Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Sullivan vs. Brooks   [Ramesh Ponnuru]

Eventually I'll get around to reading Sullivan's book. In the meantime, it's lying on my desk. Every once in a while I'll pick it up, open it to a random page, and see if Sullivan is being daft or dishonest. He's about 5 for 6 so far. His post responding to David Brooks's measured, too-generous criticisms is a compressed version of the daftness.

Who, for example, believes that Brooks "has made common cause" with "the Christianists"? The label has always been a slippery one, useful only for a social-liberal version of McCarthyism, but now it appears to mean nothing more than criticism of Sullivan or his book. Who, for that matter, believes that Brooks needs to be "remind[ed]" that we are a constitutional nation?

Sullivan takes a stab at distinguishing among political movements. The good ones make moral appeals, sometimes with religious overtones, in order to make America live up to its constitutional ideals; the bad ones offend the Constitution's values. It is a meaningless taxonomy, since whether he thinks a movement falls on the right side of the Constitution's ideals depends on whether he approves it or not. For example: Is a movement to amend the Constitution to allow states to protect unborn human beings an attempt to live up to America's ideals of equality, or a dangerous theocratic imposition? No doubt Sullivan's answer to that question will vary with the fortnight, but in no case will a simple appeal to "constitutional ideals" do any analytical work in reaching that answer.

Or take the movement to amend the Constitution to allow Congress to ban flag-burning. Sullivan believes that it represents a) the imposition of a "new social policy,"  b) that it is the work of a "spuriously religious movement[]," and c) that the fact that it resorted to trying to amend the Constitution is evidence that it is hostile to the Constitution. Whether or not that amendment is a good idea, it is not distinctively the project of social conservatives, and its core supporters tend to think that it's the Supreme Court that amended the Constitution to create a novel social policy.

Let me, for one paragraph, treat Sullivan's argument with more seriousness than it deserves. On the most charitable reading, he is arguing in this post that the best, and maybe the only, protection for liberty is the conviction, embedded in a society and its political institutions, that nobody knows the truth and that therefore people should be allowed to do their own thing. Indeed, liberty seems to him to be imperiled absent that conviction. But liberty can be protected by the widespread conviction that while we don't know everything, we do know the moral truth that people should generally be free. The idea that belief, even strong belief, is necessarily in tension with liberty is false, and I'd be very surprised if Sullivan adduces any evidence in his book to prove or even suggest that the Founders held that idea. A freedom rooted in truth is perfectly compatible with the realization that the wisest political arrangements divide power and set up checks and balances. A philosophy based on doubt can't come up with good reasons for giving allegiance to a regime with such arrangements (or to any other regime).

10/24 04:44 PMShare