Customer Reviews

The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

In the first chapter Andrew Sullivan works to earn his Conservative credentials by launching a measured attack on liberalism but most of the rest of the book is one long critique of the current evolution of American Conservativism. The bread and butter of the modern Conservative movement are gays, guns and abortions. Ironically this `Conservative' author produces perhaps the best defense of pro-choice I have ever read as well as a wonderful defense of secularism. Combine that with the fact that the author is gay (and British) and you have a rather unique voice among Conservatives.

The point where Mr. Sullivan lost me was in his distinction between true Conservatives and radicalized Conservatives. He writes, `It [conservativism] never seeks to return to a golden age or a distant past' Really? Returning to the past is generally one of, if not THE defining feature of Conservativism. The author might want to read `The Conservative Mind' by Russell Kirk or `The Conservative Intellectual Movement' by George H. Nash to see an endless parade of Conservative intellectuals pining for some bygone era. Later, the author states that, "...Conservativism's great philosophical advantage over liberalism [is that] it can be more flexible." William F. Buckley famously stated that Conservatives `stands athwart history, yelling Stop'. Conservatives have stood in the way of civil rights, woman's suffrage and now gay rights. To a Conservative the American family is mom, dad and 2.2 children. Understanding of right and wrong can only be derived from Judeo-Christians teachings and moral relativity is the bane of an ethical society. Sounds about as flexible as a brick. One final jaw dropper is Mr. Sullivan's claim that `Conservatives, after all, hate war.' Somehow I think that the modern Conservative movement has completely left Andrew Sullivan behind. He considers neither religious fundamentalist nor libertarians to be true Conservatives when in fact they are the base.

Another argument that the author uses is that George W. Bush isn't a true Conservative but this leads back to the question of what a true Conservative is. John Dean and Bruce Bartlett both used this same tactic. My opinion is that George W. Bush is the reductio ad absurdum of Conservativism. Bush is anti-intellectual, pro defense spending and singularly obsessed with lowering taxes. He also shares the paleo-conservatives love of religion as a panacea for society's moral failings. No man could possibly meet all definitions of a Conservative because many are mutually exclusive. The problem with Bush is that he is a classic ideologue who surrounds himself with like minded ideologues. Even Reagan who was the prototypical Conservative was pragmatic enough to raise taxes when it needed to be done. Bush on the other hand would stick to his agenda until the world came crashing down in a smoldering heap. This doesn't make him non-Conservative it just makes him inflexible.

Despite my criticisms this is a really terrific book and a pleasure to read. In an age where the spokespeople for Conservativism range from repugnant (Tom DeLay) to psychopathic (Ann Coulter) and all points in between (Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly etc) it's refreshing to see a Conservative with class, dignity and actual writing talent. I could see myself sitting down with Andrew Sullivan and having an enjoyable conversation, agreeing on some points and disagreeing on others. The only real demerit I give the book is that the most interesting writing is in the first half of the book and it loses steam in the second half. Still, I have no qualms about giving it a solid five stars. It would be wonderful to see Andrew Sullivan's brand of Conservativism replace the current toxic blend.

Sullivan's writing is ultra-accessible, and transforms previously dry and boring academic philosophies into something anyone can understand. His critique on the state of conservatism in America is refreshing and much needed. He presents a viable argument for doubt and faith to exist side by side, soemthing I didn't think possible.

His commentary on the current Republican party is insightful and brutally honest. A must read.

This is one book that has had a huge influence on my political philosophy. Both the author and I grew up in conservative homes, grew up in Christian homes, and voted for G.W. Bush in 2000. Before I picked up the book, that's where the similarities ended.

Sullivan is truly a fascinating man. A homosexual, British, Catholic who voted for John Kerry in 2004. Sullivan lives with HIV and I say that only to say that it doesn't stop him from living life to the fullest, from speaking passionately about the America he still believes in, his adoptive country. That is where the differences begin. But as I read his book I felt his ideas resonate with me strongly.

The term conservatism has been taken over in the last 15 years or so and abused and Andrew Sullivan's mission is to take it back. If you lament what conservatism used to be, and dream of what it truly can be, this is the book for you. His main theme is that our politics should be a politics of doubt, that is, a realization that individual humans don't have all the answers for everyone else at any point in time. Thus the beauty of the freedom that has been written into our constitution here in America.

If you know of a conservative or a fundamentalist, who is thick-headed, blindly passionate about their views, not willing to consider error in their own perspective or listen to sound reason, this is the book that just might break them down. So do be careful.

