Out on a Limb

by Andrew Sullivan

  Jefferson feared that the alternative to a Christianity founded on “internal persuasion” was a revival of the brutal, bloody wars of religion that America was founded to escape. And what he grasped in his sacrilegious mutilation of a sacred text was the core simplicity of Jesus’s message of renunciation. He believed that stripped of the doctrines of the incarnation, resurrection, and the various miracles, the message of Jesus was the deepest miracle. And that it was radically simple. It was explained in stories, parables, and metaphors—not theological doctrines of immense complexity. It was proved by his willingness to submit himself to an unjustified execution. The cross itself was not the point; nor was the intense physical suffering he endured. The point was how he conducted himself through it all—calm, loving, accepting, radically surrendering even the basic control of his own body and telling us that this was what it means to truly transcend our world and be with God. Jesus, like Francis, was a homeless person, as were his closest followers. He possessed nothing—and thereby everything.

  I have no concrete idea how Christianity will wrestle free of its current crisis, of its distractions and temptations, and above all its enmeshment with the things of this world. But I do know it won’t happen by even more furious denunciations of others, by focusing on politics rather than prayer, by concerning ourselves with the sex lives and heretical thoughts of others rather than with the constant struggle to liberate ourselves from what keeps us from God. What Jefferson saw in Jesus of Nazareth was utterly compatible with reason and with the future; what Saint Francis trusted in was the simple, terrifying love of God for creation itself. That never ends.

  This Christianity comes not from the head or the gut, but from the soul. It is as meek as it is quietly liberating. It does not seize the moment; it lets it be. It doesn’t seek worldly recognition, or success, and it flees from power and wealth. It is the religion of unachievement. And it is not afraid. In the anxious, crammed lives of our modern twittering souls, in the materialist obsessions we cling to for security in recession, in a world where sectarian extremism threatens to unleash mass destruction, this sheer Christianity, seeking truth without the expectation of resolution, simply living each day doing what we can to fulfill God’s will, is more vital than ever. It may, in fact, be the only spiritual transformation that can in the end transcend the nagging emptiness of our late-capitalist lives, or the cult of distracting contemporaneity, or the threat of apocalyptic war where Jesus once walked. You see attempts to find this everywhere—from experimental spirituality to resurgent fundamentalism. Something inside is telling us we need radical spiritual change.

  But the essence of this change has been with us, and defining our own civilization, for two millennia. And one day soon, when politics and doctrine and pride recede, it will rise again.

  The First Elite Conservative to Say Enough

  July 2, 2012 | THE DISH

  Mulling over the Supreme Court ruling in favor of Obamacare this weekend, it occurred to me why this remains a BFD. It’s not that we now have a reprieve for the idea of universal health care in the United States. Or even that we have an interpretation of the Commerce Clause that could eventually mean some nontrivial ratcheting back of the federal government’s powers vis-à-vis the states. It is that a creature of the conservative movement, one of its youngest and most intelligent stars, saw the radicalism of the four dissenters… and balked.

  He balked, it appears, because of his attachment to the court as an institution, because he was unwilling to trash its reputation by embroiling it in a deep and bitter partisan grudge match in the middle of a presidential campaign—when there was a plausible way out. He was also applying the logic of judicial restraint with respect to legislative wishes, interpreting the law to be as constitutional as it could possibly be deemed (i.e., in this case, viewing the mandate as part of the Congress’s tax power). In these two ways, Roberts upheld a form of conservatism that is not synonymous with the interests of the Republican Party at any given moment. Which is so unusual these days one wants (pathetically) to stand up and cheer.

  One of the most strikingly anticonservative aspects of today’s allegedly conservative movement, after all, is its contempt for institutions, especially elite institutions that in any way limit the scope of fundamentalist ideology. And so Newt Gingrich’s crucial innovation was throwing out the politeness and manners and decorum and rules and traditions of the House of Representatives in order to gain power by populist demagoguery. You can see his legacy in Tom DeLay’s implementation of the Medicare D entitlement under Bush, an essentially lawless and rule-free process that made a mockery of parliamentary procedure. You saw this contempt for the rule of law, if it got in the way of desired policy, in the torture policy under Bush, cynically making the patently illegal “legal” through cynicism and doublespeak.

