Out on a Limb

by Andrew Sullivan

  Conservatism is not only about limited government, and where it seeks to limit government it does so because it sees government as a force of instability. But what about those times when government is instead a force for stability? Defense leaps to mind. Conservatism, I would argue, is first and foremost about preserving or regaining a stable society. Liberty and prosperity are two of the most profound ways we can achieve a stable civilization. Limiting government often leads to both these things, and thus it is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.

  And when limiting government actually brings about social chaos rather than social stability, then it’s outworn its use. Perhaps this is why anarchy is such an impossible goal. At some point the benefit of removing the state from the equation no longer outweighs the cost.

  The underlying principle here is an Oakeshottian one: the coherence of a polity matters more than any single ideological approach to politics. This was Oakeshott’s critique of Hayek after a fashion. If the market becomes an ideology in itself, it ceases to be conservative. The real conservative tilts from intervention to laissez-faire depending on the circumstances. He may lean in the long run toward less government as a more stable principle in a free, self-reliant, and increasingly diverse country than more government. But he is always seeking the right prudential balance from exigency to exigency, from era to era, from year to year. And government is never the enemy tout court. It is a necessary means to an end.

  Oakeshott saw the politics of faith and the politics of skepticism as the two core principles guiding modern Western politics. He favored in his own day of government planning, rationalism, and left-liberal triumphalism the unfashionable tradition of freedom, mystery, markets, and personality. But he was always aware that government needed to act strongly sometimes and swiftly too. He was skeptical of excessive skepticism. A conservatism of doubt might be too sluggish in emergencies, as Oakeshott scholar Paul Franco notes, or deemed too frivolous at times. It could be incapable of summoning the necessary love or gratitude or patriotism from its subjects. So it can embrace government at times, to save civil society; and vice versa.

  What the conservative is about, in other words, is balance. And that’s why Oakeshott’s famous metaphor for the kind of politician he admired was a “trimmer.” And one of his treasured works of political writing was Halifax’s sadly neglected The Character of a Trimmer. Today we regard a trimmer as a flip-flopper. But a trimmer in the nautical sense was a man simply tasked with trimming the sails and balancing the weight of a ship to ensure, as different winds prevailed, that the ship stayed upright and on an even keel. The role of the conservative statesman is, in Oakeshott’s sense, to do the same thing—sometimes expanding government in discrete ways to ameliorate or adjust to new circumstances; sometimes restricting it for the same reasons. Here’s his own description:

  The “trimmer” is one who disposes his weight so as to keep the ship upon an even keel. And our inspection of his conduct reveals certain general ideas at work.… Being concerned to prevent politics from running to extremes, he believes that there is a time for everything and that everything has its time—not providentially, but empirically. He will be found facing in whatever direction the occasion seems to require if the boat is to go even.

  I think you can see the critique of left-liberalism in the 1970s as a classic conservative trimming of the excessive delusions of a liberalism become too powerful, too smug, and too ideological. That’s why the original neoconservatives—Kristol, Bell, Glazer, et al.—were heroes to me.

  But I also think you can see Clinton and Obama as necessary attempts to balance the excesses of this movement which inevitably succumbed to hubris, calcification, and ideological purism over time. What Bush and Cheney then did to the system in panicked response to the emergency of 9/11—a massive and radical attack on constitutional norms, a conflation of religious certainty and government, and a huge expansion of government power and spending—requires now a very intense period of Halifax-style balancing. Obama’s moderation may, in fact, not be radical enough on Oakeshottian grounds. For trimming is not about always finding the middle option. It is about restoring balance, which may sometimes mean radicalism if it is preceded by serious imbalance.

  This is a prudential task, not a theoretical one (the other core conservative insight). And we should judge this president and his opponents on the wisdom of their prudential decisions and positions. So far, it seems to me, Obama is the only game in town. Whether his judgment is right will only be determined by history. But his instincts, it seems to me, are genuinely that of a trimmer.

