Confessions of a gadfly conservative

THE CONSERVATIVE SOUL: HOW WE LOST IT, HOW TO GET IT BACK

By Andrew Sullivan HarperCollins, 294 pages, $25,95

Andrew Sullivan wants to pick a fight. I hope he gets one, even if I suppose most "theo-conservatives" will simply ignore his book. In any case, The Conservative Soul is an elegant account of one person's estrangement from the contemporary Republican Party and a step toward the reclamation of conservative politics for a more moderate crowd--a task made more urgent by the recent midterm elections.

Andrew Sullivan is a blogger and journalist, perhaps best known as a gay Catholic conservative. His heterodox background has led him to support gay marriage and social security privatization, George Bush and John Kerry. He has been a supporter of the Iraq war as well as a critic of it. What some might regard as "flip-flopping," Mr. Sullivan argues is a prudence-driven response to changing contexts.

Want certainty in politics? Join any one of the movements--communism, liberalism, all sorts of religious fundamentalisms--that Mr. Sullivan critiques. He'll stick with his own brand of conservatism: "Its essence is an acceptance of the unknowability of ultimate truth ... and an embrace of the discrepancy between theoretical and practical knowledge." Instead of trying to implement God's kingdom here on earth, the Sullivan-style conservative "takes society as it is and adjusts it from time to time as circumstances seem to require."

The Conservative Soul contrasts this conservatism with the "fundamentalist psyche" Mr. Sullivan argues has overtaken the Republican Party. In his view, fundamentalist religions become all-encompassing ideologies offering believers relief from doubt while stifling individual thought. By way of elaboration, the author moves from Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" to Islamic fundamentalism to the Left Behind books to Rick Santorum to Catholic natural law theorists. These forms of fundamentalism stress perfection, divine truth, the re-creation of humanity through salvation, and a fear that other groups in society are a threat to their existence. It's not so much what these theorists argue that infuriates the author, but, rather, the way they argue it--there is no room for discussion in this world of absolute goods. For Mr. Sullivan, this is "theo-conservatism," not Christian moral reasoning.

The author describes George Bush's election as a magical moment for Christian fundamentalists and goes on to discuss the massive expansion of government programs and powers under the current president as well as the now-floundering war in Iraq. According to Mr. Sullivan, the administration has been lost in a fog of an "ideologically driven hallucination," leading to" intransigent recklessness." Mr. Sullivan should be commended for confronting his own position on the war, of which he was an early supporter. At the same time, a mea culpa after the bombs have been dropped is not as useful as would have been a healthy skepticism of the administration's claims several years ago.

Mr. Sullivan ends by laying out his purposefully limited political vision. Drawing on Plato, Montaigne, Thomas Hobbes and Michael Oakeshott, Mr. Sullivan argues that his conservatism is "conversational" rather than authoritarian, premised in doing rather than asserting, rejects meta-narratives (that is, stories that purport to explain everything--that is, communism or religious fundamentalism) and springs out of our own experiences in the world rather than external ideals. Religion remains an important element of life, but his Catholicism is built around doubt, not certainty. He discusses the list of conservative political goals, the most important being the protection of individual rights. There is no shared concept of the good; instead, the point is to be left alone by the government in order to explore questions of the good on one's own.

While there is much to laud in Mr. Sullivan's book--his commitment to intellectual exploration, self-examination and ability to integrate political theory, personal religious reflection and contemporary politics into a coherent argument--I remain troubled that he never addresses the relationship between conservatism as a sense of loss and conservatism as rooted in doubt in a substantial way.

If conservatism comes out of thoughtful skepticism about all claims, how can it also represent a yearning for what we used to have--when what we used to have was often support for traditional authority, hierarchy and a belief in religious truth? While not reactionary, Mr. Sullivan argues that the conservative takes a "posture of sadness at the pace and direction of current events." But why is this sadness necessarily a good thing? Of course, I shouldn't be sad about the end of Jim Crow or allowances for marital rape, Is this contrarianism for its own sake or something more profound? Mr. Sullivan's argument begs for a more robust account of this sense of loss and its relationship to other values.