True Confessions
I've never been a big fan of Andrew Sullivan. An expat Brit with an opinion on seemingly every aspect of American political life, devout Catholic, foreign-policy hawk, avowed conservative and out of the closet gay man and outspoken champion of gay marriage rights, the guy rarely has trouble getting attention for his views--even when he's not exposed cruising the web for rough sex. My problems have been with his pomposity and occasional intellectual incoherence.

But the man can think, and he can write. And in this week's New Republic, he's penned a really insightful and interesting cover story on the deep schism in the right-wing coalition. Dividing contemporary Republicans into "conservatives of faith," a faction deeply informed by religion who brook no moral uncertainty and argue that since government cannot remain neutral on personal questions, it has an obligation to intervene wherever fundamental values (as they see them) are imperiled, and "conservatives of doubt," who believe that absolute truths are unknowable, that actions have consequences, and that as a result government should generally err on the side of inaction, Sullivan advances the argument that, for the first time, what splits these two factions might be more compelling than what unites them. He begins by surveying what the ascendance of "conservatives of faith" has meant in terms of the recent transformation of American government:

What matters to conservatives of faith is therefore less the size of government than its meaning and structure. If it is harnessed to uphold their definition of the good life--protecting a stable family structure, upholding Biblical morality, protecting the vulnerable--then its size is irrelevant, as long as it doesn't overwhelm civil society. Indeed, using government to promote certain activities (the proper care of children, support for the poor, legal privileges for heterosexual relationships) and to deter others (recreational drug use, divorce, gay unions, abortion, indecent television) is integral to the conservative project. Bush has added another twist to this philosophy, seeking not only to expand government programs from the top down, but from the bottom up, by incorporating new mechanisms that give citizens more choice. Hence Health Savings Accounts in Medicare and personal accounts within Social Security. If that actually means more government borrowing and spending, so be it. If government must be expanded to give more people a sense of "ownership" within government programs, fine. This is what remains of conservatism's old belief in individual freedom. The new conservatism of faith has substituted real choice in a free market for regulated choice within an ever-expanding welfare state.
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As Republicans found that it was hard to reduce the size of government, they decided to stop worrying and deploy it for their own goals.

As a result, Republicans now support institutions they previously vilified: Whereas they once wanted to abolish the federal Department of Education, now they want to wield it to advance their own agenda on educational standards and morals (no wonder that, in four years, Bush has doubled--yes, doubled--its budget). They are willing to concern themselves with aspects of human life that conservatives once believed should be free of all government interference. In his 2003 State of the Union speech, Bush said, "I propose a $450 million initiative to bring mentors to more than a million disadvantaged junior high students and children of prisoners. ... I propose a new $600 million program to help an additional 300,000 Americans receive [drug] treatment over the next three years." And the conservative movement, begun partially in resistance to federal intervention in what was regarded as the states' spheres of influence, today has endorsed dramatic federal supremacy over state prerogatives. The No Child Left Behind Act entailed a massive transfer of power from states to the federal government--not just a difference from Reagan-era conservatism, but its opposite.

No wonder the size of government has exploded. The federal government now spends around $22,000 per household per year--up from a little under $19,000 in 2000. Total government spending has increased by an astonishing 33 percent since 2000. This isn't all about post-September 11 defense and homeland security. According to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, since 2001, federal spending on housing and commerce has jumped 86 percent, community and regional development 71 percent, and Medicaid some 46 percent.

And in the other corner, "conservatives of doubt."

The alternative philosophical tradition begins in precise opposition to the new conservatives' confidence in faith and reason as direct, accessible routes to universal truth. The conservatism of doubt asks how anyone can be sure that his view of what is moral or good is actually true. Conservatives of doubt note that even the most dogmatic of institutions, such as the Catholic or Mormon churches, have changed their views over many centuries, and that, even within such institutions, there is considerable debate about difficult moral issues... [t]heir alternative is a skeptical, careful, prudential approach to all moral questions--and suspicion of anyone claiming to hold the absolute truth. Since such an approach rarely provides a simple answer persuasive to everyone within a democratic society, we live with moral and cultural pluralism.

For conservatives of faith, such pluralism can allow error to flourish--and immorality to become government policy--and therefore must be limited. A conservative of doubt, however, does not regard the existence of such pluralism as a problem. He sees it as an unavoidable fact of modernity, an invitation to lives that are more challenging and autonomous than in more traditional societies. Even when conservatives of doubt disagree with others' moral convictions, they recognize that, in a free, pluralist society, those other views deserve a hearing. So a conservative who believes abortion is always immoral can reconcile herself to a polity in which abortion is still legal, if regulated. Putting government power unequivocally on the side of one view of morality--especially in extremely controversial areas--must always be balanced against the rights and views of citizens who dissent. And, precisely because complete government neutrality may be impossible on these issues, government should tread as lightly as possible. The key in areas of doubt is to do as little harm as possible. Which often means, with respect to government power, doing as little as possible.

