Whatever our disagreements, I've always liked Andrew Sullivan as a writer, and have looked on his blog -- with its seamless blend of apparently random subject matter offered up as political commentary -- as an inspiration and a model for my own. (And, yes, he named one of his awards after me, so I'm biased.) What he offers, beyond the flair for good prose that keeps British pundits in high demand here in the colonies, is fundamentally a sensibility -- passionate but not dogmatic, always engaged yet open-minded. It's the rare sort of writer who'll do what Sullivan does at one point in his brand new tome, The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get it Back: name-check a book, and then cheerfully admit that "it runs to 8,000 pages and I cannot claim to have made it through them."

It's a disarmingly charming mode of behavior, and yet … the book in question, Martin Marty and Scott Appleby's The Fundamentalism Project, is, according to Sullivan, "the most extensive academic study of religious fundamentalism [he has] come across." The subject of Sullivan's own book happens to be the dangers posed to conservatism and the world at large by, well, the fundamentalist mentality and the dire need for a revivification of a different brand of conservatism capable of combating it. The book, in other words, is in large part about fundamentalism. Eight thousand pages is a lot to read, but if you're going to write a book about fundamentalism for an educated nonspecialist audience, shouldn't you, the author, have at least bothered to thoroughly survey the relevant research?

This is perhaps a quibble. But, working through the book, one's doubts multiply: Does Sullivan know what he's talking about? In one sense, the answer is clearly yes. His background -- like my own -- is in political theory and philosophy. The portions of the book dealing with these matters, arguing for Edmund Burke, Michel de Montaigne, and Michael Oakeshott as enduringly relevant conservative figures with much to offer the modern world, seem both sound and persuasive, at least to someone who's never specialized in their work. Their version of conservatism as a fundamentally skeptical philosophy -- one that respects tradition not out of slavish loyalty to the past, but a wise worry that human foibles will mar efforts at radical reform -- is a valuable contribution to the western political tradition, one that conservatives and non-conservatives alike have good reason to respect and admire. Even a staunch liberal reformer with something of a utopian bent can see that it is crucial that there be others on the scene who raise objections, cast doubt on ambitious schemes, and even take power now and again to clear the world of the dead brush of seemingly promising ideas that, for one reason or another, have gone awry.

A conservatism of this sort -- as opposed to the madcap adventurism, obscene corruption, and demagogic zeal of the Bush Republicans that Sullivan has come to loathe -- would be an excellent thing for the world to have, even if it's not the sort of philosophy I would want to adopt as my main lodestar. Its spirit, however, requires a certain austere rigor, a sense of discipline and modesty, and a commitment to empiricism that goes beyond a penchant for factoids. All of these qualities Sullivan, in practice, seems to utterly lack.

These days I spend most of my time writing about national-security policy, frequently criticizing the hawkish urge to blend disparate problems together into a unified "Islamofascist" menace. Thus, my red flags go up when I see Sullivan label contemporary Iran a "totalitarian" society just like Afghanistan under the Taliban or, by implication, Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. This is simply not the case. The Iranian regime, objectionable though it may be, is a run-of-the-mill authoritarian oligarchy with competing centers of power and some space for civil society. Similarly, Sullivan writes that "from the assassination of Anwar Sadat to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie to the decade-long campaign of bin Laden to the destruction of ancient Buddhist statues by the Taliban to the World Trade Center massacre and the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh there is a single line." Is there? Or was Sadat primarily the victim of Arab nationalist passion against Israel, Rushdie of a Shiite revivalist movement, and the rest attributable to a rather distinct strain of violent Islamism? More the latter, I think. Sullivan, like all-too-many conservatives nowadays, sees Muslims Behaving Badly, puts them in a single pile, and confidently proclaims (in an ironic passage coming from the great apostle of the "conservatism of doubt") that "we should not be in any doubt that exactly this need to extinguish the living rebukes to Holy Truth lay behind the massacre of September 11, 2001." Well, the leading students of the issue, from academics like Robert Pape to counterterrorism professionals like Michael Scheuer, doubt it -- shouldn't we?

But never mind. It's not clear that Sullivan really is making the same error as his hawkish colleagues, as opposed to one all his own. Why shouldn't he collapse Shiite and Sunni threads of Islamism, after all, when, under the "fundamentalist" rubric, he's ready to lump both together with highly politicized right-wing Protestant leaders like James Dobson, largely apolitical traditionalist Catholics like Mel Gibson and Joseph Ratzinger, Zionist extremists like Yigal Amir, old-school Marxists, anti-globalization activists, and even Great Society liberals? "Fundamentalist," it seems, means something like, "someone I disagree with." Such an analytical approach seems slipshod and ill-befitting a philosophy that is "defined primarily by [its] profound grasp of the limits of human understanding" and that yearns for a politics in which most commitments to "well-meaning abstractions would end up stymied in an interminable process of deliberation."

So has the conservative of doubt betrayed himself? It's a cute thought, but not really. Sullivan's temperament and his penchant for overstatement and sweeping generalizations do fit awkwardly with his chosen philosophy, but we all have our quirks. At the end of the day, Sullivan has the right enemies for his brand of ideology. Thinking of his sundry foes as forming a united "fundamentalist" bloc may be unsound, but I imagine he's hit upon more-or-less exactly the people and movements an Oakeshott or a Burke would disapprove of today.

Which brings us to the real problem here, such as it is. Though billed as "one of today's most provocative social and political commentators" on his book jacket, Sullivan's substantive views are almost frighteningly banal. Far from "bold and provocative," Sullivan offers up an unusually colorful expression of what is, in fact, the bland conventional wisdom of the Anglo-American elite. In foreign affairs he's hawkish, chastened by Iraq but not so chastened as to revisit any of the empirical or theoretical premises that led America into its current quagmire. In economics, he's disdainful of European social democracy, a supporter of balanced budgets and sound money while dismissive of concerns about inequality. On cultural matters, he's generally progressive, but doesn't much care for feminists. He loathes academic postmodernists but doesn't seem to actually know anything about them.

These elite consensus views have, in the way that only an elite consensus can, an enormous amount of political power behind them already. What the elite consensus lacks is what it's always lacked -- a serious electoral constituency -- the very problem that led it to increasingly ally itself with the very forces of more populist right-wingery that Sullivan deplores. This, though, is hardly a new story; from the Red Scare and McCarthyism to Nixon's Southern Strategy, "respectable" conservatism has long found a need to ally itself with base demagoguery to obtain power. As a gay man, Sullivan finds the current configuration of this alliance unusually obnoxious, to an extent he doesn't seem to have minded, say, Ronald Reagan's implicit appeals to segregationist sentiment. So far as that goes, good for him. But the conservatism of doubt -- which is to say the conservatism of elite complacency -- as a mass political movement is an impossible dream, and always will be.

Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.

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