The Worst Thing In the 2016 Election Cycle

The worst thing in the 2016 election cycle is the return of Andrew Sullivan to bloviating. Sully is VERY CONCERNED about the rise of Trump and why people would vote for him. Of course, as Tom Scocca notes, Sullivan’s lifelong writings have contributed to this, making his concern completely ridiculous.

When Sullivan speaks broadly about how Trumpism arose from the fact that “many of us elites” were disastrously indifferent to the fate of the working class, what he means is “I, Andrew Sullivan, specifically.”

This doesn’t mean that Sullivan paid no mind to the proles at all. His politics may have disparaged their economic concerns, but it was finely attuned to their cultural resentments, or to what he imagined their cultural resentments to be. His magazine stood ready to warn white people that reverse racism was blocking them from opportunity, that lazy moochers were stealing welfare money from taxpayers, and that political correctness was stifling important truths, such as the possibility that black people might be genetically inferior to white people.

This was the outlook of a magazine ostensibly supporting the Democrats but terrorized by the popularity of Ronald Reagan, gripped by fear that the social changes of the ’60s and ’70s had pushed the silent majority too far. Sullivan rode that current to a position of fame and influence, a self-identified conservative doing business with self-identified liberal contrarians. It’s not entirely convincing for the editor of the leading hippie-punching journal to be shocked when people start punching hippies in real life.

Sullivan’s reading of the history goes the other way. “T]he great culture wars of the 1990s and 2000s have ended in a rout,” Sullivan writes now.

But who has routed whom? On gay marriage and marijuana legalization, the two social issues closest to Sullivan’s heart, the liberal side has triumphed or seems to be getting there. Abortion, meanwhile, is less and less available; affirmative action is ever more tightly constrained; benefits for the poor are so fully stigmatized that politicians feel free to attack food stamps. The appropriations budget of the National Endowment for the Arts is, adjusted for inflation, about half of what it was at its early ’90s peak. The same morning that Sullivan’s essay on excessive democracy hit the newsstands, the New York Times had yet another front-page story about the ever-expanding Republican effort to make voting more difficult.

The culture wars are defined by which battles their leaders choose to fight. Sullivan, stepping up to do his long-form civic duty, warns that if the Democrats are going to stop Donald Trump, the supporters of “the demagogue of the left, Bernie Sanders,” must soften their attacks on Hillary Clinton, while Clinton must steer away from “identity politics” and “address much more directly the anxieties of the white working class.”

One problem with “long-form” writing is that it has a lot of words in it, and it’s hard to keep track of all of them. If Andrew Sullivan truly considers Bernie Sanders a “demagogue,” then why did he spend so much time and effort warning about the singular menace of Donald Trump? Meanwhile the word “white,” in that passage, seems to have stuck itself right in between “anxieties of the” and “working class.” What is it doing there? Maybe Andrew Sullivan could pause for another 15 or 16 months and try to figure it out.

Jedediah Purdy takes a more serious approach to dissing Sullivan and is also well worth your time.