  In the best possible sense of that term.

  Dear Ta-Nehisi

  December 1, 2011 | THE DISH

  What infuriates many about me on the question of race is my refusal to assume that research into racial differences in IQ is inherently racist. Sorry, but I don’t. I regard it as an empirical question, as I do for many human differences. But my colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates points to a deeper question and it is one I have wrestled with. How do I live with the knowledge that writing about such things as merely empirical matters, when they are freighted with profound historical evil, will deeply hurt many, and could help legitimize hateful abusers of information? What responsibility does a writer have for the consequences, good and bad, of good-faith pieces he writes? Is merely citing the massive amount of data showing clearly different racial distribution for IQ an offensive, cruel, and racist provocation? Is raising this subject worth anything anyway?

  This is not the only time I have encountered this moral problem as a writer. Was I wrong to take gay reparative therapy seriously as an argument and accord some respect to its claims as to the origin of homosexuality, as I did in Love Undetectable? Was I aggravating sexism by writing my essay on testosterone for The New York Times Magazine? Am I encouraging anti-Semitism by writing what I think is the truth about the influence of the pro-Israel lobby in hobbling US interests in the Middle East? Did I encourage unsafe sex by writing “When Plagues End,” in 1996, or undercut funding for AIDS research by revealing the breakthrough in treatment? Have I exacerbated the polarization I decry by calling those who approved or imposed “enhanced interrogation techniques” war criminals? Is “Christianist” too offensive a term even if it can be defended as a legitimate way to contrast it with live-and-let-live Christianity?

  My core position is that a writer’s core loyalty must be to the truth as best as he can discern it.

  That’s especially true in considered essays or books. On blogs, where sudden real-time judgment can lead you to occasional overstatements or errors, it is important to ensure that corrections, adjustments, or clarifications follow, and that dissent is open. (In publishing an extract from The Bell Curve in The New Republic, I also insisted in the same issue on publishing thirteen separate dissents.) The point is the truth. I believe that part of the role of the public writer is not to self-censor for fear of social or cultural stigma. And that’s one reason I took to the blogosphere before many others: because it was a place where I felt the limits on total freedom of speech were the least powerful. It was a place where taboos were weakest.

  In my mind, I regard my work as a writer as existing in a different mode from my everyday living. I am writing not with respect to any individual but for the general public—which I envision stripped of its particular racial, gender, religious, or whatever identities. If the truth hurts, so be it. In my role as a truth seeker—and it is a role, not my being—compassion and empathy are irrelevant.

  Except they aren’t.

  The abstraction of the disinterested writer in pursuit of truth is an abstraction. And as a human being, I do not live in an abstract world. That I have wounded someone—like Ta-Nehisi—whom I revere as a writer and care about as a human being distresses me greatly. The friends I’ve lost from my recent Israel posts also grieve me. The friends I lost during the AIDS crisis—when I wrote things that violated the gay consensus—hurt me even more deeply. And to tell
you the truth, I wonder whether my Christian faith is, in fact, compatible with the work I do. My compulsion to get to the bottom of highly contentious issues and my fixation on subjects where others smartly conclude the costs outweigh the gains ensure that I will continue to hurt people’s feelings.

  At one level, I wonder if this gift of freedom is not poisoned by my attraction to controversy rather than truth. I mean: Questioning a woman’s own pregnancy is an act of profound hurt. My defense in that case is that the person in question was a potential president and therefore merits more scrutiny than others. Nonetheless, it must have been deeply hurtful to Palin’s family and herself even to raise the subject if there was nothing to it. In my conscience, I concluded that what drove me was my simple inability to believe the story on the surface, and that a possible president of the United States who might have done such a thing was inconceivable. Similarly, I never believed that gender is entirely a social construction. Or that homosexual orientation is entirely genetic. My curiosity gets the better of me often.