  Similarly, McConnell’s use of the filibuster is essentially a display of contempt for the American constitutional system, rigging the system to nullify legislative majorities and to conduct politics as a zero-sum war for power, rather than as a means to debate, discuss, and implement necessary changes in an evolving society. The give-and-take of American constitutionalism has been essentially reduced by the GOP in the last two decades to take-and-take-some-more. They impeached one successful president, in an act so disproportionate to the offense (and the offense was real; Clinton was a shameless perjurer) that it helped gut any bipartisan functioning of an institution designed for deal-making across the aisles or within them. They treated the 2000 election, when Bush lost the popular vote, as a landslide mandate election—again with no deference to the other side or sense of governing as one nation.

  After Bush v. Gore and then Citizens United, I think Roberts saw the full political and constitutional consequences of a radical Court vote to gut the key legislative achievement of a duly elected president and Congress. In other words, he put the institutions of American government before the demands of partisan power mongering. And he deftly nudged the issue back into the democratic process, where it more comfortably belongs.

  I cannot say this is the moment the fever broke. The “movement right” is still furious at Roberts, pushing Romney as the principle-free instrument of their next round of institution smashing (Medicare). But that a conservative placed the country’s institutional stability before ideological fervor is so rare at this point it deserves some kind of praise. It’s a start. If the GOP is beaten this fall, it may even be seen as the moment the tide began to turn, and conservatism began to reach back toward its less feral traditions and ideas. Yes, I know I’m getting way ahead of myself here.

  But at some point, conservatism must reemerge, if only because we so desperately need it. Conservatism is, after all, a philosophy that tends to argue that less equals more, that restraint is sometimes more powerful than action, that delay is often wiser than headlong revolution. It reveres traditional rules and existing institutions, especially endangered elite institutions that the Founders designed to check and cool the popular will. Roberts took a small step toward resuscitating that tradition last week.

  It’s the first seagull spotted after a decade or two on the open seas.

  Thatcher, Liberator

  April 8, 2013 | THE DISH

  I remember reading an article in Washington Monthly back in the late 1980s by one of the smugger liberal British columnists, Polly Toynbee. It captured part of the true derangement that Margaret Thatcher brought out in her political foes. It was called simply: “Is Margaret Thatcher a Woman?” It’s still online. It was a vicious attack on her having any feminist credentials. It included this magnificent lie:

  She has experienced nothing but advantage from her gender.

  Toynbee’s case is worth hearing out, but it’s an instant classic of the worst British trait: resentment of others’ success. No culture I know of is more brutally unkind to its public figures, hateful toward anyone with a degree of success or money, or more willing to ascribe an individual’s achievements to somet
hing other than their own ability. The Britain I grew up with was, in this specific sense, profoundly leftist in the worst sense. It was cheap and greedy and yet hostile to anyone with initiative, self-esteem, and the ability to make money.

  Yes: the British left would prefer to keep everyone poorer if it meant preventing a few getting richer. And the massively powerful trade-union movement worked every day to ensure that mediocrity was protected, individual achievement erased, and that all decisions were made collectively, i.e., with their veto. And so—to take the archetypal example—Britain’s coal workers fought to make sure they could work unprofitable mines for years of literally lung-destroying existence and to pass it on to their sons for yet another generation of black lung. This “right to work” was actually paid for by anyone able to make a living in a country where socialism had effectively choked off all viable avenues for prosperity. And if you suggested that the coal industry needed to be shut down in large part or reshaped into something commercial, you were called, of course, a class warrior, a snob, a Tory fascist, etc. So hardworking Brits trying to make a middle-class living were taxed dry to keep the life spans of powerful mine workers short.

