Andrew Sullivan’s Conservative Soul

March 28th, 2007 Posted in Conservatism, Skepticism

An accurate and in some places devastating critique of Andrew Sullivan’s career of fickle naiveté:

What is baffling is why such an ardent disciple of Oakeshott came to sign himself up for the Bush program in the first place—a decision that Sullivan now says he finds “more than a little worrying.” For, from the moment of its declaration, the “war on terror” (”this crusade,” as Bush then defined it), by committing the United States to an indefinite future of hostilities against a shadowy and shape-shifting enemy, had all the hallmarks of one of Oakeshott’s most deluded Rationalist projects. Yet even as Osama bin Laden morphed into Saddam Hussein, and Paul Wolfowitz unrolled his great plan for the democratization of the Middle East by force of arms, Sullivan was a raucous cheerleader for the administration.

I have to admit Sullivan’s blog is now my favorite — perhaps because I like the prolonged mea culpa of someone who (in Raban’s words) “shilled” so long for the right. Perhaps because he’s just such a personable fellow, willing to tell you what’s on his mind and change it, a quintessential blogger. I can’t, on the other hand, get through Sullivan’s book, in which “conservatism” is defined arbitrarily as skepticism and fallibilism. According to Raban, this skepticism is really just a rationalization of fickle passions:

This may explain Sullivan’s painful about-face on the liberal-imperialist conquest of Iraq, but hardly excuses it. It is a self-serving conceit to claim, as he does, that in the days leading up to the invasion, all decent people (excluding the aforementioned nihilists and traitors) were in the same boat, equally misled by what later proved to be defective intelligence on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction

Montaigne’s remarks on the infinite depth of human fallibility were not meant as a license to embrace the one-day inspiration only to reject it as “the dumbest thing on earth” when it turns out badly.

Petty consistency is not a hobgoblin that troubles Andrew Sullivan’s mind, and he likes to chalk up his inconsistency to his conservatism, because it is a hallmark of the pragmatic conservative to know himself to be frequently mistaken.

Ouch on all counts. And Sullivan’s inconsistencies are the Republican party’s, according to Raban:

Yet in its exposure of the contra-dictions entailed in being Andrew Sullivan, The Conservative Soul rather brilliantly exposes the contradictions of the Republican Party as it is today. If two randomly selected voters who supported Bush in 2000 and 2004 were to be sat in a room and asked to unpack the contents of their heads, each would likely be appalled by the entrenched beliefs of the other. The worldviews of the Christian fundamentalist, the project-driven neoconservative theorist, and the small-government free-marketeer are, as Sullivan shows, dramatically incompatible on both religious and philosophical grounds.

These things may have more in common than they seem to at first blush.