Liberals are the Unacknowledged Legislators of the World

"Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world"

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

So Andrew Sullivan has very dramatically quit the Party of God (from yesterday.)

It was never my party, but it was one to which I could once accord regular agreement and respect. No more.

Again (from 2009.)

It seems to me that now is a critical time for more people whose principles lie broadly on the center-right to do so - against the conservative degeneracy in front of us. Those who have taken such a stand - to one degree or other - demand respect. And this blog, while maintaining its resistance to cliquishness, has been glad to link to writers as varied as Bruce Bartlett or David Frum or David Brooks or Steve Chapman or Kathleen Parker or Conor Friedersdorf or Jim Manzi or Jeffrey Hart or Daniel Larison who have broken ranks in some way or other.

After his 2009 resignation came a very dramatic laundry list of "I cannot support..."'s which looked remarkably similar to the basic critiques which Liberals have been leveling at Modern Conservatism for most of my life, and which nearly ecliped his very dramatic quittery of 1996

(Video available but not embeddable.)

So what I'm understanding here - correct me, if I'm wrong - is that you're not givin' me... any money... so now I'm left basically with nothin', I'm... left with ZERO, in which, in which, what can I do with zero, you know? What can I... I can't do anythin' with it! I need to, this is my LIFE here we're talking about! We're not just talkin' about, you know, somethin' else, were talking about MY life, you know? And it's forcing me to do somethin' I don't wanna do. To leave. To, to go out and just leave and go home and say, make a clean cut here and say "no way, Corky, you're not puttin' up with these people!" And I'll tell you why I can't put up with you people: because you're bastard people! That's what you are! You're just bastard people! And I'm goin' home and I'm gonna... I'm gonna bite my pillow, is what I'm gonna do!

One more resignation and I believe he gets a free Dr. Pepper with his next Subway purchase.

(For the calendar-conscious, you may have noticed that among Apostate Conservative, the answer to the question the question David Frum used to frame his New York Magazine article -- "When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality" -- seems to consistently be, "Immediately after they kicked my ass out of the club." Weird how their former BFFs suddenly transform into depraved monsters...two minutes after the depraved monsters serve them with divorce papers :-)

And yet as entertaining as Mr. Sullivan's bi-monthly bouts of righteous Tory revisionist quitting-in-a-huff may be, if taken to their logically obvious conclusion -- that Liberals were dead right about every failed nook and cranny of Mr. Sullivan's Conservatism all along -- it does seem that the Greatest Blogger in the World and his friends risk finding themselves up the professional creek without a gravy boat.

After all, except as bad example footnotes in yet-to-be-written history books, what possible use are Conservative public intellectuals, columnists and paid pundits if Conservatism is a world-killing, blood-soaked, bigot-powered fraud?

Which is why, with absolutely metronomic predictably, virtually all such dark tea-times of the Conservative soul arrive, sooner or later, back again at the single largest political consrtuction projects in America: the building of the Elite Centrist Bullshit Cathedral out of the rubble and rags of Conservatism's many orphaned True Believers, will-o-the-wisp "Independents" and various sad little Neocons who couldn't hang on tight enough to Bill Kristol's balls once their ideology went completely and grotesquely tits-up in front of the entire planet.

Thus we find once again that, once we pop the hood on another scathing indictment of Conservatism by another an exiled Conservative, we find (once again) little more than another high-profile rip-off the standard-issue Liberal critique tricked out in another coat of high-gloss Reagan whitewash:

The constant American exceptionalism point - taken to an absurd degree - is a function of neurosis not patriotism. It comes out n the weirdest ways - in the Christanist roundtable last weekend, Gingrich actually said that America was the only country in the world where people saw soldiers as sons, daughters, fathers and mothers. Yes, other nations are full of emotionless robots. But it is not a solution to America being way down the list on a number of variables to insist that we're Number One! always and everywhere. And no amount of this insistence that "conservatives" are the only truly American participants in democracy will help when you have no idea how to cope with the uninsured, with fiscal balance outside a Randian fantasy, with soaring healthcare costs, or debt-crippled demand...

Once again, only the Usual Suspects will be allowed to play in Mr. Sullivan's reindeer games:

The one thing I noticed in my continental run-around this past week is just how mad liberals are at Obama. I remain as baffled by this anger as I am by Republican contempt for the guy. New York magazine has two superb essays that sum up my own feelings on both sides pretty perfectly - by Jon Chait and David Frum...

