Tag Archives: Andrew Sullivan

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.

Gay Marriage for Straight People

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This was first published on Splice Today. I thought it seemed like an opportune moment to repost.
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A couple of days before North Carolina voted for officially sanctioned homophobia and Barack Obama voted against it, Maggie Gallagher recorded a video making the case that gay people marrying each other are a deadly threat to the institution of marriage.

I realize that many people disagree with me, but if you ask me why am I involved in this, it’s because the framing ideas of marriage are the most important and the most powerful thing about it, and you cannot get to same-sex marriage without denorming and changing and really transforming the basis of marriage in the public square. And I think it’s really frankly going to lead to a marriage that is weaker and weaker and less and less coherent… I think it is the end of the project of trying to revive marriage as a public institution.

For Gallagher, then, gay marriage threatens the “framing ideas of marriage.” She doesn’t quite say what those ideas are, but presumably they have something to do with marriage as a bond between one man and one woman, husband and wife, and (ideally) father and mother.

Folks like Andrew Sullivan (on whose blog Gallagher’s video appears) generally counter these arguments by arguing that, in fact, the “framing ideas of marriage” are not one man, one woman, and certainly not the rearing of children. Rather, marriage, they argue, is about love, not gender roles. From this perspective, gays and lesbians getting married doesn’t hurt the core principals of marriage. On the contrary, it solidifies them. That’s why, for Sullivan, gay marriage is a conservative movement. It simply includes gay people as equals in one of the organizing institutions of our society—an institution designed expressly to integrate individual love and relationships into society. Thus, for Sullivan, marriage is a way for gay people to learn from, and become like—the same as—straight people.

Here, for example, is Sullivan in 2008, reflecting on his own marriage.

The wedding occurred last August in Massachusetts in front of a small group of family and close friends. And in that group, I suddenly realized, it was the heterosexuals who knew what to do, who guided the gay couple and our friends into the rituals and rites of family. Ours was not, we realized, a different institution, after all, and we were not different kinds of people. In the doing of it, it was the same as my sister’s wedding and we were the same as my sister and brother-in-law. The strange, bewildering emotions of the moment, the cake and reception, the distracted children and weeping mothers, the morning’s butterflies and the night’s drunkenness: this was not a gay marriage; it was a marriage.

In a lot of ways, then, Sullivan and Gallagher, while diametrically opposed in their conclusions, are working from very similar presumptions. Both of them think that marriage, as it is, has fundamental principles, and both of them think that it is important to preserve these principles. Or, to put it another way, both of them think marriage is swell, and that it should keep on keeping on.

I like marriage too. I’ve been married 12 years, as a matter of fact. Marrying my wife was probably the single best decision I’ve made in my life; the only real competition is the decision we made to have our son. Moreover, as it happens, just a few weeks ago I got one of those online ordinations and was, as the theists says, blessed to preside over the wedding of two of my dearest friends. So… marriage. I’m for it.

I think, though, that it’s worth recognizing that, wonderful as marriage can be, it also has some serious downsides. If marriage can be the best thing in the world, then it can also be the worst. If you doubt it, I suggest you read Judith Herman and Lisa Hirschman’s 1981 book Father-Daughter Incest—undoubtedly one of the most depressing tomes I’ve ever read.

Herman and Hirschman reveal marriage as an institution not of love, but of dominance, cruelty, violence, and, above all, of rape. Moreover, they argue that rape is not an accidental, perverted result of traditional marriage—rather, it is the logical culmination. Through their work with incest victims, the authors conclude that father-daughter rape occurs most often not in perverse or abnormal marriages, but rather in hyper-normal ones.

Specifically, incest is most likely in families where the father takes the traditional role of a dominant, authoritative (not to mention authoritarian) patriarch. Incestuous fathers are generally competent workers, good providers, and respected in the community. Mothers in these families, on the other hand, are almost caricatures of feminine disempowerment. They often don’t work outside the home, and may be ill, depressed or exhausted; in large part because their husbands abuse them physically and emotionally.

