Author: Andrew Sullivan

A reader writes:

You’ve defined conservatism many times over the years as a “disposition.” The clip that you featured yesterday of Ted Olson on Fox News, defending his strong pro position on same-sex marriage, seems – to my mind – to be about as good an example of the true conservative disposition as one could hope for: principled, humane, calm, smart, broad-minded, pragmatic, courteous, inclusive and reality-based.

But the same could be said for David Boies, Olson’s liberal co-counsel partner and – since their days as opposing counsels in Bush v Gore – good personal friend.

So where exactly does the difference in “disposition” lie, in this case? It’s not in their positions on the issue, which are remarkable similar, if not identical. It’s not in their qualities of character, which are both exemplary. Is it possible that, at this level – the principled, humane, calm, smart, broad-minded, pragmatic, courteous, inclusive, reality-based level – there really is no difference between conservative and liberal? That once having ascended the peak to actual, functional intellectual, emotional and spiritual adulthood — to human maturity — the paths of liberal and conservative meet, as they say all spiritual paths do?

Maybe we are all both conservative and liberal all along. Ask yourself: if you won a new car on some game show, but could only have one of the following two options, which would you choose – brakes, or an accelerator? The answer, of course, is every car needs both, just as every person, and every polity, needs both brakes (conservatism) and accelerator (liberalism) – and hopefully, both in good working order.

So the seemingly endless fight between conservative and liberal in this country is endless because it’s a false choice, a fake war, ginned up by those who profit by that war. The real issue is not left or right. The real issue is maturity versus immaturity, selflessness versus selfishness, country versus party, disinterested truth versus power at any price. These are not left or right issues. These are developmental issues, issues of up or down, maturity or immaturity — as both Olson and Boies so clearly prove by example.

1980 and 2008 are very very different times. One was at the end of collectivist gridlock; the other comes at the end of a reckless indifference to government revenues, military prudence and foreign policy finesse. Right now, I think we need some infrastructure help, need some tax increases, need some adjustment downwards in defense spending, need a new realism in foreign affairs, because the times demand it. Maybe I'm wrong, but accepting the role both traditions play is essential to keeping the ship of state on a steady keel. 

The point is balance. And oddly, I think, and wrote in Virtually Normal, that the arguments for including gay people as equals in our society are both liberal and conservative. And that's why it's so appropriate and even moving to see Boies and Olson defend this.

There's a right wing and a left wing, but only with both wings can we actually fly.

A reader writes:

I found this piece of yours very moving, and I want to add to the conversation on gay marriage my perspective as a child raised by a gay couple (a "homogenate" as I call us, for short) in the U.S. in the 1980s.

If I had been born in the '90s or the '00s in the right state instead of the '80s, perhaps my biological mother and her lover, Mollie, could have had a civil union. That would have made their relationship simpler from a legal standpoint, for sure. But still, what would I have told my friends who came over after school and asked innocently: "Why does that woman live with you?"

Would I have felt better telling them that she is my mom's "domestic partners" instead of the usual routine: blushing, averting my eyes and blurting out "She's my mom's friend" or "Uhh … she just lives with us" before frantically changing the topic.

Even if I was a pedantic 9-year-old willing to explain to my friends what a civil union is and how it is the legal equivalent to the (first or second) marriage of my friends' parents, that still doesn't address the fundamental problem in my opinion: Mollie could be my mom's friend, my mom's domestic partner, my mom's lover — but she could never be my anything. She could never be my stepmother.

Family names are generic things — mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and all their step-incarnations. It is the possessive that creates intimacy and a sense of family. And while our family would have had the same strains as any step-family even in the best of circumstances, I have no doubt that she and I would be closer today if I had grown up calling her and thinking of her as "mine" in some sense — even when I was angry with her, or I missed my father, or, yes, when I wished that she was just gone and my family was normal.

Let me add something that I experienced as well. My in-laws have always been supportive and loving and tolerant. They accepted me at Christmas and other occasions and were glad their son had found a partner. But it was not until we told them that we were "engaged" that something suddenly clicked. They finally had a way to understand us and our love because they had the linguistic architecture to make sense of it. I was going to be their son-in-law! With those words. I became family – not Aaron's friend, or roommate or boyfriend or lover or what-have-you. But his husband. And thereby their family as well.

There was and is something about these words – engaged, married, husband – even though they may contain a mountain of different experiences, that made us a family. I think conservatives should favor the unification and mutual love and support of families. And that means they must by definition favor the mutual love and support of the gay people in them.

This is not about creating something new. It is about making a home for people who have been here all the time for centuries. It is about making the human family whole.

A reader writes:

Just an observation from your post yesterday, "Who Let the Dogs Out?" A key passage comes near the end, when you write of neoconservatism's "deeply hidden contempt" for the democratic West.

This really is where the intellectual connection to Leo Strauss is worth noting. The entire Straussian project is premised on a thoroughgoing critique of modernity — see especially Strauss's essay, "The Three Waves of Modernity." Modernity starts with Machiavelli and Hobbes and Locke, moves through Rousseau, and ends with Nietzsche (and implicitly Heidegger). That is, a nefarious break with "the ancients" occurred in the early modern period that set in motion a decline towards historicism, relativism, and nihilism. This is the theoretical backdrop to significant elements within neoconservatism; it is premised on this critique of modernity, on the possibility of impending doom, on the inability of "modernity" to sustain itself.

So neoconservatives, cynically and instrumentally, tend to defend and deploy "pre-modern" virtues and institutions — the military, war, and martial virtue; and reactionary religion ("Biblical religion"). These push against the trajectory of modern life, and thus (supposedly) stave off the decline they are convinced is always already underway. They do not try to sustain modernity from within, to reconcile, say, faith and modernity, but rather see modernity as something that needs counterweights, that needs to be pushed back against at every turn. So you purposefully cultivate certain elements that are in reaction to modernity — you push for war to fend off the decadent "softness" of modern liberals, and you make alliances with the religious right.

You can see why Irving Kristol, as editor of the CIA-funded magazine, Encounter, rejected an essay from Michael Oakeshott. The essay? "On Being Conservative." Neoconservatism, especially at its most Straussian, is in every important way un-Oakeshottian. Your writings of late bear this out, I think. In a way, you are re-enacting a quarrel between two of the great political philosophers of the 20th century.

I sure am. The Oakeshott-Strauss divide is the core faultline in conservatism. As an Oakeshottian, I'm a believer in modernity's strengths and endurance, just as I believe that religious faith can and will integrate and come through modernity's challenges. Straussians tend not to trust modernity, and many feel contempt for it; they always feared that the West was too decadent to defeat Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, just as they are deeply doubtful that the West can outlast Islamism. And the point of the West, for them, is not the freedoms it provides the masses (how crass) but the space it affords the philosophic elites.

Hence their instrumental belief in war as a virtue, in torture as a Machiavellian necessity, in primitive forms of politicized Christianity as a ballast against Islam. They are almost all value-free atheists who long for an ancient world that can never return. I'm a believer who lives for the future and is perfectly happy in a fractured, diverse, multi-cultural present. Not just that: I think that system is stronger than all the rest.

If we do not lose faith in it.

As we fight an unwinnable war in an ungovernable country, the enemy simply ratchets up the evil by targeting more and more innocent civilians, especially women and children. HuffPo's headline misleadingly suggests that US policy is behind the yearly increase in civilian fatalities but the UN report actually notes that casualties caused by the US and UK fell by 30 percent and by 64 percent in aerial bombing in one year, which strikes me as a real achievement for McChrystal. But then you see an image like that above (having scanned many of them I feel numb from the images of agony and despair) which was the result of a Coalition air-strike gone awry and you see the awful, horrible, gut-wrenching moral dilemma we are in. But the vast majority of child murders are by the Taliban:

IEDs and suicide attacks killed 557 Afghans and injured 1,137 in the first six months of 2010. IEDs alone accounted for 29 per cent of all civilian deaths in the period, including 74 children, a 155 per cent increase in IED-related deaths of children in the same span in 2009… Analysis by UNAMA Human Rights Unit identified two critical developments that increased harm to civilians in the first six months of 2010 compared to 2009: AGEs [Anti-Government Elements] used a greater number of larger and more sophisticated improvised explosive devices (IEDs) throughout the country; and, the number of civilians assassinated and executed by AGEs rose by more than 95 per cent and included public executions of children.

I still favor withdrawal as soon as possible. I do not in any way discount the moral price. If I thought there was any way to win, my calculus might change. But I don't. And we're broke. And evil like this occurs tragically every day all over the world. The art of politics and warfare is the art of the possible within certain limits. We've reached them – and then some. It gives me no pleasure to say this, and my heart is torn. But politics is not the art of the heart in the end. It's the art of the mind.

(And, yes, this photograph is graphic and the Dish's policy has always been to show reality. These children were maimed by your and my tax dollars. We have no moral standing if we simply look away. A photograph of an innocent killed by the Taliban is after the jump.)

