America's leading Catholic, conservative, anti-war, pro-gay marriage pundit wants you back

Andrew Sullivan revels in contradiction—he's the gay Republican, the Pope-lashing Catholic, the irrepressibly Christian secularist. His new book, The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, and How to Get It Back, is a gracefully written and—for a work of political philosophy—charmingly heartfelt attempt to reconcile those contradictions. Steeped in nostalgia for the England of his youth, Sullivan sketches out a musty, old-fashioned, stiff-upper-lip perspective in which humility ought to guide our political instincts, and day-to-day injustice is tolerated in order to avoid making grand mistakes.

Of course, as voters go to the polls in what many describe as a referendum on the grandaddy of grand mistakes—the decision to invade Iraq—Andrew Sullivan, one of the war's chief advocates, has a lot of explaining to do. The Conservative Soul serves as a muted apologia for his own failure to follow his political instincts. Sullivan attacks the stupidity and callousness of the administration he once so strenuously endorsed with the zeal of an ex-convert—one who briefly lost his mind and was seduced by a cult of certainty but has since regained his composure, dusted himself off, and returned to the fold of moderation and common sense.

As Sullivan walked his beloved Beagles along the streets of Washington, D.C., I spoke to him on the phone about the war, his improbable friendships with both a post-punk icon and a key figure in the Mark Foley scandal, and what, precisely, he was doing to his butt on national television one night in 2004.

RADAR: I want to argue with you about your book, but first things first: How is it possible that you and Hüsker Dü founder Bob Mould are buddies?
ANDREW SULLIVAN: He's a great guy. He lives in D.C. He's just sort of a grown-up, and I love his music and always have loved his music. I bumped into him the other day. I don't see why two gay Catholic 40-somethings should have nothing in common. Why would you say such a thing?

Well, Hüsker Dü was angry, loud, groundbreaking, talented—things you don't tend to associate with Republicans.
I was a Thatcherite, which was way more rebellious than being a punk rocker in the '70s in England. I've always thought of my political conservatism—I'm not at all, as you know, particularly socially conservative—as kind of rebellious in my own time and place.

Okay. So Ronald Reagan is basically the good guy in your book.
He's partly the good guy. He's not perfect. But he definitely rescued this country and the West, I think, in the '80s.

You also have a lot of kind words for George H.W. Bush.
Yeah, I do. I think Bush 41 was a more traditionally prudent, small-government kind of conservative.

So how do you reconcile that with the fact that so many people you single out in your book as fundamentalist, Christianist, false conservatives served in those two administrations?

The conservative movement has changed, and it's evolved, obviously, over time. Until recently, what kept the whole show on the road is what I call, and what others have called, the "Leave Us Alone Coalition." The evangelicals and the libertarians could agree to be part of the same party as long as that party was fundamentally committed to keeping government out of our lives. And that, of course, changed when Bush and Rove, in the beginning of the '90s, decided, Hey, this religious stuff is powerful.

Are you saying that Cheney and Rumsfeld have evolved—they used to be good Reaganites and now they're fundamentalists?
I think that Cheney and Rumsfeld frankly couldn't give a damn about Christianity at all. They're concerned about the wielding of power.

David Kuo, in his book Tempting Faith—which you cite approvingly—goes so far as to say that Bush used Christians but didn't actually share their worldview.
Bush may just be a fundamentalist who is so incompetent and out of it that he doesn't even know what his own government is doing. In Kuo's anecdotes, it seems that Bush is not even aware of how much money is going to faith-based initiatives. He thinks it's all happening. He has about as much understanding of that part of his government as he has about the war. Bush could be both sincere and insincere—and/or incompetent. These things are not mutually exclusive.

You devote a section of the book to tracing the "apocalyptic visions" common to all fundamentalisms—from Nazism to Communism, Osama bin Laden, and Ahmadinejad to Bush and the Christianists. You realize that Reagan believed in Armageddon, right?
He did. But he didn't let that affect his actual foreign policy decisions. You look at Reagan's record. Just as an evangelical who can personally believe in it could nevertheless, when he gets into government, operate on certain secular principles, Reagan was able to have those beliefs, but he was also a pragmatist. He violated every neoconservative tenet by negotiating with Gorbachev and ending the Cold War. He raised taxes twice. He got those marines out of Beirut in three seconds flat. He reversed himself. He adjusted. Also, remember he often mainly had a Democratic congress. What you didn't have was evangelicalism transformed into a political ideology back then.

And, of course, he ignored the AIDS crisis for so many years.

This is one thing, when that chestnut comes up—yes. What do you want from me? Am I not allowed to admire Reagan's foreign policy and his tax policies because there's one blemish on his record, or does that require one to completely disown everything?

No, it doesn't. But if you're constructing an internally consistent political framework to promote a conservative agenda that's in opposition to what you describe as fundamentalism, and you hold Reagan up as an exemplar of that—
I hold him up as an exemplar in certain respects, and if you read the book you can see that. I fundamentally talk about him in his consistent approach to limited government and individual liberty. And confronting Soviet tyranny and his basic understanding that government was not the solution to every problem. Bush believes it is or can be used that way. I could reverse the question to you and ask why you don't love George Bush. He's increased spending on entitlements up the wazoo. Isn't that what you liberals believe in? Your problem with him is that he hasn't spent enough?