Confessions of an Andrew Sullivan Reader
(written by Lancelot Finn, October 12, 2004)
I want to start with a few words in defense of Judas Iscariot.
I think Judas Iscariot must have had some admirable qualities. After all, at least one action in Judas's life shows courage, humility, and spiritual aspiration: he left everything behind and followed an itinerant prophet who healed the sick and made the lame walk, who taught blessed are the peacemakers and love your neighbor. Were I a Jewish peasant in first-century Palestine, I believe I would have sensed Jesus's holiness and been fascinated by him, but I doubt I would have had the spontaneous audacity to devote my life to him. That choice does Judas credit, though from what followed it seems he may have believed in Jesus for the wrong reasons from the beginning.
After that decision, one surmises that twenty pieces of silver were not the whole reason for Judas's betrayal, though as far as I know they may have been a tremendous amount of money at the time. I think Judas must have been disillusioned, and if so, he was not the only one: the crowds strew palms at Jesus's feet to welcome him when he entered the city, then cried "Free Barabbas!" five days later. Some may have been disappointed that Jesus did not call for armed revolution against Rome, but Judas should have known Jesus well enough not to be surprised at that. If I had to guess what single episode most likely accounts for Judas's disillusionment, it would be the scene in which a woman anointed Jesus's head with expensive oil, and when some disciples said reproachfully that the money might have been spent on the poor, Jesus's answer—"For you always have the poor with you; but you don't always have me" (Matt. 26:11)—might have seemed vain and uncaring. Once disillusioned, the same impetuous simplicity that made Judas follow Jesus made him resolute in his betrayal. It almost seems that Judas convinced himself he was doing the right thing by betraying Jesus. He is unmoved by Jesus's washing of the disciples feet. He is not shamed when Jesus exposes him as the betrayer. When he betrays Jesus with a kiss, it is as if he is saying that he still has affection for Jesus, but feels that in turning him over to the authorities he is doing what he must.
If you have guessed by now that the reason I am bringing up Judas Iscariot in an essay about Andrew Sullivan is because Sullivan has turned against Bush, that's not quite it. For one thing, George W. Bush is certainly not Jesus Christ, nor did Sullivan's support for Bush ever amount to discipleship, nor should it have. But when I think about my erstwhile hero Andrew Sullivan, the rock star of the blogosphere, it seems that he and Judas Iscariot share certain fatal flaws. Each was too impetuous, too willful. Each seemed idealistic, principled at any given moment, yet in the end his path was zig-zagging and contradictory and led him nowhere. Judas destroyed the cause he believed in. Andrew Sullivan may yet do so.
I started reading Andrew Sullivan in 2002, after seeing a reference to him in The Economist. I was excited, first because it's always a treat to discover a smart and persuasive writer, second because I knew he had edited The New Republic so I thought he was a liberal, and I was glad to see a liberal supporting the war, sympathetic to Bush, and cutting through the sophistries of the left. I was disappointed when I found out later that Sullivan considered his creed to be Reaganite conservatism. But Sullivan was independent and fairly centrist, seemed a square dealer, especially compared to the nauseating spin of papers like the New York Times (which I had become educated enough to detect), and at the same time he was passionate and pugnacious. His blog soon became my most trusted news source, a daily companion, a source of entertainment, a lens through which to view the world.
I admired Sullivan most as an eloquent advocate of the war in Iraq, and a filter for the best of the broader news media, but I soon learned to appreciate as well Sullivan's game of exposing and mocking other writers and news sources, part of the blogosphere's mission to keep Big Media honest. BBC anti-war spin was punished by calling them the "Baathist Broadcasting Company." A vintage act in this genre was Sullivan's "Imminence Watch." There was a time when media outlets were regularly reporting that Bush had called Saddam an "imminent threat," when he wasn't. This is the sort of persuasion that does not take place on the op-ed pages but rather, insidiously and subliminally, on the front and news pages where people think what they're reading is "objective," a gradual slip-and-slide of words and ideas and facts towards the left, making people perceive the world as journalists want us to see it. Andrew Sullivan fought back. He pointed out that Bush had never claimed Saddam was an imminent threat, but on the contrary, had said we should remove him before he became an imminent threat. And then he hammered away day after day, calling out every occurrence of the false "imminent threat" claim that he and his alert readers could find. You may think this is a dirty job, and someone has to do it, but why should I have found it so exciting to read? Well, that's probably not the main thing that kept me coming back to the site, but still, I quickly appreciated that the stakes were high in this trench warfare about how public debate was framed. Other perennial features were the "Poseur Alert," "Sontag Award Nominees," (terrorist-sympathizing excerpts) and "Van Halen Award Nominees" (pundits whose predictions turned out to be way wrong). Moral equivalence leftists, apologists for Islamist or Baathist tyranny, and sloppy, spinning, biased journalists felt the knife-edge of Sullivan's humorous and riveting disdain. But it was discombobulating when gay marriage news appeared, and conservative readers suddenly found themselves objects of the same disdain. Sullivan is gay and supports gay marriage. On many issues, Sullivan hews close to America's political center of gravity, but on gay marriage he is an extremist, writing a strange newspeak where "pro-marriage" means "pro-gay marriage" and anyone reluctant to overturn thousands of years of human tradition is hounded as a dark-age homophobic bigot.
