I was interested to see Slate’s Robert Wright and Andrew Sullivan in this diavlog. The formerly hawkish Sullivan recants his previous support of the war. Apparently he explains why in some detail in his book, The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back, which I have only read the reviews of. The Wright interview is ostensibly about the book. I agree with his critique of the Christian right. No brainer there. I’ve written briefly about the obsolescence of principled political conservatism here which addresses the Thatcherite/Reaganite part of his argument. But in this post I’m not interested to deal with his arguments, but rather with the phenomenon of his public persona.
Sullivan is a fascinating case. I’ve always found it perplexing why this guy has been taken so seriously–what constituency does he represent, the huge bloc of Americans who are British, gay, Catholic, and neoconservative?! His book tries to explain how all those work together, and from what I’ve read about it and know about his thinking from my occasional reading of his blog, it’s an eloquent muddle. And yet millions of people continue daily to read his blog. What is his appeal?
I’m not sure, and if anybody has any ideas about this I’d be interested to hear them. The best that I can come up with is that he reflects back to his readers the primitive fears and confused thinking of millions of Americans in a time when anxiety and confusion is so widespread. He has a very personal, honest style, and there is an engaging charm that comes with that. I think it probably makes people who identify with his positions feel that it’s smart to be fearful and confused the way Andrew is. If an articulate, decent chap like Andrew Sullivan thinks it, it must be ok to think it.
Well it’s not ok because most of what he says is an irrational, emotion-driven, if sometimes eloquent, exercise in incoherence. And he admits his vulnerability to emotional thinking in his conversation with Wright. People like him played an enormously influential role in defending the administration’s specious arguments for going into Iraq, not because it made sense but because it filled an emotional need. To admit that he was wrong about that now is fine, but why does he have any credibility at all at this point? He has credibility only so long as people find in him a kindred spirit who articulates their own confusion and ambivalence.
So this is why he interests me. He embodies a particular mindset that I’ve become fascinated with in the last six years: the decent, well-educated person who nevertheless is inclined to accept official justifications for policy at face value so long as those justifications have a "truthiness" about them that resonate with their irrational prejudices. We’re seeing something similar with the liberal types now who identify with the Democrats.
How is it possible that with all we’ve gone through since the early seventies that anybody could think this way? This kind of thinking–typical of the MSM pundit class as a whole–is like that of pack animals that imprint on the alpha leader. "Whatever you say, boss." The Italians did it with Mussolini, the French with Petain, and pundits like Sullivan did it with Bush in the period following 9/11. People are attracted to Sullivan because he’s no redneck; his primitive emotional politics are expressed with eloquence and style.
Sullivan snapped out of his trance, but what is it with Sullivan and others like him that they were so easily taken in to begin with? I’m not asking this in some smug told-you-so mood, but out of a real desire to understand why smart people can get it so wrong. Sullivan is just one very public person who represents this inclination for reason to be the servant of irrational needs that affects us all. Our thinking about almost everything that has meaning or is important is grounded in irrational assumptions–that’s the point of the post I put up last month. The key is to discern what irrational impulses are being served. In Sullivan’s case, it’s clear that he, like so many of the Americans who read him, is driven by the hysteria that followed 9/11. The continuing threat posed by terrorism is real, and we have to find prudent, realistic ways of dealing with the threat, but at a deeper level we have to find more effective ways to deal with the fear. And as far as I’m concerned, people whose thinking is driven by their fear and confusion are simply not to be trusted.
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