Whose Country Is It, Anyway?

If there exists a conservative “soul,” it is surely troubled right now. After six years of unharnessed spending, three-plus years of protracted war in Iraq, and several ethics scandals, all under the banner of an allegedly conservative GOP, it could hardly be otherwise. In a few short weeks — that is, after the midterm elections — look for the Right to tear shirts in a public display of soul-searching, even if Republicans avoid the predicted loss of one or both houses of Congress.“The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How To Get It Back” (HarperCollins, 294 pages,$25.95) is blogger-commentator Andrew Sullivan’s ostensible contribution to the whither-conservatism debates, but it won’t likely have much of an impact. That’s partly because Mr. Sullivan has written a philosophical tract where few mortals dare tread; it’s also partly because he has already alienated much of his audience with his talk of “Christianists” (the supposed American analogues to Islamism), who make an appearance here as well.Then there’s this: Mr. Sullivan tries to cram every political viewpoint in the world into either of two categories: “conservatives” and “fundamentalists.” Naturally, the good guys share Mr. Sullivan’s limited-government, leave-me-alone brand of conservatism, and the “fundamentalists” consist of everyone else, from Rick Santorum to Osama bin Laden. So, there you go, social conservatives: You’re not so different from Al Qaeda.Mr. Sullivan’s argument goes like this: The real “conservative” is someone who “knows what he doesn’t know,” whose politics evince a cautious skepticism, who avoids government moralism or grand attempts at nation-building, who shudders at the Terri Schiavo affair, who loathes Senator Santorum.This kind of conservatism, as it happens, has a long intellectual pedigree stretching back to Edmund Burke and finding another champion in the 20th-century British political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, but it hasn’t been very popular in America. In this country, great political leaders are remembered more for their grand political projects — think Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt. Mr. Sullivan recognizes this, but it doesn’t faze him.Then there are “fundamentalists.” They’re not just Al Qaeda; a “fundamentalist” is anyone who claims to know the truth about the nature or purpose of life or who would like to see widely held moral judgments make their way into law. The fundamentalist “demands that the truths handed down by revelation or ‘nature’ be applied consistently to govern all citizens,” Mr. Sullivan writes. Hence the author’s rage at Senator Santorum, James Dobson, and others who insist that Christian morals have a place at the political table; this makes them a less violent but still troubling cousin to Islamic terrorists, apparently.Mr. Sullivan’s anger boils over repeatedly, particularly toward “theoconservatives” like Princeton’s Robert George or First Things founder Richard John Neuhaus, both of whom “brought a brain to the fundamentalist psyche … and made arguments about social police that, in the 1990s and new century, helped tear the United States apart at the seams.”Hold it: “Torn apart?” We have our divisions, to be sure. But just what country is Mr. Sullivan talking about anyway?If we must call people “conservative” or “fundamentalist” — we don’t, but still — the reality is that most Americans are some combination of the two, at least as Mr. Sullivan uses the terms. The “conservative” who fears disorder and government overreach need not keep so crabbed a view as Oakeshott did. Likewise, the “fundamentalist” who thinks he knows how political life should be is not always ready to legislate away someone else’s liberties.On this count Mr. Sullivan strays far from reality. He calls today’s Republican party “perhaps the first fundamentally religious political party in American history,” which is both wrong in its understanding of the contemporary party and wrong in its understanding of history, the vast majority of which Mr. Sullivan would no doubt have found to be much more repressive than the present.Could it be that Mr. Sullivan simply disdains the GOP’s alliance with the American South? Throughout, he does little to dispel the notion that “fundamentalist” should be read in precisely that way. After all, the attributes he so disdains about the contemporary GOP also happen to be that region’s primary political attributes. Which is fair enough — he should just say it.The bottom line is Mr. Sullivan doesn’t have much to offer contemporary conservatives who don’t revere the Oakeshottian tradition of skepticism and the limited government he espouses. After all, most conservatives’ problems with the Bush administration and the Republican Congress relate to execution and management, not underlying philosophy. Fiscal conservatives are upset that the Bush administration has spent so wildly, but they knew this “compassionate conservative” would be no Calvin Coolidge. They are less upset at the grandiose vision of democratizing Iraq than at the failure to do the job properly. They are incensed at Congress’s inability to keep itself corruption-free, not at its failure to abolish the Department of Education. And, finally, they simply do not share Mr. Sullivan’s strong aversion to the mostly symbolic presence of Christian imagery and morals in politics, the importance of which can be greatly exaggerated by both sides for political effect.***The attributes of the contemporary GOP that so irk Mr. Sullivan also play a central role in political scientist Thomas F. Schaller’s “Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South” (Simon & Schuster, 336 pages, $26). Mr. Schaller thinks the Democrats can hoist Republicans on their own petard — the South — by running campaigns that carve away the fast-growing West from the Republican sphere and highlight the negative attributes of the South, especially its ugly history of racism and division in an effort to unify the rest of the country under the Democratic banner.Speaking purely in demographic terms, Mr. Schaller is on solid footing. The country’s most rapid population growth is currently occurring in the West and Mountain West. Mr. Schaller identifies a “Democratic diamond” of states to target from Ohio southwest to Arizona and north to Montana. These states truly represent the political goldmine both parties will be seeking in the coming decade. With the South solidly Republican and the coasts growing even more solidly Democratic, the interior West is the new “swing” region. Mr. Schaller rightly advises Democrats to forget about the South, which has tended to vote monolithically for one party or another for almost all of its history and, in any event, is mostly set for low population growth according to current projections.Mr. Schaller does himself a grave disservice, however, when he mouths partisan mantras. “It is precisely because Republicans can’t sell their agenda on its merits that they must convince voters that Democrats can’t be believed or trusted,” he writes. That’s convenient self-solace both sides frequently engage in. Then, at other times, he is downright nasty, calling Republicans “neoracist[s]” and claiming that Trent Lott’s awful endorsement of Strom Thurmond a few years back “remov[ed] the carefully constructed mask behind which the lingering racism of southern Republicanism hides.”Mr. Schaller is already deploying the type of divisive rhetoric he thinks will help the Democrats cleave the non-Southern part of the country away from Republicans.Mr. Conway is an editorial writer at the Washington Times, a 2006 Phillips Fellow, and a contributing editor of Doublethink.

Whose Country Is It, Anyway?

Whose Country Is It, Anyway?

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