What Happened to Andrew Sullivan?

[LFC]

I've mentioned elsewhere that Sullivan seems to be spiraling down the drain of right-wing talking points. Sure he tries to defend himself and sound "reasonable" but AFAIC he's now in David Frum defense of Republicanism territory (something Frum seems to have finally given up on). To me it feels like now that his hobby horse of gay equality and marriage have been achieved he has decided it's fine to cast shadows on other progressive positions.

Critical race theory is his current screeching point. He overplays what's being taught to the hilt while soft pedaling the right's meltdown over it as much as he dares. He's gone on for paragraphs over trivial CRT crap and while vaguely saying the right has sorta' kinda' gone too far but let's go back to talking about the left again.

Now he's backpedaled a bit and if you read the original piece it's a pretty hard reversal without acknowledging just how much he dodged the extreme the right screeching and lies on the topic of racism across the board. Here's his big concession meant to dispense with what's been going on quickly so he can run back to bashing CRT. It's a classic method of trying to sound reasonable while studiously avoiding actual details of the part you don't want to talk about and digging in even harder.

“What happened to you?”

It’s a question I get a lot on Twitter. “When did you become so far right?” “Why have you become a white supremacist, transphobic, misogynistic eugenicist?” Or, of course: “See! I told you who he really was! Just take the hood off, Sully!” It’s trolling, mainly. And it’s a weapon for some in the elite to wield against others in the kind of emotional blackmail spiral that was first pioneered on elite college campuses. But it’s worth answering, a year after I was booted from New York Magazine for my unacceptable politics. Because it seems to me that the dynamic should really be the other way round.

The real question is: what happened to you?

The CRT debate is just the latest squall in a tempest brewing and building for five years or so. And, yes, some of the liberal critiques of a Fox News hyped campaign are well taken. Is this a wedge issue for the GOP? Of course it is. Are they using the term “critical race theory” as a cynical, marketing boogeyman? Of course they are. Are some dog whistles involved? A few. Are crude bans on public servants’ speech dangerous? Absolutely. Do many of the alarmists know who Derrick Bell was? Of course not.

But does that mean there isn’t a real issue here? Of course it doesn’t.

Take a big step back. Observe what has happened in our discourse since around 2015. Forget CRT for a moment and ask yourself: is nothing going on here but Republican propaganda and guile? Can you not see that the Republicans may be acting, but they are also reacting — reacting against something that is right in front of our noses?

So much in so few sentences. First I'd like him to name these reasonable Republicans who are reacting reasonably to "something that is right in front of our noses." He doesn't because his credibility plummets when he starts spouting names like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, Paul Gosar, Ron DeSantis, and on and on. Why don't reasonable people view this position as credible? Because it's being pushed on us, with dials turned up to 11, by a large group of people who have intentionally thrown away all credibility.

So let's forget the right's lies and culture war icons. We'll go to just the issue.

What is it? It is, I’d argue, the sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites. It has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation. It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of “white supremacy,” which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.

We all know it’s happened. The elites, increasingly sequestered within one political party and one media monoculture, educated by colleges and private schools that have become hermetically sealed against any non-left dissent, have had a “social justice reckoning” these past few years. And they have been ideologically transformed, with countless cascading consequences.

"We all know it's happened." Where did that little beaut come from, the Faux News School of "Journalism?" Then he goes full-on Dreher by taking the most extreme examples he can find, writing bug-eyed Glenn Beck worthy shit about how "they" are coming to get "you", and soiling himself as if this was truly a major issue in our country.

The movement is much broader than race — as anyone who is dealing with matters of sex and gender will tell you. The best moniker I’ve read to describe this mishmash of postmodern thought and therapy culture ascendant among liberal white elites is Wesley Yang’s coinage: “the successor ideology.” The “structural oppression” is white supremacy, but that can also be expressed more broadly, along Crenshaw lines: to describe a hegemony that is saturated with “anti-Blackness,” misogyny, and transphobia, in a miasma of social “cis-heteronormative patriarchal white supremacy.” And the term “successor ideology” works because it centers the fact that this ideology wishes, first and foremost, to repeal and succeed a liberal society and democracy.

In the successor ideology, there is no escape, no refuge, from the ongoing nightmare of oppression and violence — and you are either fighting this and “on the right side of history,” or you are against it and abetting evil. There is no neutrality. No space for skepticism. No room for debate. No space even for staying silent. (Silence, remember, is violence — perhaps the most profoundly anti-liberal slogan ever invented.)