Other Information: It is a quick read with large margins and double-spacing and it is a page-turner. It is the kind of book you will want to pass on to your friends and family.

Sullivan does excellent work in showing how far from traditional conservatism George W. Bush is with his emphasis on heavy government spending without commensurate taxation, his unconscionable expansion of executive power at the expense of other branches of government and against the U.S. Constitution, as well as his putting religious ideas, themselves without rational basis, in the place of reasonable, skeptical inquiry. The only fault of the book is that it makes Reagan a more competent president than in fact he was: Reagan's fiscal profligacy in expanding defense spending while cutting taxes doubled the national debt in the eight years of his administration.

Sullivan's book joins Bruce Bartlett's Impostor as a debunker of Bush's supposed conservatism.

Being 40, the only Conservatism I have grown up with has been, in one way or another, affiliated with religion. The most pronounced strain of religious conservatism has always seemed ideological, fundamentalist, bigoted, narrow minded, anti-environmentalist and, ironically, anti-conservationist... Indeed, if you look up the antonym of Liberal, it is not Conservative, but "hateful, hurtful, malevolent, malicious, mean, misanthropic, selfish, unkind".

So... I picked up this book to find out why, "in God's name", anyone would be a conservative. If a gay man, Andrew Sullivan, can be conservative, then there is obviously something I am missing.

However, having read the book, I am still as perplexed as before. By the time Sullivan is done, he has also painted the "fundamentalist" strain of modern conservativism as "hateful, hurtful, malevolent, malicious, mean, misanthropic, selfish, unkind"... explicitly, in some passages, less so in others.

So what is Sullivan's conservative soul?

He writes: "The radical alternative to all these options is conservatism. As a politics, its essence is an acceptance of the unknowability of ultimate truth, an acknowledgement of the distinction between what is true forever and what is true for the here and now, and an embrace of the discrepency between theoretical and practical knowledge. It is an anti-ideology, a nonpogram, a way of looking at the world whose most perfect experession might be called inactivism." P. 230

And yet when he discusses gay marriage, his inactivism isn't quite so inactive. "[The Conservative] might think it's wise to try this out in a few states first. But he will understand that some adjustment is necessary because the world changes..."

Of course, this is precisely what Liberals like Howard Dean initiated in Vermont. Sullivan would like to identify this kind of Politics as " true Conservatism", but it's the Liberals who are demonstating exactly the kind of "flexibility" he would like to co-opt as a Conservative value.

His last chapter, wherein he defines "true" Conservatism, as opposed to the fundamentalism he excoriates in the first two-thirds of the book, is so diffuse that it could be applied to *any* political system that is *not* fundamentalist.

And that's the rub. Can Sullivan really separate fundamentalism from Conservatism and still call it Conservative? I'm not convinced. I remained unconvinced by Sullivan's conservatism. According to my reading, he is a closet Liberal.

This is a philosophical essay, not a political diatribe. This is a very educated, articulate, thoughtful, and practical book. It is so good it probably needs to be read more than once.

As an estranged moderate Republican who believes in a balanced budget, smaller government, and minimalist interference in state, local, and individual rights not assigned to the federal government by the Constitution (and also the elimination of central banks that are NOT authorized by the Constitution), I found provocation, solace, and humor in this book (the discussion of the role of the penis and its eternal sperm, in relation to fundamentalist strictures and fears, is alone worth the price of the book).

Gifted turns of phrases as well as erudite references to both ancient and modern philosopher-kings abound. I especially likes "Immoral decisions, in other words, are like environmental pollutants" (page 125), and on page 209, "In this nonfundamentalists understanding of faith, practice is more imporant than theory, love more important than law, and mystery is seen as an insight into truth rather than an obstacle."

The author's real life as a gay man who has survived AIDS no doubt infuriates the fundamentalists and the less hypocritical evangelists, but this is part and parcel of his qualifications--he completely trashes both the incumbent President and the Christian extremist fundamentalists that have substituted dogma for dialog.

This is a personal essay. It is neither a summary nor a substitute for the many other books I have reviewed on both the left and the right, and so I end by saying that the book gets five stars for its extra leavening of philosophical reasoning, but I urge those who find favor in this book to throw a wider net, or at least read my reviews of the last 25 books on ideology, religion, faith, Iraq, and the impeachable offenses of Bush-Cheney.

PLEASE READ THIS BOOK. Andrew Sullivan travels the talk show circuit as an engaging political thinker with penetrating insights and the courage to openly debunk the leader of his party. But one cannot know the depths of this 40-something British immigrant without reading The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back.