(Photo: Asan Bibi, 9, (R) and her sister Salima,13, (L) stand in the hallway of Mirwais hospital October 13, 2009 Kandahar, Afghanistan. Both were burned when a helicopter fired into their tent in the middle of the night on October 3rd, according to their father. Three members of the family were killed in the incident. The family belongs to the Kuchi ethnic tribe, nomads living in tents out in the open desert whom are very vulnerable to a war they have little understanding of. The Taliban are now staging suicide attacks and IED blasts in densely populated areas to create a bigger impact as more of Afghan's war wounded hit the headlines. By Paula Bronstein/Getty Images.)

(Photo: Five-year-old Fatima is held by her mother Sabaro as her daughter recovers from an I.E.D attack where she was hit by shrapnel outside of Kandahar city along the airport road October 12, 2009 Kandahar, Afghanistan. By Paula Bronstein/Getty Images.)

Here is what Tim Pawlenty said about a Muslim center being built a few blocks from Ground Zero:

We shouldn't have images or activities that degrade or disrespect that in any way.

What Pawlenty is saying that the expression of religious faith by American citizens "degrades and disrespects" a site where eleven privileged religious fanatics murdered 3,000 human beings, Christian and Muslim, Jewish and atheist, male and female, American and countless other countries. A local Muslim group asked him to retract or clarify. If he wants to compete with Palin in the primaries, he can do neither:

“Our governor has engaged in collective guilt by saying that all Muslim activities and images anywhere near Ground Zero are degrading and disrespectful,” Taneeza Islam, civil rights director for Minnesota’s chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said in a statement.

Pawlenty’s spokesman Bruce Gordon said there’s “no misunderstanding” over the governor’s comments, which suggested building a mosque near the site of the World Trade Center attacks was unpatriotic. “The governor's message is clear: New York is a big place. Find a different location for the mosque,” Gordon said in an email.

The obvious, inevitable implication of Pawlenty's statement is that American Muslims bear some collective responsibility for the mass murder on 9/11 – that there is no essential difference between American Muslims eager for interfaith dialogue and the mass murderers of 9/11. This is how we win the war of ideas in the world?

One wonders what's next. When the new tower is built, will Muslims who work there be forbidden to pray? Or shunned because they do? Are Muslims welcome at Ground Zero at all, according to Pawlenty? Are Muslims even welcome in America?

What we're seeing is, to my mind, ominous. It's increasingly clear that the debt hangover of the last decade, combined with the financial crisis and the full and growing impact of China and India on global labor markets may well mean a long, grim, endless employment recession. At the same time, we have an opposition party that believes in torture, pre-emptive war, Greater Israel, and the stigmatization of Muslim-Americans. We have a party that not only has no serious solutions to any of our current problems (what climate change?) but wants to ratchet up the war on Jihadist terror in such a way that will embolden the Islamists, give our enemies a fantastic p.r. gift, conflate all Muslims as potential terrorists and elect a half-term former governor on the basis of her proud ignorance. And then what? Over to you, Mr Netanyahu. A global religious war is on – and coming to your neighborhood soon.

If your alarm bells aren't ringing, they should be. And if you are not increasingly motivated to support the president who alone stands in the way of these ominous portents, then you will have no one to blame when these fear-mongering demagogues get back into power.

What a birthday treat! Goldblog suggests Kandabar. A simpler version would be Ak-Bar, although there's one of those already in Los Angeles apparently (Dish readers, I tell you).

I have to say I'd definitely go into a bar called Jihard. "Who's Your Baghdaddi?" isn't bad either. Infidel-ity is too upscale – that should be a piano bar playing only Gershwin. Halal Sailor: a little retro. Dicka Dicka Dicka should be a sex club. The Sixth Pillar is a little T.E. (but could definitely add a little upper-class English S&M for spice). imam4imam should be a website. Men-R-It is a nice play on minaret, but way too subtle. TGI Thursdays is a classic.

The clear winner in our blue ribbon panel (that would be me) is Bar Van Gogh-Gogh.

Named in honor of Theo, a martyr for Western freedom, it should have plenty of go-go boys, belly dancers, and a door policy of mandatory beards. Maybe Anderson's boyfriend could start it up. He's from Corsica, you know, a great guy, and he sure knows how to run a happening joint.

Update: a reader writes:

You are aware that there is already a New York Dolls strip club on 55 Murray Street (which will be just around the corner from the Cordoba Institute)? So haven’t we already crossed the bridge of allowing Ground Zero ‘gentlemens’ entertainment? And if we’re OK with adult entertainment of the heterosexual variety we can’t then reject entertainment of the homosexual nature in the same area.

Two hour marriages is a business with a future.