I roll my eyes at some of the extremes but no, they really aren't all that common. In fact all of the younger people I've discussed these issues with haven't really seen it in a rock-solid blue area like Philadelphia. In terms of the true issues America is facing, like if our democracy will even continue to exist in a recognizable fashion, our crumbling healthcare system, wealth disparity, massive debt, and on and on it's a tempest in a teapot. Oh, yeah. And if we want to talk about the power swing in the culture war let's discuss the number of schools still allowed to teach creationism as a science, the demonization of LGBTQ people, and the unholy coupling of Christianism (a Sullivan term) with Republican politics.

[LFC]

Sullivan has left the New Yorker by "mutual agreement."

Conservative commentator and author Andrew Sullivan on Tuesday announced he is exiting as a writer for New York Magazine at the end of this week in what editor in chief David Haskell called a “mutual” agreement.

“Andrew and I agreed that his editorial project and the magazine’s, though overlapping in many ways, were no longer the right match for each other,” Haskell said in an email to staff.

He replied.

The good news is that my last column in this space is not about “cancel culture.” Well, almost. I agree with some of the critics that it’s a little nuts to say I’ve just been “canceled,” sent into oblivion and exile for some alleged sin. I haven’t. I’m just no longer going to be writing for a magazine that has every right to hire and fire anyone it wants when it comes to the content of what it wants to publish.

The quality of my work does not appear to be the problem. I have a long essay in the coming print magazine on how plagues change societies, after all. I have written some of the most widely read essays in the history of the magazine, and my column has been popular with readers. And I have no complaints about my interaction with the wonderful editors and fact-checkers here — and, in fact, am deeply grateful for their extraordinary talent, skill, and compassion. I’ve been in the office maybe a handful of times over four years, and so there’s no question of anyone mistreating me or vice versa. In fact, I’ve been proud and happy to be a part of this venture.

What has happened, I think, is relatively simple: A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me, and, in a time of ever tightening budgets, I’m a luxury item they don’t want to afford. And that’s entirely their prerogative. They seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space. Actually attacking, and even mocking, critical theory’s ideas and methods, as I have done continually in this space, is therefore out of sync with the values of Vox Media. That, to the best of my understanding, is why I’m out of here.

I'd say there likely is a problem with his work. Multiple problems, in fact. His cancel culture and critical race theory pieces have been a bit histrionic and, to be blunt, filled to the brim with more opinion and lawyering than factual data to back up his positions. Another issue he's shown himself to be downright stubborn on is the supposed link of race and innate intelligence. He has pulled the cancel culture card repeatedly on that one, trying to paint himself as the objective one. The problem is that he's studiously ignored actual scientists who explain, in detail, why the work he's looking at is massively flawed. He didn't even really acknowledge that "race" is an incredibly unscientific term when used to describe skin tone. All one has to do is look at the physically distinct populations in Africa to realize that their somewhat shared skin tone (it varies quite a bit, actually) that skin color is a silly proxy without first finding an attachment to cognitive ability. And what about "blacks" from other continents? And yet no true acknowledgement about the flaws in what he kept bringing up, just a ton of weasel wording to avoid admitting the research was garbage. Of course one might say he was "just asking the question."

[goldenvalley]

Jul 11, 2021 19:17:25 GMT LFC said:

Sullivan has left the New Yorker by "mutual agreement."

Sullivan's time as the thinking person's conservative is long over.  Single sex marriage legalized during that time and he came to see that invading Iraq was a bad idea. But then he crashed under the pressure of his daily blog, disappeared, and decided a once a week gig writing for New York Mag was his way of staying relevant. But in order to do that, he needed not to sound so reasonable. So he reverted to his true self, an "elitist"...educated, well spoken, maintaining his privilege as a white, educated man who just happened to be gay. 

[indy]

I think I've mentioned before that I really loved Sullivan's ability to quickly collect up interesting things to read on other sites when he did the daily dish. It simply saved a lot of time trying to find them on my own and he found stuff I likely would have never stumbled across. On the other hand, I never found his longer form stuff very compelling. When the daily dish went away, so did I.

[LFC]

I had much the same experience as Indy though I found his writing on same sex marriage to be pretty good. It's when he fell into other culture conflicts that he fell apart, using many of the same religious tropes as so many others. The worst, which he was guilty of, is branding actual thought out positions as "religion" in order to desperately try to level the playing field. He also twisted himself in knots to make an intellectual rather than spiritual case for his faith. It wasn't very effective.

