I know Andrew Sullivan gets praise these days, including here, for his Anti-Trump writing. But this pleasing rhetoric disguises some fundamental problems with “America's Most Famous Gay Catholic Tory Conservative Public Intellectual” (h/t Driftglass). He believes in:
- The Unicorn of the existence of a “true conservatism”;
- Equating the actual lunatic right with a fictional “far left” (consisting of college kids at Middlebury etc.); and
- Lingering racism, by denial of it and false equivalence (he has not lost his affinity for The Bell Curve):
The preoccupation with race on the far left is now so deep, in other words, it’s becoming simply an inversion of that on the far right...
This Friday, the The Professional Left Podcast with Blue Gal and Driftglass will have its 400th episode, and I’ll be doing a separate post about that. Today, though, Driftglass has another of his running series, Stupid Shit Andrew Sullivan Says, in response to Sullivan’s latest NY magazine piece. Driftglass gets to the essence of Sullivan’s problem:
We have become, at this point, inured to having an irrational president…
"We" have done no such god damn thing.
...in an increasingly post-rational America.
"America" is not "increasingly post-rational". The Republican Party is utterly and completely post-rational. Insane, actually, and has been for a very, very long time.
We’ve also come to tell ourselves that somehow (a) this isn’t really happening, (b) by some miracle, it will be over soon, or (c) at some point the Republican Party will have to acknowledge what they are abetting, and cut their losses.
Again with this "we" horseshit.* There is no "we" in this equation. There is the Right, who are cruel and proudly ignorant and bigoted and quite mad.
And as bad as Trump and the Republicans are, Sullivan always manages false equivalency:
The preoccupation with race on the far left is now so deep, in other words, it’s becoming simply an inversion of that on the far right...
Sullivan will also never acknowledge we have Trump today because of the demonization of Hillary Clinton, to which he contributed a great deal as an early adapter of blind-Dowd-hatred syndrome. . In October 2015, he said on Maher:
“A large majority of the country don’t believe a word she’s saying, for good reason.”
“She’s a talent-free hack.”
“a mediocrity”
“The question is, not whether she can calculate, is whether she can do anything but calculation, whether she has any vision, whether she has any core beliefs, or whether she’s in the prison of another bubble called Washington”
So sorry, Andrew, you’re no shining example of anti-Trumpism.
*h/t an old joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto I don’t think can be used today.