  To put it bluntly: the Britain I grew up in was insane. The government owned almost all major manufacturing, from coal to steel to automobiles. Owned. It employed almost every doctor and owned almost every hospital. Almost every university and elementary and high school was government run. And in the 1970s, you could not help but realize as a young Brit that you were living in a decaying museum—some horrifying mixture of Eastern European grimness surrounded by the sculptured bric-a-brac of statues and buildings and edifices that spoke of an empire on which the sun had once never set. Now, in contrast, we lived on the dark side of the moon and it was made up of damp, slowly degrading concrete.

  I owe my entire political obsession to the one person in British politics who refused to accept this state of affairs. You can read elsewhere the weighing of her legacy—but she definitively ended a truly poisonous, envious, inert period in Britain’s history. She divided the country deeply—and still does. She divided her opponents even more deeply, which was how she kept winning elections. She made some serious mistakes—the poll tax, opposition to German unification, insisting that Nelson Mandela was a terrorist—but few doubt she altered her country permanently, reestablishing the core basics of a free society and a free economy that Britain had intellectually bequeathed to the world and yet somehow lost in its own class-ridden, envy-choked socialist detour to immiseration.

  I was a teenage Thatcherite, an über-politics nerd who loved her for her utter lack of apology for who she was. I sensed in her, as others did, a final rebuke to the collectivist, egalitarian oppression of the individual produced by socialism and the stultifying privileges and caste identities of the class system. And part of that identity—the part no one ever truly gave her credit for—was her gender. She came from a small grocer’s shop in a northern town and went on to educate herself in chemistry at Oxford, and then law. To put it mildly, those were not traditional decisions for a young woman with few means in the 1950s. She married a smart businessman, reared two children, and forged a political career from scratch in the most male-dominated institution imaginable: the Tory party.

  She relished this individualist feminism and wielded it—coining a new and very transitive verb, “handbagging,” to describe her evisceration of ill-prepared ministers or clueless interviewers. Perhaps in Toynbee’s defense, Thatcher was not a feminist in the left-liberal sense: she never truly reflected on her pioneering role as a female leader, she never appointed a single other woman to her cabinet over eleven years, she was contemptuous toward identity politics, and the only tears she ever deployed (unlike Hillary Clinton) were as she departed from office, ousted by an internal coup, undefeated in any election she had ever run in as party leader.

  Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir preceded her, but Thatcher’s three election victories, the longest prime ministership since the 1820s, her alliance with the United States in defeating the Soviet Union, and her liberation of the British economy place her above their achievements. What inspires me still is the thought of a young woman in a chemistry lab at Oxford daring to believe that she could one day be prime minister—and not just any prime minister, but the defining public figure in British postwar political history.

  That took vision and self-confidence of a quite extraordinary degree. It was infectious. And it made Thatcher and Thatcherism a much more complicated thing than many analyses contain.

  Thatcher’s economic liberalization came to culturally transform Britain. Women were empowered by new opportunities; immigrants, especially from South Asia, became engineers of growth; millions owned homes for the first time; the media broke free from union chains and fractured and multiplied in subversive and dynamic ways. Her very draconian posture provoked a punk radicalism in the popular culture that changed a generation. The seeds of today’s multicultural, global London—epitomized by that Olympic ceremony—were sown by Thatcher’s willpower.

  And that was why she ultimately failed, as every politician always does. She wanted to return Britain to the tradition of her thrifty, traditional father; instead she turned it into a country for the likes of her son, a wayward, moneymaking opportunist. The ripple effect of new money, a new middle class, a new individualism meant that Blair’s rebranded Britain—cool Britannia, with its rave subculture, its fashionistas, its new cuisine, its gay explosion, its street art, its pop music—was in fact something Blair inherited from Thatcher.

