Andrew Breitbart and His Eulogists

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This first ran on Splice Today.
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Rush Limbaugh made an ass of himself last week, as he often does. In consequence, the death of Andrew Breitbart had a half-life short even by the standards of the Internet news cycle. There’s apparently only room on the web for one right-wing pundit spat at a time. You can opine on Breitbart’s legacy or sneer at Rush’s misogyny, but doing both at once is too soul-killing for even the most soulless pundit.

The speed with which Breitbart’s communal eulogy has effervesced into its respective Internet archives is a strikingly neat self-refutation of its own main thesis. That main thesis is that Breitbart’s death was an event that should be of actual importance to some range of people who were not his friends or family. David Frum insists, “It is impossible to speak nothing of a man who traced such a spectacular course through the contemporary media,” and goes on to lament that “It’s difficult for me to assess Breitbart’s impact upon American media and American politics as anything other than poisonous.” Conor Friedersdorf characterizes him as “a singular figure unlike any other in American politics or Web publishing.”

Andrew Sullivan goes even further in his quest for meaning, arguing that Breitbart’s early death is a sign of the intense pressure faced by the new media blogocracy. Constantly checking Twitter and site stats, barking 24-7 after the latest culture war blip, Breitbart was, apparently, crucified upon the cruel cross of his Blackberry.

“Human beings were not created for that kind of constant unending stress, and the one thing you can say about Andrew is that he had fewer boundaries than others. He took it all so seriously, almost manically, in the end. The fight was everything. He felt. His anger was not feigned. He wanted to bleed and show the world the wounds. He wanted to scream. And he often did. And when you are on that much, and angry to that extent, and absorbed with that kind of constant mania, and obviously needing more and more validation, and on the online and real stage all the time, day and night, weekends and weekdays… well, it’s a frightening and dangerous way to live in the end. He is in that sense our first new-media culture-war fatality. I fear he won’t be the last.”

The title of Sullivan’s post is “Breitbart—And Us.” It’s a telling phrase. Because… who is that “us” exactly? When you first read it, it seems like it’s supposed to mean, you know, “us”—everybody and their siblings.

But by the end of the piece, it’s clear that we’re not talking about a universal “us.” Surely I can’t be the only one on the planet who doesn’t own a Blackberry. In fact, when Sullivan says “us,” then, what he actually means is “us, the really successful new media pundits.” Breitbart’s death is significant to Sullivan not because it offers some sort of universal warning about the human condition, but because Breitbart and Sullivan are (despite differences in politics) basically a lot alike. They’re extremely successful people in the same industry. It’s not exactly a revelation that driven people obsessed with their jobs are in danger of heart attacks. But it hits Sullivan close to home because Breitbart was a driven person not just in any job, but in the same job Sullivan has.

It’s natural enough to be interested in, and to want to talk about, your colleagues. It’s water-cooler gossip; everybody does it. But since pundits do so much talking in public, I think it can be easy for them to forget that their water-cooler gossip isn’t necessarily transcendentally important. I can’t say I followed Breitbart’s career closely. But you read his eulogies, and what do you get? A personally charming and generous muck-raking journalist with shoddy standards and a big mouth, who managed to land a big story or two, slander some innocent people, and mostly generate a lot of hot air. It’s a character that was hoary in 1951 when Kirk Douglas played it in Ace in the Hole. The fact that Breitbart was one of the people to bring the archetype into the digital era is of interest primarily to those in the industry. To everybody else, it’s just the latest iteration of a familiar truth; e.g., whatever venue you find them in, journalists are scum.

Andrew Sullivan likes to tout the digital media’s escape from the hidebound orthodoxies and navel-gazing of traditional media. But if the rapidly evaporating Breitbart furor shows anything, it’s not that the man was a visionary pioneer, or that he epitomized the decline of our culture, or that our age is more stressful than any other. Rather, it’s that online journalists are every bit as self-obsessed as their print forbearers.

44 thoughts on “Andrew Breitbart and His Eulogists”

  1. An Andrew Sullivan reflection on another person’s death that is ultimately about Andrew Sullivan? Must be Tuesday.

  2. Isn’t the Blackberry pretty much dead, killed by the iPhone and its ilk?

    Never heard of Breitbart. Am I reading the right sites or the wrong ones?

  3. One striking thing about Brietbart is that his face seemed to curl into a sneer as its default position: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gf0aVqmwPUc.

    It does seem like the “progressives” and right-wingers who constantly spew venom at each other online and obsess over one another’s foibles have more in common with each other than with the rest of America.

