I don’t want to beat this Sully-saving-conservatism thing into the ground, and I really will stop posting soon, but Guster makes a good point:
Sully’s idiotic brand of ‘conservatism’ is thriving in the right wing of the Democratic Party. He just refuses to see it.
I’d argue more generally that there is almost no difference between Andrew Sullivan’s views and those of “liberal” commentators like Joe Klein or Jacob Weisberg (or anyone else at Slate, I pick him because he’s the head of the operation). They all supported the Iraq War (Klein more ambivalently than the others), they all had major man-crushes on George W. Bush, they all think Michael Moore and Paul Krugman smell funny, they all think Paul Ryan is a great patriot, they’re all skeptical that the American middle-class deserves Social Security and access to health care. Sure Sullivan took longer to fall out of love with the cowboy king, but he’s also louder in his condemnation of torture, less reflexively pro-establishment, and more socially liberal (aside from reproductive rights).
I just can’t see why the political philosophy that most American media “liberals” espouse needs some kind of saving. In the United States, we have one party whose policy positions are comparable to those of European right-center parties and another that functions as a confederacy of nihilistic insurgents. So what if the first party is called “liberal” and the second is called “conservative”? We’re Americans, honey, our names don’t mean shit.
Butch Villalobos
Don’t stop posting on this, and a great reference at the end, DougJ. Safe travels!
cleek
they are common establishment centrist hawks.
mistermix
What, no watch in the anus reference?
Zifnab
Clearly you are not a modern American media “liberal”. Sully feels his opinions need promoting because they are his opinions. It’s no terrible surprise that he’d throw out a rallying cry for positions he supports.
geg6
Sometimes I just love you, DougJ. This post today is exactly why.
schrodinger's cat
He is socially liberal only about the issues that affect him directly. If he was Andrea Sullivan instead of being Andrew Sullivan, he sure as hell would have supported reproductive rights.
david mizner
Doug, you have a real knack for writing about this without mentioning the person who lives in the White House, who Sully has championed because they’re both deficit and national security hawks, and both like to distance themselves from the “extremes” as they shoot for some cushy reasonable center (although Sully seems to care more about the Constitution than does Pres.)
In any case, it’s a common tactic among the establishment center-right (see: David Brooks) to pretend that their views are marginalized when in fact they predominate.
Han's Solo
The Democratic Party is now the home to both America’s liberals and conservatives.
As I’ve pointed out many times: Today’s GOP stands for nothing. They only care about policy to the extent that it helps them raise money. The GOP’s goals are strictly limited to short term victories at all costs. When those short term goals conflict with prior long term principles the long term principles are left on the ideological refuse piles you can find on the back trail of any elephant (metaphorically speaking).
fasteddie9318
@Zifnab
He doesn’t just try to rally people to his point of view; he acts as though he’s on some sort of holy crusade to save “conservatism” from the unwashed masses who are trying to besmirch it. Meanwhile “conservatism” as Sully imagines it has been the overwhelmingly dominant operating philosophy of the DC establishment in both parties since at least the 1980 elections and really doesn’t need saving from anything (which situation is, also too, the single biggest reason why this country is lurching down the pipes and on into the septic tank). He’s come completely unhinged from real life on this particular issue. I couldn’t give less of a shit about that, but for some unfathomable reason Sullivan is influential, and so it’s good that somebody points out how totally batshit delusional he is every once in a while.
fasteddie9318
@schrodinger’s cat:
And, unless Andrea were herself a lesbian, she’d be bitterly opposed to equal rights for filthy sodomites and lesbians.
Arrik
That Tarantino shout-out just made my day.
fasteddie9318
@Han’s Solo:
Sorry, there wasn’t enough room in the house for everybody, so we took in the conservatives and gave the liberals some ponchos and hacky-sacks and told them to fuck off and die.
Jimmy Johns
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.
From —
http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2011/04/war-is-paul-ryan-is-force.html
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Han’s Solo #8:
This isn’t right. They do have core principles which when pressed they will fight for as if this was Masada all over again. Those principles are: tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation of large businesses, spending lavish amounts of money on the military-industrial complex, supporting the oil and gas industries, and maintaining the cultural values of the Old Confederacy.
Everything else is tactics and they certainly give every appearance of hating whatever it is that the Dems are for right this very minute, but they are not without larger goals of their own. The GOP has had to be flexible in pursuit of these goals in the wake of the Dem wins in 2006 and 2008 but they haven’t given up on those goals and they play a longer game than we do.
evinfuilt
@8 Han’s Solo
You’re right, the Dems are pretty much two parties (look at the Progressive Caucus in the House to find the actual liberals.) The repubs are just the reflexive party of no. All their decisions are based off what the other people are doing.