On the race vs. intelligence thing he turned into George Will on climate change. He blew it up front and instead of giving a fair reading to the piles of evidence from actual scientists who understood the overwhelming flaws in what he was reading he fell back on the lame excuse that they have an agenda to cover it up. It was rather sad and pathetic but it put him in a warm cocoon where anything that explains why what you're asking about is flat out not can be dismissed with a vastly lower level of evidentiary examination than the side you're spotlighting as you "just ask the question." Will fell into the same type of comfy and intellectually lazy hole.

[LFC]

I decided to take a quick peek in at Andrew. To put it bluntly, he's become Rod Dreher 1.0. He's not yet completely insane (yet) but his lens for viewing the world is so far out of skew that he's fighting alternative facts. Here's his piece, or at least what you're allowed to read, on why he was looking to vote Republican in the 2022 election. This could have come straight outa' Faux. And his meltdown over the current science related to gender and the boogeyman of CRT is pure Dreher (bold mine). He apparently took a lot of hits from more realistic readers which he responded to, not very well I'd say.

There was no choice in 2020, given Trump. I understand that. If he runs again, we’ll have no choice one more time. And, more than most, I am aware of the profound threat to democratic legitimacy that the election-denying GOP core now represents. But that’s precisely why we need to send the Dems a message this week, before it really is too late.

By “we,” I mean anyone not committed to the hard-left agenda Biden has relentlessly pursued since taking office. In my view, he and his media mouthpieces have tragically enabled the far right over the past two years far more than they’ve hurt them. I hoped in 2020 that after a clear but modest win, with simultaneous gains for the GOP in the House and a fluke tie in the Senate, Biden would grasp a chance to capture the sane middle, isolating the far right. After the horror of January 6, the opportunity beckoned ever more directly.

And yet Biden instantly threw it away. In return for centrists’ and moderates’ support, Biden effectively told us to get lost. He championed the entire far-left agenda: the biggest expansion in government since LBJ; a massive stimulus that, in a period of supply constraints, fueled durable inflation; a second welfare stimulus was also planned — which would have made inflation even worse; record rates of mass migration, and no end in sight; a policy of almost no legal restrictions on abortion (with public funding as well!); the replacement of biological sex with postmodern “genders”; the imposition of critical race theory in high schools and critical queer theory in kindergarten; an attack on welfare reform; “equity” hiring across the federal government; plans to regulate media “disinformation”; fast-track sex-changes for minors; next-to-no due process in college sex-harassment proceedings; and on and on it went. Even the policy most popular with the center — the infrastructure bill — was instantly conditioned on an attempt to massively expand the welfare state. What on earth in this agenda was there for anyone in the center?

It therefore doesn’t surprise me that in his final pitch to voters this week, Biden barely mentioned his record. He didn’t talk about inflation, the looming recession, crime, immigration, Covid. He mentioned nothing that would motivate anyone beyond his own base.

He returned instead to his previous 2020 electoral blackmail: you have no choice but to vote for Democrats because the far right is so hostile to democracy. To which my answer would be: Well, I did that already. And I was treated like an easy mark by the Dems — who pocketed my vote and ignored all of my concerns. Voting for an actual election denier would remain a dealbreaker for me. But otherwise, when Trump is not on the ballot, why would I be suckered by the woke left again?

Worse than this bait-and-switch is the condescension that came with it. Think of the absolute assertions by the Biden administration and their media flunkies: The border is secure. Covid vaccines prevent infection. There is no CRT in high schools. The lab-leak theory and Hunter Biden’s corruption were disinformation. There is no medical debate about fast-track, affirmation-only, sex changes for minors. Inflation is caused by corporate greed. Women in college always tell the truth; and men always lie. A president can forgive student loans by fiat. Debt doesn’t matter. A woman can have a penis. The people who attack Asian-Americans are all white supremacists. The idea of individual merit is racist. Can you think of any social issue where the Biden administration hasn’t taken the position of the illiberal “social justice” left?

Just for fun I looked up Sullivan's Republican candidates for governor and a U.S. House seat. The latter was a standard "back the blue / pro-growth i.e. yet more tax cuts, less regulation" kind of Republican who believes "the market" will solve our healthcare problems. So utterly clueless on the things that have already failed repeatedly already but definitely more old Republican mainstream. For governor? Well how's this for "an actual election denier" who "would remain a dealbreaker?"

Diehl told GBH in 2021 that he didn’t think the election was stolen from Trump. But in August of this year, Diehl said he had been wrong in that initial assessment.

At that time he told WRKO, “I was wrong initially. It definitely was an election that was stolen from Trump, and it was rigged in a way that should never happen again,” GBH reported.