Sullivan is refreshingly honest, about his own life and his journey to today, and about what has happened to the Republican party and the American people.

"I think of my own analytical errors in the past few years. Looking back, I can see that my outrage at the atrocity of September 11, however merited, may well have blinded me to the intricacies and dangers of a subsequent war in Iraq...We were all wrong."

But this is far more than a confessional about a war gone wrong, or about "the ineptness and neoconservative recklessness I saw in the Bush administration." This book is an exploration of how the conservative movement was led into a "rival form" of religious, political fundamentalism and why the resultant loss of constitutional freedoms and America's moral high ground was the logical next step in the seizing of power by ideological fundamentalists.

"The essential claim of the fundamentalist is that he knows the truth....It isn't an argument from which he could be dissuaded by something we call reason....The values of the fundamentalist are facts. God has revealed them in a book that is inerrant, whether that book is the Bible or the Koran; or he has entrusted them to hierarchy whose interpretation of scripture and tradition and history and nature is authoritative and even, in some cases, literally infallible."

Sullivan revisits the founders of the American constitution and finds they were "well aware of the dangers of religious fundamentalism allied to government power, hence the First Amendment."

"The Founders, [to the dismay of fundamentalists like former Senator Rick Santorum], did not write a Constitution dedicated to the inculcation of virtue. In fact what is stunning about the American Declaration of Independence and subsequent Constitution is how morality and virtue are all but absent as a primary concern. The tripartite goal of the American founding was "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." They did not write, "the pursuit of virtue or the pursuit of morality....Americans insisted on freedom first."

In Sullivan's analysis, the lurch toward George W. Bush's theocracy violates the foundations of conservatism. "Tax cuts were simply a matter of faith," and accompanied a "staggering expansion of government power and spending [which] increased by an astonishing 38 percent since 2000" resulting in "a bankrupting of the American government" so that "by the end of one term, President Bush had more than doubled [the US Government's future spending commitments] to $43.3 trillion [with] absolutely no way to finance it." Sullivan details the Bush excesses in fiscal, social and foreign policy as "intransigent recklessness" accompanied by "a refusal to account for reality, to acknowledge error, to prepare for all contingencies." In place of Constitutional safeguards and limited government "came a new theory of [presidential] constitutional powers [in which] the president had the right to ignore the law." This has led to a "decision to end decades of humane warfare in the United States military" and to sanctioned torture.

This is not conservatism, Sullivan asserts. "The conservatism I grew up around was a combination of lower taxes, less government spending, freer trade, freer markets, individual liberty, personal responsibility....The defining characteristic of the conservative is that he knows what he doesn't know."

Sullivan, himself, avoids the errors he finds in the theocratic Bush administration, by admitting up front that "this book...is an attempt to explain what one individual person means by conservatism." Sullivan suggests "there is more to life than politics [but] the best form of politics is that which enables us to engage in nonpolitical life more fully and more freely."

By reaching back into the wisdom of the American Founders and of observers like the fifteenth century Montaigne, and by carefully, thoughtfully analyzing the strangeness of recent years, Sullivan has returned reason, quiet analysis and civility to the public discourse and brought hope to those who, like Sullivan, "have felt like throwing in the towel and simply saying: all right, I'm not a conservative if that's what it now means."

Andrew Sullivan is a conservative after my own heart. Having written his doctoral dissertation on the famed British conservative Michael Oakeshott, this book is an attempt to articulate a vision of Oakeshottian conservatism. That said, this book fails at the task.

What Sullivan wanted to say, as I understand him, was this: his vision of conservatism - the 'conservatism of doubt' - has it that government should intrude and plan as little as necessary to preserve order. This is because conservatives, as distinct from liberals, see human knowledge as constrained and, thus, human attempts at large-scale planning to be frought with pomposity and difficulty. Conservatism should be about letting individuals control their own lives as much as possible becuase they will know better how to do so than politicians. Unfortunately, as Sullivan sees it, conservatism has gotten away from such principles and become a 'conservatism of faith,' that holds values to be absolute and knowable and, thus, the politician's job as legislating the good.

The problem, as I've already said, is that Sullivan doesn't really make that case very cogently or well. He is abstruse, repetitive, and not very organized in his case. As such, this book comes off as unclear and unimpressive.

