Raban on The Conservative Soul

By Scott Horton

A year ago this weekend, I was in Baghdad, not getting much sleep between regular bombings and helicopters passing overhead, but doing my best to escape from time to time into the drafts of what turned into Andrew Sullivan's new book, The Conservative Soul. I had a long dialogue with Sullivan about this book, and I couldn't for that reason serve as an altogether detached reviewer. Moreover, Sullivan and I have been fighting together at the frontlines of the battle over torture for more than two years now, so we are something on the order of comrades-in-arms. Nevertheless, I had the distinct sense in those early spring days on the Tigris that I was looking at a very important book. It was in fact the first work I had seen that dealt with the crisis in conservative thought in America in a penetrating, nonpolemical way.

Any trip today to an airport bookstore will discover tables of books with political diatribe of the left and right. Most of these works are highly formulaic and show shoddy or no research and very little thought. Most are also filled with acid ad hominem attacks on leading figures from the other political corner. They feed off of one another in a sort of frenzy of partisan political hatred. Few if any of these works will withstand the test of time and frankly I think the country would benefit from simply having most of them pulped. (No, I am not advocating censorship—merely expressing a wish for productive recycling).

Sullivan's book is different. He is concerned with the essence of ideas—less the parade of personalities and more the transformation of political discourse. He is deeply worried about what has happened to conservative thought in America. Like a good conservative, he is concerned about loss, specifically the alarmingly rapid disappearance of a conservative tradition—which could be reflected in different constellations by Eisenhower, Goldwater and Reagan—almost immediately after it was being judged politically triumphant. Sullivan saw, earlier and far more keenly than most, the rupture in American conservatism between the Theocons and the small-government, balanced-budget, personal-freedom conservatism that characterized Goldwater. But this is also an intensely personal book. In the best of it, Sullivan stacks up the Theocon trend against his own conservative lodestars—most significantly, Michael Oakeshott, but also Michel de Montaigne, and Edmund Burke. The points of reference are very well taken and the discussion is extremely revealing.

America is a profoundly conservative country, but it has a different conservative tradition from most of Europe and Latin America. Continental conservatism can be defined with reference to the prerogatives of a monarch or autocrat and an established church. However, America was founded as an act of rebellion against the monarchy and its established church. It was therefore difficult from the outset to be a conservative in the old sense in America. Instead, Americans drew on a new kind of conservatism, one which valued human freedom, property rights, small-government and fiscal austerity. This was the Old Whig thinking of figures like Edmund Burke, which was redefined as conservative by the Jacobin revolutions on the Continent. This explains a fairly fundamental divide between conservatism in the English-speaking countries and conservatism in Europe. But the changes in Republican politics in the era of Bush and Rove have been a repudiation of the old Anglo-American conservatism in favor of the theologically focused conservatism which characterizes much of Europe. This is not a simple shift in course, but a great rupture with the old tradition.

After the 2006 election, Sullivan's book is getting broader recognition, and the current New York Review of Books features as its lead a review of The Conservative Soul by Jonathan Raban. This is the first really serious review the work has had, and the first to recognize the enduring potential of the work as a contribution to the history of American political thought.

Raban takes a number of jabs at Sullivan in the review—assailing his post-9/11 enthusiasm for the Iraq War, his criticism of Susan Sontag, and, most pointedly, his newfound career as a blogger. Sullivan's blog writing is, says Raban, profoundly unconservative by Sullivan's own definition. He chides "a quickness to take passionate sides," "a schoolboy tendency to hero-worship," and "condescending scorn." These criticisms are rather strongly put, but anyone who reads Sullivan's blog has probably had a similar thought pass through his mind at some point. I think, however, Raban's criticism is more directed at the medium of blogging than at Sullivan. It's clear that Raban is a blogging skeptic.

What blogging offers the reader a rapid, almost immediate response time, a robust, assertive style, and a dialogue between bloggers and their readers which can at times lead to remarkable real-time research. Bloggers are accused of cheapening the quality of dialogue by mainstream media, which clearly feels threatened. But at their best, bloggers have been the carp in the pond, pushing the pace and depth of research on political stories. It would be hard to imagine the internet today without his Daily Dish, and in years to come it will be hard to imagine conservative thought without referencing Andrew Sullivan's book.