I am always gobsmacked by the easy, smooth clarity of his writing and thought. In this column he questions the more extreme orthodoxy of the current political moment, and all political orthodoxies. I think he is on to something. Human affairs seem to swing from one extreme to another reach the truth of balance only after a lot of extremism.
Chance are we are just as wrong about a lot of things as our grandparents were. But in the moment our passions seem so obviously correct. I suppose it is a sort of optical illusion. We are right, moral, scientific but those long-ago people were mistaken, twisted, and blind.
In any case, I recommend it to you.
I always thought he was a VERY sharp writer. I know he catches a lot of flak from the left. Maybe that’s ok. Someone has to catch it. I never thought of him as a partisan or ideologue.
I was impressed when he first came to my attention long, long ago. He was in favor of Gay people getting married. For this he was attacked by … Gay people. (Their argument being marriage, kids a fog and a house in the suburbs would end Gay Culture.) I was, and still am, impressed by his cutting through the fluff to get to the heart of the matter.
Andrew Sullivan likes to lionize himself as some sort of modern originator of the notion of gay marriage. He did in fact advocate early for gay marriage, and he did in fact take some heat, but it wasn’t because of his proposal, it was because he wrote, and I quote, that marriage would save gay people from “a life of meaningless promiscuity followed by eternal damnation.”
In the modern epoch, breakfast offends some people. Larry Krammer was the main one who caught flak for his writings on this subject, especially his novel about Gay life in the Old Days.
He writes, (NYT column) contained the following sentence, describing research into racial inequality: “Economics journals are still filled with papers that emphasize differences in education, upbringing or even IQ rather than discrimination or structural barriers.” But why are these avenues of research mutually exclusive? Why can’t the issue of racial inequality be complicated — involving many social, economic, and cultural factors that operate alongside the resilience of discrimination? And wouldn’t it help if we focused on those specific issues rather than seeing every challenge that African-Americans face as an insuperable struggle against the hatred of whites?
Which is his subtle way of attempting to direct a dialog about racism away from the topic of racism. It is eloquent, candy-coated deflection, analogous to “You say the engine is running badly because the injectors are clogged, but I believe that the engine is a complex device, and the injectors are just one small component out of many, which should be viewed with the proper perspective against the greater whole.”
So, basically, right here he is suggesting that we stop talking about racism, but doing it in a sly manner that allows him to say that he never said that.
It was an ok article, and he made some good points about the left demanding ideological purity as well as follow through action to embrace the ideological purity. The idea of walking away from family and friends due to ideological disagreement is getting more and more common from what I’ve seen.
But I don’t think you can really address whats happening without discussing Trump. Anytime minorities grow in either power or number, there is a pushback from people trying to defend a social order that defends their status and privilege. Trump is an example of one such pushback (another would be the creation of the KKK after the civil war) against having a black president for 8 years.
Yes minorities are doing better and thats great. But sadly when minorities do better, it causes pushback by those who don’t want them to do better. Trumps election was to a large degree an effort to push back. MAGA was a call to return to the days of America being a white christian patriarchy with low immigration.
But you also have to add in the desperation due to the virus. Lots of people didn’t have $400 to pay a bill before the virus hit. now we’re at depression levels of unemployment and its the second ‘once in a lifetime’ economic collapse for a lot of people in Generation Y and Z within the last 15 years. $500 billion in loans were given to corporations and details of which ones got which loans aren’t being publicized. Also you have the governments slow march towards fascism and there is a lot of stuff people are upset about and pushing back against.
I don’t think Sullivan understands the mood or the movement right now. He doesn’t seem to understand the role Trumpism plays in this or the coronavirus. Both of which are pretty important to the mood right now.
This is basically a culmination of resistance to fascism, racism, economic inequality and the virus all hitting at once. Sullivan doesn’t really seem to understand what built to this movement, just the fact that some people are so angry that they are demanding other people do something proactive, which he feels is totalitarian.
Thing is, the Right has a longstanding habit of disowning, blackmailing, terrorizing or outright torturing or killing family and (alleged) friends whom they have an “ideological disagreement”.
Unless the left starts doing things like having children they consider too right wing hauled off and tortured in conversion camps the way the right wing does to homosexual children, somebody bashing the left for mistreating family members out of politics is at best using a huge double standard.
Well, he deserves to have his stuff taken out of context. I hope I can learn from his writing style, because it is horrific, and I see that I sometimes do that same kind of effete shit that makes stuff painful to read.
Bad take. Racial inequality is a complex topic and solving it does require us to consider lots of different things at the same time. Your comparison to a car engine, where one malfunction really can cause the whole system to shut down, is fatuous. In the real world, social breakdowns have lots of different causes. He’s not suggesting we “stop talking about racism”. That’s pure projection on your part. He’s saying we should broaden our analysis to consider other factors as well as racism. This is a perfectly sensible suggestion which reflects the complexity of the problem.
That still reads to me like he thinks that there are forms of sex between consenting adults that are somehow wrong. It just isn’t their fault. And the implication is that, if we let them marry instead, it’ll stop them from doing these bad things.
This is fair; yes he is saying some sex is wrong and that marriage would help the situation. But the earlier characterization – that Sullivan said “that marriage would save gay people from ‘a life of meaningless promiscuity followed by eternal damnation’” – removes the context and distorts the meaning.
He did not say unmarried gay people are headed for eternal damnation. He said that IF gay people are taught their very personality is sinful, and IF you tell them that they must be forever celibate or else be eternally damned, THEN their response may be reckless/compulsive sex alternating with shame and withdrawal, etc.
The Village Voice did the same thing with the quote, which Sullivan discusses here: