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The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back Hardcover – October 10, 2006
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"As engaging as it is provocative. . . . Sullivan’s book should be read closely by liberals as well as conservatives.” — Jonathan Raban, The New York Review of Books
One of the nation's leading political commentators makes an impassioned call to rescue conservatism from the excesses of the Republican far right, which has tried to make the GOP the first fundamentally religious party in American history.
Today's conservatives support the idea of limited government, but they have increased government's size and power to new heights. They believe in balanced budgets, but they have boosted government spending, debt, and pork to record levels. They believe in national security but launched a reckless, ideological occupation in Iraq that has made us tangibly less safe. They have substituted religion for politics and damaged both.
In this bold and powerful book, Andrew Sullivan makes a provocative, prescient, and heartfelt case for a revived conservatism at peace with the modern world, and dedicated to restraining government and empowering individuals to live rich and fulfilling lives.
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper
- Publication dateOctober 10, 2006
- Dimensions6 x 1.09 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100060188774
- ISBN-13978-0060188771
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“Andrew Sullivan has been more honest and open-minded than just about anybody else on the right. . . . His book is important, not only because he is willing to re-examine his own views relentlessly, but also because this is a moment when conservatism is in tumult. . . . The Conservative Soul is imbued with Sullivan’s characteristic passion and clarity. . . . This is Sullivan at his wonderful best.” — David Brooks, The New York Times Book Review
“A kind of bildungsroman of Sullivan in the 9/11 years. . . . His invective is scorching, and one is happy he has turned on his former big-tent mates. . . . There is the reflection of a memoir in this book, a lingering heat and passion that are the detritus of a personal struggle.” — New York magazine
“Intellectually challenging and thoroughly captivating. . . . Sullivan is blessed with an insatiable appetite for ideas and argument. . . . What he has to say about most things is interesting, elegantly expressed, and deeply thought through.” — The Economist
“Sullivan’s is at once an obvious yet much-needed siren. . . . The Conservative Soul calmly and rationally attempts to deduce the malady that in barely 15 years has rendered Reagan-era conservatism all but unrecognizable.” — Bryan Burrough, The Washington Post Book World
“The Conservative Soul is as engaging as it is provocative. . . . Brilliantly exposes the contradictions of the Republican Party. . . . Sullivan’s alienated eye allows him to probe fundamentalist Christian theology with impressive clarity. . . . Sullivan’s book should be read closely by liberals as well as conservatives.” — Jonathan Raban, The New York Review of Books
“An adept social commentator, Sullivan skewers errant nonsense. . . . The Conservative Soul will be a success. Sullivan is a lucid, intelligent writer...a genuine pleasure to read.” — Commonweal
From the Back Cover
what does it mean to be a conservative anymore?
With the Iraq war, the rise of Christian fundamentalism, exploding government spending, soaring debt, insecure borders, and an executive branch with greater and greater power, Republicans and conservatives are debating this question with more and more urgency.
The contradictions keep mounting. Today's conservatives support the idea of limited government, but they have increased government's size, power, and reach to new heights. They believe in balanced budgets, but they have boosted government spending, debt, and pork to record levels. They believe in individual liberty and the rule of law, but they have condoned torture, ignored laws passed by Congress, and been indicted for bribery. They have substituted religion for politics, and damaged both.
In The Conservative Soul, Andrew Sullivan, one of the nation's leading political commentators, makes an impassioned call to rescue conservatism from the excesses of the Republican far right, which risks making the GOP the first fundamentally religious party in American history. Through an incisive look at the rise of Western fundamentalism, Sullivan argues that conservatives cannot in good conscience keep supporting a party that believes in its own God-given mission to change people's souls, instead of protecting their liberties. He carefully charts the arguments of the new conservatism, showing why they cannot work in today's America, why they fail the test of logic and pragmatism, and why they betray the conservative tradition from Edmund Burke to Ronald Reagan.
In this bold and powerful book, Andrew Sullivan criticizes our government for acting too often, too quickly, and too expensively. He champions a political philosophy based on skepticism and reason, rather than certainty and fundamentalism. He defends a Christianity that is sincere but not intolerant, and a politics that respects religion by keeping its distance. And he makes a provocative, heartfelt case for a revived conservatism at peace with the modern world, dedicated to restraining government and empowering individuals to live rich and fulfilling lives.
