A Reader Asks...

In a previous post, SO Katie said this:

... I love Andrew Sullivan. Maybe its because I'm more of a centrist than an extreme leftist ... maybe my parents didn't do good enough job brain washing me. ;-)

But I think it is great to see a conservative stand up for gay rights as Andy has done for years. I also think it is great that he is railing against the use of torture.

Was Andy dismissive of Iran Contra and Watergate?

Good points, so let's take them one by one.

First, I honestly don't know what an "extreme leftist" even looks like anymore.

When I was a kid, an "extreme leftist" might have been a loosely apt description of a member of or sympathizer with any one of a number of Marxist-inflected activist organizations, while someone on the extreme right might have looked a lot like a hippy/feminist/gay/black-loathing, gun-nut Archie Bunker-type who huddled around the radio listening to Joe Pyne because the rest of the news was secretly run by Jews and/or Commies.

Admittedly somewhat cartoonish, but you get the idea.

But now consider how violently into the wingnut infrared the political spectrum has shifted in last 30 years.

With the exception of Bernie Sanders, there is almost no one of any prominence on the Left I can think of anywhere in elected or appointed office at the federal or state level who has even a poppy seed of Teh Socialist stuck between their teeth; in a dim room after a couple of beers, most Liberals and Progressives in serious politics today would be virtually indistinguishable from the Rockefeller Republican of a generation ago.

Locally and anecdotally, I know maybe one gen-u-ine “Das Capital”-quoting Marxist. He wears a suit, owns property and cheerfully works with both unions and conservative company owners in a spirit of pragmatic equanimity; whatever he reads at night, by day he is in the getting-shit-done business and is very well-respected.

Now consider what an exponentially ever more degenerate and depraved arc the Right has been hurtling down during that same period. How many Republicans of the First Water are now anti-science bigots? Bible-thumping idiots? Wreckers? Stooges of the oligarchs?

How many of them are either racists, or are cravenly willing to pander to racists in exchange for power?

How many of them hate this country? Really, really hate the complexity of it? The diversity? The built-in checks and balances? The premeditated secularism and tolerance burned right into our motherboard?

How many of them applauded as Bill Clinton was slandered and destroyed because he was in the wrong Party? How many cheered when Newt Gingrich gave the order for Republicans to grab every microphone in the world and scream “Liberals are Traitors” in unison year after year?

How many of them sent every dime they could scrape together to Christopathic hateporn merchants like James Dobson and Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson?

How many of them creamed their Ronald Reagan Underoos at the thought of the Cheney Torture Administration flossing their ass-cracks with the United States Constitution?

Millions of them, that’s how many.

As this country was put up on blocks and stripped down to the rivets, millions of them applauded. And bellowed. And jizzed themselves blind.

Millions and millions of people who hate this country so much they’ve seceded from it in everything but name. Hate it so much they invented their own Wrathful Swine God who has nothing whatsoever to do with Christ, but everything to do with feeding their own rage and ignorance back to them tarted up in cherry-picked scripture.

Hate the unbearable Liberalism of reality itself so passionately that the billionaires who underwrite their fascism invented a whole new and ludicrously biased media which exists solely to externalize and echo back to the pig people the voices in their heads.

And then we have the Professional Centerists of our Elite Media, for whom (I wrote four years ago and through the proxy of Tom Friedman) the…

…Universe is carefully divided into Conservatives – who are wrong – and Liberals – who are somehow, mysteriously and equally wrong all the time and in equal numbers on every issue. And only Captain Obvious, frolicking across the few lonely yards of sand on his Isle of Reasonableness, can see the truth.

It does not matter how many millions of miles the Shining Path Republicans drag the “middle ground” to the Right.

It doesn’t matter that the Party of Lincoln is now infested crotch-to-crown with maggoty Segregationists.

It doesn’t matter that Nixon looks like a fucking Socialist compared to the positions now being advocated by the GOP today.

However far into the Armageddonist Abyss the wingnuts charge, Captain Obvious will dutifully pace off half that distance back towards where the Left (the band formerly know as “Rockefeller Republicans”) happened to be that day, drive his little stake into that shifting ground and declare that THIS is where the treasure of Comity and Reasonableness is buried. And that everyone on either side of his little islet is equally and oppositely wrong.

This is the reality that ultimately tangles up my wiring when it comes to pinning on labels. Because in a world where you can get tagged as an "extreme leftist" by the Right for, say, disagreeing with Bill O'Reilly over torture…or by the GOP for believing Social Security shouldn't be gambled away in the stock market…or by the Fox News Teabaggers for believing tax rates should be put back to their Clinton Administration levels...what does any label mean anymore?

