
John Dicker
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