About the Author
Andrew Sullivan is one of today's most provocative social and political commentators. An essayist for Time magazine, a columnist for The Sunday Times of London, and a senior editor at The New Republic, he is also the editor of "The Daily Dish," one of the most widely read political blogs on the Web. He lives in Washington, D.C.
From The Washington Post
Conservatism is facing a crisis that won't be solved, one suspects, merely by switching presidents. To those of us far removed from Beltway philosophical battles, Andrew Sullivan -- a columnist for Time magazine, a prominent blogger and a senior editor at the New Republic -- might seem an unusual candidate to parse the problem. He's British. He's Catholic. He's gay. But Sullivan is also smart and well read, and in his new book, The Conservative Soul, he calmly and rationally attempts to deduce the malady that in barely 15 years has rendered Reagan-era conservatism all but unrecognizable.
The pathogen he identifies is Christian fundamentalism. The Conservative Soul, in fact, is one of several similar books issued this fall that collectively serve as a call to arms to American elites to put down their New York Times crossword puzzles and their glasses of Fumé Blanc and wake up to the idea that the fundamentalists most dangerous to our future are not Islamic and foreign but Christian and homegrown. Sullivan's is at once an obvious yet much-needed siren; his text calls to mind the book Mary Lefkowitz wrote several years back, Not Out of Africa, to rebut charges that the foundations of ancient Greek culture were built by black Africans. Afrocentrism was so nutty that most intellectuals couldn't be bothered to answer it. The same, I fear, is true for Christian fundamentalism. Its political tenets are so addlebrained and its leaders so difficult to take seriously that it's only now -- after the country has been run by a born-again Christian for six years -- that thinkers like Sullivan realize that it's time for reasonable people to do something about it.
The Conservative Soul, unfortunately, is not only too polite but too high-minded to galvanize anyone without a graduate degree in philosophy. This is not a bad thing, just a warning. If you belong to the Elks Club, apply catsup to your scrambled eggs or have ever read anything by Ann Coulter, this is not a book for you. It is written by a card-carrying intellectual and aimed at card-carrying intellectuals. Sullivan wades deep into the high grasses here; he is more interested in Hegel, Hobbes and Leo Strauss than anyone you've seen arguing on television, much less voted for. Further, the book doesn't really explain how conservatism lost its soul, just that it did, and it doesn't offer any real prescription for getting it back.
Instead, and this is the book's great value, Sullivan takes us back to basics -- we're talking Plato here -- to remind us of the bedrock differences in the two schools of belief that, like squabbling conjoined twins, inhabit the Republican Party's tortured body. The first half of The Conservative Soul, which explores the philosophical underpinnings of Christian fundamentalism and explains how they are anathema to a free society, made me as angry as anything I've read in months. That there are people in 21st-century America who believe the Bible is literally true, who believe the Earth was created 6,000 years ago, and who believe that our lives today should be dictated by codes of conduct written by people who lived 2,000 years before modern medicine, electricity or equal rights -- and that these same Americans have influence in national affairs -- should infuriate anyone with a functioning mind. Fundamentalism, Sullivan reminds us, is the antithesis of reason. Its adherents -- Christian, Muslim, Jewish or otherwise -- have been handed The Truth and cling to it, facts be damned. Quoting figures as varied as Pope Benedict XVI and Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), Sullivan repeatedly emphasizes how fundamentalism abhors the thinking mind, insisting that an individual's conscious choices -- whether to have an abortion or what to order at Burger King -- amount to moral anarchy.
In the book's second half, Sullivan switches from anger to nostalgia, reaching back to remind us of the things that made Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher's brand of conservatism so appealing and so successful as a mode of governance. He traces the influence of fundamentalists to Bill Clinton's various personal deficiencies, which triggered a moral counterattack from Christian leaders who felt they knew something about morality. It's a good story, but Sullivan doesn't tell it with any narrative grace. Instead, he gnashes his teeth in frustration at the changes this period brought to conservatism. It's the hallmark of his book -- a fine intellectual effort that, for all Sullivan's clear thinking and clear prose, probably won't change any minds that fundamentalist beliefs haven't already ossified.
