Andrew Sullivan retires from blogging.

January 29, 2015 4:56 PM

"It’s been a strange relationship, hasn’t it? Some of you – the original white-on-navy ones – went through the 2000 election and recount with me, when I had to explain the word “blog” to anyone I met; we experienced 9/11 together in real time – and all the fraught months and years after; and then the Iraq War; and the gay marriage struggles of the last fifteen historic years. We endured the Bush re-election together and then championed – before almost anyone else – the Obama candidacy together. Remember that first night of those Iowa caucuses? Remember the titanic fight with the Clintons? And then the entire arc of the Obama presidency. You were there when it was just me and a tip jar for six years, and at Time, and at The Atlantic, and the Daily Beast, and then as an independent company. When we asked you two years ago to catch us as we jumped into independence, you came through and then some. In just two years, you built a million dollar revenue company, with 30,000 subscribers, a million monthly readers, and revenue growth of 17 percent over the first year. You made us unique in this media world – and we were able to avoid the sirens of clickbait and sponsored content. We will never forget it."

Steven Waldman discusses seven ways Andrew Sullivan changed blogging:
"Changing your mind in public. In the early days of blogging, most people wrote on the Web the same as they did in print—as if they had one shot, and being wrong was an embarrassment, not to be acknowledged. Sullivan decided that the new form provided the opportunity to put one’s thought process on display...
How to use a link. No, he didn’t invent the “a href,” but he was one of the first to understand that “merely” pointing to something interesting written by someone else was a service to readers, not an admission of inadequacy...
The readers as experts. In the early days of the internet, there was deep suspicion and confusion about how to incorporate user input. Most media outlets decided to bring in readers through raucous commenting areas. Sullivan was one of the first to feature deep, detailed stories from his readers—stories that provided expertise either on a technical topic or a personal experience...
The digital anchorman. During the 2009 Iran election protests, Sullivan played Walter Cronkite in a way I hadn’t seen before. Instead of calling on correspondents in the field, he did something unheard of: He sampled interesting bits of media from around the internet—a tweet from a civilian, a quote from a foreign journalist, pictures from websites, blogger analysis, etc...
Pacing. Sullivan has been a great blogger in part because he was a great magazine editor. He has understood the importance of pacing, mixing serious topics with light, long with short—items about his dog mixed with pieces about torture. He was among the first to embrace one of the core benefits of digital writing—that you needn’t exaggerate the importance of an item to make it stretch to 750 words or squish it beyond recognition to make it fit in a confined space...
Digital crusading. In the olden days, a newspaper might crusade on a topic by doing a massive series. Sullivan was among the first to fashion a blog-crusade. He takes a particular issue and returns to it repeatedly, sometimes with magnum opuses and sometimes with a one-sentence giblet of insight or reporting. Each post might stimulate reaction from readers, which often feed him new information or insight..."

posted by bookman117 (136 comments total)

While Sullivan is certainly an interesting and storied character in the world of political blogging, I can't help but think that Waldman dramatically overstates just how groundbreaking the work itself was.

Offering offsite links as an inherent service to visitors? Citing reader expertise? Aggregating snippets of news from around the world during a crisis? All of the revolutionary, groundbreaking things he credits Sullivan with are part of the native digital landscape that journalists and large corporations have struggled with while everyone else simply adopted them. He didn't change blogging as much as he was a successful blogger working a beat that traditionalists considered their domain.

I don't want to gripe, but that glowing article feels particularly ahistorical.
posted by verb at 5:07 PM on January 29, 2015 [37 favorites]

So long and thanks for the Iraq War.
posted by glhaynes at 5:08 PM on January 29, 2015 [87 favorites]

Left out of nearly every discussion of Sullivan: he probably did more than anyone to publicize and talk about Michael Oakeshott, who was an absolutely superb thinker who wrote beautifully.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 5:08 PM on January 29, 2015 [5 favorites]

Mark Ames (now with PandoDaily, previously founding editor with Matt Taibbi of The eXile) has a few things to say about Sullivan, in a re-posted and updated article from 2013:

Andrew Sullivan is not the Future of Journalism (January 28, 2015)

... 2013 title: If Andrew Sullivan Is The Future of Journalism Then Journalism Is Fucked
posted by Auden at 5:09 PM on January 29, 2015 [32 favorites]

Offering offsite links as an inherent service to visitors? Citing reader expertise? Aggregating snippets of news from around the world during a crisis?

Yeah, that's how one would spruce up "wrote for my blog" for a resume.
posted by glhaynes at 5:10 PM on January 29, 2015 [17 favorites]

He was still doing that?
posted by Cookiebastard at 5:12 PM on January 29, 2015

Also, Sullivan gave a voice to Glenn Greenwald and Daniel Larison when they were no name bloggers.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 5:17 PM on January 29, 2015 [6 favorites]

"The middle part of the country - the great red zone that voted for Bush - is clearly ready for war. The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead -and may well mount a fifth column."
posted by asterix at 5:17 PM on January 29, 2015 [29 favorites]

Even the little cartoon of himself typing away on a laptop is pompous and smug.
posted by The Card Cheat at 5:20 PM on January 29, 2015 [8 favorites]

I have typed at least five comments.

I have deleted all of them.

He was good with English. I cannot argue that.
posted by eriko at 5:23 PM on January 29, 2015 [43 favorites]

So for those who don't want to RTFA to find out exactly why he is retiring from blogging, here you go:

I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again. I’m a human being before I am a writer; and a writer before I am a blogger, and although it’s been a joy and a privilege to have helped pioneer a genuinely new form of writing, I yearn for other, older forms. I want to read again, slowly, carefully. I want to absorb a difficult book and walk around in my own thoughts with it for a while. I want to have an idea and let it slowly take shape, rather than be instantly blogged. I want to write long essays that can answer more deeply and subtly the many questions that the Dish years have presented to me. I want to write a book.

I want to spend some real time with my parents, while I still have them, with my husband, who is too often a ‘blog-widow’, my sister and brother, my niece and nephews, and rekindle the friendships that I have simply had to let wither because I’m always tied to the blog. And I want to stay healthy. I’ve had increasing health challenges these past few years. They’re not HIV-related; my doctor tells me they’re simply a result of fifteen years of daily, hourly, always-on-deadline stress. These past few weeks were particularly rough – and finally forced me to get real.
posted by modernnomad at 5:25 PM on January 29, 2015 [5 favorites]

I'm not as dismissive of him. He changed his mind. He admitted he was wrong. He modeled something I wish more conservatives were capable of showing, which is some level of intellectual honesty and introspection. I stopped reading when he went independent and he was infuriating at times (especially his naive fetish for sociobiology), but he could also be interesting and he writes beautifully.

I'm more interested in whether I can forgive people who voted for the war as senators and now want to be president.
posted by spitbull at 5:28 PM on January 29, 2015 [31 favorites]

Well he changed his mind about the Iraq war. Didn't change his mind about whether black people are genetically inferior to whites.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 5:30 PM on January 29, 2015 [15 favorites]

I wrote a long comment defending Sullivan back in 2012. I stand by most of it.
posted by spitbull at 5:32 PM on January 29, 2015 [8 favorites]

He had the sort of knee-jerk personality where you immediately stake out a strong, emotional position on a subject that comes up, and then later cool off and actually think about it. (Maybe). I used to read the blog a fair bit, but I reached my lifetime limit on his stuff years ago. Just... do the cool off thing first, then write something thoughtful.
posted by selfnoise at 5:35 PM on January 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

He demonstrated some amazing virtue in considering alternative viewpoints and changing his own mind--most notably about the Iraq War and torture, where he flip-flopped in 2004 before the election, endorsed Kerry, and spent the next six years aggressively owning his previous position and apologizing for it without reservation.

