...is quitting his
But what do I know.
He will also have a podcast, because we can't have too many of those.
I learned about this in his final New York Magazine column: a longish, passive-aggressive exercise in self-pity which begins with Mr. Sullivan assuring his readers in the first sentence that he was not going to go on and on about you-know-what --
The good news is that my last column in this space is not about “cancel culture.”-- after which he spends a good chunk of the next 12 paragraphs going on and on about you-know-what. Here's a sampler:
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 take exception to this last part. Over the past 15 years I have frequently questioned Mr. Sullivan's motives and judgement. So much so that he once sent me an email asking why I was going after him in such blunt and scathing terms. If memory serves I believe I replied by pointing out that Mr. Sullivan frequently went after people in blunt and scathing terms, and then I probably said something about about the goose and the gander.
We have freedom of association in this country, and if the mainstream media want to cut ties with even moderate anti-Trump conservatives, because they won’t bend the knee to critical theory’s version of reality, that’s their prerogative....
Since I closed down the Dish, my bloggy website, five years ago, after 15 years of daily blogging, I have not missed the insane work hours that all but broke my health. But here’s what I do truly and deeply miss: writing freely without being in a defensive crouch; airing tough, smart dissent and engaging with readers in a substantive way that avoids Twitter madness; a truly free intellectual space where anything, yes anything, can be debated without personal abuse or questioning of motives...
And I never heard from Mr. Sullivan again
He -- gulp -- canceled me.
Very sad. But somehow I'm still here. Still able to take this from Mr. Sullivan's Farewell Cruel Twitter missive --
And maybe it’s worth pointing out that “conservative” in my case means that I have passionately opposed Donald J. Trump and pioneered marriage equality, that I support legalized drugs, criminal-justice reform, more redistribution of wealth, aggressive action against climate change, police reform, a realist foreign policy, and laws to protect transgender people from discrimination.
-- then pause to laugh and laugh and laugh because what Mr. Sullivan is describing as "conservative" is about 80% chapter-and-verse from the Evil Liberal Agenda.
Which pairs ever so nicely with this thing I wrote is 2012 on the internet weblog I never quit:
Mr. Sullivan's Conservatism is identical to Mr. Brooks' Moderation in that their respective ideological systems amount to little more than what is convenient and enjoyable for each man to believe at any given moment.Which, in turn, allows me to answer the question "Why the fuck, in this Year of our Lord 2020, is Andrew Sullivan still picking ludicrous fights with Liberal straw men and clinging like grim death to his Conservative name-tag when he so clearly is not any kinda Conservative at all?" with this piece from the archives internet weblog archives from 2009:
If Mr. Sullivan suddenly developed a taste for pineapple ice cream, within a week he would be penning columns about how "Liking Pineapple Ice Cream" is a cardinal Conservative value because of something something Edmund Burke. If he got sick on bad Thai food, we would suddenly see a spate of columns discussing bad Thai food and how it is something that only extreme Christianists or Left Liberal would ever put in their mouths.
He is, at best, a flighty dilettante with a wealth patron and does not have the slightest fucking clue about how his adopted country works.
... 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".
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.Eleven years later and I still see no reason to change a word of it.
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?
No Half Measures
4 comments:
years ago, Kurt Vonnegut wrote that he didn't want to be considered as an SF writer, in part, because too many critics mistook SF to be a pissoir, rather than a literary category. Many conservative SF writers and fans never seem to have forgiven him - Pournelle and NIven send him to hell in one of their sloppy rewrites of the Inferno - but those critics missed the point. Vonnegut had some kind things to say about SF, but he wasn't a fan boy and he just wanted to make some money. Vonnegut may have never been an SF writer, but he wrote some great SF. He just didn't want those books limited by the SF label.
In this, Sullivan seems to be the antithesis of Vonnegut. Despite his decades long protestations, and his long support of conservatism, he has never been that conservative. Really, all of Sully's good ideas have been liberal ideas, and his conservative ideas are generally stupid and unsupportable. For example, he seems clueless as to the most basic reason to disregard The Bell Curve - it's junk science. But rather than acknowledge that, he claims that critics have an ulterior motive, a lack of integrity or a lack of intellectual courage, when they challenge him. And so he resumes his imaginary quest. Perhaps he will wind up at the Lincoln Project, who seem to pay themselves well for rewriting history.
But... But... you questioned Sullivan's motives! Not fair in a "truly free intellectual space where anything, yes anything, can be debated without personal abuse or questioning of motives..."
Well....you could do a little polishing, just sayin'
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