According to Herman and Hirschman, the emphasis on traditional sex roles within marriage—a strong father little involved in child-rearing, a weak mother unable to effectively protect those in her care—leaves children vulnerable to rape. The father sees the daughter as essentially a perk of patriarchal power—patriarchal power the mother cannot effectively counter. The authors conclude, “As long as mothers and children are subordinated to the rule of fathers, such abuses will continue.” They add that this is a tragedy not just for children and mothers, but for fathers as well, who “As long as [they] retain their authoritarian role… cannot take part in the tasks or the rewards of parenthood.”

Of course, most marriages do not have much to do with the caricatured gender roles that Herman and Hirschman identify as typical of incestuous families. But still… those caricatured gender roles do have something to do with marriage. They are one distorted image of marriage’s essence—of marriage designed not as an outgrowth of love, but as an outgrowth of patriarchy and rigorously codified gender roles. Many radical queer activists have opposed gay marriage for just this reason. For them, marriage is, at its core, oppressive and inequitable.

I think they’re wrong—marriage isn’t inequitable at its core. But Sullivan and Gallagher are wrong, too, when they claim that the essence of marriage is beneficent. The truth is that marriage doesn’t have an essence, any more than it has a core. Certainly, marriage is an institution, but institutions aren’t immutable. They shape us, but we shape them, too. Marriage has been, and can still be, a way to oppress women, to enforce particular gender roles, and even to abuse and torture children. It has also been, and can still be, a way to link family and community in love.

Gallagher is correct when she suggests that gay marriage will change the institution of marriage. Marriage has, in the past, been about one man/one woman, just as Gallagher says; it’s been an assertion that gender and gender roles are as important as, or even more important than, what you feel in your heart.

Gay marriage is a final, absolute refutation of that logic. If two men can get married, or two women, then marriage must really be not about power, but about love. Gay marriage, then, is radical in the best sense, in that it offers equality and hope not just to gay people, but to children, women, and men of every orientation—even to Gallagher, resist it as she will. Gay marriage is not just about straight people accepting gays into our institutions. It’s about gay people teaching us what those institutions mean. The gay community has given straight people a lot over the years, but surely gay marriage is one of the greatest gifts it has offered us. Despite North Carolina, despite Maggie Gallagher, I still believe, as I believe in my marriage, that we will, someday, humble ourselves enough to be worthy of it.

The Iraq War as Blogging Psychodrama

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This first appeared at Splice Today.
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I Was Wrong: A Real Time Chronicle of the Iraq War, 2001-2008, Andrew Sullivan’s recently released ebook, is a compilation of his blogging on the Iraq war. As such, it begins with a post on September 11, 2001, a few hours after the attack on the World Trade Center. “When our shock recedes,” he writes in that first entry,

“our rage must be steady and resolute and unforgiving. The response must be disproportionate to the crime and must hold those states and governments that have tolerated this evil accountable. This is the single most devastating act of war since Nagasaki. It is the first time that an enemy force has invaded the precincts of the American capital since the early nineteenth century. It is more dangerous than Pearl Harbor. And it is a reminder that the forces of resentment and evil can no longer be appeased. They must be destroyed – systematically, durably, irrevocably. Perhaps now we will summon the will to do it. “

Sullivan’s initial reaction, is, then, a narrative — and a familiar one. It is a story of evil revenged, good triumphant, and violence unleashed. World War II is summoned up, through references to Nagasaki, Pearl Harbor, and appeasement. The accuracy of these past allusions (Saddam’s chemical attack on the Kurds in 1988 caused more deaths than September 11, to name just one post-Nagasaki example) is less important than the future they point to. That future is just war, and a new greatest generation, of which Sullivan (through that collective “we”) will be a part

Of course, it didn’t work out that way. I Was Wrong is the story of a story gone awry; it’s about how Sullivan thought he was in a book about good defeating evil, and instead discovers himself in a different tale altogether. The arc of that tale is traced clearly enough in the chapter subheads of the ebook: “Trauma”, “Doubt” and “Regret.” Shocked by 9/11, Sullivan hoped for, demanded, and was finally thrilled by the reality of war. As the Iraq quagmire deepened, and the extent of Bush’s “feckless” mendacity became clear, he began to re-examine his support. And finally, with the revelations of Abu Ghraib, he realized that the war should never have been waged, and that he had been complicit in an atrocity. “Those of us who supported this war cannot wash our hands of the blood of tens of thousands of innocents it has now claimed,” he wrote in October 2006. And he adds, in an epilogue, “Although my intentions were good, I feel ashamed of some of the sentences in this book.”