But that Mark Ames takedown is a damning indictment, and having followed Sullivan for many years until I got tired of his predictable cycle of histrionics, counterpoints, moderated reflected, I saw for myself that Sullivan did nothing... nothing... to atone for the much greater wrongs listed there.
posted by fatbird at 5:37 PM on January 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

His refusal to back down over The Bell Curve just a few months ago is a toxic stew of racism and arrogance. I do think he changes his mind on some topics -- I've seen it -- but that he refuses to acknowledge how hurtful, harmful, backwards, stupid, and racist that Bell Curve issue was...to me it shows either he is lacking in intelligence (which would be weird, considering how intelligent he can be on some topics) or blindingly racist. Believing "Are black people genetically less intelligent than white people?" is a question worth asking rather than lighting on fire like the garbage it is...what is wrong with you, Sully?
posted by sallybrown at 5:39 PM on January 29, 2015 [29 favorites]

You know, I've actually been planning to write an AskMe sometime soon, asking "Where can I go to get the news, in a format like Sullivan's blog?" I guess this is a good place to field the question: where can someone with liberal inclinations and an intense appreciation of feminism and social justice go for the Sullivan Experience?

I stopped reading Sullivan's blog several months ago. The straw that broke this camel's back was his treatment of GamerGate, although I had intentions to stop reading his blog back when he was giving space to the idea, "maybe intelligence is tied to race!!!" But, all the same, there is so much that he did right, and there's so much that I do miss about his blog.

I loved View From Your Window. I actively looked forward to the weekly contests, and I miss them. I'm not sure why it was so fascinating to see out someone's window, but it managed to be both so personal and so inviting. Trying to guess (and never, ever, ever getting close to right) was fun. Finding out how many varied guesses people made, also fun.

Sullivan also has a fantastic ability to compile links. A lot of blogs do the "link dump", where you end up with a huge collection of randomly assorted links to places online -- I never can really read through them. Link dumps are useless to me, because I need to see them collected by subject, I need enough context to feel like I know why I should want to click the link, and I need enough of a teaser to feel hooked into reading more. Sullivan was a master of this. He new how much text to quote, he was great at making their subject immediately clear. His blog provided such a wonderful, curated collection of op eds on so many subjects.

I also have a lot of respect for how Sullivan handled comments from his readers. Often, the e-mails he posts are well thought out, well written, and worth reading. He doesn't just post those who agreed with him, and he is actively and earnestly interested in those who could give good proof that he was wrong.

And let's not forget that Sullivan is responsible for an amazing, amazing collection of stories about late-term abortions. Let's not forget that his blog hosts some of the most powerful, moving, significant expressions of what it is like to need an abortion, to have access to it or to be denied. I often got frustrated with Sullivan's ability to read through such stories, to be moved so significantly by them, and then still respond with "but, still, obviously abortion is immoral, duh"... But, that's Sullivan for you: it's curation where his biggest talent lies.

So, any suggestions? Where can one find expertly, precisely, impressively curated news and news commentary?
posted by meese at 5:40 PM on January 29, 2015 [14 favorites]

I loved View From Your Window.

I did too, as well as so many of the letters/emails to him he would publish. He did a good job fostering a community of interesting readers.
posted by sallybrown at 5:44 PM on January 29, 2015

Well, now that he's stopped blogging, I'm sure it's only a matter of time before he realizes it's morally degenerate and tells us that everyone still doing it is evil and always has been.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 5:44 PM on January 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

Also, way back before Matt Yglesias wrote for Slate and was just an independent blogger, Sullivan had him on his blog roll. Then sully switched sites, and Yglesias wasn't on the blog roll anymore. I emailed Sullivan and asked him why. Sullivan wrote back: "he bores me"
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 5:44 PM on January 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

I also have Sullivan to thank for linking me to the first Ta-Nehisi Coates piece I ever read.
posted by sallybrown at 5:45 PM on January 29, 2015 [5 favorites]

Sullivan wrote back: "he bores me"

Someone didn't get invited to the Flophouse parties!
posted by octobersurprise at 5:49 PM on January 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

I too discovered TNC through Sullivan. So there's that.
posted by spitbull at 5:51 PM on January 29, 2015

His refusal to back down over The Bell Curve just a few months ago is a toxic stew of racism and arrogance.

Man, really? I feel like I started and stopped reading The Daily Dish in the same month back in, like, 2005 over that racist crap science. For someone who is lauded for admitting when he's wrong, he's really hung onto that idea for a long time.
posted by muddgirl at 5:52 PM on January 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

It's hard to not have very mixed feelings about Sullivan. I tend to check his blog most weekdays, and (though I've never met him personally) from his writings and his online and TV interviews, I find him very likeable. But with time you forget all the horrible crap he's responsible for... and when you read that Mark Ames article, and re-encounter the truly vicious, malign and hateful things he wrote and said about those (like myself) who dared oppose the looming Iraq War and Bush presidency back in the Orwellian years following the attack on the World Trade center... well.
posted by Auden at 5:53 PM on January 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

I myself think it's a good exercise to try to sustain mixed feelings about public figures. Cartoon hero/villain distinction has become the coin of the realm.
posted by spitbull at 5:56 PM on January 29, 2015 [40 favorites]

So I don't understand what his quitting blogging means for his media company. Are they shutting down too, or just moving away from paywalled blogs or what?
posted by mathowie at 6:00 PM on January 29, 2015

He is a very good writer who says some incomprehensibly stupid shit at times.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:02 PM on January 29, 2015 [5 favorites]

I sort of love and hate Sully but tuned out a few years ago. However, he's nothing if not an attention whore, so I'm guessing this 'retirement' will last about 30 seconds, or until people stop talking about, whichever is shorter.
posted by Sportswriters at 6:03 PM on January 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

No one who loves the Pet Shop Boys and petite vanilla scones can be all bad and I will FITE anyone who says differently.
posted by octobersurprise at 6:08 PM on January 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

I have no idea how I feel about this. He's someone who has Made A Difference, many times for the bad, and sometimes for the good. I don't want to read anything else by him. I'll enjoy reading more by TNC and Peter Beinart.
posted by Going To Maine at 6:10 PM on January 29, 2015

He is a very good writer who says some incomprehensibly stupid shit at times.

I explain this as Sullivan being far more interested in the attention he gets than the quality of the debate he incites, and this is why his legacy will be shitty, on the balance.
posted by fatbird at 6:10 PM on January 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

I don't think I've ever read anything by him, but looking at the comments here has made me realize how agonizing it must be to do anything of substance on the internet.
posted by weewooweewoo at 6:15 PM on January 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

That Spitbull comment is pretty on point. But I'd prefer if Sullivan were more an intellectual hedgehog than an intellectual fox.
posted by Going To Maine at 6:16 PM on January 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again.

Man, if I had a bitcoin for every time I --

*checks current bitcoin value*

Yeah, I'd still be loaded.
posted by Enemy of Joy at 6:22 PM on January 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

I like Sullivan, and yes, he's totally infuriating sometimes. He's a conservative, but his blog has also been the place to go to get intelligent conservative critiques of the right, plus some of the most eloquent defenses of Obama around.