And once again, the painfully obvious fact that all of the brave, edgy insights in which Mr. Sullivan now traffics have been purloined straight out of the Liberal Book of Common Prayer will be wiped away with a cheap swipe at the imaginary excesses of imaginary Liberals.

From Mr. Sullivan's dramatic 2009 resignation:

Does this make me a "radical leftist" as Michelle Malkin would say? Emphatically not. But it sure disqualifies me from the current American right.

To paraphrase Reagan, I didn't leave the conservative movement. It left me.

From Mr. Sullivan's dramatic November, 2011 resignation:

If I hear one more gripe about single payer from someone in their fifties with a ponytail, I'll scream.

And from the Dramatic Exeunt of 1996:


Bullshit Centrism is where the money is, kids. A spacious and well-furnished last refuge for cowards and scoundrels and parasites once they have sucked all the marrow out of whatever they were touting as their core conviction was last week.

But Liberalism abides. And Mr. Sullivan sneers at Liberal anger precisely because it comes from the one, basic American truth that Mr. Sullivan dare not acknowledge: that the Dirty Fucking Hippies were right about the Right all along, and that every single grudging step the Obama Administration has made in the direction of good politics and good policy has been a step away from the bullshit "Both sides do it!" Centrist cult of David Brooks, Andrew Sullivan, David Gregory, David Frum, Tom Friedman and virtually the entire Beltway Media...

...and towards the Liberals.

And so every time Mr. Sullivan "screams" another Liberal "in their fifties with a ponytail", this whiny ivory-tower Apostate Tory Conservative who made his professional bones writhing in the Reagasmic dung with reactionary traitors, Birchers, bigots and assorted Christopath witch doctors can expect at least one, lone blogger to remind his readers that much of Mr. Sullivan's knee-jerk loathing of his Liberal intellectual betters seems to come from a deeper and more profoundly mercenary place.

Me, from "Here is a Revised List" in 2009:

...

In fact there is virtually nothing in the whole, Lutheranesque list of grievances digitally spiked into the front door of the Party of God (May it forever be Holy, Reagan and Apostolic, amen!) that Liberals haven't been warning people like Mr. Sullivan about -- in ever-more urgent tones -- for the last 30 years.

Perhaps a small illustration would make things clearer (some of Mr. Sullivan’s comments on the Right; my helpful interlineal notes on the Left.)

I cannot support a movement that claims to believe
in limited government but backed an unlimited domestic
and foreign policy presidency that assumed illegal,
extra-constitutional dictatorial powers until forced
by the system to return to the rule of law.

Are you referring to Nixon’s Watergate?
Or Reagan/Bush’s Iran/Contra?

I cannot support a movement that exploded
spending and borrowing and blames its
successor for the debt.

You forgot to add
“…unless Reagan does it.”

I cannot support a movement that so abandoned
government's minimal and vital role to police
markets and address natural disasters that
it gave us Katrina and the financial meltdown of 2008.

The radical, mass-deregulation
of everything regardless of consequences
was built right into the DNA of the
Conservative movement from the
moment of its birth.

And you damn well know it.

I cannot support a movement that holds
that purely religious doctrine should govern
civil political decisions and that uses the sacredness
of religious faith for the pursuit of worldly power.

Perhaps you should take it up
with Jerry Falwell’s ghost.
Or Pat Robertson?
Or Phyllis Schafly?
Or Ralph Reed?
Do I need to go on?

I cannot support a movement that is deeply
homophobic, cynically deploys fear of homosexuals
to win votes, and gives off such a racist vibe that
its share of the minority vote remains pitiful.

You forgot to add,
“…unless Reagan does it.”
Again.

I cannot support a movement which has
no real respect for the institutions of government
and is prepared to use any tactic and any means
to fight political warfare rather than conduct
a political conversation.

Like, say,
impeaching Bill Clinton?

...

I cannot support a movement that
criminalizes private behavior in the war on drugs.

Does the name “Reagan” ring a bell?

I cannot support a movement that would back
a vice-presidential candidate manifestly unqualified
and duplicitous because of identity politics
and electoral cynicism.

Andrew Sullivan,
meet
Mr. J. Danforth Quayle.

I cannot support a movement that regards
gay people as threats to their own families.

