Andrew Sullivan, enlightenbed conservative?

US Democrats became accustomed long ago to trying to frame their programs and policies in conservative-sounding terms.

Now with Trump as President, many Democrats are eager to embrace conservatives critics of Trump. And seem to often do so in an overly-credulous manner.

Andrew Sullivan, conservative former editor of The New Republic is one well-known commentator who pitches himself to Democrats as one of the Respectable Conservatives. Sullivan argues for a enlightened conservatism, the Democratic dream that never seems to die, in America Desperately Needs a Healthy Conservatism New York 09/14/2018.

He cites a book, Conservatism: An Introduction to the Great Tradition, by Roger Scruton, who Sullivan lauds as "arguably the most acute conservative thinker of his generation." Yes, that could be considered a low bar to clear.

But it wouldn't be entirely fair to judge Scruton by Sullivan's praise of him in this column. And the account of the history of conservatism that Sullivan gives here with reference to Scruton isn't especially impressive. Sullivan takes Edmund Burke as the founding spirit of modern conservatism. although Burke's famous polemic against the French Revolution situates him as a reactionary in the context of the time, as Corey Robin describes in The Reactionary Mind (2011).

Sullivan conjures a Goodie-Two-Shoes version of conservatism that bears little relationship to the lobbyist- and white-supremacist-driven reality of "conservatism" in the real existing Republican Party of 2018:

[Conservatism] saw all too well how the good intentions of liberalism could lead to its unraveling. It abhors war as the ultimate change-maker and disrupter; it despises concepts of race or gender that eradicate the uniqueness of the individual; it defends high culture against philistinism and mediocrity; it cherishes norms. It values the particular over the general, prefers present laughter to utopian bliss, relishes humor in all its forms, defends art as an apolitical force, and respects religion as a separate avenue for the search for ultimate truth, and a critical component of the civil and moral society that enables government to be small and limited. [my emphasis]

But the real point of Sullivan's article seems to be that the Mean Libruls are just as bad as the Trumpian conservatives. Which is what Republicans always argue to justify Trump's latest outrage.

And the bolded passage above is stock Republican rhetoric used against affirmative action and antidiscrimination laws. He goes on to list among more saccarhine goals he presents as his version of conservatism:

I also believe we need to slow the pace of demographic and cultural change. It is happening too fast, even for America, to sustain our society’s coherence and cohesion. The elite indifference to mass immigration — especially the illegal kind — is an ugly pact between Republican elites, eager for cheap, exploitable labor, and Democratic elites, who cynically encourage it because they think it will give them a reliable voting bloc.

In other words, his supposedly enlightened conservatism lines up with Trump and the TrumPutinists in European politics presenting immigration as a "demographic and cultural" menace to the Homeland.

I don't mind if Sullivan complains about Trump. But I don't find any reason to see his politics as enlightened conservatism. Or enlightened at that all, for that matter.