At his best he's generously eclectic-- I discovered Ta-Nehisi Coates and Matt Yglesias through his blog, and a huge number of interesting pieces from all over... only Mefi is better at coming up with great stuff to read several times a day.

Although he's a good writer, he's a great curator, and I'll miss his blog, and probably give his books a miss.
posted by zompist at 6:30 PM on January 29, 2015 [5 favorites]

As a left-leaning black person with at least some knowledge of molecular biology, Sullivan's rhetoric on The Bell Curve was triply insulting. Insulting because of the racism. Insulting because of how upset he was by the expectation that socioeconomic disparities between different groups of people be taken seriously in discussions of "intelligence". Insulting because his views were heavily dependent on misunderstandings about both population genetics and the relationship between human genotypes and phenotypes, both subjects he was clearly uninterested in learning more about.

I also became aware of Matthew Yglesias and Ta-Nehisi Coates by reading him. He's a great writer, and I learned a lot from reading his column so many years. More than he suspects.
posted by IShouldBeStudyingRightNow at 6:33 PM on January 29, 2015 [24 favorites]

I hope he stays retired.

I doubt it.
posted by valkane at 6:45 PM on January 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

I must be the only person in the country who thinks support for the Iraq war makes ones opinions completely irredeemable. Reading him, I could never ever get past the ignorant depraved blood thirsty garbage he spouted in 2002. I know people change their minds and I do believe he thinks he's contrite, but still, 12 years later, I simply don't trust a mind that calculated that the invasion of Iraq was anything other than foolhardy at best and more correctly a war crime. It wasn't a difficult thing to see. Rednecks blinded by patriotism I might forgive. Thinking people with a platform belong on trial.

It's probably bad that I can't put aside that one misjudgment and appreciate his talent but then again tens of thousands of dead Iraqi children can't appreciate it either.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 6:54 PM on January 29, 2015 [42 favorites]

I must be the only person in the country who thinks support for the Iraq war makes ones opinions completely irredeemable.

Nope.
posted by Cookiebastard at 6:58 PM on January 29, 2015 [7 favorites]

I used to read him. Then one day I told myself, I will never dignify this clown again by reading him.

Maybe three years ago. I haven't read a word he has written since. It's a matter of principle.
posted by Repack Rider at 6:58 PM on January 29, 2015

"The view from my window ... Damn, it's Baghdad in 2006 again." - Andrew Sullivan in Hell
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 6:58 PM on January 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

I must be the only person in the country who thinks support for the Iraq war makes ones opinions completely irredeemable.

Nope.

I remember either reading or hearing Dan Savage once explain that he no longer expressed opinions about whether or not the US should send troops to war because he had been wrong in supporting the Iraq War, and that he felt it to have permanently disqualified him from expressing opinions on the subject. I was impressed.
posted by Going To Maine at 7:07 PM on January 29, 2015 [22 favorites]

@meese
>So, any suggestions? Where can one find expertly, precisely, impressively curated news and news commentary?

http://weeklysift.com/
posted by Fupped Duck at 7:13 PM on January 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

It's probably bad that I can't put aside that one misjudgment and appreciate his talent but then again tens of thousands of dead Iraqi children can't appreciate it either.

And counting...

Can't believe anything he says. He'll be back and blargging soon enough.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 7:18 PM on January 29, 2015

I was in college, far away from home, and a charming and charismatic nationally syndicated AM talk show host urged me to go out and read this amazing new book, "The Bell Curve" - I did, and it was obvious hogshit from the get-go. I mean, I've got a pretty big library of paranormal and conspiracy theory books, and the Bell Curve fits in there pretty neatly. And that's how I stopped listening to Rush Lindbaugh.
posted by Slap*Happy at 7:21 PM on January 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

Andrew Sullivan has been the most influential public intellectual of the last twenty-five years: "Doesn't Andrew Sullivan have a reasonably strong claim to that title, especially after the recent Supreme Court decisions on gay marriage? Sullivan was the dominant intellectual influence on this issue, from the late 1980s on, and that is from a time where other major civil liberties figures didn't give gay marriage much of a second thought, one way or the other, or they wished to run away from the issue."
posted by kliuless at 7:21 PM on January 29, 2015

While I find Sarah Palin to be as ridiculous as a clown wrapped in knox blocks, Sullivan's whole Trig Palin birther obsession was a further extremely distasteful and borderline insane obsession of his. I didn't discover him until his pro-Obama period and didn't realize how his insanity had expressed itself earlier in his career, but when I did I stopped reading his blog. He did awful things - he helped torpedo health care during the Clinton years, he helped prevent a thorough investigation of Reagan's October surprise, and, of course, he was one of the loudest cheerleaders for the Iraq war.

Sometimes, the good men do doesn't balance out the evil they did. Sullivan has a lot more work to do to balance his past evil.
posted by Joey Michaels at 7:30 PM on January 29, 2015 [14 favorites]

He was the stereotype in so many ways -- the 70's mustache, the Alcoholics Anonymous theology, the Miss America Pageant fan, the college swim coach. But he was also dying. His skin was clammy and pale. His apartment smelled of Maxwell House coffee and disinfectant and the gray liquid that was his constant diarrhea. I remember one day lying down on top of him to restrain him as his brittle, burning body shook uncontrollably with the convulsions of fever. I had never done such a thing to a grown man before, and as I did, the defenses I had put up between us, the categories that until then had helped me make sense of my life and his, these defenses began to crumble into something more like solidarity.

One the worst Sullivan paragraphs ever, yet it sums up everything there is to know about his rhetoric even though it was published 18 years ago: the monomaniacal insistence on self-promotion in his smallest gesture of human warmth (you can picture him ruminating about how he'd describe the diarrhea of the dying AIDS patient/mentor even as he lay on top of him to "restrain" him); the arrogation of other people's lives and stories only to bolster his own story; the ostentatious and frosty ridicule of other gay men inasmuch as they are unlike him in any way, even as he self-righteously claims "solidarity" with them and spokesmanship of their community; and the perverse resistance to anything resembling historical awareness.
posted by blucevalo at 7:32 PM on January 29, 2015 [6 favorites]

Can't believe anything he says. He'll be back and blargging soon enough.

Yeah, there must be money involved, somehow.
posted by valkane at 7:33 PM on January 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

I guess that obnoxiously arch contrarian blogging is lucrative enough that you can retire at fifty?
posted by octothorpe at 7:47 PM on January 29, 2015

The Card Cheat: "Even the little cartoon of himself typing away on a laptop is pompous and smug."

Hey now, that's Terry Colon you're talking about.
posted by Chrysostom at 7:54 PM on January 29, 2015 [6 favorites]

Much of what I treasured about Sullivan was his unpredictability. He was maybe the only major writer on the web who I'd think "I wonder what he'll think about this?" Everyone else, I know well in advance.

He was really wrong on the Iraq war, and the "decadent fifth column." But he admitted his mistake, and more importantly, spent many years and thousands of words thinking about why he was wrong, and what he would do to improve in the future. The world would be a better place if more people who were wrong about the Iraq War, or the promise of communism, were similarly able to engage in real self-examination.
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 8:14 PM on January 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

"I made my money. Fuck you peons. I'm going to go pretend I'm not a shill for a while. It'll be almost like I'm human, at least in my eyes."
posted by kjs3 at 8:35 PM on January 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

He has a beagle!
posted by clavdivs at 8:56 PM on January 29, 2015

I am really entertained by the attempt to make a virtue out of Sullivan's "changing his mind." If only he'd done it even more frequently, he might've occasionally just by chance managed to end up on the right side of an issue!
posted by RogerB at 9:09 PM on January 29, 2015

Yeah, it shows great strength of character to be able to change your mind after it becomes abundantly clear that your opinion is now unpopular.
posted by teponaztli at 9:17 PM on January 29, 2015 [24 favorites]

> He was really wrong on the Iraq war, and the "decadent fifth column." But he admitted his mistake, [...] The world would be a better place if more people who were wrong about the Iraq War, or the promise of communism, were similarly able to engage in real self-examination.

