Andrew Sullivan's Soul

Though billed as "one of today's most provocative social and political commentators" on his book jacket, Sullivan's substantive views are almost frighteningly banal.

-Matthew Yglesias

I can't recall the title, but I recently picked up a new novel by precisely the sort of young, so-called postmodern writer that Andrew Sullivan would surely despise without reading, and the dust jacket copy began:

Did you know that most authors write their own jacket copy?

So there is that.

There is also the fact that Andrew Sullivan writes for Time, a publication of almost magisterial banality.

But mostly there is the fact that Andrew Sullivan is a world-class, self-obsessed, bien-pensant twit writing a blog that, par contre Yglesias' praise, offers no substance other than a skein of narcissistic reflections, a strung strand of popcorn, a candy necklace. Yglesias says that Sullivan offers a sensibility, which is rather like saying that some poor, homely girl has a winning personality, a pretty laugh, or a great smile. Sullivan, to hear Yglesias tell it, is widely but not deeply read, occasionally funny, always self-involved, and never terribly original. He is, in other words, every other gay man with a bachelor's degree.

The problem with Sullivan isn't, as Yglesias says, that he doesn't actually know what on earth he's talking about, but that as the living avatar of banality, he is immensely popular, since there is nothing Just Folks like more than hearing what they already believe, but said purdier. Sullivan gets credit for somehow turning against Republicans, and if you operate from the assumption that the division that matters in America is between the Donkle and the Oliphant, then that credit is due. If, on the other hand, you find yourself in the ever-declining minority that asks into the substance of beliefs, here is what you find in Andrew Sullivan: a man whose Church irrationally condemns him and consigns him to damnation who is churched nonetheless; a man who believes in a modest bellicosity even though it always fails; a man who invariably condemns in the harshest terms the avant, until he drags his dawdling arrière up the the very line that reasonable forward-thinkers long-ago laid down, and then from that vantage again condemns the swifter thinkers. He calls this "skepticism." Perhaps you can think of another term.

Sullivan calls himself a conservative, which in his writing, if not his mind, means a defender of his own habitudes against the depredations of those "fundamentalists" (Yglesias is good on his use of that word) whom he sees seeking some radical alteration of Andrew Sullivan's quotidian existence. In the universe of his writing, Andrew Sullivan is the immovable object. The Church drifts from him. The War drifts from him. The Party drifts from him. But poor Andy, wherever he goes, there he is.

He claims to enjoy Montaigne and seems to believe that Je suis moi-même la matière de mon livre means that Essais is a collection of autobiographical sketches to amuse, enlighten, and entertain--as if Montaigne, were he alive today, might be hawking copies during NPR pledge drives and letting Terri Gross ask him what it was like to discover that his grandmother had been a Jew, and how did that affect his career as a writer?

Here is a part of what Susan Sontag wrote on September 24, 2001:

Our leaders are bent on convincing us that everything is O.K. America is not afraid. Our spirit is unbroken, although this was a day that will live in infamy and America is now at war. But everything is not O.K. And this was not Pearl Harbor. We have a robotic president who assures us that America stands tall. A wide spectrum of public figures, in and out of office, who are strongly opposed to the policies being pursued abroad by this Administration apparently feel free to say nothing more than that they stand united behind President Bush. A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in Washington and elsewhere, about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counter-intelligence, about options available to American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a smart program of military defense. But the public is not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality. The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.

Sullivan called her a traitor and fifth columnist and said that she "waits in a welter of metaphor until they murder us again."

Now, of course, Sullivan feels that he and others fell too easily into step behind an out-of-depth (at least!) president. He believes that a lot of thinking needs to be done about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counterintelligence, as well as a a smart program of military defense. He knows that the public is not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality. He is sure that the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric of our officials is contemptible.

Susan Sontag is dead, of course, and Sullivan still gives out an award named in her dishonor to those whose positions deviate too greatly from his own, even as he has come to agree with that far greater, better, kinder, more decent, more intelligent, and more humane human being five years after the fact.

Update: Corrected the gender travesty in the French. Note--avoid second language when pissed off.