I’d love the repub party to hurry up and die so the Democratic Party can break into two like they belong.
Roger Moore
@Han’s Solo:
Sure they stand for something. They stand for tax cuts for rich people and fucking over poor people. They stand for perpetual war. They stand for denying women reproductive rights. They stand for bashing racial minorities and LGBT folks. IOW, today’s GOP stands for neo-feudalism. That may be an awful thing to stand for, but it’s something.
Han's Solo
ThatLeftTurnInABQ – I disagree. I think each of those “core principles” you mentioned they believe in only to the point that it helps them raise money. If the people that paid for their elections (like the Koch brothers) suddenly had a change of heart so would the GOP. Of course, since the same people that buy the GOP every election also pay for the right wing think tanks it would not be limited to just the politicians, it would be the mighty wurlitzer also too.
boss bitch
Oh the same guy that he called a coward for not having the guts to gut entitlements like Paul Ryan? The same guy who he called an IMPERIALIST, then took it back? The same guy who Sully’s had a disturbing love, intense hate relationship with?
And Sully, the one who was very gung ho about Iraq and Shrub cares more about the Constitution?
jayackroyd
My friend Stuart Zechman wrote this down, at some length (prolixity is his metier) a few years ago. h
http://bit.ly/lWumzG
He thinks, and I have come to agree,that this thing he calls “centrism” and many people call “neo-liberal” is an ideology that is profoundly different from New Deal liberalism-that it is not “moderate” or “pragmatic” liberalism, but an ideology that believes in a collaborative relationship, rather than an adversarial relationship, with large private organizations, and is not committed to New Deal policies of the government providing a pension and health insurance to the middle class.
Centrists favor things like abolishing Glass-Steagall, replacing Medicare with health insurance exchanges with premium support, cap and trade energy policies. They don’t believe that the public sector can create jobs (Goolsbee: http://bit.ly/mdkPLL)
This isn’t a position on the spectrum between Goldwater and LBJ. It’s a different way of looking at things from the way either of them view policy—it’s a technocratic, elites run things view of governance.
And it yields terrible policy, as we are living through.
Villago Delenda Est
“Say what you will about the tenets of National Socia1ism, at least it’s an ethos.”
Chris
@ ThatLeftTurnInABQ –
With the latter being the least important of all of these by far. The first four are cardinal principles. The last one is an afterthought, tossed as red meat to the rubes in order to keep them voting, but it’s not in and of itself an objective of the party. They’re less interested in actually protecting those values than they are in exploiting the resentment when those values are threatened.
david mizner
@18
So Obama is more imperialistic than Sully and somewhat less of an austerity-fetishist — what’s your point?
Sully was and continues to be an Obama champion unlike, say, smelly Paul Krugman.
Han's Solo
Roger Moore – Again, I kindly disagree. They only stand for those things because their elections are paid for by people who stand for those things.
Such is their love for the “Free Market” that they are willing to sell their very ideology, as long as the price is right. If they have a core principle, a very big if, it can be defined with a single word: opportunism.
eastriver
Sully’s lurch to the left has a very simple explanation. He couldn’t get any gay men to talk to him in NYC, never mind suck him off. It really is that simple.
Joel
Weisberg is a dickbag. You were right to single him out.
Ghanima Atreides
look.
conservatism worships the past, progressivism worships the future.
white anglosaxon objectivism ruled the world for a while.
but things have changed.
social media, the internet, demographics.
conservatism is a dying philosophy, devolving into fundamentalism.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Chris #21:
There is an element of truth to this so far as the party apparatus is concerned, but it think it conceals a larger truth that it is important for us not to lose sight of: US politics is organized along dualistic lines with only two major political parties not just because we have a first past the post electoral system, but because it is the expression of a state of civil war (continued by other less violent means) between two irreconcilable cultural blocs, neither of which is dominant enough to put down or assimilate the other.
These began as the contrasting cultural associations in the British Isles which during the 17th and early 18th centuries were transplanted across the Atlantic and colonized New England on the one hand and the southeastern part of the US on the other hand, with numerous zone of intermixing and additional complexities caused by the importation of yet other cultural blocs from elsewhere (such as Central and Eastern Europe). Each of these cultural blocs here in the US is strong enough to impose its values on a major political party or if necessary to call into being a new party if it is abandoned by both of the major parties. The GOP leadership today may have at times a merely tactical loyalty to the culture and values of the Confederate states, but if they ever seriously waver from that stance for a prolonged period of time, they will be replaced with something else via an organic process of party decline and the rise of a new party from the grassroots up.