Bush tripped over Sullivan's wedge issue and Sullivan switched sides, becoming comprehensively cynical about Bush, whitewashing Kerry's liberalism. If George W. Bush had not backed the anti-gay marriage amendment, or if Sullivan were straight, he would still be writing like in 2003. He would be pouncing fiercely on Kerry's long apathy towards democracy promotion and his fraternizing with Marxists from the Vietcong to the Sandinistas. He would be skewering Kerry's jaded contradictions of conscience, from the Vietnam War to abortion. He would be trumpeting the Bush administration's record of alliance- and coalition-building, and pointing out its recent renewed emphasis on diplomacy, as against Kerry's denigration of our allies. He would write about what scum the "insurgents" are, denounce the nihilism they represent, and emphasize how we must stand resolute in the face of Zarqawi's bombs. He would hail Bush's vision, articulated with ever-increasing eloquence, about the transformational power of liberty. He would document the collective flip-flop of the liberal establishment on nation-building, which they supported when Clinton was in office but ridicule now that a Republican is doing it. He would be a harsh critic of Bush's big spending in his first term, but he would offer tentative enthusiasm for the more conservative economic agenda that seems to be on the table for a second Bush term. And he would trash Kerry's domestic spending agenda. In short, he would be one of the Bush camp's most articulate champions on a whole range of issues, if it weren't for the suggested marriage amendment.
But I'm not accusing Andrew Sullivan of intellectual dishonesty here. Not at all. The thing is, Sullivan doesn't know that that's what he would be writing. It takes a third party to see that Sullivan's switch, in any other terms, doesn't make sense.
Take fiscal policy. Yes, Bush is running a big deficit, but that is caused mostly by 1) a tax cut which Sullivan supported, 2) a war Sullivan supported, and 3) a recession Sullivan doesn't think Bush caused. True, Bush's failure to discipline non-military spending is also partly to blame, and Sullivan has been consistent in attacking that. But that was true all along. It has not accelerated this year. And there are signs that it may ease off in Bush's second term, since Bush has proposed little new spending and promised to "reduce federal spending." And anyway, Sullivan's hero Ronald Reagan was a big deficit spender, too. So why should Sullivan turn against Bush now? It doesn't add up.
The war is a more egregious case. In 2003, Sullivan was an enthusiastic backer of regime change in Iraq. Now, for the past two months, his blog has been a slow, steady drumbeat of gloom and doom about Iraq, just because there's been an acceleration of the insurgency, probably motivated in part (terrorists are not stupid) by the chance of spooking voters into throwing out George Bush. What did Sullivan expect, in a war? Sullivan, too easily convinced by a full-of-holes Atlantic Monthly article by James Fallows, would say the war was managed incompetently. He thinks (as far as I can tell) that it would have worked better if we had sent more troops, and not disbanded the army and the civil service, but how does he know? Even if so, would Sullivan have done better? Would John Kerry have done better? Aren't we letting the perfect be the enemy of the good? And what is the point in dwelling on past mistakes? Shouldn't we let bygones be bygones and press forward with the work of making Iraq safe for democracy now? Instead, Sullivan acts as Zarqawi's megaphone, calling for panic and castigating those who prefer to stay calm. Sullivan personifies the attention deficit which Niall Ferguson, in his book about America, Colossus, identifies as a key factor in the incapacity of Americans for the beneficent exercise of global power that he calls "liberal empire."