  She was, in that sense, a liberator. She didn’t constantly (or even ever) argue for women’s equality; she just lived it. She didn’t just usher in greater economic freedom; she unwittingly brought with it cultural transformation—because there is nothing more culturally disruptive than individualism and capitalism. Her 1940s values never retook: the Brits engaged in spending and borrowing binges long after she had left the scene, and what last vestiges of prudery remained were left in the dust.

  Perhaps in future years, her legacy might be better seen as a last, sane defense of the nation-state as the least worst political unit in human civilization. Her deep suspicion of the European project was rooted in memories of the Blitz, but it was also prescient and wise. Without her, it is doubtful the British would have kept their currency and their independence. They would have German financiers going over the budget in Whitehall by now, as they are in Greece and Portugal and Cyprus. She did not therefore only resuscitate economic freedom in Britain; she kept Britain itself free as an independent nation. Neither achievement was inevitable; in fact, each was a function of a single woman’s willpower. To have achieved both makes her easily the greatest twentieth-century prime minister after Churchill.

  He saved Britain from darkness; she finally saw the lights come back on. And like Churchill, it’s hard to imagine any other figure quite having the character, the willpower, and the grit to have pulled it off.

  Surprised by Grief

  August 6, 2013 | THE DISH

  It’s not as if I have any excuse (you warned me plenty of times), but I’m shocked by how wrecked I am right now. Patrick, Chris, and Jessie, thank God, have been holding down the fort on The Dish, because otherwise I’m not sure I could think about much else right now. How can the emotions be this strong? She was a dog, after all, not a spouse or a parent.

  And yet, today, as I found myself coming undone again and again, I realized that living with another being in the same room for fifteen and a half years—even if she was just a mischievous, noisy, disobedient, charming, food-obsessed beagle—adds up to a lot of life together. I will never have a child, and she was the closest I’ll likely get. And she was well into her teens when she died.

  She was with me before The Dish; before my last boyfriend, Andy; before I met Aaron. She came from the same breeder as the beagle my friend Patrick got as he faced down AIDS at the end of his life. I guess she was one way to keep him in my life, so it was fitting
that his ex-boyfriend drove me to the farm in Maryland to get her. I was going to get a boy and call him Orwell (poseur alert), but there were only girls left by the time we got there. I didn’t know what I was doing, but this tiny little brown-faced creature ambled over to me and licked the bottom of my pants. She chose me. On the ride home, I realized I hadn’t thought for a second what to call a girl dog, and then Dusty Springfield came on the radio.

  My friends couldn’t believe I’d get a dog or, frankly, be able to look after one. I was such a bachelor, a loner, a workaholic writer, and gay-marriage activist with relationships that ended almost as quickly as they had begun. I thought getting a dog would help me become less self-centered. And of course it did. It has to. Suddenly you are responsible for another being that needs feeding and medicine and walking twice a day. That had to budge even me out of my narcissism and work mania.

  But I also got her as the first positive step in my life after the depression I sank into after my viral load went to zero in 1997. I know it sounds completely strange, but the knowledge of my likely survival sent me into the pit of despair. I understand now it was some kind of survivor guilt, and, after so much loss, I had to go through it. I wrote my way out of the bleakness in the end—as usual. But this irrepressible little dog also pulled me feistily out.

  She was entirely herself—and gleefully untrainable. I spent a large part of our first years together chasing her around bushes and trees and under wharfs, trying to grab something out of her mouth. She’d find a disgusting rotten fish way underneath a rotting pier, wedge herself in there, eat as much as she felt like, and then roll around in ecstasy as I, red-faced, bellowed from the closest vantage point I could get. There was the year that giant tuna carcass washed up on the sand and I lost her for a split second and nearly lost my mind looking for her until I realized she was inside the carcass, rendering herself so stinky it was worse than when she got skunked. But the smile on her face as she trotted right out was unforgettable. It was the same proud, beaming face that appeared from under a bush in Meridian Hill Park covered in human diarrhea, left by a homeless person. Score!