Right angles

IN his “Grand Old Party” (2003), historian Lewis L. Gould credits Ronald Reagan with “transforming the Republican Party into a conservative unit with a diminishing band of moderates on its fringes. His advocacy of smaller government, deregulation, and private enterprise commanded general assent while he was in office.” This conformity of thought may have been the apogee of conservative like-mindedness, despite Republican control of Congress and the White House in the first years of this century. The works of the present-day GOP, Gould notes, would once have been anathema to conservatives: deficit spending, an expanded bureaucracy and a foreign policy whose outsize Wilsonianism yearns to “make the world itself democratic.” “How a smaller government would achieve that monumental task has not yet been explained,” he comments wryly.

The GOP’s dramatic shift away from the conservatism of Reagan or Barry Goldwater toward a faith-based politics both illiberal and anti-conservative has raised a chorus of dismay, and not just across the congressional aisle. Disquiet emanates from such as the American Enterprise Institute, conservative commentator George Will, the pages of the American Conservative, former Republican operatives Kevin Phillips (“American Theocracy”) and John W. Dean (“Conservatives Without Conscience”) and former neoconservative philosopher Francis Fukuyama (in “America at the Crossroads,” he writes that neoconservatism “has evolved into something I can no longer support”).

A sense of betrayal is in the air, and it gets additional ventilation from columnist, blogger and New Republic senior editor Andrew Sullivan in “The Conservative Soul,” a book he tells us “was born out of frustration.” Sullivan takes time to buff the reputations of Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, but his real aim is to parse the differences between his understanding of the conservative perspective and its philosophical roots and what is occurring today under its rubric.

“[C]onservatism has become such a large and sprawling complex of ideas that no one has a monopoly on the term anymore,” Sullivan writes in his prologue, although in the Cold War years some of that variety was veiled by the strong, unifying principle of anticommunism. Fukuyama and Dean are better explicators of the complicated history at play. Sullivan’s account is more personal, and except when he discusses the influence of “theocons” (theocratic conservatives), that history isn’t his focus.

All three explain the conservative flip-flop differently. Fukuyama cites the infusion of neocon principles, including a willingness to use military power for moral purposes, a distrust of social engineering and skepticism regarding the legitimacy and effectiveness of international law and institutions to achieve security or justice. Mainstream conservatism became so conflated with these tenets, he argues, that it was “increasingly hard to disentangle neoconservatism from other, more traditional varieties of American conservatism, whether based on small-government libertarianism, religious or social conservatism, or American nationalism.” Dean recalls a question he and Goldwater discussed and that remains unanswered: “Why do those on the religious right act as they do? Are they motivated by religion or conservatism?” Citing a Zogby poll showing that conservative Christians make up 58% of all Republicans, he notes that they subject the rest of us to regressive, authoritarian governance that “now constitutes the prevailing thinking and behavior among conservatives.”

Sullivan’s analysis resembles Dean’s on the influence of the religious right (a term Sullivan mostly avoids), with a semantic twist. What Dean calls authoritarianism, Sullivan calls “fundamentalism,” a mind-set he spends much of “The Conservative Soul” differentiating from conservatism. At times, this line of argument smacks of trying to rescue a perspective from its practitioners -- “[F]undamentalism is, in some respects, the nemesis of conservatism,” Sullivan writes -- but the account seems heartfelt, and his anger at the swelling religious influence on the Republican Party is clear. He calls George W. Bush “the most powerful Christian fundamentalist in the world” and today’s GOP “perhaps the first fundamentally religious political party in American history.” He draws loose parallels to Muslim fundamentalism as well.

If you’re among the 18% of Americans who, according to Harris poll figures, identify themselves as liberal, or just another disaffected Republican, “The Conservative Soul” will be particularly fun to read. Sullivan -- a gay Catholic conservative who believes in a woman’s right to choose, the normality (read: moral acceptability) of non-procreative sex, Darwinian theory and other heresies -- deplores many aspects of the current administration and hints that his brand of conservatism may have “a brighter future among Democrats and Independents than among Republicans.”

But the problem is that Sullivan’s minimalist reckoning of conservatism is broad enough to encompass almost anyone. “There is a little conservatism in everyone’s soul,” he claims, “even those who proudly call themselves liberals.” He grounds his own conservatism in the writings of Whig political philosopher Edmund Burke, as many do, and invokes the grief and sense of cultural loss suffered by proponents of the impulse to conserve. That and a desire for personal security seem enough to qualify one for membership. What does one have to believe to be a conservative? Nothing. It’s how one believes.

Simply put, Sullivan’s thesis is that fundamentalism is uncompromising and based on inerrant texts or infallible authority, with an apocalyptic edge, whereas conservativism is “an acceptance of the unknowability of ultimate truth, an acknowledgment of the distinction between what is true for the here and now, and an embrace of the discrepancy between theoretical and practical knowledge. It is an anti-ideology, a nonprogram, a way of looking at the world whose most perfect expression might be called inactivism.” He reinforces those points in varied ways, invoking Plato and Montaigne and quoting extensively from British philosopher Michael Oakeshott. He takes aim at, among other things, the concept of “natural law” and ridicules theoconservatives such as Pat Robertson and Richard John Neuhaus, as well as Sen. Rick Santorum’s exuberant attacks on secularism (which, to Santorum, “elevates the self, the arbitrary individual good, above all else”).

Much of Sullivan’s emphasis is on the public-private divide and government intrusion in personal affairs, where liberal and traditional conservative thought commonly overlap. Washington’s meddling in the case of comatose patient Terri Schiavo “revealed something profound about the new conservatism,” he writes, including its “scant concern for family prerogatives, state law, judicial review” and even states’ rights, “if those states violated the tenets of Christian fundamentalism.”

A firm belief in the beneficent nature of conservatism underlies “The Conservative Soul.” Sullivan states that the “great and constant dream of the conservative is to be left alone by his own government and by his fellow humans, as much as is possible” -- an old theme, to be sure. He is no moralizing finger-wagger like virtue maven William J. Bennett, and he is sensibly outraged at an administration that countenances torture and engages in warrantless domestic eavesdropping. But in wrapping up his argument, he also tells us that he “cannot and will not propose a policy prescription for the present day.” Yet policy derives from ideas -- why else would a political philosophy matter? In his final chapter, “A Politics of Freedom,” which is where the gloves come off, he cites the famous 1981 Reagan dictum that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Apparently, Sullivan is in accord. In these times, he notes, “conservatism often means repealing laws, abolishing unnecessary institutions, getting rid of needless government departments.”

Bush may well be “the decider” -- but is conservatism the dismantler? Read “The Conservative Soul” and decide for yourself. *