  I just know that it is hard for me to be a writer any other way. It seems to be in my nature—a querulous, insistent curiosity that sometimes relishes the hostility it often provokes. What I remain committed to is a constant reevaluation of these arguments and complete openness to new data. But the hurt remains.

  One justification is that the truth counts, and that even if we are able to ignore it for a while, it won’t become less true. What I fear about liberal democracy is that if it rests itself on untrue notions of substantive human equality—both individually and in groups—it will one day fail. Covering up resilient inequality merely kicks this can down the road. And at the rate neuroscience is going, the empirical research—using far more powerful techniques than IQ testing—could upend a lot of assumptions. Liberal democracy is better defended if it rests on formal civic moral equality, and not substantive, skills-based human equality. So, for example, it’s a great argument for gay equality that homosexuality is 100 percent genetic. But I have never used that argument because the evidence isn’t there for it. I think one should be careful about resting arguments on wobbly truth claims.

  One resolution to this conflict is to quit the public arena for areas of life where general truths are not so central; to find another way to make a living, and live it without the danger of hurting so many feelings. Throughout my life, I have considered doing this, for spiritual, moral, and religious reasons. I fear there are too many times when I hurt more than heal, even though I don’t intend to hurt. I fear that insisting on finding out reality at the expense of charity and empathy is not something a Christian should do lightly, if at all.

  And so I ask Ta-Nehisi for forgiveness; not as a writer, where good faith and honesty alone matter, but as a friend and human being, where empathy counts.

  Why Continue to Build the Settlements?

  March 30, 2012 | THE DISH

  One of the more striking aspects of the preemptive strikes on Peter Beinart’s tightly argued polemic The Crisis of Zionism is not just their viciousness, but their avoidance of the core issue of the book:

  Why continue to build the settlements?

  Is it not clear by now that the settlements’ existence and relentless expansion are turning liberal Zionism into “something much darker”? What justification is there for continuing to build them, to add to them, to keep increasing the Jewish population in an area that under any two-state solution, Israel would presumably have to give up? Only today we read in Haaretz the following:

  Civil Administration’s maps and figures, disclosed here for the first time, suggest the barrier route was planned in accordance with the available land in the West Bank, intended to increase the area and population of the settlements.

  A total of 569 parcels of land were marked out, encompassing around 620,000 dunams (around 155,000 acres)—about 10 percent of the total area of the West Bank. Since the late 1990s, 23 of the unauthorized outposts were built on land included in the map. The Civil Administration is endeavoring to legalize some of these outposts, including Shvut Rahel, Rehelim and Hayovel.

  Etkes believes this indicates the settlers who built the outposts had access to the administration’s research on available land—more proof of the government’s deep involvement in the systematic violation of the law in order to expand settlements, he says.

  Let us be clear. The Israeli government is systematically taking and holding the land that could be the Palestinians’ future state. They have been doing so for decades. The deliberate population of occupied land violates the Geneva Conventions. The occupation itself enrages the Arab and Muslim world and creates a huge drag on the United States’ strategic need to build up allies among emerging Arab democracies, and defuse Jihadism across the globe.

  And Peter’s book is explicitly about this problem. It lies at the center of his argument. And yet it is all but ignored by his critics. The trope responses are varied in their weary familiarity. Let us examine them.

  The Palestinians have for a long time been their own worst enemies, and in the past have not sought peace. It’s more complicated than that, but sure, for much of the past sixty years, the Palestinians bear a huge responsibility for their own situation.

  Why continue to build the settlements?

  Iran’s nuclear development is the most urgent issue.

  Let’s concede that for the sake of argument, but why continue to build the settlements?

  China occupies Tibet and you don’t fixate on that.

  Well, I do oppose the occupation of Tibet and if my own taxpayer’s dollars were going directly to sustain that occupation, or to facilitate transfers of the Chinese population to Tibet to shift the demographic balance, I’d have an issue with that as well.

  But why continue to build the settlements?