Actually, the world would be better if the people who were absolutely and completely wrong about Iraq, costing hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, were utterly discredited so they could never make such a mistake again.

As Glenn Greenwald pointed out, at the time of the Iraq War many people spoke out against it with great rationality, and were completely ignored, because they weren't Serious, Sensible People. The war happened, and all the Serious, Sensible People who said it would take a few months and a few million dollars were utterly wrong. And yet over a decade years later, those morons are still the Serious, Sensible People whose opinions are the only valuable ones, and the people who accurately predicted exactly what was going to happen are still completely marginalized.

You can admit you're wrong and be forgiven when you are arguing over sports trivia. When you aggressively push for a war based on hallucinations and arrogance, and you are utterly wrong and hundreds of thousands die, "Whoops, my bad!" is not sufficient.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 9:22 PM on January 29, 2015 [43 favorites]

What Atrios Said:

SUNDAY, APRIL 15, 2012

WANKER OF THE DECADE - 2nd Runner Up

Andrew Sullivan.

While the horrible events of 9/11 predated, somewhat, THE ESCHATON DECADE, among the numerous consequences was the rise of the warbloggers. Sullivan had a longish media career, but was also one of the early bloggers. And after 9/11, General Sullivan enlisted in the Fighting 101st Keyboard Kommandos, otherwise known as the "warbloggers," whose primary mission was to fight America's most important enemy, the enemy at home known as "Americans."

In the Sunday Times of London on September 16, 2001 (!!), Andrew had these lines:

The middle part of the country - the great red zone that voted for Bush - is clearly ready for war. The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead -and may well mount a fifth column.

This was 5 days after 9/11 (presumably written a couple of days before). It was those coastal enclaves that were, you know, attacked, and already Andy had established that the "decadent left" was likely plotting treason as an appropriate response to 9/11. But the real wanking happened when there was a minor rewrite for when that piece was republished elsewhere and archived on his blog as a "Best of" (other proud accomplishments were his promotion of The Bell Curve and Betsy McCaughey's Clinton HCR lies).

The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead - and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column.
posted by charlie don't surf at 9:25 PM on January 29, 2015 [9 favorites]

One of the ten worst human beings on the planet, and that's including the corpses of bin Laden and Albert Fish. Any follow up sentence I write to this will get me banned.
posted by Awful Peice of Crap at 9:44 PM on January 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

Yeah, I guess what really sticks in my craw about his "apology" about Iraq, in which he professes his undying loyalty to the policies of Reagan and Thatcher as an excuse for why he trusted Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, is that he not once mentioned regret at characterizing those who disagreed with him as treasonous.

Yeah, as a gay man he was a not-that-early supporter of gay marriage, another issue for which there is a blindingly obvious morally superior position. If we're going to use this fact to portray him as the "most influential public intellectual of the last 25 years", I'm going to go out on a limb and say that every married same sex couple I know would tear up their marriage license if it would undo the Iraq war.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 9:53 PM on January 29, 2015 [6 favorites]

Whatever. I like him, and I'll miss reading his site.
posted by spilon at 10:05 PM on January 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think this will be good for him. He's clearly a smart guy; but I always felt with his blog he was so busy posting and reacting that he never stopped to think things through in a thorough and systematic fashion. Some of his of obsessions were weird, like Trig Palin. Others were odious, like the IQ and race stuff.

He was one of the very first people pushing hard for gay marriage, so I give him credit there.
posted by persona au gratin at 10:22 PM on January 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

A smug bastard who had some talent, he also got waaaay too much credit for doing things that should be (and in some places, are) commonplace.

Being a Thatcherite should have barred him from being considered possessing any decent liberal thought, and he has the fairly standard conservative minority pompousness of believing that because he has looked past being gay to support politicians who have anti-gay positions, he is somehow superior to all the other gay people who find that rather a stumbling block. And also that condescension in acting like the only reason other gay people wouldn't support the same people is because of the anti-gay part, rather than that they might disagree with his preferred politicians based on anything else.

Encountered very sparingly, he could be worthwhile, but any more exposure had a way of revealing his true hollowness. Odious is a good word for him.
posted by gadge emeritus at 10:57 PM on January 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

Andrew Sullivan has been the most influential public intellectual of the last twenty-five years.

You left off the punchline -- "Pre-Sullivan, I would give the honors to Milton Friedman."

Ha!
posted by JackFlash at 12:50 AM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Andrew Sullivan has been the most influential public intellectual of the last twenty-five years.

You left off the punchline -- "Pre-Sullivan, I would give the honors to Milton Friedman

the correct answer is obviously Thomas Friedman
posted by ennui.bz at 1:24 AM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

He is the beagle of columnists. Unpredictable, unleashable, untrainable, individualistic, loud, brilliant, out in front whether it's the right direction or not, who will, if you love him and keep him close, eventually bite your face.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 3:34 AM on January 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

He was one of the very first people pushing hard for gay marriage, so I give him credit there.

HE IS GAY AND WANTED TO GET MARRIED.

He's a right wing asshole. He only comes around to the sensible moral position when it serves his self interest.

He is a very good writer. And his short, punchy writing style should be emulated. But brilliant? Sorry I read a bunch of his writing and no way no how. I simply don't see it. And I read his dissertation.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 4:34 AM on January 30, 2015 [16 favorites]

And I read his dissertation.

[mic drop]
posted by GrammarMoses at 5:29 AM on January 30, 2015 [4 favorites]

You know, if you only read things that you agree with, you become one of those people who only read things they agree with. You can't complain about the right-wing Fox News echo chamber and then return to your own.

Also, yeah, I'm sure you've never written anything you've regretted.
posted by fungible at 5:39 AM on January 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

He is a reactionary weathervane. Now he is hopping on the get away from the keyboard bandwagon. There will be another bandwagon soon.
posted by srboisvert at 5:54 AM on January 30, 2015

You can't complain about the right-wing Fox News echo chamber and then return to your own.

False equivalence.
posted by gimonca at 5:54 AM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

You know, if you only read things that you agree with, you become one of those people who only read things they agree with.

While what you've said is technically true, in this thread on this topic it's so what's not actually occurring and is such a false equivalence as to be a sparkling star of wrongness. Not liking Andrew Sullivan or thinking he's overpraised does not logically lead into anything else you wrote, and it's pretty damned foolish to think it does.
posted by gadge emeritus at 5:59 AM on January 30, 2015 [4 favorites]

False equivalence.

It's really, really, really not.

I was going to chime in with my mixed/complex feelings about sully throughout the years, but others have covered that ground pretty well. So I'll just say I look forward to his mix tapes on 8tracks.
posted by echocollate at 5:59 AM on January 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

You know, if you only read things that you agree with,

Keep in mind that some of those people you are addressing with the royal you include people who Andrew Sullivan has publicly called, in so many words, genetically inferior traitors.

