Sullivan, Edwards, Palin and the Atlantic
I don’t link to Andrew Sullivan, and you may notice I ordinarily don’t discuss him.
And I’m not going to do too much of either here, except to say I consider that something very sad and disturbing happened to his mind a number of years ago. Here’s a post from Tom Maguire that discusses the latest bizarre manifestation of this fact.
My point is a different one, and it’s not really about Sullivan himself. I have a question: why is the Atlantic still providing a forum for Sullivan’s descent into irrelevancy, illogic, and obsession? He may not know any better. But surely they ought to realize it’s time to quietly draw the curtain.
Sullivan’s posts at Atlantic aren’t all peculiar. And compared to Olberman’s ranting at MSNBC, Sullivan is the soul of rationality and moderation.
Mostly Sullivan writes chatty pro-Obama, anti-Bush stuff that fits in well with The Atlantic demographic and covers the gay base. He does have a very serviceable blog writing style.
The liberal bias in magazines like The Atlantic is so pronounced that I doubt Sullivan’s off-the-reservation musings raise much of a blip.
huxley: actually, if you have followed the recent Sullivan story, it was revealed some time ago that he only writes about half of his posts, and leaves the more pedestrian fare to helpers and co-bloggers, although it’s posted under his name. It is quite possible that most of the ho-hum sane ones are by the associates. The most bizarre ones do seem to be by Sullivan himself, who has become quite obsessed with his conviction that Palin is a pathological liar who passed off her daughter’s baby as her own. He just can’t “prove” it yet.
Yeah. Moral insanity tends to became worse in the course of time. When someone choses highly deviant behavior as a way of life, he often ends in suicide or dementia, or both.
I think that you are quite right that something sad and disturbing happened to Sullivan’s mind several years ago. My own hypothesis: he overdosed on psychotherapy.
When I think about Sullivan and the horrible thing that happened to Charles Johnson, I wonder if maybe there’s something in the process of blogging that makes susceptible minds go TILT. It’s unnatural to keep on opining under the pressure of readers’ expectations, and maybe once a warp is introduced to a blogger’s thinking, the process gets out of control. The blogger’s readership shifts because of the warp, and then the blogger writes to please that new readership. There isn’t much opportunity to self-correct.
Not that this will ever happen to Neo!
Over the course of many years, I’ve found many good articles in Atlantic, and to some extent, it continues to have some content worth the price. Yesterday, I e-mailed Atlantic to say that if they don’t fire Sullivan, I will cancel my subscription. It’s not much, but it’s what I can do.
mizpants –
I think that the attention and feedback can trigger things in some people under some conditions, kind of like how parenthood triggers an insane level of micro-managing in some people, or how some folks just can’t manage being a supervisor.
(best example is someone who had a schedule of Thanksgiving down to the 15 minute mark, starting at 5pm two nights prior and including recipes, which was strictly enforced on the household. Seriously.)
I can think of several other bloggers who were fine–even going back and reading their stuff, it’s still fine– but just…lose it. There’s usually a stress trigger, somewhere, and sometimes folks just wobble a little then correct, or stay sane with a different view, but very few go utterly bat-crit and come back.
BDS consumed his every waking moment and became his reason for being but now that Bush is gone he has latched onto Palin like a drowning man clinging to a branch. 🙂
It’s interesting to speculate on what happened to Andrew Sullivan and Charles Johnson.
They didn’t just shift from one political stance to another, as people often do. They also shifted to a more rabid and less rational mode on some topics.
At first I chalked up Sullivan’s change to his anger over gay marriage plus a cynical desire to parlay his blogging skills into more prominence and possibly more money. But he’s gotten so deranged on Palin and incoherent on anything touching torture issues that it seems to be more than those.
This is not the Andrew Sullivan I used to know.
Now that I think about it, the Charles Johnson “change” was quite different from Sullivan’s, and even more disturbing because it was so Jim Jones-ish. What had been a running joke about him being the master of his lizardoid hoards or whatever it was — I forget now — turned into something he began to take seriously and he started with the banning and the spying on other blogs. He wanted to purge his readers of impurities in their thinking. He went mad with power.
mizpants: Good point!
Johnson really did veer into Suppressive Person mode (a la Scientology) the way he would track down and ban people or cut off all links to “wrong” websites.
Johnson was far less surprising. Even when he was nominally on the right, he was insane, and I never felt comfortable reading him.
