Tornado Alley (PROG)

[ksuave]

The Sullivanian Persuasion
Posted by Hendrik Hertzberg

When Andrew Sullivan decamped from Oxford (England) to Cambridge (Massachusetts) in 1984, he brought with him the elements of a distinctive brand of conservatism—Thatcherite exuberance leavened by Oakeshottian skepticism, you might call it, or maybe Oakeshottian skepticism hardened by Thatcherite exuberance. Sullivan has an immigrant’s passion for America, but Sullivanian conservatism never tracked all that closely with the center of gravity of the stateside right. And over the past decade—especially since he manfully renounced his initial support of the Iraq war—Sullivan has become one of the more merciless critics of the increasingly unhinged “movement” conservatism of his adopted country.

Sullivan still favors flat (or flatter) taxes, prefers small (or smaller) government, frowns on unions, wants “entitlements” to be means-tested, frets about cultural degradation and race-based affirmative action, etc. But the issues that engage him most fully are, I would say (though he might not), more “liberal” than “conservative”: opposition to torture, to neocon delusions of omnipotence, to religious fundamentalism, to capital punishment, and to an untrammelled national-security state; belief in a secular political order, in a strong (or at least adequate) social safety net, in science, and, of course, in marriage equality, which he practically invented. He endorsed Kerry in ’04 and Obama in ’08 and remains a supporter of the President—a critical supporter to be sure, especially on issues of war and war powers.

Reflecting on an exchange with a fellow blogger, Sullivan wrote the other day:

PM Carpenter sees little difference between his conservative progressivism and what he calls my progressive conservatism. And it is true, I think, that the current British Tory party might better fit into today’s Democrats than today’s Republicans. But although I acknowledge that for an entire generation or two, “conservatism” has come to mean ideological, fundamentalist, cultural panic and hallucinogenic economics, I don’t want to concede the tradition of Burke, Babbitt, Hayek and Oakeshott to the left.

This reminds me curiously of the stubborn last-ditch stance of a small segment of the American left throughout most of the Cold War period: the little band of thinkers and activists who called themselves democratic socialists. They grouped themselves intellectually around Dissent magazine and organizationally around the remnants of the old Eugene Debs-Norman Thomas Socialist Party and then, after a final split, around a grouplet called Democratic Socialists of America. (The split was over the Vietnam war, which the DSA types opposed and their factional opponents, many of whom would drift to neoconservatism, favored.) They were proud of their affiliation with the Socialist International, which put them in an ideological fraternity, if not in a political league, with the British Labour party, the Scandinavian social democrats, the German SDP, and the Israeli Labor party. They were firmly anti-Communist, pro-union, and pro-“bourgeois democracy.” In truth, their politics were not much different from the politics of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. (Did I say “their”? I should probably say “our,” because as a youth I was a DSA member myself, just as my parents before me had been members of the Socialist Party.)

This cohort—whose luminaries included Michael Harrington, Irving Howe, Michael Walzer, and Barbara Ehrenreich—devoted a lot of energy to trying to rescue what they regarded as the good name of socialism from what they regarded as its usurpers. A losing battle, that. Tom Hayden once remarked that socialism is a word that confuses the American voter, and he was right, and no wonder. Unlike Western Europe, where mass socialist parties dominated the center-left and alternated in power with Christian Democrats and conservatives on the center-right, the United States never had a socialist party strong enough to educate voters to the profound differences between democratic socialism and the totalitarian “socialism” of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (to say nothing of the “National Socialists” of Germany). For American democratic socialists, the compensation for political futility was intellectual independence. Their outsider critiques of the structural inequities of the American political economy and of the moral mistakes of Cold War “anti-Communism,” such as McCarthyism and support for “anti-Communist” dictatorships, had an influence far beyond their numbers.

So I see certain parallels between the Harrington-Howe socialists and Andrew Sullivan’s valiant defense of what he regards as true conservatism. Of course, there are big differences. One is that while the democratic socialists usually offered critical (often highly critical) support to the Democratic Party at election time, today’s Republican Party has veered beyond the limits where Andrew can offer even critical support (his quirky affection for Ron Paul notwithstanding). By the same token, though, one of the two great political parties that alternate in power in the United States regards itself as conservative and will continue to do so, whereas the Democrats never remotely regarded themselves as socialist. One of these days or years, the Republican Party will be back in power. (With its House majority, it has veto power already.) For that reason, Andrew’s lonely fight for “The Conservative Soul” (the title of one of his books) is politically important and urgently worthwhile in a way that the Quixotic battle for “socialism” in America simply wasn’t.

And I probably don’t need to add that comparing Sullivan conservatism to Harringtonian socialism, no matter how tangentially, is a pretty serious compliment.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2011/06/andrew-sullivan.html