Andrew Sullivan: Defining Conservatism Down

Andrew Sullivan fancies himself a rarefied conservative, elevated far above the more instinctual conservative voters of America. Unfortunately, he’s a fraud. In particular, his recent paeans to the “conservatism of doubt” are, quite frankly, unmitigated bullshit.

Sullivan writes, among other things, “Doubt-based conservatism, in other words, is not just Burkean and English. It is Madisonian and American. This reckless era of big government fundamentalism is exactly the time to recover and celebrate it.”

In his discussion, Sullivan ignores the American tradition of energetic local governments, replete with various morals legislation and other non-libertarian features, including numerous established Churches at the state level at the time of the Founding. (See, e.g., M. Stanton Evans’ “The Theme is Freedom” for more on this point.)

The founders had no doubt we were a Christian nation. True, they did not want any particular denomination to take the reigns of the state, whether it be a High Church Anglicanism, a recreation of Oliver Cromwell, or, worst of all in their eyes, Catholicism. But at a local level, government-supported Churches, oath requirements, and religiously-inspired schools were the norm, as were other aspects of government based on moral commitments rather than thorough-going “doubt.” The Founders believed that it was a very different matter when a local government made a law than if the same law came from the federal government. One could easily flee a local law, if that law was intolerable. As government becomes more local, it becomes less and less a type of government. Particularly in small towns, it is more like a club or a family.

More important, until very recently, Christian principles informed the laws at every level of government, e.g., bans on polygamy, blue laws, rights against self-incrimination (to prevent the temptation to make a false oath). Christian arguments were employed both to attack and to defend slavery. Christianity was the idiomatic American mode of discussing moral and social issues, whether that issue was prohibition or free trade.

All but a few radicals believed that the laws should recognize the nation’s Christian culture and its Christian majority. Certainly no one presume that the lack of a national, government-supported Church mandated the militant secularism seen in Revolutionary France and its progeny in Latin America and Continental Europe.

Sullivan’s confusion about secularism and the First Amendment leads to his hair-brained assaults on so-called Christianists. It’s true, some Evangelical Christians may be crude in their beliefs, not quite well read in the Constitution, ridiculously messianic in their treatment of Israel, and inclined towards other types of radicalism. But they are not the Taliban; their aims are chiefly defensive. Sullivan’s attacks on radical “Christianists” miss something important about cause and effect: right-wing Christians’ views are a reaction to an assault on their way of life by liberal political radicals, which is exacerbated by their disempowerment by Sullivan’s beloved judiciary. Their reaction is healthy and normal and predictable. But Sullivan and his ideological brethren only see hate in this defensive posture. Any normal person in any other era in history, whose mind is not warped by liberalism, would see this defensiveness and radicalization as a natural reaction to radical change imposed from hostile forces.

Rules on abortion, gay marriage, and mandatory prayer in schools have been given uniform treatment by courts from which there is no recourse, and thus important decisions about a collective “way of life” are being made for a Christian majority that they cannot influence. The attacks upon and disempowerment of Christians by media, academic, and political elites inclines them towards a right-wing reactionary position. In particular, the deliberate attempt to change the values of their children through public education and a constant drum-beat of propaganda is deeply offensive to normal people, not least because the values being imposed lead to individual and social dysfunction.

Sullivan betrays his lack of conservatism when he writes, “I am a conservative in politics so I – and anyone else – can be a radical in every other activity, if we so choose.” It’s true, an American conservative’s natural small-government politics allows a significant amount of experimentation and individual autonomy, particularly through protections of property rights and voluntary associations.

But the point of the conservative defense of our inherited liberties is not indifference to established mores and values; the point is to prevent any radical group from attacking those values through centralized power coupled with a penchant for social engineering. The point is to allow tradition to persist naturally, while also allowing ways of life to evolve through the self-balancing and decentralized mechanisms of federalism, the market, individualism, private social pressure, tolerance, family life, and the hard school of experience.

This organic system recognizes that the laws and customs of San Francisco will always be different from those in North Dakota, and that both groups will be better off if they each develop laws and institutions that conform to their values. That was the point, incidentally, of the Defense of Marriage Act, which prevents radicals in the courts of Massachusetts from empowering gay “married” couples to impose their values on Alabama or Texas or other normal parts of America simply by moving there. Sullivan, of course, has no regard for any local tradition or law that does not conform to his handy-dandy-egalitarian-pro-gay-marriage-slide-rule-kit.

Sullivan engages in a “bait and switch” technique by equating his social radicalism and political libertarianism with conservatism. Conservatives respect tradition, religion, localism, and inequality as important aspects of the way things are and should be. Sullivan has no respect for any of these things. Sullivan also rightly notes that the Constitution is conservative in its transmission of British political principles of divided power. But he betrays his radical core by assuming our way of life (i.e., what conservatives aim to conserve) can be encapsulated in that document.

Our way of life—our jobs, our marriages, our churches, our beliefs, our values, our local ordinances, our schools, our habits, how we spend our money, how we speak, who we spend our time with, what we believe is right and wrong and natural, what we want to teach—are much more broader than the realm of politics, and these things only have become explicitly political by the encroachments of liberalism, which sees these realms of discrimination and “private oppression” as worthy subjects of political control under the rubrics of equality and liberation. A true conservative knows that our political liberty depends on certain internal and informal chains imposed by opinion, self-respect, religion, conscience, and other parts of life that are not political, but that have political consequences.

Sullivan is a fraud. He shows none of his supposed skepticism when he was “euphoric” over Iraqi elections. Nor have his doubts been evident when he has confronted the various liberal assaults on organized religion, our ethnic and cultural make-up, basic sexual morality, or other features of our times.

Sullivan’s claim to fame is his putative conservatism combined with his notorious homosexuality. He’s a curiosity, at best. Without the combination, he’d be an uninteresting and predictable liberal foreign policy observer. So, he maintains the conservative identity, but tries to subvert conservatism from within, defining it to match whatever flavor-of-the-month viewpoint he happens to be peddling today and using the language of conservatism to consolidate the gains of earlier radicals.

Sullivan forgets that conservatism is ultimately a certain view about change. It might in one circumstance demand more government, in another, less. Its touchstone is not whether any particular political or social custom conforms to an abstract principle like Free Markets, Secularism, or Small Government. Its touchstone is respect for tradition, which is itself the expression of a certain kind of humility. A traditionalist conservative recognizes that things may be imperfect and somewhat inconsistent for reasons that we cannot even fathom. For this reason, he is way about change. The risk of change, the possibility of irreversible damage, leads the conservative to worry more about defending his inheritance than achieving the promised, but rarely realized, utopia that will come with liberal “progress.” We are instead to hold on to what we have received from our forbears dearly, forgoing the illusory prospects of improvement.

Remember what Burke said:

We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made in morality, nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born, altogether as well as they will be after the grace has heaped its mold upon our presumption and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert loquacity.

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