  7. I still really like xkcd, I have to say. The art’s actually really nice at capturing postures/gestures; the guy raising his hand there to make his point is kind of great.

  8. @Noah

    Did you read the hypertext?

    xkcd is indeed great – as you note, to a significant extent because of the artwork. It’s Randall Munroe’s and Kate Beaton’s world, we’re just living in it.

  9. Alternate reply to Jack:

    The business of right wingers is to go on making mistakes. The business of progressives is to correct the mistakes. The business of moderates is to allow the mistakes and prevent the corrections.

  10. I’m not a moderate, if that’s what you’re implying. And I’m not suggesting that, say, Noam Chomsky and his readers are the intellectual equivalents of Rush Limbaugh and his listeners. But plenty of liberal commentary on the internet mirrors the shallowness and dishonesty of right-wing commentary, regardless of whether the liberals’ overall worldview is more intelligent. That recent article revealing the kinky dating profile of the anti-Planned Parenthood activist is a good example. There was a guy from Media Matters who traded Twitter insults with Brietbart on a daily/hourly basis; I don’t think his Tweets were any more valuable than Brietbart’s.

    I wrote a post that was somewhat about this subject years ago on The Cerebus Yahoo Group, of all places, and I still kind of like it: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/cerebus/conversations/messages/165486

  11. That rhreality post about the sexual proclivities of the planned parenthood activist was shameful. I was glad to see that lefties were lining up to tell them they shouldn’t have done that, at least. Wish right-wingers would do that with Breitbart.

  14. @Jack

    The liberal worldview is more intelligent? I am a very liberal person (I find it hard to understate my liberal leanings any more than that), but I think it’s pretty odious to claim that any particular moral or political stance is “more intelligent” than another.

  15. If you don’t think it’s more intelligent than the other stances, why is it your stance? (Rhetorical question.)

  16. Petar, I’m confused about what you’re objecting to here. I wrote, “regardless of whether the liberals’ overall worldview is more intelligent,” suggesting that the liberals’ overall worldview may or may not be more intelligent. However, I do think that some liberal positions are smarter than some conservative positions, and I would guess that you also find some moral and political stances to be smarter than others (support for liberal democracy vs. support for ISIS, for example). Maybe I should have said “better” instead of “smarter,” though. My point was just that even when I more-or-less agree with liberals on sites like the Huffington Post, I often find their commentary dumb and shallow (the constant complaining about “Faux News,” for example) and think that it mirrors right-wing commentary (as when liberals call right wingers “wing nuts,” just as they’re called “libtards”). I wasn’t trying to say that people on the left are smart and people on the right are stupid, if that’s what you got from it.

  17. God, if only the Huffington Post were as effective as Fox News.

    (I guess it should be noted at this point that the Huffington Post are neo-liberal pigs, but then, for Donald Trump supporters, so is Fox News.)

  18. @Jack

    So I guess my objection is nit-picky and depends on a couple of definitions not a lot of people share. The first is that intelligence is not the accumulation or responsiveness to logic, knowledge, or facts, but the ability to learn and adapt your worldview (which is not the same as your willingness to do so, which is an important distinction). The second definition is less a definition and more a statement of how political positions are formed, namely, that they really have nothing to do with intelligence. Identity issues/spirituality and environmental context play a much larger role in forming your politics than any process of logical construction. For example, Trump supporters are not being stupid, they are reaffirming a set of (personally, odious) white identity politics that the Republican party adopted as its own with Nixon’s Silent Majority. It’s not a matter of how smart they are, because learning really has nothing to do with it. I’m liberal and “progressive” (whatever that even means) because I was raised in a liberal household by immigrants who taught me a staunch anti-war stance that they earned from their experiences. Neither they nor I formed our positions because we are smarter than anybody. We formed those positions because of individual experience and context. Claiming otherwise, that your positions, whatever they are, are formed by intelligent inquiry regardless (or moreso than) personal context, is the road to elitism, which is one of those things can creep up on you really easily if you’re not careful (I know this from personal experience and I will claim, without any proof whatsoever, that I have escaped the worst kinds of elitism).

  20. One left-right asymmetry frequently noted is that, at least nowadays, leftwing craziness is politically marginalised and effectively toothless, while rightwing craziness is — in certain countries (for instance, oh, let’s say the US and Australia) — mainstream and driving policy (cf Benghazi investigations, Obama-birtherism, climate denialism…).

