1. Andrew Sullivan with a moving, beautifully written defense of a conservative intellectual tradition that has attracted about 7000 American devotees since WWII, most of whom were U Chicago grads. nymag.com/daily/intellig…
2. It appears that what Sullivan is looking for is a political tradition that stretches back to FDR and the New Deal...a political tradition that, in the American lexicon, has generally been called *liberalism*. 
3. The idea that the US is a nation of immigrants, a nation that benefits from diversity (a fairly conservative or centrist idea as old as Jane Addams & John Dewey) is, apparently, just a cynical Dem ploy to win elections. The only lofty, authentic ideals are conservative ones.
4. The argument here rests upon a faulty assumption (that goes back to the Cold War era) that we might call symmetrical centrism. There are liberals in the middle (conservative and liberal types) and on each side (Commies and Fascist) there be dragons.
5. Each side, left and right, is equally prone toward steering the ship of state into the dragons. And the dragons on each side are equally dangerous...the gorgons of genocide and the gulag on our right look pretty much the same as those on our left.
6. I think most historians of the Cold War era would say this understanding of American politics was never all that accurate. It's become even less accurate now.
7. These scare tactics about "the totalitarians in the campus left" are just not tenable to anyone who teaches. The idea that the BLM movement and white identitarians are somehow equivalent threats to our society is just ludicrous.
8. Whenever a person of the left says something remotely angry or intolerant, Sullivan gets really worried and treats that utterance as revelatory of something essential about the left..."this is what they *really* want. They just hate white people."
9. But when self-described conservatives fight tooth and nail against school integration in the 60s, or rail against Islam as a religion of terrorism, or say gay people are immoral...well, that's just "an unfortunate aberration in an otherwise decent conservative tradition."
10. I won't go on...but here's another thread where I offered a critique of the ahistorical way in which Sullivan conceptualizes "conservatism" and "leftism."
11. One of the nation's leading intellectual historians, James Kloppenberg, wrote an entire book tying Obama's governing philosophy to the history of American pragmatism and liberalism. There is a huge political constituency for these ideas. nytimes.com/2010/10/28/boo…
12. I would challenge someone to read Sullivan's piece and show me the conservative politician who has voiced those ideas and inspired tens of millions of people to vote for them. No one comes to my mind, but maybe I'm overlooking someone.