I think these two regional cultures are stronger and more enduring than the political parties which they use as vehicles for their expression. This can be clearly seen in the way that US political parties reorganized themselves during the mid-19th Cen with the decline of the Whigs and the rise of the GOP, and again during the mid-to-late 20th Cen. with the shift of the regional loyalties of the South from the Dems to the GOP which began during FDR’s time and is now largely complete today.
Roger Moore
@Han’s Solo:
I think you’re wrong. It may be true that today’s Republican party believes the neo-Feudalist line only because they’ve been getting it from the Kochs, et. al., but I think they’ve well and truly drunk the Kool-Aid. They’ve listened to the propaganda for long enough that they actually believe it. The party wouldn’t turn on a dime even if you replaced its big financial backers with their Bizzaro World counterparts.
Ghanima Atreides
hey mistermix.
here is the piece i submitted to EDK for the LoOG.
He didnt reject it, i pulled it after he sat on it for two weeks.
i think you can see why EDK was never going to print it.
The Rise of the Third Culture and the Death of Conservatism
Murc
Er… not to defend Sully, but, screw it, I’m gonna defend Sully.
Sully endorsed GORE in 2000. Not Bush. Gore. And he did so precisely because he didn’t trust Bush, because he smelled the con man on him.
He also endorsed Kerry in 2004. Sure, he went coo-coo bananas after 9/11 and during the first part of Iraq, but he’s hardly unique in that and I think it’s somewhat unfair to describe him as ever having been ‘in love’ with Bush. He repeatedly took a giant fucking stick to the Bush Administration and never voted for him and specifically endorsed only a tiny minority of his policies, although failing on the war is certainly a big one.
El Cid
Sullivan believes himself such a defender against evil leftism that he gets to bellow over anyone who seems too leftist, particularly women, at least if his appearances on Bill Maher’s “Real Time Letting Right Wing Loudmouths Ramble Over Liberals I’m Just A Mere Host”, especially with Naomi Klein.
Chris
@ jayackroyd –
Thanks for the link.
I’d argue XXth century American liberalism itself was pretty “reasonable,” “pragmatic” and “moderate.” It drew from both sides of the Democratic/Republican and the capitalist/socialist debates, ending up in some sort of moderate, state-promoted syndicalism that balanced between the interests of all social classes (and eventually supported racial integrationism too).
That’s worthwhile and intellectually honest, “centrism” as currently practiced is not. Being reasonable and pragmatic means accepting good ideas no matter where they come from (e.g. economic populism from the Democrats, racial egalitarianism from the Republicans, back in the day), not pretending that bad ideas are good just so both sides can go home with a smile on their faces.
eastriver
You guys are waaaaaay over thinking this. It’s all about L’il Sully.
Chris
Moderation limbo for S word. Trying again –
@ jayackroyd –
Thanks for the link.
I’d argue XXth century American liberalism itself was pretty “reasonable,” “pragmatic” and “moderate.” It drew from both sides of the Democratic/Republican and the capitalist/soshulist debates, ending up in some sort of moderate, state-promoted syndicalism that balanced between the interests of all social classes (and eventually supported racial integrationism too).
That’s worthwhile and intellectually honest, “centrism” as currently practiced is not. Being reasonable and pragmatic means accepting good ideas no matter where they come from (e.g. economic populism from the Democrats, racial egalitarianism from the Republicans, back in the day), not pretending that bad ideas are good just so both sides can go home with a smile on their faces.
The Bearded Blogger
All factions of the GOP feel like they belong to some unitary whole, incoherent as it seems from the outside. This whole is not united by policy or ideology but rather by emotions:
fear, hate, a sense of entitlement, a persecutor’s sense of being persecuted, power-worship, money-worship, a desire for purity and cleanliness, contempt for the downtrodden. These are the emotions (not ideas, not models of reality) that make the GOP a whole.
Sullyvan feels more at home in the GOP because he shares many (if not all) of those emotions. Policy-wise, he’s a red-state democratic senator, or a Joe Lieberman.
Ghanima Atreides
nutshell.
It is the haves vs the have not.
and even sam harris is starting to get it.
bob_is_boring
Here’s the thing on this:
I don’t care about Sullivan or what he thinks; I would spend virtually no time/effort/energy thinking about him except that blogs such as this one — which I read regularly — have some sort of fetishistic obsession with his writings for reasons that are utterly unclear to me.
Who. the. fuck. cares?
Now he’s certainly no McArgleBargle — who among us is? — but the rise of the blogosphere should (operative word) mean that random blokes with a middling-if-above-average prose style shouldn’t be telling us what to think anymore.