Its the sheer magnitude of his faults that is so frustrating with Sullivan. Its not like he got Obamacare wrong, or thought XYZ tactics were better than ABC.

He got the Iraq war wrong and called people who got it right traitors.

He still gets race wrong, and was instrumental in popularizing regurgitated Nazi eugenic theories about how black people be dumb.

This is like, well I don't know what is is like. Its hard to compare how huge these things are. These fuckups in any other profession would get you shunned and in search of a new career. Not with beltway journalists though.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:02 AM on January 30, 2015 [19 favorites]

He still gets race wrong, and was instrumental in popularizing regurgitated Nazi eugenic theories about how black people be dumb.

GodDAMN it. I completely missed this dimension to his writing and beliefs and now I'm just horrified, pissed and embarrassed he was on ever on my "check this blog our regularly" list.

This shit, handily collected by Gawker in A Reader's Guide to Andrew Sullivan's Defense of Race Science is just unreal.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:09 AM on January 30, 2015 [5 favorites]

"I had no interest in this subject until I saw the data in Murray's and Herrnstein's book. I was, frankly, astounded by it. As a highly educated person, I had never been exposed to this data. And yet, it turned out it was undisputed."

That's from the Gawker link. Sullivan wrote that. Clearly, he's quantiatively illiterate and has no business writing about those topics.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:21 AM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

...because he has looked past being gay to support politicians who have anti-gay positions, he is somehow superior to all the other gay people who find that rather a stumbling block.

Quislings gonna quizzle.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 6:24 AM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

echocollate:
>> False equivalence.
> It's really, really, really not.

So the fact that some people who lean left choose not to read Andrew freaking Sullivan proves that there is epistemic closure on the left? Have you not heard of asymmetric polarization, or the many studies that have shown that American conservatives are far more polarized than American liberals?

Five charts that show how conservatives are driving partisan rancor in DC

Where's the liberal version of the Tea Party? Who is the lefty equivalent of Erick Erickson, who got a big media gig despite being a reactionary? Where's the Fox News version of Joe Scarborough getting a three hour morning block on MSNBC?

I could go on, but if the best counterargument you can marshal is a "nuh-uh", then I'd probably be wasting my time.
posted by tonycpsu at 6:24 AM on January 30, 2015 [8 favorites]

HE IS GAY AND WANTED TO GET MARRIED

This is not something I expected to see. Are only straight people qualified to be credited with gay rights advancement? Is LBJ the one to whom we should attribute the civil rights successes of the 1960s? Sullivan is far from ideal, and maybe even a bad person. But it's a twisted view that removes his influence from the story of this generation's biggest civil rights advancement.

As someone whose views on the Iraq war and American politics basically paralleled Sullivan's (though I ask the jury to consider my youth and Republican upbringing in determining my sentence) I have found him to be mostly interesting. Reading his blog has been a waxing and waning habit of mine, and I'll miss its presence. That is if its really gone.
posted by the christopher hundreds at 6:33 AM on January 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

nuh-uh, you're not wasting your time.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:33 AM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

> This is not something I expected to see. Are only straight people qualified to be credited with gay rights advancement?

The point is that Sully wasn't exactly revolutionary, and he definitely wasn't the only one. He was just the highest profile conservative (or among them) at the time who was all YAY about gay marriage. He wasn't out on the far edge on this.
posted by rtha at 6:39 AM on January 30, 2015 [6 favorites]

The point is that Sully wasn't exactly revolutionary, and he definitely wasn't the only one. He was just the highest profile conservative (or among them) at the time who was all YAY about gay marriage. He wasn't out on the far edge on this.

In 1989? Maybe I'm the one who grossly misunderstands things, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find a liberal publicly supporting gay marriage in 1989, let alone a conservative. At least outside Scandinavia.
posted by the christopher hundreds at 6:51 AM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

An honest question: Who's had a more successful blogging career than Sullivan has? I'm talking consistency of output (if not intellectual rigor), influence outside their own echo chamber, longevity, engagement with their readership, introducing that readership to other (better) writers and thinkers, and occasionally affecting the national discourse?

What other blogger could retire (or "retire") and inspire this kind of conversation, or at least this level of engagement?

(*excluding mathowie, who now that I've reread my own question, may actually qualify.)
posted by chicobangs at 6:54 AM on January 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

My problem with Sullivan is not that he was wrong about something and needs to atone. It's that he's massively intellectually dishonest and always has been.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 6:55 AM on January 30, 2015 [14 favorites]

Who is the lefty equivalent of Erick Erickson, who got a big media gig despite being a reactionary?

Let's be fair. Erick Erickson got a big deal media gig because he was smart enough to buy the domain "redstate.com". That's the kind of savvy we want in our political commentators.
posted by Going To Maine at 6:59 AM on January 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

I haven't really read Sullivan since 2005ish. Thinking back, it must have been via him that I encountered the whole IQ/race thing*, and he had an undue degree of influence on my opinions in my late teens, probably because of his accessibility.

Still, anyone denying his influence is wrong. The shit he gets over Iraq is precisely because he persuaded a lot of ostensibly liberal people. I don't doubt that advocating in the mainstream media for gay marriage since 1989 persuaded a lot of people, too.

*On balance, I would rather never as much as heard of the issue, which is a unique experience for me, I think.
posted by topynate at 7:08 AM on January 30, 2015

WANKER OF THE DECADE - 2nd Runner Up

Politically I'm closer to Black than Sullivan. I opposed the Iraq War from the very beginning—a terrible fuck-up that will probably yet drive this country into ruin—and I'm happy to concede the substance of most of the criticisms of his work here; and yet, more often than not, I'd still rather read Sullivan's blog, than Black's.

So the fact that some people who lean left choose not to read Andrew freaking Sullivan proves that there is epistemic closure on the left?

Like nearly everything else it seems, reading or not reading Andrew Sullivan so easily becomes a marker of one's stand on bigger issues. The idea that an author could be read for any other reason than to take a side on his political opinions gets elided. Suddenly, not reading him begins to look like a disdain for the free and open spirit of inquiry OTOH while reading him starts to look morally suspect OTH.
posted by octobersurprise at 7:09 AM on January 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

The Ames piece is brutal.
Recommended .
posted by the man of twists and turns at 7:43 AM on January 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

This is not something I expected to see. Are only straight people qualified to be credited with gay rights advancement?

No, but reactionary conservatives should not be praised or lauded for only being on the right side of something only when they personally benefit from it.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:46 AM on January 30, 2015 [9 favorites]

The Ames piece is brutal.

Yeah, fuck anyone who makes a mention in the Breivik manifesto any kind of measure of a person.
posted by topynate at 7:50 AM on January 30, 2015

> In 1989? Maybe I'm the one who grossly misunderstands things, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find a liberal publicly supporting gay marriage in 1989, let alone a conservative. At least outside Scandinavia.

How I know I am an Old is that I now do that thing my mom used to do, thinking something was a decade ago when it was really two decades ago. Fun.

In any case, I still don't think it's that remarkable that a gay guy who wanted to get married would be in favor of gay marriage.
posted by rtha at 7:51 AM on January 30, 2015

The Ames piece is brutal.

Yeah, fuck anyone who makes a mention in the Breivik manifesto any kind of measure of a person.