Doubt, in other words, means restraint.
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Conservatives of doubt are not necessarily atheists or amoralists. Many are devout Christians who embrace a strong separation of church and state--for the sake of religion as much as politics. Others may be Oakeshottian skeptics, or Randian individualists, or Burkean pragmatists, or libertarian idealists. But they all agree that the only solution to deep social disagreement is not a forced supremacy of a majority or minority, but an attempt to keep government as neutral as possible, power as close to people as possible, and as much economic power in the hands of the private sector as possible.

Sullivan goes on to note that certain charismatic leaders on the right, most notably Ronald Reagan, have unified both factions. The more interesting example to me, though, is Barry Goldwater--one of the most decisive losers in American political history, but also one of the most ultimately influential and important. Goldwater (and I suppose Reagan as well) came across as a "conservative of faith," but acted like a "conservative of doubt"--particularly in the later years of his Senate career, he bent strongly libertarian on questions of gay rights and showed a streak of fiscal prudence that would leave him in the lonely company of the McCains and Snowes were he in the Senate today. Another way to frame this schism is to counterpose pragmatists and dogmatists: both Reagan and Goldwater were ultimately pragmatic politicians, though in Reagan's case it certainly helped that he was always balanced by a Democratic House, and in his last two years by a Democratic Senate as well.

Having set the pieces on the board, Sullivan goes on to delineate their conflict:

Since there is no higher authority than God, and, since there can be no higher priority than obeying him, the entire notion of separating politics and religion is inherently troublesome to the fundamentalist mind. Whereas for older types of faith-conservatives, religion informed their view of the world and shaped the way they entered civil discourse, the new conservatives of faith bring their religious tenets, unmediated, into the public square.
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In response to several court cases across the country that edged closer and closer to giving legal equality to gays and lesbians, conservatives in Washington responded by proposing--as a first resort--a constitutional amendment prohibiting marriage and any of its benefits from being granted to same-sex couples. Again, what's interesting is just how far-reaching the initial position was. Several other conservative positions were ruled out in advance: that marriage is a conservative institution that should include gays; that states should be allowed to figure out their own marriage policies as they have done for decades; that no action need be taken as long as the Defense of Marriage Act remained on the books, preventing one state's marriages from being foisted on another; or that conservatives could support civil unions or halfway measures that could grant gays some, but not all, of the rights of heterosexual marriage.

In various state constitutional amendments, again actively promoted by the Republican Party, gay couples were also denied benefits or protections. Judges--some liberal, many conservative--were described as "activists" or "extremists" if they applied their state constitution's guarantees of equal protection to gay couples. The rhetoric was extraordinary. Letting gays marry was equated with the "abolition" of marriage, even though no one was proposing to change heterosexual marriage rights one iota. "Homosexuals ... want to destroy the institution of marriage," James Dobson said. "It will destroy the Earth."
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The religious right's insistence that homosexuality is a psychological disease requiring treatment forced the president to avoid ever using the words "gay" or "lesbian" or "homosexual" in his speeches; even recognizing the existence of gay citizens was too much for the social right. No surprise, then, that the 2004 Republican Party platform called for constitutional amendments banning all legal benefits and protections for gay couples everywhere in the United States. In a society with a big openly gay population, this was not a politics of moderation. It was and is a crusade.

Crusades, however, are not means of persuasion. They are means of coercion. And so it is no accident that the crusading Republicans are impatient with institutional obstacles in their way. The judiciary, which is designed to check executive and legislative decisions, is now the first object of attack. Bare-knuckled character assassination of opponents is part of the repertoire: Just look at the swift-boat smears of John Kerry. The filibuster is attacked. The mass media is targeted, not simply to correct bad or biased reporting, but to promote points of view that are openly sectarian, even if, as in the case of Armstrong Williams, you have to pay for people to endorse your views. Religious right dominance of the party machinery, in an electoral landscape remade by gerrymandering, means that few opponents of fundamentalist politics have a future in the Republican Party.

This piece, for all its abundant insight, ultimately disappoints the way Andrew Sullivan usually disappoints: in the end, he seems to conclude that staying within a Republican coalition that actively detests him as a gay man, and ideologically dismisses him as a "conservative of doubt" still beats hanging with the Democrats. This to me is emblematic of a larger problem with our politics: team loyalty all too often trumps notions of the public good.

To my view, the great political cause of our time is containing and defeating the moral absolutism and undeterred ideological aggression of the current dominant strain in the Republican Party. Left unchecked, they'll wreck our economy (the subject of my next post), impose a singular twisted ideal of morality, and remake America along lines unrecognizable to those who have gone before us. This was the key issue of last year's presidential campaign, and it will continue to dominate our politics for the next three years. I've said before, and I'm sure I'll say again, that we have until November 2008 to test this premise that American democracy is self-correcting and ultimately punishes absolutism and political arrogance. If it fails to do so in the next two electoral cycles, that will be a clear signal that the "grand experiment" has finally failed.