Which brings us in my long, winding way to the second point: setting the context within which I'll try to answer the “Whither Andy Sullivan” question.

Because the context here really is vital.

I agree that Andy Sullivan has written many things over the years that, if judged blind-submission-writing-contest-style, are perfectly fine, and with which I concur. The problem I have with Andy and several other chastened-by-recent-history Conservatives is that, in writing about culture and/or politics, shearing content from context is virtually impossible.

Sullivan and many others, make their daily bread writing about politics and culture.

Fine.

They are in the business of taking fierce positions and defending them aggressively.

Good.

But in the world of politics and policies, those opinions are not sofa-bound, five-finger-exercise. In the world of politics and policies, people play with live ammunition, and so however sincerely angry and articulate as these apostates are -- and I will gladly stipulate that Andy Sullivan is plenty of both -- the question people like me will keep demanding of them for the rest of their public lives is this:

“OK, well then where in the fuck have you been for the last 30 years?”

This from Wikipedia:

One of the most common charges Sullivan addresses is that he is inconsistent, that his views on certain policies (such as the desirability of invading Iraq) and people (such as George W. Bush) change considerably over time.
...

And this:

Though Sullivan was very strong in his praise of George W. Bush immediately after 9/11, he has recently called such views "stupid and premature" in retrospect. He has similarly since characterized the president as a "shallow, monstrous, weak, and petty man."[42] In response to suggestions by Sullivan that Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld may have intentionally refused to support the Iraq War effort (during occupation), conservative blog Ace of Spades did a parody of Sullivan's Daily Dish site.”

Three cheers for seeing the error of one’s ways and all, but notice how virtually every one of Sullivan’s eleventh-hour epiphanies are put in harness in the service of the greatest and most dangerous Conservative Dead Ender delusion of all: that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with Conservatism itself.

How else except by building his ideological bunker under a mile-thick ablative shield of diamond-hard delusion could an openly gay man throw himself energetically into pimping for a party and movement that openly built its power base on the foundation of hating gays and working tirelessly for their extinction? How else but through the mesmerizing power of masochistic delusion does a drug libertarian spend his adult life carrying water for the Party whose corrupt leader launched the disastrous War on Drugs and declared drug abuse to be "public enemy number one in the United States” 38 years ago?

Like so many others of his kind, Sullivan maintains his career (and quite possibly his sanity) by hiding out in a meticulously-constructed fantasy-land. Bolted together out of leftovers from the Book of Genesis, it posits a righteous, sinless, pre-Fall "Real Conservatism" that apparently flickered in and out of existence like some exotic subatomic particle (two parts lepton to one part moron) sometime between 7:00 and 7:03 A.M. GMT on March 9, 1981.

Then a buncha stuff happened. For about a quarter of a century. During which time Andy Sullivan remained a staunch defender of the Wingnut Faith.

Then quite!suddenly! Sullivan noticed – OMFG! – the Movement had somehow been betrayed!

“… [c]onservatism is a philosophy without a party in America any more. It has been hijacked by zealots and statists".

By some guy named George Bush! (from the video)

“…the Bush republicans – who are not Republicans, not real Conservatives. They’re actually Leftists and Socialists when it comes to economic policy…”

But of course since Sullivan’s Real Conservatism was never anything more than a sham to begin with, Dubya wasn’t Conservatism’s aberration; he was its apotheosis. Or, as Glenn Greenwald put it here in his generally-favorable assessment of Sullivan’s writing and thinking:

…
"Conservative principles" are marketing props used by the Conservative Movement to achieve political power, not actual beliefs. Sullivan's principal argument that the Bush presidency never adhered to conservative principles is true enough, but the same can be said of the entire American conservative political movement. That is why they bred and elevated George Bush for six years, and suddenly "realized" that he was "not a conservative" only once political expediency required it.

And with his relentless failed-cult-leader twaddle that the Glorious Movement was just seven flavors of caramel-covered awesome until it was mysteriously hijacked and gutted during the middle of the Bush Administration by people who simply weren’t Reagany enough -- for all of his well-reasoned positions on issues from civil liberties to torture -- Andrew Sullivan is still spending his passion and talent proliferating a toxic delusion which should instead be sealed into lead-lined ideological sarcophagi and buried like Chernobyl.