An astonishing piece by Andrew Sullivan in the Times of London on antiwar Republicans, featuring Ron Paul. Aside from the condescending airs and insulting description of Ron as a “crank” — “even cranks have a point sometimes” — Sullivan gives an enthusiastic account of the rise of the antiwar right, and clearly recognizes that what’s happening in the Paul campaign, and in a wider section of the conservative movement, is the revival of the Old Right, or, as Sullivan puts it, “the fiscally prudent, freedom-loving isolationists of the United States.”
I say this is an astonishing piece because its author has come so far since 9/11 as to make a complete reversal: it’s as if Wendell Wilkie had suddenly morphed into Robert W. McCormick. Here’s Sullivan a few days after 9/11, in the same newspaper:
“This was the myth of the place apart, the city on the hill, the eternal elsewhere. And when you saw the squeamishness of Americans to intervene abroad, their often dangerous reluctance to embroil themselves in foreign entanglements, it was at some level this myth that prompted them. Isolationism, for all its faults, was always the flip-side of American exceptionalism. It was a naivete that was nevertheless founded on a dream that refused to die.
“But in one morning, this dream ended as America was wakened from its long sleep. The elsewhere is now somewhere. The refuge is now insecure. The threat from without is now also within. The new world is now just the world. Isolationism is no longer even a choice. It is lying in the rubble in downtown Manhattan.”
“Isolationism,” averred Sullivan in his previous incarnation as the Avenging Angel of 9/11, “is dead.” What one has to wonder is how, or why, it was suddenly revived in Sullivan’s mind. While I am always glad to see new converts, surely such a complete turnaround requires a bit of an explanation, or, at least, more of an explantion than Sullivan is giving.
Sullivan’s hostility to Pat Buchanan has been pretty consistent over the years, and yet Paul’s differences with Buchanan are pretty much confined to the trade issue: Ron’s a free-trader (not the Bushian fake variety, but the real thing), while Pat is a protectionist. On foreign policy, however, their views are so similar as to be virtually indistinguishable. So why the double-standard — why is Sullivan gushing over Paul, and yet is presumably set in stone in his contempt for Buchanan?
Let’s just hope no one tells Sullivan about Ron Paul’s position on gay marriage.