Andrew Sullivan, conservative blogger for the Atlantic Monthly, has thrown in the towel – this time the whole towel:
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I cannot support a movement that claims to believe in limited government but backed an unlimited domestic and foreign policy presidency that assumed illegal, extra-constitutional dictatorial powers until forced by the system to return to the rule of law.
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I cannot support a movement that exploded spending and borrowing and blames its successor for the debt.
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I cannot support a movement that so abandoned government’s minimal and vital role to police markets and address natural disasters that it gave us Katrina and the financial meltdown of 2008.
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I cannot support a movement that holds torture as a core value.
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I cannot support a movement that holds that purely religious doctrine should govern civil political decisions and that uses the sacredness of religious faith for the pursuit of worldly power.
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I cannot support a movement that is deeply homophobic, cynically deploys fear of homosexuals to win votes, and gives off such a racist vibe that its share of the minority vote remains pitiful.
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I cannot support a movement which has no real respect for the institutions of government and is prepared to use any tactic and any means to fight political warfare rather than conduct a political conversation.
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I cannot support a movement that sees permanent war as compatible with liberal democratic norms and limited government.
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I cannot support a movement that criminalizes private behavior in the war on drugs.
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I cannot support a movement that would back a vice-presidential candidate manifestly unqualified and duplicitous because of identity politics and electoral cynicism.
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I cannot support a movement that regards gay people as threats to their own families.
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I cannot support a movement that does not accept evolution as a fact.
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I cannot support a movement that sees climate change as a hoax and offers domestic oil exploration as the core plank of an energy policy.
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I cannot support a movement that refuses ever to raise taxes, while proposing no meaningful reductions in government spending.
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I cannot support a movement that refuses to distance itself from a demagogue like Rush Limbaugh or a nutjob like Glenn Beck.
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I cannot support a movement that believes that the United States should be the sole global power, should sustain a permanent war machine to police the entire planet, and sees violence as the core tool for international relations.
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Does this make me a "radical leftist" as Michelle Malkin would say? Emphatically not. But it sure disqualifies me from the current American right.
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To paraphrase Reagan, I didn’t leave the conservative movement. It left me.
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And increasingly, I’m not alone.
Sullivan is an eloquent person. We don’t need him as a "Liberal." We have plenty. But we desperately need rational people with "Conservative Souls." The right he’s talking about is neither right [as in wing] nor right [as in correct]. They’re something else – and, as Sullivan points out, it’s the wrong thing to be.
I met Andrew Sullivan once. We were both on a panel discussion and wound up sitting next to each other at the preceding dinner. He’s an interesting guy. PhD, in political science I think, from England; bright, quick thinker. Seemed like a pretty good guy. He had just published a book called “Virtually Normal” (1995) which was one of the better statements opposing the pathologizing of homosexuality, and this was a panel on the topic before a group of psychoanalysts in Washington.
I was surprised to learn later on of his conservative political position and have followed his writings through the years as he began to distance himself more and more from the Republicans. Now, at last, he has made the break — or at least has acknowledged that they left him.
I always regretted that I didn’t get him to explain to me why someone like him would have been a conservative in the first place. Most Republican’s I have known just spout boilerplate slogans, which they then don’t live up to — except for cutting taxes. I’ve wanted an intelligent explanation of the core values that motivate someone like that.
But that was not the subject of the event where I met Andrew, so we didn’t talk about that.
I can actually understand the “conservative soul.” I might even have a partition in mine with a piece of that – it’s the anti-utopian piece. Any large scale attempt to solve a problem with a system presents “loopholes” that attract the self-serving side of man. Few of us go to an accountant and say, “Please go over my finances and make absolutely sure that I donate maximally to my government” or say to our doctors “Don’t do one thing not covered fully by my Medicare Plan” or say to our divorce lawyers, “I want to be sure that [s]he gets the best settlement possible. After all, I once loved her.” In that way, I am conservative about general programs. It’s a small piece, but it’s there.
As for Andrew, he’s a “conservative” with a brain – one of the few remaining. Conservative could actually mean “skeptical” or “thoughtful.” What it means today is the opposite – “greedy,” “selfish,” “contemptuous,” and “dishonest” come to mind.