Sullivan was once a very thoughtful writer and thinker from the center-right. It’s not the fact that he veered leftward that bothers me, as the fact that he’s seemingly gone nuts.
Well, Sullivan is a bit of a jerk in real life. My ex and I had some unfortunate experiences with him during our stays in Provincetown a few years back, though I had no idea who he was at the time, and jerks are hardly uncommon in Ptown. The women who are prominent in town are hardly fond of the guy, either.
Once upon a time he read and wrote lengthy pieces, and edited other writers, and wrote with a different voice. After achieving such prominence as a blogger, and making a good living at it, he shifted to the rapid-scan reading of multiple web news, commentary, and blog posts. I think that eventually changes the brain’s wiring, and contemplation becomes out of the question. Instead, react and emote, and eventually quit even reading links, just jump to comfortable conclusions.
Carry that to an extreme, combine it with deep resentment over gay marriage and immigration/citizenship barriers to HIV-positive Brits, constant med cocktails and hormone supplements, as well as recreational pot and X, and no wonder he’s Excitable Andy as Kaus would put it.
The Atlantic has a stake in generating page views and links, so what do they care if it deteriorates into a freak show? Even Jeffrey Goldberg gets to play off some of Sullivan’s more deranged anti-Israel slurs with a little back-and-forth.
… why is the Atlantic still providing a forum for[Sullivan] … ?
Because the Atlantic is pro-Left, anti-Right and they believe that a certain number of folks will believe there is some truth in Sullivan’s anti-Right rants on Palin and other subjects. After all, Sullivan does have a sizable readership, doesn’t he?
Neocon, sometimes you still seem to be living in a world in which magazines like the Atlantic serve some sort of noble, unbiased intellectually motivated purpose in the pursuit of truth for its own sake. If they ever did, they don’t now.
grackle: the Atlantic was a decent magazine just a couple of years ago. Light years ahead of Harper’s. I haven’t read it much in the last two years, but I used to a while back, and it wasn’t bad at all.
I was thinking the exact same thing about Atlantic and Harper’s.
Frankly, Sullivan’s obsession with Sarah Palin’s uterus has gotten to the point where I think Palin ought to sue him for harassment, or *something.* It’s gone beyond funny, it’s gone beyond strange, it’s gone beyond creepy, it’s gone beyond sick, all the way into horrifying.
colagirl,
If Palin were a man Sullivan would heart Palin.
😛
the Atlantic was a decent magazine just a couple of years ago. Light years ahead of Harper’s.
Atlantic is, of course, liberal but still a decent magazine. Harper’s has plumb lost its mind.
Sigh. I used to subscribe.
Leaving my biases aside, I must say that most of the slicks and Sunday supplements have lost ground in terms of general readability.
Again and again, I find myself reading articles in which the author overwhelms me with dutiful details and anecdotes, as if to prove to the editor that the expenses of the article were well-spent and the writer has mastered complex cumulative sentences, but I have no idea what the point of the article is.
It’s very frustrating.
And then if you subject, say, a James Fallow article (a mainstay in The Atlantic) to close reading you find that that logic doesn’t hold up any better than an Obama speech. It just takes you longer to parse the darn thing and find the holes.
grackle: the Atlantic was a decent magazine just a couple of years ago. Light years ahead of Harper’s.
I’ll take your word for it and admit that I have never regularly read either magazine. Perhaps I was too hasty in my previous comment. I was a casual reader of Sullivan’s pre-Atlantic blog for awhile, never realizing that he self-identified as a conservative. If Sullivan is a conservative then I’m an Eskimo. I thought of him as an entertaining liberal blogger, but left off when he contracted Bush Derangement Syndrome. I sent him an email telling him why and received an email back which was of the “good riddance” variety. I’m sure I was not missed.
I read McArdle on-line because she manages to write fluently about economics — an area in which I need to be educated. I have found most writers on economic issues to be poor writers. She seems to be a nice, caring person who purports to be a libertarian but who is(as far as I can tell) actually a liberal with libertarian economic traits. She seems to buy into most of the Progressive political memes. She voted for Obama because she was afraid that McCain would have started a war with Iran — or so she has implied. My guess is that she simply could not identify psychologically with the McCain/Palin duo, they being too far afield of the class and intellectual milieu she aspires to and probably has big problems with social conservatism — an attitude with which I can emphathize. On foreign policy she seems to be Progressive but it’s not a subject that she writes about very often so that too is a guess on my part.
