Andrew Sullivan and Plato's Republicans

Andrew Sullivan returns to paid mainstream media in the strangest way imaginable: by penning a long, boring SparkNotes high school study guide on Democracy: A Study In Contrasts.

With chapters on "That Guy Plato" --

What did Plato mean by that? Democracy, for him, I discovered, was a political system of maximal freedom and equality, where every lifestyle is allowed and public offices are filled by a lottery. And the longer a democracy lasted, Plato argued, the more democratic it would become. Its freedoms would multiply; its equality spread. Deference to any sort of authority would wither; tolerance of any kind of inequality would come under intense threat; and multiculturalism and sexual freedom would create a city or a country like “a many-colored cloak decorated in all hues.”

-- and "The Electoral College is Not Really a College" -- 

Part of American democracy’s stability is owed to the fact that the Founding Fathers had read their Plato. To guard our democracy from the tyranny of the majority and the passions of the mob, they constructed large, hefty barriers between the popular will and the exercise of power. Voting rights were tightly circumscribed. The president and vice-president were not to be popularly elected but selected by an Electoral College, whose representatives were selected by the various states, often through state legislatures. The Senate’s structure (with two members from every state) was designed to temper the power of the more populous states, and its term of office (six years, compared with two for the House) was designed to cool and restrain temporary populist passions. The Supreme Court...

-- and shot through with the author's sweeping, parochial, unattributed generalizations delivered by slow freight in the Authoritative Passive Voice --

For the white working class, having had their morals roundly mocked, their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects decimated, now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome.

-- all I can say is, if Mr, Sullivan was shooting for a GED-level lecture on American democracy executed in a marmish tone and calibrated to pass muster with the Texas State Board of Education, then the first third of this banal turd has succeeded admirably.

Then, of course, comes the obligatory hippie punching, because what bland, cliche-barnacled journey-of-imagination-but-not-actual-journalism to heart of blue collar turmoil by the most privileged gay Conservative Catholic British Tory snob in America would be complete without stopping along the way to take a bite out of those awful, snooty Liberals:

...

This is just one aspect of what Trump has masterfully signaled as “political correctness” run amok, or what might be better described as the newly rigid progressive passion for racial and sexual equality of outcome, rather than the liberal aspiration to mere equality of opportunity.

Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes, thereby condemning those often at the near-bottom rung of the economy to the bottom rung of the culture as well. A struggling white man in the heartland is now told to “check his privilege” by students at Ivy League colleges. Even if you agree that the privilege exists, it’s hard not to empathize with the object of this disdain. These working-class communities, already alienated, hear — how can they not? — the glib and easy dismissals of “white straight men” as the ultimate source of all our woes. They smell the condescension and the broad generalizations about them — all of which would be repellent if directed at racial minorities — and see themselves, in Hoffer’s words, “disinherited and injured by an unjust order of things.” 

...

The Black Lives Matter left stoked the fires still further; so did the gay left, for whom the word magnanimity seems unknown, even in the wake of stunning successes...

And after you have waded through miles of this sort of thing, you can get on with the final third of the article in which Mr. Sullivan points out that Donald Trump is Bad.  Very Bad.  No, really.  He is really Very Very Bad and we should all wake the fuck up and start to take him seriously.  All hail the Acela Corridor's very own Paul Revere, typing bravely away from deep inside his Beltway bubble about the outbreak of a war that we on the Left have already been fighting for decades.

But ultimately what makes this a truly Andrew Sullivan-brand column is the nose-bleed altitude of internal illogic and cognitive dissonance to which it dares to aspire.  On the one hand, even from the safety of his Washington D.C. fastness, Andrew Sullivan is not blind enough to miss the level of deep and passionate pig-ignorance, hate and racism which runs bone-deep through the Republican party --

...

In some ways, this story contains all the elements of Trump’s core appeal. The vexing problem of tackling jihadist terror? Torture and murder enough terrorists and they will simply go away. The complicated issue of undocumented workers, drawn by jobs many Americans won’t take? Deport every single one of them and build a wall to stop the rest. Fuck political correctness. As one of his supporters told an obtuse reporter at a rally when asked if he supported Trump: “Hell yeah! He’s no-bullshit. All balls. Fuck you all balls. That’s what I’m about.” And therein lies the appeal of tyrants from the beginning of time. Fuck you all balls. Irrationality with muscle.

The racial aspect of this is also unmissable. When the enemy within is Mexican or Muslim, and your ranks are extremely white, you set up a rubric for a racial conflict. And what’s truly terrifying about Trump is that he does not seem to shrink from such a prospect; he relishes it...

-- nor is Andrew Sullivan stupid enough to pretend that deliberately cultivating and harvesting hate and rage and fear has not been at the core Republican electoral strategy all along:

...and those convinced [Trump] cannot bring a whole new swath of white voters back into the political process should remember 2004, when Karl Rove helped engineer anti-gay-marriage state constitutional amendments that increased conservative voter turnout.

And yet, somehow, while Black Lives Matter and "the gay left" and "students at Ivy League colleges" are singled out for extra helpings of Mr, Sullivan's pissy indignation, no such scorn is heaped on Fox News or Hate Radio or Regnery Press or the Wall Street Journal or any of the other cesspools of fascist propaganda which the millions and millions of bigots and imbeciles who make up the Republican base turn to every day for flattery, validation and endorsement of their worst impulses.  

But Mr. Sullivan knows what his audience of Beltway Shipwreck Kellies perched precariously atop their perks and privileges and high opinions of themselves want to hear.  He has friends throughout the ecosystem and knows how to mix the right barbs and the right honey in proportions that will please the people who write the checks. which is why he has a column in New York magazine. 

Update:  As I type this I see that Mr. Sullivan has parlayed his ponderous turd of an article into another invitation to let Chris Matthews talk over him on MSNBC where he just used the word "asshole" on live teevee. (h/t Heather at Crooks& Liars.) So, to recap...

• Things you are allowed to say on MSNBC without repercussions:  "asshole".
• Things which you are never under any circumstances allowed to say or even hint at in any way on MSNBC:  Larry Wilmore was absolutely god damn right about Joe Scarborough.

Update:  Add "campaign finance" to the long list of things about which Mr. Sullivan knows nothing.