Reviewed by Bryan Burrough
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Product details
- Publisher : Harper; First Edition (October 10, 2006)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0060188774
- ISBN-13 : 978-0060188771
- Item Weight : 1.18 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.09 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,950,994 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,336 in Political Commentary & Opinion
- #3,631 in Political Conservatism & Liberalism
- #8,324 in U.S. Political Science
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The conservatism that he remembers - this book is a philosophical memoir -from the Thatcher years is no longer recognizable in the policies of the present-day Republican Party, neither in Congress nor at the White House. The GOP is now the party of deficit spending, big government, bribery, corruption, sex scandals, foreign wars, nation building, and more federal involvement in healthcare and education. The direction of the Republican Party has alienated many of the traditional conservatives that I have previously reviewed in this space such as Kevin Phillips and Francis Fukuyama. Even though Sullivan supported the war in Iraq, he now feels that it has become something he can no longer support.
Sullivan argues that the conservative movement - if you can call it that - has been hijacked by religious fundamentalists. When I reviewed Kevin Phillips' "American Theocracy," I felt that Philips was overstating the threat of fundamentalism. I thought fundamentalists were pandered to during election years and forgotten in between. However, after reading this book, I can see how the fundamentalist mindset has taken hold and is leading this country in the wrong direction.
The category of fundamentalism, as Sullivan uses the term, is a very broad one. A fundamentalist is someone who sees only one truth - his or her own - and will not tolerate any dissent or political pluralism. With this definition he lumps together Communists, Nazis, Islamic jihadists as well as extremist Jews and Christians. Religious fundamentalists reject not only liberal democracy but the very notion that religion should be relegated to the private sphere. Admittedly there are many shades of extremism, but this is the virus that is now afflicting the Republican Party.
In this book Sullivan argues for a more modest and temperate brand of conservatism, one that is more open-minded, sceptical, and tolerant of political diversity. This conservatism of doubt borrows heavily from Michael Oakeshott, a British Philosopher who was the subject of Sullivan's doctoral dissertation at Harvard. According to Sullivan, "the defining characteristic of the conservative is that he knows what he doesn't know." (Not to be mistaken with Rumsfeld's known unknowns, they were empirical unknowns rather than metaphysical.) Think of the conservatism of William F Buckley or George F Will, both of whom feel very secure in what they don't know. Conservatives don't know what change or reform will bring so they are against it. (To "stand athwart history" as Buckley would say.) A conservatism of doubt believes that there are few things the government can correctly, therefore things are better left to the private sphere. Minding one's own business, is a very modest philosophy.
With the results of the midterm elections, I think the Republican Party will rediscover the modesty and the open-mindedness that Sullivan is arguing for. I hope that the Democrats also retain some of these values that they should have learned during their 12 years in the wilderness. So far they are not yet your parents' Democrats.
Sullivan is at his best when explaining why these ideas have such power and vitality and specifically why they have found such a direct expression in the creation and historical development of the United States of America.
As readers of The Dish will know Sullivan is an expert rhetorician and a highly-skilled advocate of this view of conservatism. What they may not appreciate is the depth of the philosophical well from which he has drawn and the extent to which he has learned from conservative thinkers of the past before developing and applying their ideas to our current political situation. The strength of the position he outlines is that it is flexible and humble in the face of new policy questions and challenges, it does not pretend to have instant answers from either divine revelation or an ideological recipe book. Precisely because it is flexible it can free human creativity to find new solutions.
The passage with which I most heartily agreed was:
"The real leaders of a free society are not its politicians. They are its artists and laborers, scientists and teachers, bloggers and social workers, sportsmen and movie directors, day traders and research students, architects and farmers, waiters and comedians."
My only complaint about that statement was that he did not include writers, of which Mr Sullivan is himself a most worthy and shining example.
He begins with an exploration of fundamentalism: its reliance on certainty of belief, rigid enforcement of rules, and the notion of the State as a force for pushing its citizens in an allegedly ideal direction. He then pivots to conservatism and its defining characteristics as he sees them: curiosity, doubt, skepticism, acceptance of human fallibility, and the notion of the State as minimalist guarantor of security and the individual citizen's ability to pursue his or her own happiness.
All of this is laid out understandably to the lay reader and convincingly to the skeptical reader (including this liberal). Sullivan takes what could be an esoteric exercise in definitions and terms and makes it enjoyable and down-to-earth, with the deeply-felt humanity that his longtime readers have come to expect.
Andrew Sullivan has long been one of my favorite writers, and since I began reading his blog in 2009, he has had an outsized influence on my political philosophy. The Conservative Soul represents the type of long-form expression he intends to return to after years of sharing his thoughts in bits and pieces. If his future books and articles are anything like this one, they will be worth waiting for.