Just so we are clear, Breivik didn't mention Sullivan, but he did mention (and Ames mentions Breivik's mention) Steve Emerson, who Sullivan hired. And when you make a decades long career of spewing hate, and someone cites you as an influence in their manifesto before they kill a whole bunch of people, I think that does say something about someone, i.e., Emerson.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:01 AM on January 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

An honest question: Who's had a more successful blogging career than Sullivan has? I'm talking consistency of output (if not intellectual rigor), influence outside their own echo chamber, longevity, engagement with their readership, introducing that readership to other (better) writers and thinkers, and occasionally affecting the national discourse?

What other blogger could retire (or "retire") and inspire this kind of conversation, or at least this level of engagement?

No one.

Sullivan may be disliked for ideological purposes, and people will still hold his Bell Curve and "fifth column" bullshit against him. That's when I started reading him, in the weeks after 9/11, because I had to see what that jingoistic, right-wing bastard was up to. But he did change his mind on Iraq/neoconservatism at least, and wrestled with it all very publicly, and while some may not have forgiven him, how many public figures can you say that about?

Sullivan was influential in part because other writers wanted to be him. He has an elegant style and an ability to articulate issues in a way that resonate, for good or bad. Plus, from a writer's standpoint, he seemed to have a dream gig - freedom. The Atlantic wanted him. The Daily Beast wanted him. His "brand" was such that major media organizations courted him, wanting his brand to become theirs.

And again, what other blogger can you say that about?
posted by kgasmart at 8:29 AM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

This can be a very tough and unforgiving crowd--not being familiar with many of the articles/references/allusions in the comments I would not want to be ill prepared in saying I enjoyed reading some of his work--but I did. I wish him well
posted by rmhsinc at 8:31 AM on January 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

kgsmart--thanks for articulating some of what I felt ill prepared to say
posted by rmhsinc at 8:33 AM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

He worked his way up to influential blogger from influential editor of a major national magazine. What other blogger started with such clout?
posted by muddgirl at 8:44 AM on January 30, 2015 [5 favorites]

MisantropicPainforest: I take issue with that. Having determined to your own satisfaction that someone is wrong, you don't thereby get licence to smear them with whatever. Ames is doing this at a remove of two – he raises Breivik to contaminate Emerson so that his raising of Emerson will better contaminate Sullivan.

I should probably declare a personal interest – I know someone (else) whom Breivik mentioned. Considering how long his drivel was, that's probably not too unusual.
posted by topynate at 8:55 AM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

He worked his way up to influential blogger from influential editor of a major national magazine. What other blogger started with such clout?

He started with clout, yes, and then he deployed it well. That second part is fairly tricky, and worth lauding.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:13 AM on January 30, 2015

And he's being lauded. For crying out loud, he was cited above as being in the conversation for the most influential public intellectual of the last quarter-century, and nobody's making a serious effort to dispute that.

There should still be room for people to point out the advantages that he had, and note that he got many things wrong, and that "mea culpa" doesn't change the fact that, as a political commentator, part of the job is to get things right more than you get them wrong.
posted by tonycpsu at 9:37 AM on January 30, 2015

Another One Bites The Dust...And Another One: The Saga Of The New Republic
posted by tonycpsu at 10:00 AM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

"mea culpa" doesn't change the fact that, as a political commentator, part of the job is to get things right more than you get them wrong.

No, that is not the problem. There are plenty of conservative commentators that are consistently wrong, but don't have the corrosive influence of Sullivan.

Sullivan helped destroy the environment where it was even possible to judge whether ideas are right or wrong. My declaring liberals as treasonous, you are not just silencing the opposition, you make every rational argument against the war into a pro-war argument. If the DFH libruls are for it, that means every right-thinking Amurican must be for it.
posted by charlie don't surf at 10:06 AM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

For crying out loud, he was cited above as being in the conversation for the most influential public intellectual of the last quarter-century, and nobody's making a serious effort to dispute that.

Are you reading the same thread I am?
posted by the christopher hundreds at 10:13 AM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Are you reading the same thread I am?

Yes. People have objected to him being considered an influential public intellectual, but nobody's put another name forth or made a case that someone else deserves that title more than Sullivan does. In the Marginal Revolution thread there are some decent suggetions -- I'd go with Krugman or maybe Pinker personally, but they each have weaknesses -- Krugman is strong on the "public" and "intellectual" components, but his influence is limited -- even he complains about how he says the same things over and over and nobody listens to him. Pinker is enormously influential and intellectual, but not really "public" in the way Krugman or Sullivan are.

That's all I was saying -- that the category of "influential public intellectual" is kind of a strange one, and that Sully earns enough points in all of them that it's hard to make a case for someone else without arguing over how much weight to assign to influence, notoriety, and intellectual rigor.
posted by tonycpsu at 10:20 AM on January 30, 2015

If we're talking about public intellectuals in general, and not bloggers in specific, then I'll go with John Stewart, although he'd likely refuse the title.
posted by muddgirl at 10:23 AM on January 30, 2015

Yes, he has been influential. Hooray! He helped make the world worse!
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 10:45 AM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Having determined to your own satisfaction that someone is wrong, you don't thereby get licence to smear them with whatever.

I didn't smear them with 'whatever'. No one is saying Emerson is a bad guy because he has some personal pecadillos. Emerson is a bad guy because he has made a career out of demonizing a whole group of people and spreading hate.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:45 AM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Good riddance, but it won't last.

The fact that Sullivan occasionally can turn a felicitous phrase doesn't excuse his complete moral and intellectual bankruptcy. Either the "Bell Curve" nonsense or his vicious smearing of Iraq War critics alone should have been enough to get him banned from polite society forever.

However, considering that no "conservative" pundit is ever truly unemployable as long as there's wingnut welfare, look for him to return after he's run through the money that suckers people gave him to start the website he's now winding down.
posted by Nat "King" Cole Porter Wagoner at 10:53 AM on January 30, 2015 [4 favorites]

'Whatever' = something not germane but that sounds bad, to wit, the Breivik stuff. I don't give a fig about Emerson.
posted by topynate at 11:25 AM on January 30, 2015

"circumcision is mutilation except if you're a jew"
posted by judson at 11:42 AM on January 30, 2015

> An honest question: Who's had a more successful blogging career than Sullivan has? I'm talking consistency of output (if not intellectual rigor), influence outside their own echo chamber, longevity, engagement with their readership, introducing that readership to other (better) writers and thinkers, and occasionally affecting the national discourse?

Matt Drudge. He scores big on "affecting national discourse" and "longevity". Since you took "intellectual rigor" off the table he also matches on "consistency of output". And he even gets a technical win on "introducing ... readership to other (better) writers", because every off-site link on drudgereport.com is automatically to a better writer.

Good-bye Andrew Sullivan, you were almost as successful as Matt Drudge. And maybe just a little bit more publicly racist.
posted by benito.strauss at 11:47 AM on January 30, 2015 [5 favorites]

An honest question: Who's had a more successful blogging career than Sullivan has?

Arianna Huffington. Perez Hilton.
posted by ethnomethodologist at 1:54 PM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Seconding the Ames piece.
posted by benito.strauss at 2:03 PM on January 30, 2015

Hilton, yeah, that's hard to argue with. Arianna.. does she even blog anymore? If so, who reads it? I think of her as more of a blogging mogul a-la Nick Denton than a blogger.
posted by tonycpsu at 2:48 PM on January 30, 2015

Arianna.. does she even blog anymore?

Yes?