And now there's Sullivan's support for Kerry. Sullivan is still a swing voter, agonizing over whether to back Kerry in the end, but he's been on the Kerry message for weeks: Bush is out of it, he's not leveling with the American people, Iraq is much worse than you think, Bush is dividing the country. When I hear Kerry speak, what he is saying often seems familiar from reading Andrew Sullivan's blog. Then there is Sullivan's absurd whitewash of Kerry as he tries to paint one of the country's most liberal senators as "conservative." Er, well, sort of, in a way, if you think about it, from a certain point of view… the caveats are buried, but "conservative" is in the headline. "The Conservative Party" was the title of Sullivan's article describing the Democratic National Convention. Kerry has not really tried all that hard to represent himself as a conservative. He has "a plan" for everything (a "program" might sound too transparently liberal); it's always spend this, finance that, rant against corporations, raise taxes on the rich, deliver lower health care premiums, government is the answer. But he makes enough conservative noises that people who want to fool themselves might be able to do so. Andrew Sullivan wants to be fooled. Andrew Sullivan doesn't seem to realize how much a Kerry victory would make a chump of Andrew Sullivan. What would be the voters' message in electing Kerry? That the Bush tax cut, which Sullivan supported, was a mistake. That the war in Iraq, which Sullivan supported, was a mistake. That the man who called Andrew Sullivan's beloved Reagan years "eight years of moral darkness" was right.
It all makes me think that maybe he was leading me astray all along. In hindsight, one of his humorous regular features provides a clue: the "Sontag Award." I did a Google Search and found what I suppose was the original offending quote, from a September 24, 2001 essay in The New Yorker:
The disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgement that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed super-power, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word "cowardly" is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards.
What's wrong with that? It sounds to me like a legitimate point of view; in fact, it's mostly right, and though Sontag no doubt does not see it this way, it was a pre-emptive justification for Bush's policy course over the last four years. We were attacked because some people were outraged by "specific American alliances and actions," including "the ongoing bombing of Iraq." We were attacked because we were scorned as cowards, who "kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky," and are not "willing to die themselves in order to kill others." The attacks were not justified, but the outrage certainly was. In the past three years, Bush has turned away from the alliances and actions that enraged al-Qaeda. We are no longer killing innocents in Iraq; they are. Our soldiers have shown that they believe American freedom, and not only Islamofascist fanaticism, is worth dying for. As a super-power, we have been taken down a notch. Some of our alliances are frayed. In Fallujah the limits of our power have started to become clear. But our identification with civilization and liberty worldwide is clearer than ever. While Andrew Sullivan launched a one-man inquisition against Sontag, Bush internalized her valid critique, and had a change of heart. Sullivan's intentions are good, but his verve and pugnacity are more consistent than his good judgment. Over time, he zig-zags and discredits himself, because, even though his contradictory mish-mash of views render him a centrist, he is intolerant of certain valid points of view and thereby becomes myopic and misses things. And this is the cause of his most catastrophic mistake of all: in the year 2004, George W. Bush's golden age, when he took on the mantle of Reagan's legacy and, strengthened by his victories over totalitarianism, and, undaunted by a tide of hate from the left, sending a message of hope and freedom to a troubled world.
Did Judas realize he was betraying Jesus to his death? Does Andrew Sullivan realize he stands a good chance of bringing down the curtain on the Reagan legacy? In each case, I think not, though they should have.
When Judas returns to the high priest a few hours after the betrayal to say, "I have sinned in that I betrayed innocent blood," (Matt 27:4) it suggests to me that Jesus's sentence took him by surprised. Perhaps he convinced himself that the other guys were better than they seemed. They were the religious establishment after all, preening themselves on their virtue; surely they would follow all proper procedures, be generous and merciful, not kill an innocent man. Of course, the high priest did not have much sympathy for Judas, since, in their view, Jesus was not innocent at all. "What is that to us? You see to it."
I suspect Andrew Sullivan has done more damage to the president, and more help to Kerry, than George Soros and MoveOn with all their billions. I can imagine him, two years from now, when Kerry has semi-socialized the health care system, subordinated our foreign policy to the UN, withdrawn the troops from Iraq and left their young democracy to be overthrown by Islamist thugs, raised income taxes, corporate taxes, and a few tariffs, plus taxes on overseas profits that hurt American firms on international markets, signed the Kyoto treaty, and provided nuclear fuel to Iran. Andrew Sullivan's blog will howl at the betrayal of the Reagan legacy, in a position a bit like that of Judas. Kerry's supporters (hint: they're liberals) will answer: yeah, what's the problem? That was what we wanted all along.
After all the hours I've spent enjoying Andrew Sullivan's blog, I wouldn't want him to come to that. Vote Bush, folks. Do it for Andrew Sullivan's sake.
UPDATE: Since Andrew Sullivan has linked to this piece, I've put some more comments about it on my blog to, well, dispel misunderstandings. Visit my post and comment freely. Andrew Sullivan: I love ya man!