How did I miss that?

I just read a post at Arthur Silber’s blog (The Light of Reason) entitled, The Case Against Andrew Sullivan: Rove’s Assistant Propogandist, in which Silber makes the claim that Sullivan has been doing, since 9/11, what Rove did last week—calling liberals traitors.

I haven’t paid much attention to Andrew Sullivan the last four years aside from noting that he’s an ultra-conservative. I’ve seen him on television a couple of times and I’ve read excerpts from his blog. That’s about it. My impression has been that he’s annoying, but occasionally surprises me with what seems like common sense.

Well, so much for that occasional pipe-dream.

Contained within one of Arthur Silber’s excerpts was a quote from an Andrew Sullivan column that ran in the Wall Street Journal on October 4, 2001.

In one atrocity, Osama bin Laden may have accomplished what a generation of conservative writers have failed to do: convince mainstream liberals of the illogic and nihilism of the powerful postmodern left. For the first time in a very long while, many liberals are reassessing—quietly for the most part—their alliance with the anti-American, anticapitalist forces they have long appeased, ignored or supported.

What has escaped me all this time is that Andrew Sullivan swallowed the neo-conservative swill and has been regurgitating it almost verbatim. Specifically, “nihilism of the powerful postmodern left.” Those are specific words that one doesn’t just draw out of the ether on one’s own.

Someone has been reading and digesting Leo Strauss, the architect of neo-conservative thought.

To wit:

[Strauss] was convinced that liberalism cultivates nihilism, and makes it the foundation of its polity. In Strauss’s view, this is the achievement of modernity...

For the sake of truth, liberals reject the imposition by those in power of a single and indisputable reality. This liberal stance conflicts with the Straussian conviction that society requires unwavering faith and unflinching devotion. And even though the result is zealotry and fanaticism, Strauss does not flinch from it; for zealotry and fanaticism are preferable to nihilism and skepticism, because the latter weaken society, while the former strengthen it.

Shadia B. Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1997), pp. 8-9.

Claims of treasonous behavior and seeing a traitor around every corner work well within the Neo-Con construct. In fact, it is necessary to keep the masses in line. It has worked so far. And Andrew Sullivan has done a yeoman’s service to the cause.

So, no matter how reasonable he sounds, at times, Sullivan is not someone I’d trust out of my sight. He has a neo-con’s heart which promotes God, Gold (unfettered capitalism), and Glory (Nationalism and Pax Americana). Not exactly my idea of the shining city on the hill.

Every time you hear someone screaming “Traitor” at anyone who disagrees with [ultra] conservative policy, remember that Leo Strauss also blamed Hitler’s rise to power and the Holocaust on the nihilism caused by liberalism. Nihilists are not religious or ordered enough, therefore the society they create is a vacuum from which bad people rise and the downfall of the state occurs. [Neo] Conservative societies promote fierce Nationalism as well as the religious opiate of the masses—good things—in order to keep people in line and subservient to their governments, run by the elites who know best. Prime neo-conservative philosophy. Yelling “Traitor” is an effective tool for keeping the masses in line. Remember that and thank Andrew Sullivan for advancing the cause.

Ironies abound.