Andrew Sullivan is also a blogging mogul, right? Content for the Daily Dish is generated by a staff of editors.
posted by muddgirl at 3:16 PM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

(Also, it's been nearly 10 years since I started/stopped reading the daily dish, and it just came back to me how irritating I find his favorite kind of post. "Here's what so and so thinks.... Here's another opinion.... and another...." It seems like a lot of other people really like this styling, but it's like nails on a chalkboard to me. I guess I prefer my linkdumps to have either more context or no context at all.)
posted by muddgirl at 3:23 PM on January 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

I guess my point is Andrew is, in my mind, way more known for being influential because of his writing, while Arianna is more known for having a giant army of bloggers that write stuff for her site, and, oh yeah, she also blogs. I just didn't think her actual blog output was that influential these days.
posted by tonycpsu at 3:36 PM on January 30, 2015

Now he's blogging about people blogging about his blog post about quitting blogging. Just GO AWAY ALREADY. Set a time and date and then STFU. A good time and date would be RIGHT NOW.
posted by charlie don't surf at 8:12 PM on January 30, 2015

Sullivan being wrong about the Iraq War and racist pseudoscience should disqualify him from having any kind of valid opinion on anything, really. The problem isn't really Sullivan himself. He'll say mea culpa about Iraq, but that wasn't really all that courageous if the vast majority of the country--and the world--realizes the same thing. Naturally he'll defend himself, but it shouldn't really matter because in a perfect world Sullivan would've been marginalized for his toxic opinions long ago.

The real problem is a system that props up hacks like Sullivan. I don't really know if conspiracy is the word, but maybe all adds up to a kind of conspiracy; those in power that pull the strings, the plutocrats and one percenters and the like, they seem to find Andrew Sullivan useful. That's how he stayed in the public sphere for so long, because his screeds serve their purposes. Contrast that with, oh, every liberal everywhere who spoke out against the war.

Turn on the Sunday political talk shows and you'll see a dozen Andrew Sullivans or other journalists or politicians of that bent. Those people are placed there deliberately. Try and find a liberal, a true liberal on those shows...well, wake me up when you find one, it'll take a while.
posted by zardoz at 10:23 PM on January 30, 2015

Chuck Todd deliberates?
posted by clavdivs at 11:47 PM on January 30, 2015

Y'all feel about Sullivan the way I feel about Hillary Clinton. Just as long as we are keeping track of unforgivable sins, actually standing up in the senate and voting to unleash armageddon on innocent Iraqi and Afghan people way trumps calling people who opposed that traitors in my book.

For those who know my mefi contributions over the years, you know I give no quarter on stupid sociobiology, and I had the good fortune to be a student of Stephen Jay Gould as a young man, meaning no one's racist sociobiological bullshit ever gets by me. I have been offended deeply by Sullivan's drivel on the subject in the past, and in fact written him enraged emails several times (none of which he ever responded to). But his take has continued to interest me because it has aired, publicly, a naive, essentialist, self-interested way in which well off, highly educated white guys are drawn like flies to shit by that stuff. His views on race, odious as they are, are widely held among people who read him. As a well off white guy (and an anthropologist who can be appealed to for "amirite" validation on various points), I run into them a lot -- other white guys of means often assume you share their secretly held un-PC views. I'm talking about silicon valley sorts and engineer grandpas and tax accountants. Sometimes "blacks are inferior amirite?" is accompanied by implied or stated "but Jews/Chinese/Indians are ok/really smart/even better than white people at math amirite"). This is the audience that continues to eat up anything that flirts with the edge of respectability while confirming sociobiological claptrap justifying racist prejudice and self-satisfied superiority as the reason one is well off. One only needs to turn on NPR or read The Economist to encounter it, it's hardly restricted to right wing media or even Republican circles.

So here's my thinking: because Sullivan has shown himself to be capable of reflection, and of publicly performing a walkback from the brittle, paranoid, self-justifying ideological capital-S Stupid of "conservative thought" as we know it in the last couple of decades, as he did on the Iraq war militarism and torture party, I have held out hope, and still do, that his racism would gradually whither and be replaced by an introspective realization of how easily he was played for a fool, and how sheltered his intellectual world really has been. His engagements with TNC pointed in that direction, anyway. Racism, militarism, patriarchy, and homophobia are conservative values par excellence. Winning influential converts who, despite being in deep denial about their privilege, publicly have the scales ripped from their eyes has strategic value in consigning these values to the trash heap of history.

Yeah he could apologize more for calling me a traitor for opposing the Iraq war, but among the many respectable people who were doing that at the time, many of whom are still publicly celebrated liberals, or people with TV shows, or elected members of the legislature, I don't rate Sullivan very highly. I don't think his views were decisive or even that influential. I mean, WTF Chris Hitchens, right? And here we come back to the likely Democratic nominee for 2016, whom I anticipate I will be expected to forgive on pragmatic grounds by my fellow lefties and feminists and even pacifists. She's expressed regret for her vote, but she's never apologized for it exactly.

Seems less consequential how one feels about a blogger (and I dispute strongly that he amounts to a particularly influential figure, relatively speaking -- blogging was always overrated by those of us who were engaged with it in that decade, and Matt Drudge wasn't influential because of any coherent idea he had other than the idea of the outrage machine itself).

Anyway, as much as I have enjoyed Sullivan over the years, I barely bothered to visit his blog once it broke away from TDB and the Atlantic, contexts in which I might discover his writings in a context of other (ok, other center-right establishment militarist racist) views in which I was interested. I felt guilty about not paying for a subscription the few times I did find myself over there in the last year or so, because of some poem or Cannabis Closet (one of my favorite of his series) posting or whatever. So I stopped visiting the Dish altogether (downside of the pay-blog model, your old readers give up entirely out of guilt if they don't want to pony up, and it's worse if you spend a lot of time begging and shaming, as Sully did).

He's a voice in the din. He appeals to other well-educated white guys of a certain age (like me) because the struggles he has performed are not dissimilar to those of others trying to become aware of their privilege or their naiveté. My politics in many ways come down to the view that we can't move forward without winning converts among those formerly precisely concerned with "conserving" their own privilege through preaching "conservative" ideology. So as an expresser of the privileged-elite-coastal-educated white guy Id, he has been a weather vane a lot more than he has been the wind, but it pays to watch the weather vanes when the wind is changing.
posted by spitbull at 6:58 AM on January 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

Y'all feel about Sullivan the way I feel about Hillary Clinton.

And when people start writing about how Hillary Clinton changed blogging, I'll say the same.
posted by verb at 7:04 AM on January 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

Well obviously, I meant that with an implied mutatis mutandis. And I specified the change in context.

I don't care if someone else hates Sullivan for righteous reasons. Unleash the vitriol. Your (used-to-be-one-of-your) Favorite Blogger Sucks is an old MeFi tradition.
posted by spitbull at 7:08 AM on January 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

I don't really know if conspiracy is the word, but maybe all adds up to a kind of conspiracy; those in power that pull the strings, the plutocrats and one percenters and the like, they seem to find Andrew Sullivan useful.

There's no conspiracy, anymore than it's a conspiracy to keep Rush Limbaugh on the air. They both say controversial things that appeal to a large segment of people, and are amplified by angering a larger segment. The problem with Sullivan is that one of his great skills is surfing a wave of, in his words, "provocation" that gives him the intellectual lifestyle he craves. A recurring theme of his is that American conversation is boring compared to British. At Oxford you could have a really deep debate on the inferiority of black people, or the perfidy of left wingers, or how craven the poor are by nature and why they need a Thatcher or Reagan to force them off the dole. The sincerity of one's belief in these positions is secondary to the debate.