    I remember the early-mid 00s, when the pox-on-both-your-houses libertarian/quasi-libertarian/”independent” view was something like: “on the one hand, the neocons have started an illegal and immoral war on transparently trumped-up pretenses; on the other hand, Michael Moore is fat and annoying, so it’s a wash, really” (cf. Peter Bagge in Reason, every South Park episode ever…)

    (Not saying that that’s actually your view, Jack, just getting up on my hobby horse for a minute)

  25. Yglesias too. Also Chait, though of course he always wants to bomb everybody.

    And christ, Kevin Drum supported it initially, though it looks like he switched to opposition before the first attack was launched.

    Fucking Woodrow Wilson dies hard.

  26. @Jones

    Don’t people already say “DINO”?

    @Noah

    I know what you mean, but I’d say that’s giving them far too much credit. Wilson declared war on an actually powerful country that was actually invading somebody. (Fucking Lyndon Johnson dies hard, maybe?)

  28. But that’s not what people mean when they say “Wilsonian.” As for invading weak foreign countries and saying it was for their own good, McKinley had already pioneered that one.

  29. To be clear, I have no objection to spitting on Wilson, only to giving the Iraq war supporters what they want by associating them with WWs I & II.

  32. The RINO acronym worked better when the GOP was better organized. It used to be that a talking points memo would come down from the national office and by the end of the news cycle the right would not only have framed the issue, but they’d have gilded it. Toeing the rhetorical was as much a part of the republican litmus test as voting record. That doesn’t seem to be the case in a post Tea Party world.

    The idea of an equivalent term for democrats… Well, that seems like a tough one. We’r talking about a party that never had the discipline, or even the internal coherence to create a reliable litmus test. Democrats are all over the map on social issues, especially where race is concerned, and always have been. And Clinton put an end to whatever claim the party had on economic progressivism. Add to that a complete failure to frame issues or to put together a coherent platform on issues like immigration and health care, and I’m not sure what an actual democrat would even look like.

  33. I don’t think tha’ts right, Nate. Pretty much everyone who looks at these things says partisan coherence is increasing, for dems and republicans. Dems used to have a lot more variation on abortion than they do now, as just one example.

  34. You’re totally correct where issues of policy are concerned, and I think I conflated what democrats and republicans do with how they frame what they’re doing. I suppose a better way to stake my claim would be to note that where republicans have, at least until recently, done a good job with staying on message, and that makes it easier to appear on message, and that makes it easier to point out when a republican goes off message. I’m not sure that the democrats have managed that level of rhetorical coherence, which makes it harder to dissociate a given democrat from the party.

  36. Is that xkcd strip saying that you should never dislike or notice similarities between people who oppose one another? Sam Harris vs. Jerry Fawell, Breitbart vs. Huffington, Stalin vs. Hitler, Alien vs. Predator… You have to pick a side or shut up?

  38. That’s an exceedingly uncharitable reading, Jack. The joke is that Stick Figure 1 is a hypocrite, that even as SF1 is chiding atheists for their intellectual arrogance/sense of superiority (which, purportedly, makes them just as bad as fundamentalists) SF1 is just as arrogant/smug. This point doesn’t generalise to other comparisons

    (And, Noah, Jack said “Alien vs Predator”, not Alien vs Predator…)

  39. I would definitely watch a pay-per-view event where Sam Harris and Jerry Falwell faced off, not least because of the sheer viciousness guaranteed out of that debate. It would probably be more vicious than the Alien v Predator match up…

  40. Jones, I guess, although that implies that it’s always arrogant/smug to call someone arrogant/smug. Graham Clark apparently thinks that the cartoon applies to my comment above, which was about this kind of thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8UZgKyDR6Y. I don’t think the presumably liberal guy yelling at Breitbart in that clip is doing anything useful, and I don’t agree that “The business of progressives is to correct the mistakes” of right-wingers, at least if that involves adopting the same tone as right-wingers. It would be pretty ridiculous if Amy Goodman spent her broadcasts insulting Rush Limbaugh or Chomsky got into Twitter fights with Michael Savage.

  42. Who’s “we,” the Democratic Party? Are these Breitbart-bashing badasses ultimately foot soldiers for the Democrats?

  43. Well, you’ve said you’re not a right-winger and not a moderate, so let’s say “we” is everybody who isn’t either of those things.

  44. Ah,fair enough Jack, I wasn’t thinking of the context it was posted in here.

    But just to belabour the point about smugness — I think the atheism “debate” is a special case because the atheist targets of Stick Figure #1 often accuse their religious opponents of intellectual hubris, or at least close-mindedness.So the gag is an escalation of epistemic oneupmanship…and I still don’t think the point should generalize…

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