As I said earlier, I actually enjoyed Sullivan's talk. I'm a sucker for the "big idea" sort of presentation, which is exactly what Sullivan was doing. He was arguing that faith and certainty are not what conservatives are supposed to base their policy decisions on. Conservatives, Sullivan argued, are supposed to be full of doubt about the wisdom of certain things like war and government regulation of the economy. He argued that America had been established by conservatives who wished to create a government that would not be able to do very much. He kept praising the wisdom of the founding fathers and the framers of the constitution over and over.

As he said these things, I could almost hear many of my students' heads exploding across the auditorium. It was great watching them scratch their heads trying to follow his argument and understand his logic. I think it was a useful intellectual exercise for them. You mean conservatives are supposed to think? Really?

Now, of course, Sully's use of American history in the presentation was way off base. I'll give you a rather prominent example that pretty much scuttles his whole argument from the get-go.

If you really wanted limited conservative decentralized government, we actually had that in 1787 with the Articles of Confederation. Many (if not most) historians now argue that the Constitution was actually an attempt on the part of the ruling class in America to centralize their control over the nation. In the years after the Revolutionary War, the nation had gotten a little bit too rowdy and out of hand for these folks, as evidenced by Shays' Rebellion in Massachusetts.

Unlike Washington and Hamilton, some didn't think Shays' Rebellion was a big problem at all. Thomas Jefferson didn't ("a little revolution every now and then is a good thing") find anything to worry about in Shays' Rebellion. Actually, Jefferson did have his doubts about the wisdom of the Constitution, although he largely kept those to himself in France, where he was during the drafting of the document. But Sullivan essentially presents Jefferson's views about the government and the Constitution as if they were held by the framers of the Constitution in 1787, which is, quite frankly, totally bogus.

It was only later, in the 1790s, that Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans began to craft their views of the government and the Constitution. I kept wanting to ask Sully the magic question: "Mr. Sullivan, do you know that Thomas Jefferson had nothing to do with drafting the Constitution?"

Anyway, I know some have accused Sully of being a bit of a political shape-shifter and I thought the presentation the other night was indicative of such a (probably short-term) shift. I think Sully had good points to make about how conservatives have lost their way, they've become too emotional, too faith-based, and irrational. However, for him to read back through American history and try to use the framers of the Constitution as Exhibit A in a case of how conservatism is supposed to work is too much of a stretch.

However, having said this, I did enjoy the presentation. I thought our students were a bit rude to Sully. Our students had no idea who this guy was and didn't accord him much respect. Probably a third of them left during the Q & A, which was not polite in the least. Of course, I think after they had heard two seven minute answers from Sully to questions they asked him, they sort of lost patience with him.

Anyway, that's my report. Feel free to comment on this as you wish.