Sullivan’s recognition of his errors, and his willingness to admit them, are both extremely admirable. Yet, there are unsettling ways in which the story he thought he was telling in the beginning and the story he ends up telling fit together almost too well. In his second post on the day of 9/11, for example, Sullivan writes:

It feels – finally – as if a new era has begun. The strange interlude of 1989 – 2001, with its decadent post-Cold War extravaganzas from Lewinsky to Condit to the e-boom, is now suddenly washed away…. The one silver lining of this is that we may perhaps be shaken out of our self-indulgent preoccupations and be reminded of what really matters: our freedom, our security, our integrity as a democratic society.

In this story of 9/11, the fall of the towers becomes an awakening; a traumatic shock that erases the past and leads to moral and spiritual renewal. Though the specifics are somewhat altered, isn’t that also the story of I Was Wrong, with its path from benightedness to revelation to knowledge, awakening, and renewal? Sullivan here, waxing lyrical about America and freedom and democracy, doesn’t sound so very different from Sullivan at the end of the book endorsing Obama and “a new direction, a new statement that the America the world once knew and loved is back.” We always seem to be regenerating in one way or another, always involved in a never-ending American apotheosis of purification and renewal.

This is, perhaps, just another way of saying that Andrew Sullivan is still Andrew Sullivan; he may have reversed his opinions, but he’s still the same excitable, starry-eyed blogger in 2008 that he was in 2001. From this perspective, the most important part of the title I Was Wrong is not the “Wrong”, but the “I”. In his afterword, Sullivan says that “a blogger writing daily…has nowhere to hide,” by which he means that he can conceal nothing. But it also seems to suggest that he, himself, conceals everything — that he’s so close to the camera that you can’t see past him. Thus, September 11 becomes his revenge fantasy. Thus, I Was Wrong turns the Iraq war and its aftermath into the confessional, spiritual journey of one, Andrew Sullivan.

Blogging as a form explains a good deal of this self-absorption. You read Andrew Sullivan for news to get not just Andrew Sullivan’s take, or opinion, about the news, as you might find in an op-ed. Rather, you read Sullivan’s blog, or Sullivan’s book, to get Andrew Sullivan’s story of the news — an ongoing narrative about the world, filtered through his particular perspective. The fact that the Iraq War ends up being about Andrew Sullivan isn’t because Andrew Sullivan is a navel-gazing narcissist; it’s simply a genre default. In superhero comics, the superhero wins; in romance novels, the girl gets the guy; in blogging, the blogger is front and center. If you don’t like the trope, you read something else.

Whether you like them or don’t, though, tropes have meaning. In this case the narrative impulse to turn piles of dead bodies into a story by, and/or about, this one guy watching seems like it has more than a passing relationship to American policy. The invasion of Iraq, as Sullivan’s book painfully shows, was about a desire for revenge and for American renewal and goodness — it was about us, first and last, in other words, rather than about the WMDs that weren’t there, or about human rights which Abu Ghraib showed we didn’t much care about in the first place.   Sullivan can change the story about himself from revenge to regret, but he can’t stop making it about himself. One way or another, for us the meaning of Iraq is not Iraq, but us. The real moral error in I Was Wrong is not believing Bush or miscalculating the costs of war, but treating a country full of people as characters in one’s own psychodrama. That’s called imperialism. As this book shows, even for someone as honest and thoughtful as Andrew Sullivan, it’s a hard vice to break.
 

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