I can't say it's been easy reading him all the time, but there is a core in his writing that hooks me every time. He's speaking plain and honestly from the heart, even in the moments where I disagree with him, and it's always compelling stuff. Today he wrote a long piece about his divorce from the American Right (if he was ever really a part of them in the first place), and he used a term in this piece that I liked a lot: Political Conversation.
If nothing else, Andrew is devoted to the idea of pushing forward political conversation at the needed expense of political warfare. I wish I could say that his efforts were bearing fruit, but from the tone of today's political discourse, I think you can see it hasn't. (Not that it was on Mr. Sullivan to change the tone of American Political Conversation in the first place, but it's a good thing that he's trying.)
I have seen him lavishly praise President Obama and mercilessly rip him. In the end, as there are more pluses than minuses in the President's column, he remains a supporter, and will probably be one on to 2012 and beyond. This is all I ask of people. This is what I expect from Political Conversation. Not an expectation of perfection; but pushing what you like, ripping what you don't and at the end of the day calculating the scoreboard for yourself, and voting your best interests. At the end of the day (November 12), you're going to look at what President Obama's done and say: I liked X, Y, and Z; I didn't like P, Q, and R, and I can live with A, B, and C, and go from there.
That's not what I'm seeing from the extremes of both ideologies, where life is always simple and hard choices are easy to figure out; where I'm seeing a perpetual drawing of lines in sand, constant demands of the President to do "X" (whatever "X" may be), and if he doesn't, "then I'll never vote for him again". This is in addition to others calling him a traitor, a socialist, a fascist, a Nazi, a Communist, and a Terrorist.
It's like we've morphed into a nation of spoiled teenage "mean" girls, where everything that happens is just the worst thing ever.
In any respect, Andrew is going through much the same problem with the American right as I'm having with some on the left. He went so far as to write a short manifesto, cataloging his problems with the right.
If you look at them carefully, some of these ideas make him sound downright liberal.
Of course, he's not (and he says so in the piece):
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.
I cannot support a movement that exploded spending and borrowing and blames its successor for the debt.
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.
I cannot support a movement that holds torture as a core value.
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.
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.
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.
I cannot support a movement that sees permanent war as compatible with liberal democratic norms and limited government.
I cannot support a movement that criminalizes private behavior in the war on drugs.
I cannot support a movement that would back a vice-presidential candidate manifestly unqualified and duplicitous because of identity politics and electoral cynicism.
I cannot support a movement that regards gay people as threats to their own families.
I cannot support a movement that does not accept evolution as a fact.
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.
I cannot support a movement that refuses ever to raise taxes, while proposing no meaningful reductions in government spending.
I cannot support a movement that refuses to distance itself from a demagogue like Rush Limbaugh or a nutjob like Glenn Beck.
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.
Does this make me a "radical leftist" as Michelle Malkin would say? Emphatically not. But it sure disqualifies me from the current American right.
To paraphrase Reagan, I didn't leave the conservative movement. It left me.
And increasingly, I'm not alone.