I suspect that his walkback on the Iraq War came because it finally started to dawn on him that such conversations, fostered through The New Republic and his blog, had an actual impact on other people, that they weren't just academic explorations and free-wheeling thought experiments. I have a friend on Facebook who shits up my feed with similar "provocations". And of course the thing Sullivan seems wilfully blind to is that these "conversations" do have an impact. I remember several years ago a comment he made in response to an email challenging him on this exact point, and he basically said "If I thought my words had an actual impact, I could never do this because I couldn't bear the consequences". I think the underlying motivation here is self-serving: he gets off on violently energetic debate, and he's parlayed that into a long career as a notable media figure. Fuck you, he got his.

I mean, WTF Chris Hitchens, right?

Everything said here about Sullivan goes double for Hitchens.
posted by fatbird at 8:53 AM on January 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

He was really wrong on the Iraq war, and the "decadent fifth column." But he admitted his mistake, and more importantly, spent many years and thousands of words thinking about why he was wrong, and what he would do to improve in the future. The world would be a better place if more people who were wrong about the Iraq War, or the promise of communism, were similarly able to engage in real self-examination.

Part of the reason I give him some credit for changing his opinion is the glaring contrast with all the pro-war bobbleheads who have never admitted they were wrong, and yet guys like Dick Cheney and William Kristol still get airtime to spout their bullshit. That doesn't change the fact that Sullivan has never really apologised for all the bile he spat at people who disagreed with him (as far as I know.)
posted by homunculus at 3:37 PM on February 1, 2015

Now he's blogging about how he's the most influential public intellectual in goddam history.

Reading My Own Obits
That’s how the past week has felt. Tyler Cowen went so far as to call me “the most influential public intellectual of the last 20 years.” Here’s how you make a blogger blush:

What. A. Conceited. Idiot. You can't do such blatant self-aggrandizement and then go "aw shucks, they really like me" about it. But his selection of an extended quote means he owns the remarks. Here's the first part of the quote that Sully chose to publish about himself:

I thought long and hard before selecting Andrew for the designation of most influential public intellectual. Perhaps Paul Krugman has changed more minds, but his agenda hasn’t much changed the world; we haven’t, for instance, gone back to do a bigger fiscal stimulus...

Of the first four sentences of that blog post, he repeats phrase "the most influential public intellectual of the last 20 years" twice. No matter how many fucking times you repeat it, I still won't believe it. And then he chooses to republish a citation comparing himself to Paul Krugman. Hey Sullivan, Krugman won the Nobel Prize for his work on international trade policies that changed the world. He is co-author of one of the most influential economics textbooks in use today, students that learned from his book are now using his theories to change the world. Krugman's work on the "Asian Contagion" has influenced worldwide economic policy and changed the world.

Meanwhile, YOU, Sullivan, are a chickenhawk blogger. JUST GO AWAY.
posted by charlie don't surf at 5:23 PM on February 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

delong crosses the streams on sullivan/chait (& klein) - "to the extent that you generalize the problem to people being wrong on the internet, the root problem is not 'internet' but 'wrong'. No medium of expression is going to resolve that. So is there a solution? Or an approximation of a solution? I keep on thinking that it has to be 'stackable content': every argument at every length—headline, tweet, Facebook paragraph, 500-word blogpost, 2000-word extended useful discussion, 10000 word longform. And whoever first figures out how to publish effectively at all those lengths in a way that encourages amplification and engagement will win the internet for all time..."
posted by kliuless at 5:55 PM on February 2, 2015

Oh FFS. Ezra Klein was invented by Atrios, who thought his teenage blogger schtick was cute so he pulled strings to get little Ezra a press pass, and they went to the Democratic Convention and blogged about each other and lived happily ever after. And now Brad is writing about Ezra writing about Sullivan, whereupon Ezra comments on Brad's blog and complains that he was misquoted and that the remarks attributed to him were actually from Kevin Drum.

This is what Atrios used to call "The Wankosphere." Except back then, it was the punditocracy on cable teevee. Now the bloggers like Ezra are the punditocracy on cable teevee.
posted by charlie don't surf at 6:53 PM on February 2, 2015 [1 favorite]

Blogging After Andrew Sullivan

In a nutshell, what is dying is the idea of the blog as a news source. In the old days, as a reader, you would have a favorite blogger, who would write many frequent posts throughout the day. That would be your main news source, your portal to current events. Often the post would have a slight bit of commentary or reaction. Basically, you got to hear the world narrated through the voice of someone you liked. For me, those narrators were University of California, Berkeley, economist Brad DeLong and Matt Yglesias, now at Vox. For many, it was Sullivan.

Twitter has basically killed that... However, that doesn’t mean that blog posts are now just news articles freed from the tyranny of professional editors. With blogs, you can do something that news can’t easily do -- you can carry on a conversation... So blogging is far from dead. Blogging 2.0 will be more focused on longer posts, high-level discussions and specialized expertise, while retaining the focus on distinctive voice and free-wheeling subject matter that made Blogging 1.0 so fun.

posted by kliuless at 8:08 AM on February 3, 2015

Also, yeah, I'm sure you've never written anything you've regretted.

I still count this comment by markkraft more than five years ago as one of the most informative things I've ever read on MeFi. There has to be some point at which the pileup of reprehensible things one says and does moves from regrettable to invalidating, as in: his opinion simply cannot be countenanced, period.
posted by psoas at 2:10 PM on February 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

Sully says he will STFU on Friday.

He won't.
posted by charlie don't surf at 10:23 AM on February 4, 2015

When he said he was stopping he was just being provocative, you see.
posted by benito.strauss at 10:27 AM on February 4, 2015

Paul Krugman unloads on Sully (well, relative to his usual demeanor):

Brad, who has a stronger stomach than mine, trawls through Andrew Sullivan, and finds that far from making abject apologies for trashing me way back when for the unforgivable sin of reaching the same conclusions circa 2001 that he would reach some years later, Sullivan has continued to look for reasons to attack me. OK, human nature. But I didn’t know that Sullivan had raced to Michael Kinsley’s side in Kinsley’s very sad attempt to confront me over the alleged threat of inflation.

[...]

So it was really sad to see Mike Kinsley decide to go after me on this, of all things. For Sullivan, of course, it wasn’t sad – just in character.

posted by tonycpsu at 6:00 PM on February 5, 2015 [1 favorite]

Now he's whining about how horrible the Iraq war was for HIM. How it shattered his illusions about how the world revolved around him.

JUST. SHUT. THE. FUCK. UP. Your attempts to recapitulate your glorious career are clear proof of your utter inability to comprehend the world outside your head.
posted by charlie don't surf at 7:37 AM on February 6, 2015 [1 favorite]

Brad DeLong: People Are Talking About How Great Andrew Sullivan's "The Dish" Was...: Live from La Farine

My answer is that when I think of The Dish, I find I don't have a favorite moment. I think of the incompleteness of Andrew Sullivan's self-criticism. I think of him casting himself as Curly of The Three Stooges in his enthusiastic prosecution of the intellectual War on Paul Krugman that, IIRC, began in 2001 with things like:
...
And, of course, the promises of and forecasts by the Bush administration of the consequences of passing its tax cut did not come true--and if Andrew Sullivan thought in 2001 that it was aimed at improving the lives of "waitress moms", he was the only one.

But the fact that, in general in the 2000s, Paul Krugman was right did not keep Sullivan from continuing to carry on his long, doomed, twilight struggle against realistic assessments of the economic situation.

posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:56 PM on February 13, 2015