Captain Beefheart versus Bolt Vanderhuge

"Because in Mr. Sullivan's world, 'Liberal' does not refer to a political ideology, but to an impoverishing political ghetto from which no amount of 'being right about everything' will permit you to achieve escape velocity. In Mr. Sullivan's world, 'Liberal' is a terrible disease that afflicts losers who do not get invited to spout their views on teevee." 

-- driftglass, December 2009

Three years ago, the official Vox magazine line on Mr. Andrew Sullivan was that he was "the most influential public intellectual of the last 20 years":

How Andrew Sullivan changed America

Who is the most influential public intellectual of the last 20 years?

This designation should go to someone who actually has helped change the world, rather than just changing lots of minds. It also should go to someone who has embodied key trends of the time, noting that for both standards I am focusing on the United States.

Based on those standards, I am inclined to pick Andrew Sullivan, who is most recently in the news for his announcement that he is quitting after fifteen years of blogging.

Three years later, Ezra Klein has suddenly discovered that Andrew Sullivan is actually more of a mealy-mouthed fraud who continually and radically reinvents the history of the United States and the history of Christianity to comport with his woozy, myopic, Tory sense of How Things Should Be:

The political tribalism of Andrew Sullivan
Sullivan’s essay on political tribalism shows he’s blinded by his own.

Which means I'll probably have to pack up my shack at the edge of respectability and move on down the road.

Again.

Well, I've had a good run.

You see, since blogging's earliest days I've been writing about the "Andrew Sullivan" which Ezra Klein discovered only yesterday and which would never have risen to Vox's editorial attention had Mr. Sullivan not decided to take a gratuitous shot at Mr. Klein during his long, weepy disquisition on Very Important Things Like the Meaning of Fucking Life You Assholes.

I knew when we launched Vox that there would be criticisms I didn’t anticipate, but I’ll admit, I never foresaw one of them being that writing explainers doesn’t satisfyingly replace the role of religion in people’s lives.

Yet here we are:

But the banality of the god of progress, the idea that the best life is writing explainers for Vox in order to make the world a better place, never quite slakes the thirst for something deeper.

Rats. Foiled again!

That’s Andrew Sullivan writing in New York magazine, and while the column caught my attention for that line, which I will now have needlepointed on a pillow, the broader piece is wrong in more important, less amusing, ways...

So now I expect my little beanfield of serious Sullivan critiques will be overrun for awhile in an extended, low-stakes, high-drama, clickbait slapfight among privileged, cloistered Beltway insiders:

What I am interested in is American politics, and in this essay, Sullivan offers a nostalgic analysis of our current problems that has become popular among a certain class of pundits — David Brooks calls Sullivan’s essay a shoe-in for his annual Sidney Awards — but that doesn’t hold up to the slightest scrutiny, and in fact displays the very biases it laments.

Were I a betting man, I would lay down a couple of small wagers on the following propositions.

One, this will end in a Bill Maher show rapprochement between the antagonists.

Two, once all the Beltway sound and fury signifying nothing has passed, nothing will have changed.

Because there is a Club...

Meanwhile, for you Future Historians, here is a thing I wrote a very long time ago:

Yes, Mr. Sullivan, your objections emphatically do make you a "radical leftist", because in the hands of the shitkicker demagogues of the Right like Malkin, phrases like "radical leftist" have long since lost any meaning. They are just the pejorative-du-jour, pulled from a random grab-bag of Limbaugh-words -- socialist, elitist, feminist, Marxist, anti-American, compassionate, cut-and-run, surrender, Liberal, extremist, collectivist, queer, Communist, fascist, atheist, humanist, "New York", "San Francisco", “Chicago”, French, European -- that each used to have discrete and very different meanings, but are now bleated interchangeably by the Pig People and their overlords at anyone with a softer heart than Curtis LeMay and less imperial ambitions than Genghis Khan.

But then again, if Mr. Sullivan simply outed himself as a Liberal, he would instantly lose his place in the food-chain, wouldn’t he? Because like that microscopic number of self-loathing black Conservatives who make their daily bread by serving the interests of the Southern Bigot Party, more than any other single factor, it was always the sheer gawking, oddballness of the brazen self-delusion inherent in being the gay champion of the Christopath Homophobe Party that put Mr. Sullivan in the spotlight.

That was what gave him his unique and lucrative cache.

After all, Liberal gay political writers are a dime a dozen, and so in a strange way we find Andrew Sullivan locked in the same kind of mortal combat over labels -- and for exactly the same reasons -- as Roy Cohn's character in "Angels In America" as he adamantly insisted -- even as he was dying of AIDS -- that he was not a "ho-mo-sex-shall".


(Not Safe For Work)

Because, Cohn reasoned, homosexuals were nobodies; losers who had zero clout and “in 15 years cannot pass a pissant anti-discrimination bill from City Council.” And since Roy Cohn could get the President of the United States (or his wife) on the phone -- could take the man he was fucking to the White House and make Ronald Reagan smile at him and shakes his hand -- it therefore followed that Roy Cohn could not possibly be a homosexual.

That unlike every other person in his position on Earth, Roy Cohn was a heterosexual man, who fucked around with guys.

Likewise, even though Mr. Sullivan now, belatedly comes to believe much of what Liberals believe and finally deigns to notice a horde of grotesque truths about his Conservative Movement about which Liberals have been sounding the alarm for 30 years, Andrew Sullivan nonetheless looks us all straight in that eye and argues that he could not possibly be some mere Liberal.

Because in Mr. Sullivan's world, "Liberal" does not refer to a political ideology, but to an impoverishing political ghetto from which no amount of "being right about everything" will permit you to achieve escape velocity. In Mr. Sullivan's world, "Liberal" is a terrible disease that afflicts losers who do not get invited to spout their views on teevee.

Mr. Sullivan regularly receives such largess, therefore he must not be a Liberal.

He instead must be the lone member be of some rare and singular new species; some miraculous form of haploid political minotaur.

Because if he is not something spontaneously-generated and utterly sui generis, then he is just another Lefty-Come-Very-Lately, showing up at our door at 3:00 A.M., 20 years late and trailing toxic baggage behind him like a Halley Comet.

And who in the world would pay him to do his little dance then?

Behold, a Tip Jar!