Hitchens has long been a favorite of mine. He’s partially sane, having a good viewpoint on certain aspects of foreign policy, but other than that I find little with which to agree. No matter, he is a consummate writer and debater — always worth reading and I love it when he demolishes anti-war types on TV.
grackle – I’ve been reading MM since she was working at the Twin Towers clean up and blogging independently (Jane Galt, renamed to Assimetric Information).
She is a bundle of contradictions in terms of politics, and I think you are correct that her views seem to be influenced to a great degree by classism and a desire to be liked by the right sort of people. Oddly enough Her husband works (worked?) at a conservative thinktank. People (a writer at Playboy, IIRC, oddly enough) have raised a stink over that related to the Tea Party movement, impling that he was secretly influencing her blogposts that were at least not uniformly critical of them.
She used to be far more libertarian, even verging on conservative at times but as she has moved into NY-DC media circles (Business Week, I think, then the Atlantic) she’s adopted conventional liberal attitudes about most topics while remaining fairly conservative in economics. She’s had Sullivan-like drift to an anti-Bush stance though I think the influence for her was more the Iraq war.
She was a strong opponent of HCR and got a lot of grief from her liberal readers for it. Her acceptance of liberal memes really comes out when she dashes off a quick post about an emerging story or blogs about a topic outside economic. She uncritically accepted the ‘they were bugging Landrieu’s office’ story about James O’Keefe, and was clearly happy to see him (supposedly) taken down a peg or two. She’s also had a hard time admitting that the revelations about the CRU have pretty much proven theories of AGW to be a fraud.
With regard to Harpers and Atlantic, I used to read both of them regularly – and since high school, as my mother had a subscription to both. Back in the day, they were pretty similar and of similar high quality; Mom could never decide which one to give up in the name of economy, so she kept them both. I fell to the same dilemma – but I let Harpers go after 9/11, mostly because of Lewis Lapham, the sanctimonious old poop. At that time, the Atlantic just seemed to get better, especially when Michael Kelly was the editor. But I let it go also, a couple of years ago. Couldn’t afford it, and it seems also to have gone pretty much the same way as Harpers.
In February 2006, on practically a moment’s notice, I went to DC to take part in the show of support in front of the Danish Embassy that Christopher Hitchens organized in response to the cartoon controversy. Several prominent conservatives were in the crowd–Tony Blankley and Bill Kristol, for example–in addition to Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan. (I noted to an interesting looking woman in the crowd that there were very few of us girls there, and she looked at me like I had told her the sky was green; little did I know she was Carol Blue, Hitchens’s wife!) Anyway, after the crowd dispersed and I was walking back to my hotel, I saw Andrew go by on his bicycle, and something in me, probably the continuing feeling of solidarity, made me call out his name. He immediately stopped and came over, and we talked for a good half hour on the street corner. He was nothing but a gentleman. I did notice, though, that his thinking about Bush administration policies was changing, sharply. There was a hardening of the heart, it seemed to me. Long before he started in on Palin but soon after that meeting, I noticed that the tone of his writing began to change dramatically. I even wrote to him once, during the 2008 presidential campaign, saying that I hated to be critical since he had been so kind to me that day in 2006 but that it seemed to me that he had gone from being a critical observer to an ideological partisan, to which he wrote back telling me not to worry, that he was just fine. Of course, he’s only gotten much much worse. I hate to say it, but the thought first came to my mind on that cold clear day in February that something bad was happening to his brain and that it was physiological. I don’t read him at all anymore. I find it just too painful.
I’ve figured for a few years now that Sully’s longtime HIV has had a sanity-toll on his head. Sad. His stuff when he was Editor of The New Republic and had Fred Barnes, Mort Kondracke, Charles Krauthammer and other very solid guys writing for him was often wonderful. The best piece I’ve ever read on Bill Clinton’s mental pathology was written by Sully as ‘TRB’ in TNR in Feb or March 2001, just after Bubba’s exit. It was titled,”Psycho”. His multi-part NY Times Magazine series on the idiocy of “Hate Crimes” re-Gays was amazingly spot on in the early 2000s.
Sad. And The Atlantic, former home of the late-great Michael Kelley, has fallen far in recent times.
… free form poetry without any line-breaks?
The geeks are always with us. Lesson? If you’re a rat or a chicken, duck!