Firefly Conservatism

Explaining Conservatism to Conservatives is a dirty job but somebody has to do it.

Fortunately, Andrew Sullivan provides us an easy starting point by providing his very own  definition of Conservatism:

Conservatism is, after all, a philosophy that tends to argue that less equals more, that restraint is sometimes more powerful than action, that delay is often wiser than headlong revolution. It reveres traditional rules and existing institutions, especially endangered elite institutions that the Founders designed to check and cool the popular will.

So Conservatism is...software.  An app, that can be loaded into any platform that features "traditional rules and existing institutions" under assault by headlong revolutionaries.

Fine.

But like so many of Conservatism's dilettante Useful Idiots, Mr. Sullivan cannot bring himself face what happens in the real, non-Beltway world when those abstract, dorm-room ideals are adopted by bad people fighting to preserve despicable institutions.

What happens when those "traditional rules" are the pro-ignorance, anti-science, anti-female, homophobic tenets of Conservative Christian fundamentalism?

What happens when the "existing institution" is white supremacy, girded generation after generation by an ancient, paranoid, rage against those damn Yankee devils and their Evil Gummint in Washington interfering with their traditional, bible sanctioned way of life?

These are the true and terrible realities of what happened to Conservatism in America, which is why Mr. Sullivan instead prefers to jerk off endlessly about what I refer to as (and am probably borrowing from some cleverer person) "Firefly Conservatism".  A Conservatism with all the  glories and grace notes of the antebellum South -- the nobility of a Great Cause all dressed up in buckskin and clever dialogue about liberty and scrappy underdogs standing up to the Oppressive Buttinski Central Gummint -- shorn completely of the brutal, racist realities out of which that culture grew. 

And thus, just like Sarah Palin and Bill Kristol  and Sean Hannity, instead of honestly facing Conservatiism real American history, Mr. Sullivan is busy rewriting the past to suit his fantasies.

To this end, Mr. Sullivan conflates the very different fates and histories of four, prominent apostate Conservatives -- "Posner or Greenspan or Bartlett or Frum" -- who (like Mr. Sullivan) spent most of their professional lives carrying water for the bad guys and who have only very recently left the Movement...or have been frog-marched out of it against their will.

In Mr. Sullivan's telling, these often-very-reluctant 11th hour converts to "honest Conservatism" are heroes of "intellectual honesty" who ("unlike so many who pass for conservative intellectuals these days") come by their beliefs via "independent thinking and study."

Of course, if all you knew about the last 40 years of American political history was Mr. Sullivan's fairy tale, you would never know that the ground which Mr. Sullivan's League of Extraordinary Burkeans have been forced to reluctantly occupy has been the intellectual homeland of a group of people called "Liberals" for generations (or, as one long-forgotten wag once put it, "repeating as breathless epiphany stuff thoughtful Liberals have been saying for 30 years.")

Instead, in Mr. Sullivan's telling, his band of Honest Conservatives has not only had to overcome the perils of the Fire Swamp -- "[t]he raving loons in the GOP base" and those "who pass for conservative intellectuals these days" -- but (as is the case in all Apostate Conservative fairy tales)  these noble, white, well-paid Conservative men have had to contend with the wiliest enemy of them all. 

The Dirty Fucking Hippie:

Each one of them, unlike so many who pass for conservative intellectuals these days, has his own view of the world, formed by independent thinking and study - often in the face of institutional liberal disdain.

Right now, America's Leading Conservative Public Intellectuals exist in a despised intellectual limbo between the ravening monster they helped create...and those who were right about the monster all along.   Which is why -- no less than Palin, Hannity and Kristol -- America's Leading Conservative Public Intellectuals are frantically rewriting history to recast themselves as the heroes and sages of the age to come, and to remove from the public record any hint that the Dirty Fucking Hippie were right all along.

Whether they will be permitted to succeed is still an open question.

(Of course, Mr. Sullivan -- whose Blog Motto used to be Orwell's "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle" -- routinely reacts to this kind of critique of that-which-is-in-front-of-his-nose by pretending it does not exist.  Perhaps someone could reach out to him at andrew@thedailybeast.com and find out why :-)