January 20, 2004

Making sense of political writer Andrew Sullivan --an interview. Quotable:

[My road toward Conservatism] began living under socialism. Growing up in Britain in the 1970s, watching the country's terminal decline, seeing the damage unions could do, and how the entire ruling elite had lost hope - all that made me a Thatcherite. I also went to a publicly-funded magnet school that selected boys at the age of 11 on the basis of IQ tests and gave them a chance to succeed.

My folks weren't rich. It was the only way I could have gotten an excellent education. I was so grateful. And then the Labour government took office and tried to abolish the school because it was deemed “elitist.” The school went private while I was there and lost its mission to educate under-privileged kids. (The school raised enough money to give me a scholarship to finish my time there). In all that, I saw that the Left was actually hostile to ordinary people, their aspirations, their achievements. The ideology of envy and equality of outcome trumped the ideas of freedom and equality of opportunity. And so I became a follower of the liberalizing right.

I wore a Reagan 80 button in high school; I read Solzhenitsyn and Orwell; I became fascinated by the horrors of Soviet tyranny; I read Hayek and Oakeshott and Friedman; I was so psyched when Thatcher won office that I stopped my calendar on the day - May 3, 1979 - and left it on the wall at that date. And at Oxford, I enraged my peers by celebrating the arrival of Pershing missiles with a champagne party.

But again, I was political in order to free people from being forced into politics. I wanted to ratchet back the state to let people breathe more freely, however they wanted to. I'm not interested in being ideological all the time. I love pop culture; I love gay culture; I love sex; I enjoy movies and Shakespeare and bodybuilding and my dog. I'm conservative in politics so that I can be radical in every other human activity. To me, that makes sense. But I'm aware I'm somewhat alone.

Posted by Greg Ransom | TrackBack