  Obama made freezing the settlements a precondition for talks, so it’s his fault, the Greater Israel lobby insists, that the two-state solution is going nowhere. But when the issue at hand is a division of land, and when one side, which holds almost all the raw power, wants to keep taking parts of that land while it is simultaneously negotiating its division, it’s an impossible negotiation. You don’t negotiate while simultaneously adding facts on the ground to tilt the talks your way. You freeze the situation; you talk to the other side. That’s all Obama asked for—just a freeze of construction for a year. Netanyahu refused. Even the ten-month alleged suspension made no measurable difference in the number of new homes built in the relevant year.

  So again: Why continue to build the settlements?

  And the reason for urgency is obvious: the faster the settlements grow in property, scale, and population, the harder it will be to remove them. The longer a democracy occupies a foreign country and people, the more it risks the moral corruption of imperial control of another people’s destiny, of dehumanizing those you fear, of fueling the hatred you then use to justify further violence and coercion. Peter Beinart’s book is a simple restatement of this truth.

  It cannot be restated enough.

  And the evasions of this central point of Beinart’s book by its vitriolic critics are as legion as they are predictable. And they matter. Because the evaders do not want to answer the question: Why continue to build the settlements? They do not want to answer that question and dodge it relentlessly because the answer is obvious and devastating to their position.

  The answer is that the settlements are there because the current Israeli government has no intention of ever dividing the land between Arabs and Jews in a way that would give the Palestinians anything like their own state, and have every intention of holding Judea and Samaria for ever. Netanyahu is, as Beinart rightly calls him, a monist. He is the son of his father, Ben-Zion, as Jeffrey Goldberg has also insisted on. But what Peter does is spell out one side of the Netanyahu vision that Goldberg elides.

  Vladimir Jabotinsky was a huge influence on Netanyahu’s father and Netanyahu himself. He’s a complicated figure, as Beinart readily concedes. For
Jabotinsky, what it all came down to in the end was “the single ideal: a Jewish minority on both sides of the Jordan as a first step towards the establishment of the State. That is what we call ‘monism.’ ” My italics. The Revisionist Zionists (whence eventually Likud) envisaged a Jewish state that would not only include the West Bank but the East Bank as well, i.e., Jordan.

  Ben-Zion Netanyahu followed Jabotinsky’s vision, and his willingness, even eagerness, to use violence to achieve it: “We should conquer any disputed territory in the land of Israel. Conquer and hold it, even if it brings us years of war.… You don’t return land.” Ben-Zion Netanyahu even favored the “transfer” of Arabs living in Palestine to other Arab countries. In 2009, Netanyahu Sr. put his position this way to Maariv:

  “The Jews and the Arabs are like two goats facing each other on a narrow bridge. One must jump into the river.” “What does the Arab’s jump mean?” asked the interviewer, trying to decipher the metaphor. Netanyahu explained: “That they won’t be able to face the war with us, which will include withholding food from Arab cities, preventing education, terminating electrical power and more. They won’t be able to exist and they will run away from here.”

  Suddenly the situation in Gaza and much of the West Bank makes more sense, doesn’t it? It’s a conscious relentless assault on the lives of Palestinians to immiserate them to such an extent that they flee. And if you do not think that Bibi Netanyahu’s father isn’t easily the biggest influence on his life and worldview, read Jeffrey Goldberg. Money quote:

  “Always in the back of Bibi’s mind is Ben-Zion,” one of the prime minister’s friends told me. “He worries that his father will think he is weak.”

  Ben-Zion is a radical and a fanatic and an illiberal Zionist, who sees the world as forever 1938, the Arabs as a monolithic group of barbarians, and foreswears any interaction with them except through force. You cannot understand the current Israeli government without grasping that it is led by the son of the man who said this, and who shares his worldview. “The Arabs know only force,” Bibi has said. And here is the message from Ben-Zion on Iran, as reported by Goldberg: