Andrew Sullivan Whittles the Point

I like Andrew Sullivan more than a liberal should like a conservative... no, it's not a crush, and I'm no stalker, but I like to catch up with Sully every so often.  Mabye it's the recovering catholic thing.  As I previously mentioned, he seems to have a greater grasp on logic than a lot of conservatives - or he's just less dogmatic than the talking-point-regurgitators.  Today he talks it through, and you can't fault the honesty:

It will never be within the conservative's temperament to see a blinding moral cause and do all he can to bring it about as soon as possible. In that sense, my own moral fervor about marriage rights, for example, is not very conservative, even if you could very plausibly argue that the argument is, in many ways, a conservative one. When I see do-nothing conservatives objecting to gay marriage from purely Hayekian, don't-rock-the-boat grounds, I can recognize a genuinely conservative argument. (And, as Jonah rightly points out, the unprogrammatic nature of conservatism does indeed mean that many of us will live with some element of contradiction and that many of us will be able to disagree on prudential issues in politics, while sharing broadly the same tradition.)

Sully's talking about an intellectual conservatism, though, and I think it's worth noting that by this "don't-rock-the-boat" measure, few righties are actually conservative.  [or intellectual, but that's just snark]  Many "conservatives" have  extreme visions of what the country should be like - how other people's lives should be lived - and that's not very conservative.   True conservatives would just want to temper the social change progressive suggest with tradition.  In the real world, we have competing hegemonies, though for some reason we just try to force it all onto a nice polar line, where left means one thing and right the opposite.

Comments

[SMC]

Are neo-cons allowed to wear S&M Gear on TV?

[ls]

he is secretly liberal. And a big S&M Bottom. You can tell... it's a catholic guilt thing...