Take the chapter on the Bush administration's alleged adherence to the "conservatism of faith" (The Bush Crucible). Here, Sullivan attempts to tie the Bush administration to a plethora of "theoconservative" beliefs. While his take is hard to disagree with, Sullivan's argument is weak precisely because he hardly quotes or cites many of the Bush administration's players. He quotes congressman Rick Santorum at length, and several editors/talking heads for cosnervative politics quite a bit. But to make a case that the Bush administration is agressively pushing theoconservative policies, he needs to make direct connections with the Bush administration. (I am embarassed to say that I've read many liberal writers like Cris Hedges make this case way more convincingly and directly than Sullivan).

Another huge mistake Sullivan makes - a mistake that, if avoided, would have negated most of this book's negative reviews - is his omission of a chapter tying his conservative vision with that of other prominent past conservatives. Had he made more of his similarities with such conservative legendaries as Burke, Oakeshott, Reagan, and Thatcher, people would be much more hesistant to grumble that Sullivan is simply not a conservative. While Sullivan alludes a few times to his having been a young Reaganite and Thatcherite but might have been wise to devote a chapter to explaining how his vision of conservatism - small government, fiscal responsibility, skepticism of government planning - was once the dominant strand of conservatism. That way, it would be hard indeed for critics to dismiss Sullivan as simply "not a conservative."

All in all, I wanted to give more stars to this book. I admire Sullivan and share many of his conservative sympathies (and antipathies to what currently passes as conservatism). But in the end, this book was too abstruse, disorganized, and poorly argued for me.

On a business trip last week, I finally had the chance to finish The Conservative Soul. It's Andrew Sullivan's political analysis of the last couple of decades, on where he thinks the "right wing" has gone off the rails, and what he thinks true conservatism ought to be. Even though it's a couple years old now, his analysis is still very relevant and astute (in some ways even more so, as we watch the crack up of the right in the wake of their 2008 losses). Though he touches on many particular hot-button issues by way of example, his focus is more on philosophical underpinnings and the motivations for broad political trends and alignments. Starting from an assessment of the particular vacuums after the collapse of the "old left" that enabled the rise of the "new right", he diagnoses the "fundamentalist psyche" (a need for absolute truth arbitrated by central authorities and authoritative texts), the "theoconservative project" (to "recapture" the public square from the "false neutrality" of secular liberalism), and its ascendancy in the "Bush crucible". He then sets out to propose an alternative "conservatism of doubt" and a "politics of freedom". While some details of his account are anchored in the specifics of American politics in a particular time, some of his philosophical work, particularly in the chapter about natural law and in his latter positive chapters, are quite profound and less tied to this moment in history. His dissection of natural law (as it is wielded today) versus the implications of Darwin and "nature" is keenly argued and very insightful. His presentation of his preferred understanding of conservatism, as articulated in Montaigne and Oakshott, leading to his political philosophy manifesto, extrapolating from Hobbes, is compelling. (Makes me want to work through his bibliography of those classic philosophers.) In his classic style, Sullivan writes eloquently, deftly weaving deep philosophical argument with crackling contemporary examples and personal experiences and insights. Full of thought-provoking ideas from his distinctive perspective, lucidly expressed, this book was a pleasure to read.

As a young adult just beginning to soak in the various philosophies of politics, I would say that this is an excellent book to start with. After scanning through Bryan Burrough's Washington Post review, I'd have to disagree with his statement that Sullivan's book "is not only too polite, but too high-minded to galvanize anyone without a graduate degree in philosophy." Compared to the hyperbolic ramblings of Ann Coulter and Michael Moore, then yes, Burroughs is correct. This is a serious piece of work, but not necessarily a completely esoteric one--this book trumps Coulter and Moore, however, because it is much more accessible than the other two's arguments.

Sullivan assertions are so much more pragmatic, as well--he can be accredited for his respect towards practically everyone in the political spectrum. Even his blatant attack on Robert George's idea of "natural law," which consumed most of the first half of Sullivan's book, was notably well-rounded and treated with considerable respect towards the Fundamentalist Christian movement in the United States.

With that in perspective, everyone--Democrats, Republicans, Fundamentalists, Atheists, seniors and teenagers--should read this book. That is where I think Burrough's argument is flawed; Sullivan's belief is that every individual possesses some kind of itch to break out of the Elks club meetings, Dave Matthews Band concerts, and Coulter/Moore book clubs-- to be skeptical of what every presents itself as a routine--is truly what conservatism stands for.

This book, though lacking "narrative grace" as Burrough rightfully said, can enlighten more than just the post-graduate crowd. Besides, there are a hell of a lot of kids out there today who read the political narratives of Solzhenitsyn and Hobbes; why can't Sullivan be added to that list?