Drifting To and Fro

As is often the way when one drifts toward or away from some habit or topic, I've been surprised, recently, to read people mentioning Andrew Sullivan's blogging activities. When he left for his August break, his blog left my mind, and I haven't been back since. Sullivan has descended from indisputably must reading to hackdom.

Intending not to return to the Daily Dish seemed such a natural decision that I let myself repose in a blissful world in which nobody paid attention to its author. Some posts that I've come across today suggest that, while that world was only a fleeting illusion, the opposite may be only a fleeting reality.

Jonah Goldberg, noting Sullivan's activist-speak reference to "principled conservatives," says, "These little jabs get so tiresome." Yes, indeed, they do. I, for one, am getting to the point of finding it a curiosity that people continue to respond to them more seriously than to the latest Dowd inanities.

Marc Comtois, in fact, is thinking about removing Sullivan from his list of links — not so much as a response to Sullivan's monomania, but because links are a species of recommendation. And as Marc advises:

Andrew, if it seems that all those with whom you once agreed now disagree with you, but still agree with each other, it is true: that should tell you which entity seems to have changed philosophically. It is you, not us, who has become inconsistent. You are not some righteous lone wolf standing on a hill howling at the moon with a song of ideological purity because his pack left him. Instead, you have wandered from the pack and, despite our howls, you ignore us.

For one example of Sullivan's drift, we turn to Paul Craddick:

After quoting a pargraph from the article, Sullivan writes, "I have to say I'm delighted by Cato's stand. Bush is slowly destroying conservatism's small government credentials and commitment to expanding personal freedom." Yes indeed, the institute is unhappy with the Bush administration for record deficit spending, and its regulatory record. Strangely, though, Sullivan omits what may be Cato's biggest complaint about Bush:

'But the tipping point was the invasion of Iraq. As early as December 2001, Institute scholars were writing op-eds urging the administration not to go to war against Saddam Hussein; when it did, Cato was one of the first think tanks to warn that the lack of postwar planning would doom the reconstruction effort. In October 2003, several Cato foreign policy experts joined the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, co-organized by its director of foreign policy studies, Christopher Preble. Today, Cato is unabashed in its calls for an immediate exit from Iraq, a view encapsulated in a March USA Today op-ed by Preble titled "wisest move: leave soon." The Institute's link to its Iraq Web page reads "exit: iraq." Indeed, when it comes to the war, Cato sounds like The Nation--in a March Chicago Sun-Times op-ed, Cato fellow Stanley Kober even called out the administration for not listening to its international critics and failing to retain international support.'

There mightn't be a more perfect illustration of the rot that has invalidated Sullivan's podium for calling anybody unprincipled. Overwhelmed by his feelings about the one issue that can, for him, subsume the importance of defeating Islamic fascism, Sullivan links arms with others who strongly opposed, and continue to oppose, what he once correctly understood to be a step toward that defeat. And he doesn't bother to address the incongruity.

One can trace the incidentals of Sullivan's turned head in his apparent misunderstanding of conservatism's lessons. While it may accord with the libertarian subset, his limited, short-sighted conception of what it means to have a "commitment to expanding personal freedom" is clearly not conservative.

A lesson that those who look to tradition are apt to retain, but that Sullivan has lost, is that personal freedom is a much fuller concept than "things I can do" — or, more psychologically appropriate, "things others can't tell me I can't do." Exhibit A: Sullivan's own political and analytical servitude to the desperately immediate cause of homosexuality's normalization.

Sullivan must manage to find the freedom of he who transcends practicality's limits such that disappointing impracticality can be acknowledged. Otherwise, his chains will drag him down.