At Wednesday’s debate, Diehl appeared to adjust his response again saying, “I thought there was potential for election fraud.”

And this little beauty...

“Yes, America is burning. But that’s how forests grow,” Healey said in a 2020 speech to the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce.

And that's in Massachusetts where you would expect to find more sane Republican candidates.

Expect Sullivan to talk himself into voting for DeSatanist in 2024. I can already hear the echos of Dreher before he completely lost it, complete with hand-wringing, yeah buts, faux hesitancy, and concern trolling. Huh, I just described the Queen of Insincere herself, Susan Collins!

[goldenvalley]

Dec 6, 2022 21:10:38 GMT LFC said:

I decided to take a quick peek in at Andrew. To put it bluntly, he's become Rod Dreher 1.0. He's not yet completely insane (yet) but his lens for viewing the world is so far out of skew that he's fighting alternative facts. Here's his piece, or at least what you're allowed to read, on why he was looking to vote Republican in the 2022 election. This could have come straight outa' Faux. And his meltdown over the current science related to gender and the boogeyman of CRT is pure Dreher (bold mine). He apparently took a lot of hits from more realistic readers which he responded to, not very well I'd say.

****

Expect Sullivan to talk himself into voting for DeSatanist in 2024. I can already hear the echos of Dreher before he completely lost it, complete with hand-wringing, yeah buts, faux hesitancy, and concern trolling. Huh, I just described the Queen of Insincere herself, Susan Collins!

So it seems that Sullivan only supported Dems until he got his dearest wish...single sex marriage.  Once he got that he returned to his ultra right conservativeness sprinkled with contempt for some of his fellow queers who aren't "straight enough" for him.

[indy]

Who on Earth subscribes to this crap? Who pays him money to whine about the things he doesn't like, mischaracterize other people's positions, and offer profoundly self-centered and self-certain words like 'if you really want to be on “the right side of liberalism,” you will join me."'?

[LFC]

Dec 7, 2022 12:56:59 GMT indy said:

Who on Earth subscribes to this crap? Who pays him money to whine about the things he doesn't like, mischaracterize other people's positions, and offer profoundly self-centered and self-certain words like 'if you really want to be on “the right side of liberalism,” you will join me."'?

He's like so many other people who began as actual conservatives and, as they aged, fell down a rabbit hole. It's almost epidemic and I think speaks to core traits of people drawn to conservatism, or at least the American brand of conservatism. FFS look at George Will, who is not a stupid man, but is still a climate change denier. AnBr just put up that post about Greenwald and Taibi who, though not conservative, did kind of define themselves by what they fought against. When it comes to having a list of defining enemies to choose from there's no side like conservatism. You can put Dershowitz into that bucket too. It's like they're addicted to conflict and the right has the best drugs.

Back in the day I subscribed to the Daily Dish because it was an excellent news aggregator. It's how I found TPM. The pablum he's serving up today? If it was free I wouldn't read it other than to check in occasionally to see the train wreck, but when I want a train wreck I look at TAC. Dreher and company make a much more horrific crash to gawk at.

[goldenvalley]

Dec 7, 2022 14:46:34 GMT LFC said:

Dec 7, 2022 12:56:59 GMT indy said:

Who on Earth subscribes to this crap? Who pays him money to whine about the things he doesn't like, mischaracterize other people's positions, and offer profoundly self-centered and self-certain words like 'if you really want to be on “the right side of liberalism,” you will join me."'?

When it comes to having a list of defining enemies to choose from there's no side like conservatism. You can put Dershowitz into that bucket too. It's like they're addicted to conflict and the right has the best drugs.

Nice analysis.  I wouldn't put Dershowitz in that category however.  He's just an attention whore.  I see him more akin to Guiliani than to the others you mention.

[LFC]

Dec 7, 2022 16:03:42 GMT goldenvalley said:

Dec 7, 2022 14:46:34 GMT LFC said:

When it comes to having a list of defining enemies to choose from there's no side like conservatism. You can put Dershowitz into that bucket too. It's like they're addicted to conflict and the right has the best drugs.

Nice analysis.  I wouldn't put Dershowitz in that category however.  He's just an attention whore.  I see him more akin to Guiliani than to the others you mention.

Maybe, but of course the best way for these whores to get attention is to go where they can find the most outraged people. So maybe Greenwald and Taibi believe in what they're doing and have just lost their ability to think while Dershowitz and Giuliani take the same path for personal aggrandizement. It's a match made in hell.