Stupid Shit Andrew Sullivan Says, Ctd.

"I might add that it was strange arriving at Harvard to discover that the only non-left-liberals in the faculty were Straussians. The concept of a conservatism that was not dogmatic, that did not rest on eternal truths to be found in Plato and Aristotle but on the prudential management of contingent liberal societies ... well, I realized I had left it all behind in Britain. I just had my Oakeshott in the Widener library for succor.
...


"America, alas, didn't have a Burke or an Oakeshott to craft its conservative philosophy. It ended up with the work of a German Jewish exile, whose political didacticism was as pronounced as his philosophical inscrutability. The failure of American conservatism to come up with more than fundamentalist religion and gloriously noble foreign interventionism as its core policies (along with making government insolvent by pretending that lowering taxes increases revenue) might be seen as a consequence of this strange admixture."

-- Andrew Sullivan, 05/22/12

This remarkable little potsherd of Mr. Sullivan's writing will disappear into the digital ash-pit of history by tomorrow, but for my own amusement I thought I'd suspend it in time for just a moment longer to consider just how assiduously Mr. Sullivan is revising his own history to comport with the prevailing marketplace.

Mr. Sullivan built his entire media career on being a gay Conservative.  In many ways the gay Conservative: the guy the Right could point to to prove that they didn't hate Teh Gay with every fiber of their being.  This was the arc of  Mr. Sullivan's professional life until December, 2009 when he very publicly and finally broke with "the Right" (while protesting loudly that this certainly did not make him a Liberal):

Sullivan delivered his “Tis a far, far better place I go” speech here, which said, in part:

For these reasons, I found it intolerable after 2003 to support the movement that goes by the name "conservative" in America. I still do, even though I am much more of a limited government type than almost any Democrat and cannot bring myself to call myself a liberal (because I'm not). My reasons were not dissimilar to Charles Johnson, who, like me, was horrified by 9/11, loathes Jihadism, and wants to defeat it as effectively as possible. And his little manifesto prompts me to write my own (the full version is in "The Conservative Soul").

Now in the whole of Mr. Sullivan's text, I could not help but notice that he italicized-for-emphasis only twice, one of which he deployed here -- "cannot bring myself to call myself a liberal (because I'm not)" -- to underscore how very much NOT a Liberal he is.

And yet in his enumerated reasons for leaving the Right I see nothing that would freak a Liberal out. I see no point-of-view that wouldn’t find a cozy, conversational corner at one of our Sekrit America-Hating Box Socials.

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.

Much of the rest of my post was given over to showing -- point by point -- how every one of the horribles which Mr. Sullivan claims finally drove him tearfully out of the Conservative movement had, in fact, been present on the Right for decades: present and clearly evident to anyone who bothered to look.

So Mr. Sullivan left the American Conservative movement in 2009.

Except he really left the American Conservative movement in 2003.

Except he really, really had left the American Conservative movement figured out when he entered Harvard, University --

The concept of a conservatism that was not dogmatic, that did not rest on eternal truths to be found in Plato and Aristotle but on the prudential management of contingent liberal societies ... well, I realized I had left it all behind in Britain. I just had my Oakeshott in the Widener library for succor.

-- which Harvard Magazine tells us was at the very apotheosis of the Age of Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell, in the Year of Our Lord, 1984.

Perhaps one day, Mr. Sullivan will share with his readers his as-yet-unpublished in utero suspicions that Richard Nixon was not a man to be trusted and Governor George Wallace was getting Edmund Burke all wrong!

Mr. Sullivan has done very well for himself: he rode that Conservative pony a long, long time and when the stink became unbearable, he found a newer, better pony to ride.

The only hitch, of course, is that even a cursory glance an Mr. Sullivan's Awesome!New!Revelations! about the true nature of the American Conservative movement --

"The failure of American conservatism to come up with more than fundamentalist religion and gloriously noble foreign interventionism as its core policies (along with making government insolvent by pretending that lowering taxes increases revenue) might be seen as a consequence of this strange admixture."

-- shows that they look amazingly like what American Liberals have been saying for the last +30 years.

Or as one, long-forgotten wag once put it:

...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?

Who indeed?