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?

You were a vocal, ardent, and influential proponent of the invasion of Iraq. At what point should we no longer take public intellectuals seriously when they've been so wrong on such an important issue, like the war?
Ultimately, that's up to the readers to decide. If they think that my judgment was so faulty in this respect that it is not to be respected in any further decision then that's their judgment. From my point of view, all I can do is write as honestly as I can and account for whatever mistakes I've made and to explain them. Not just to explain them but to explain why, which is what I try to do in this book. At the same time, people do get things wrong. And if you're a writer over a period of 20 or 30 years or if you're a politician, surely you're going to make mistakes. I think it's up to the reader or the voter.

Did you ever question your own judgment? Or doubt yourself? Because you played a fairly important rhetorical role in the pre-war debate, such as it was.
You flatter me. It's a very complicated story here because there are some issues—for example, the intelligence—that we had to take to some extent on trust. Even the people who opposed the war, or many of them, based it on the assumption that WMD existed, but they weren't necessarily the bigger threat—or there were other threats that should have been dealt with. The other side was wrong as well in many respects.

But had we followed their advice we'd be in better shape.
That we don't know.

We do know that perhaps hundreds of thousands of people that are dead now would still be alive.
We don't know that, actually. We know what has happened because of the result of our actions. We don't know what the result of inaction would have been. Many people who opposed the Iraq war opposed the Afghanistan war. Not many of them are prepared now to admit it, but many of them did. All one can do is account for the decision one has made. But I don't think the hard left, which was against anything Bush did, and actually believed that America deserved what Al Qaeda gave us, has been proven right. Do you?

No.
You don't think Michael Moore, who said the Afghan war was about an oil pipeline deal, has been proven right. But I don't see you demanding that he take account of his own errors.

I'm not interviewing him right now.
Has he ever recanted that publicly?

Not to my knowledge.
Mistakes are made by everybody all the time.

The difference is that the mistakes made by you and the Bush administration were irreversible and deadly.

If Michael Moore's advice had been followed, Afghanistan would have remained a Taliban stronghold and who knows how many deaths Al Qaeda would have achieved? What do you want me to say? I have said I am sorry and ashamed. I don't know what more you want from me, and I explained in this book how I made those mistakes.

But I'm also saying, equally, there's a glib certainty with those who were against the war that didn't exist before the war and might be itself a form of certainty that deserves to be questioned. I don't think we should replace one neoconservative certainty with one liberal certainty that we should have never done anything or that everything that America has done is bad or that for example the motives for going into Iraq were rotten. I certainly supported it for what I thought were good, safe reasons. And a lot of liberals did, too. And we're all anguished now about what happened. All I can say is that this book is an attempt to at least come to terms with the errors I made. I'm not sitting here from a position in which I am criticizing everybody excluding me. I'm including myself in this criticism.

In addition to Bob Mould, you are friendly with Jeff Trandahl, a former clerk of the House of Representatives, who was one of the people who reportedly passed on concerns about Mark Foley to Speaker Dennis Hastert's office months before the scandal broke, and has testified before the House Ethics Committee about it. Have you spoken to him lately?
No.

Is there a gay Republican community in D.C.?
I don't really know specifically. I think there are overlapping social networks. I always knew Jeff in a totally non-political context. I would see him at bars. We worked out at the same gym. We chatted, and I've known him since he got here. Certainly not through any political connection. Most of my gay friends in D.C. are liberal Democrats. And I think that's true of a lot of Republicans. People on the Hill, I think, gay staffers on the Hill, do have a network. But I think you'd be surprised at how diverse it is. I think there are two types of gay Republicans in D.C. There are the openly gay and dealing-with-it Republicans. And then there are the screwed up, closet-case Republicans. I knew quite a few of the former; I don't really know any of the latter. I knew who Mark Foley was, but I had never met him or met anybody who knew him.

Is there anything to the notion that there was an effort on the part of some gay staffers, like Trandahl, to handle Foley's indiscretions more gently out of sympathy to his status as a closeted gay man?
I don't know. I think we're going to have to wait for the investigation. From everything I heard, the openly gay guys were the ones trying to stop it, and the straight guys were the ones that couldn't handle it. That's the narrative that seems to be emerging, but I really don't know. I'll tell you this, I absolutely believe that Dennis Hastert knew for a very long time they had a problem with Mark Foley. I think he is flat-out not telling the truth about their awareness of the problem. The man had apparently been grabbing and groping for years, and people on the Hill knew about it and some of them tried to do something about it. More than that I don't know.

You and other bloggers essentially took credit for getting Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd fired. Do you really think that a multinational publishing company with $2.5 billion or so in annual revenue fired its two most powerful editors because of what you wrote on your blog?
No, and I never wrote that I brought down Howell Raines. The New York Times brought down Howell Raines, I just egged some people on. Obviously, it was the staff of the New York Times that did it, but we played a part. It was one of the first times that people within media institutions contacted bloggers and were able to air some of their complaints through us. I don't think anybody doubts that we were a part of that process. We weren't the decisive part; we were just an accessory.

At the time we were new media, and we were kind of excited. We thought we were just losers sitting behind computers in our boxer shorts, and obviously we got a little carried away. But we're human; we've matured. Look where you're writing. You guys couldn't succeed as an actual magazine. [Editor's note: Radar will be back on newsstands in February.] Put it this way, you are in a very good position to know why online journalism is actually vibrant and working and is a good thing. So you should forgive occasional moments of glee. More pertinently, I do think that Josh Marshall and I and a couple others really did help bring down Trent Lott. If we hadn't kept that story alive for the week before the mainstream media picked it up, it might have died.

On the other hand, I think I've tried over the years—even though I was an early believer in this medium—not to be among the worst blogger triumphalists. I've always understood that the mainstream media is essential. Actually, I've always described myself as a parasite upon the system. But I also think it's fascinating to see how we can use this new system.

By the way, what were you doing to your butt on the Bill Maher show back in 2004? You appeared to be massaging it after you stood up and the closing credits were rolling.
I thought the show was over. My fiancé has told me never to pick my butt in public again. That's as good an argument as any for gay marriage.

Photos, from top: David McNew/Getty Images; Martin H. Simon-Pool/Getty Images; Paul Hawthorne/Getty Images