There are half a dozen commentors [sic] on this here lil’ site — not to mention some excellent frontpagers — about whose thoughts I am more interested that anyone who writes for
SlateStaleSlate, Esquire, the Altantic, Salon, HuffPo, etc etc etc.He writes a decent sentence? Terrific. He holds a-few-to-several non-abhorrent views! So does my fucking cat. He’s well-meaning? So’s my racist grandma.
Just quit reading, discussing, and obsessing (lookin’ at you, Cole) over this overblown asshole.
Just. Don’t. Look.
Ghanima Atreides
@Bearded
The scientific term for this is RWA, or right-wing authoritarianism. Part of the new domain of red/blue genetics.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Chris #33:
That sounds right to me.
I sometimes wonder if the very fecund positive pragmatism of that era (roughly the mid 20th Cen) was a byproduct of the (temporary as it turns out) state of confusion and flux in the relationship between the partisan political parties and the regional cultural blocs I described in #27 above. In an era when both parties contained both liberals and conservatives it seems like ideology within each party was more up for grabs than it is today and some of the legislation from that era was passed via some (by today’s standards) really weird political alliances and coalitions. Our politics today strikes me as coming closer to those of the 1880s and 1890s which was a period of legislative gridlock, especially in the Senate.
Tuffy
Conservatism and trolling for anonymous bareback HIV-positive gay sex, they just go together.
DougJ in Damascus
That is central to my point. Weisberg and Klein probably voted for Gore too.
Chris
@ The Bearded Blogger –
Agree completely, well described.
Chris
@ ThatLeftTurnInABQ –
If you’re saying the two defining cultures are the Northeast and the South, then what is it that defines the two cultures and that defines their differences?
And I think you’re right about the pragmatism/partisanship. In the Gilded Age, everyone knew what their team was, and you had gridlock like today. After the 1930s, everything changed and it took fifty years for the parties to settle back down into a Civil Cold War type of format again.
liberal
@30: “Er… not to defend Sully, but, screw it, I’m gonna defend Sully.”
Sully ultimately is a moral monster. He’s responsible for the ascientific, racist _Bell Curve_ nonsense, by giving it free publicity.
liberal
@bob_is_boring:
Exactly. And heh.
Ghanima Atreides
wallah will you retards give up on the crap 16 yr old psuedo-science polysci book already?
NO ONE READS THAT BOOK ANYMORE.
when you start raging on that crap it sukks all the oxygen out of the room and we can’t talk about cool shit like red/blue genetics.
schrodinger's cat
Sullivan couldn’t have voted for anybody since he just got his green card sometime earlier this year. You need to be a permanent resident for 5 years (3 years if you are married to an American citizen)before you can apply for naturalization.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Chris #42:
The short answer is that the NE Yankee culture is more urban, mercantile, parliamentarian, and literary, and it is derivative from the Puritan culture of Protestant England, especially the Dutch influenced culture of East Anglia and the channel coastal ports which played such a large role in the Cromwellian side during the English Civil War of the 1640s. The Planter culture of the SE is more rural, agricultural, royalist, and is derivative from the Cavaliers and Scots-Irish of the old Country who were on the losing side in the 1640s but took back power during the subsequent Restoration period after Cromwell’s death. And note that the rhetoric we hear today about “taking back our country” is an eerie echo of the English politics of the latter era.
The most readable introduction to this topic (as it applies to the split in US politics) which I’ve found is Kevin Phillip’s book The Cousins’ War. The book Albion’s Seed is better in terms of dealing with the complexities of multiple overlapping cultures rather than just the duality which Phillips talks about and which IMHO is overly simplistic, but Phillips is far more readable of an author, or so it seems to me, so I suggest starting with TCW and then following it up with AS. Both are hefty tomes but well worth the investment in effort IMHO. Reading Phillips’ work opened my eyes to aspects of the American Revolution (such as the contribution of paranoid anti-Catholicism to the political climate of the 1760s) which aren’t exactly taught in US history classes in our schools and which I had remained sadly ignorant of until quite recently.
liberal
@48 ThatLeftTurnInABQ
I haven’t read that much about this stuff, though it does seem intriguing. One thing, however: the fact that current Southern culture is marked by religiosity didn’t arise until the mid-1800s, IIRC.
Murc
@Doug-
Then I’m afriad your point with regard to mentining how much ‘in love’ Sully was with Bush escapes me. I mean, lord knows the man has plenty to criticize, but accusing him of having a hard-on for George W. seems out of line.
@shrodinger-
That’s entirely an error on my part, and I apologize. Despite his anglophilia (and yeah, that’s exactly what it is even though he’s a antive englishman) I think of Sully as an American, and I kind of envision him voting. That’s my bad, and I shouldn’t do it.
SoINeedAName
Since your obsession with Sullivan is clearly pathological, my professional opinion: Give it a rest!