“Reagan”?

I cannot support a movement
that does not accept evolution as a fact.

“Reagan”?
Any bell at all?

I cannot support a movement that sees
climate change as a hoax and offers
domestic oil exploration as the core plank
of an energy policy.

And…right…here
is where I got fucking fed up
with repeating myself.

I cannot support a movement that refuses
ever to raise taxes, while proposing no
meaningful reductions in government spending.

Read. My. Lips.

I cannot support a movement that refuses
to distance itself from a demagogue like
Rush Limbaugh or a nutjob like Glenn Beck.

The 1994 Republican Congress
gave Limbaugh
credit for their victory.
Gave him a fucking plaque.
That's 15 years ago.
Not 15 minutes.

So it turns out that virtually all of Mr. Sullivan's hard-won epiphanies amount to little more than the well-thumbed history and plainsong lore of our Fucked Up Modern Age as it has been long understood and passed down among those awful Liberals. And so when I see statements like this -- "Does this make me a "radical leftist" as Michelle Malkin would say? Emphatically not." -- what I see is a man who might want to distance himself from the appalling actions and despicable outcomes of his former allies, but still wants to continue honoring their idiotic parameters and debased vocabulary.

Yes, Mr. Sullivan, your objections emphatically do make you a "radical leftist", because in the hands of the shitkicker demagogues of the Right like Malkin, phrases like "radical leftist" have long since lost any meaning. They are just the pejorative-du-jour, pulled from a random grab-bag of Limbaugh-words -- socialist, elitist, feminist, Marxist, anti-American, compassionate, cut-and-run, surrender, Liberal, extremist, collectivist, queer, Communist, fascist, atheist, humanist, "New York", "San Francisco", “Chicago”, French, European -- that each used to have discrete and very different meanings, but are now bleated interchangeably by the Pig People and their overlords at anyone with a softer heart than Curtis LeMay and less imperial ambitions than Genghis Khan.

But then again, if Mr. Sullivan simply outed himself as a Liberal, he would instantly lose his place in the food-chain, wouldn’t he? Because like that microscopic number of self-loathing black Conservatives who make their daily bread by serving the interests of the Southern Bigot Party, more than any other single factor, it was always the sheer gawking, oddballness of the brazen self-delusion inherent in being the gay champion of the Christopath Homophobe Party that put Mr. Sullivan in the spotlight.

That was what gave him his unique and lucrative cache.

After all, Liberal gay political writers are a dime a dozen, and so in a strange way we find Andrew Sullivan locked in the same kind of mortal combat over labels -- and for exactly the same reasons -- as Roy Cohn's character in "Angels In America" as he adamantly insisted -- even as he was dying of AIDS -- that he was not a "ho-mo-sex-shall".


(Not Safe For Work)

Because, Cohn reasoned, homosexuals were nobodies; losers who had zero clout and “in 15 years cannot pass a pissant anti-discrimination bill from City Council.” And since Roy Cohn could get the President of the United States (or his wife) on the phone -- could take the man he was fucking to the White House and make Ronald Reagan smile at him and shakes his hand -- it therefore followed that Roy Cohn could not possibly be a homosexual.

That unlike every other person in his position on Earth, Roy Cohn was a heterosexual man, who fucked around with guys.

Likewise, even though Mr. Sullivan now, belatedly comes to believe much of what Liberals believe and finally deigns to notice a horde of grotesque truths about his Conservative Movement about which Liberals have been sounding the alarm for 30 years, Andrew Sullivan nonetheless looks us all straight in that eye and argues that he could not possibly be some mere Liberal.

Because in Mr. Sullivan's world, "Liberal" does not refer to a political ideology, but to an impoverishing political ghetto from which no amount of "being right about everything" will permit you to achieve escape velocity. In Mr. Sullivan's world, "Liberal" is a terrible disease that afflicts losers who do not get invited to spout their views on teevee.

Mr. Sullivan regularly receives such largess, therefore he must not be a Liberal.

He instead must be the lone member be of some rare and singular new species; some miraculous form of haploid political minotaur.

Because if he is not something spontaneously-generated and utterly sui generis, then he is just another Lefty-Come-Very-Lately, showing up at our door at 3:00 A.M., 20 years late and trailing toxic baggage behind him like a Halley Comet.

And who in the world would pay him to do his little dance then?