Review: The Conservative Soul by Andrew Sullivan
From Live-Free-Or-Die, New HampshirePLEASE READ THIS BOOK. Andrew Sullivan travels the talk show circuit as an engaging political thinker with penetrating insights and the courage to openly debunk the leader of his party. But one cannot know the depths of this 40-something British immigrant without reading The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back.
Sullivan is refreshingly honest, about his own life and his journey to today, and about what has happened to the Republican party and the American people.
"I think of my own analytical errors in the past few years. Looking back, I can see that my outrage at the atrocity of September 11, however merited, may well have blinded me to the intricacies and dangers of a subsequent war in Iraq…We were all wrong."
But this is far more than a confessional about a war gone wrong, or about “the ineptness and neoconservative recklessness I saw in the Bush administration.” This book is an exploration of how the conservative movement was led into a “rival form” of religious, political fundamentalism and why the resultant loss of constitutional freedoms and America’s moral high ground was the logical next step in the seizing of power by ideological fundamentalists.
"The essential claim of the fundamentalist is that he knows the truth….It isn’t an argument from which he could be dissuaded by something we call reason….The values of the fundamentalist are facts. God has revealed them in a book that is inerrant, whether that book is the Bible or the Koran; or he has entrusted them to hierarchy whose interpretation of scripture and tradition and history and nature is authoritative and even, in some cases, literally infallible."
Sullivan revisits the founders of the American constitution and finds they were “well aware of the dangers of religious fundamentalism allied to government power, hence the First Amendment.”
"The Founders, [to the dismay of fundamentalists like former Senator Rick Santorum], did not write a Constitution dedicated to the inculcation of virtue. In fact what is stunning about the American Declaration of Independence and subsequent Constitution is how morality and virtue are all but absent as a primary concern. The tripartite goal of the American founding was “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” They did not write, “the pursuit of virtue or the pursuit of morality….Americans insisted on freedom first."
In Sullivan’s analysis, the lurch toward George W. Bush’s theocracy violates the foundations of conservatism. “Tax cuts were simply a matter of faith,” and accompanied a “staggering expansion of government power and spending [which] increased by an astonishing 38 percent since 2000” resulting in “a bankrupting of the American government” so that “by the end of one term, President Bush had more than doubled [the US Government’s future spending commitments] to $43.3 trillion [with] absolutely no way to finance it.” Sullivan details the Bush excesses in fiscal, social and foreign policy as “intransigent recklessness” accompanied by “a refusal to account for reality, to acknowledge error, to prepare for all contingencies.” In place of Constitutional safeguards and limited government “came a new theory of [presidential] constitutional powers [in which] the president had the right to ignore the law.” This has led to a “decision to end decades of humane warfare in the United States military” and to sanctioned torture.
This is not conservatism, Sullivan asserts. "The conservatism I grew up around was a combination of lower taxes, less government spending, freer trade, freer markets, individual liberty, personal responsibility….The defining characteristic of the conservative is that he knows what he doesn’t know."
Sullivan, himself, avoids the errors he finds in the theocratic Bush administration, by admitting up front that “this book…is an attempt to explain what one individual person means by conservatism.” Sullivan suggests “there is more to life than politics [but] the best form of politics is that which enables us to engage in nonpolitical life more fully and more freely.”
By reaching back into the wisdom of the American Founders and of observers like the fifteenth century Montaigne, and by carefully, thoughtfully analyzing the strangeness of recent years, Sullivan has returned reason, quiet analysis and civility to the public discourse and brought hope to those who, like Sullivan, “have felt like throwing in the towel and simply saying: all right, I’m not a conservative if that’s what it now means.”
posted by DanZ @ 1:53 PM
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