Andrew Sullivan, at war with himself, is a fascinating case study. He’s a devout Catholic gay conservative, raised and schooled in Great Britain, and obviously brilliant. Everywhere he has written and opined has seen his cognitive dissonance on display: his friends and colleagues are mostly progressives, many of the knee-jerk variety, and he longs to be accepted and loved by them. Andrew also has too much integrity for that, much of the time anyway. He edited The New Republic after contributing articles most notably on the topic of AIDS and gays in America, but that publication’s turned on him, rebelling when he found scientific and intellectual value in Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s “The Bell Curve,” the theory of which was (and is) officially condemned as politically incorrect and inherently racist. Sullivan, temperamentally inclined to keep an open mind, became a pariah in his own magazine. Later he wrote for The New York Times Magazine but was fired, because his tendency to call out progressives and the Times itself on intellectual dishonesty and bias annoyed Times editor Howell Raines. Sullivan’s whole career has been like this; one of the most influential bloggers when blogging was all the rage, these days he makes money and waves with his substack newsletter, “The Weekly Dish.”

Sullivan writes like a dream, and when he is good, he is very, very good indeed. Ethics Alarms has highlighted several of his essays in the past (most recently last December) and will doubtlessly do so again.

Yesterday I found myself reading Andrew’s latest essay without knowing who wrote it (don’t ask me how that happened). I almost quit reading after a few paragraphs. Oh, great, another diatribe by a Trump-Deranged conservative like David Frum, I thought to myself.

Speaking of the just finished convention, the piece stated early on, “Trump’s political story — like this choreographed television spectacle — really could be called Triumph of the Will if it were not so reminiscent of Idiocracy.” Oh, fine, another “Trump is Hitler” smear. Who is this idiot? It went on in a similar vein:

And the narrative that Trump has crafted — which requires a truly historic suspension of disbelief — just became more potent. The outsider businessman, taking on the corrupt elite, hounded by the woke press, targeted by leftist courts, unjustly impeached, outrageously smeared, almost assassinated … somehow survived and has the prospect of the greatest comeback in American history.

“They” spied on his campaign, sabotaged his policies, demonized his supporters, invented hoaxes to impeach him, then prosecuted him four times on flimsy or fake grounds, and yet he still stands. As many speakers at the convention said, “they” also tried to kill him. When he was president, the economy boomed, the world was at peace, crime was the lowest in the history of the world, wages high … until “they” stole the election from him and instantly turned America into Venezuela. The truth, of course, is immensely different, but there are enough shreds of verity in Trump’s skewed version of events for the narrative to seduce. 

That’s where I almost quit. “Shreds” of verity? The Trumpian hyperbole is easy to mock and deserves it, but the “elites” Trump has opposed aren’t corrupt? The Clintons, Pelosi, Cheneys, Obama? Trump wasn’t “hounded by the woke press”? He wasn’t “targeted by leftist courts”? I’m in agreement with many lawyers, constitutional scholars and American government experts that Trump was unjustly impeached twice, and I believe it is beyond argument that he has been and continues to be “outrageously smeared.” Trump wasn’t “almost assassinated? He didn’t survive?

No, if he get elected again it won’t be the greatest comeback in American history, but it will certainly be in the distinguished company of Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, Grover Cleveland, William Howard Taft and Richard Nixon, along with Robert Morse, Edward Albee, Judy Garland, Rosemary Clooney, Sea Biscuit and the 2004 Boson Red Sox.

“They” DID spy on his campaign. Trump’s entire Presidency was sabotaged. Of course his supporters were demonized…

…was the writer, whoever his is, denying that? And Trump has been prosecuted on flimsy or fake grounds. This was obviously another “it isn’t what it is” screed, and frankly, I’m sick of them. But I decided to read on…

The Democrats’ Biden formula — impose radical social, economic, and cultural change by fronting it with a moderate, easy-to-bully old man — has unraveled as obviously as Biden’s health. One reason is that the president is simply incapable of catching the attention of the country — except in universal cringe — and has singularly failed to construct a compelling narrative of his own.

Another is the incoherence of the Resistance. If you want to protest potential abuse of the justice system by a future president Trump, don’t bring an obviously flimsy, political case in New York City that merely helped Trump sweep back to dominance in the GOP. If you want a saner GOP, don’t demonize every other possibility, from DeSantis to Vance. If you emphasize the danger of political violence, don’t turn a blind eye as BLM burns America’s cities to the ground, or ignore Antifa. If you want to accuse Fox News of propaganda, don’t push out equal and opposite propaganda on toxic MSNBC. If you think democracy dies in darkness, why try to get Trump legally excluded from some state ballots, and prevent any real primary among Democrats?

More saliently, if one of your main lines of attack on Trump is his mendacity, it was probably not a great idea to tell the entire country that Biden was, in Joe Scarborough’s words, “far beyond cogent. In fact, I think he’s better than he’s ever been — intellectually, analytically…”

The lies the Democrats have been telling us these past few years are legion: inflation won’t happen/is temporary/is good for you; the Southern border is secure; “equity” is “fairness”; biological sex is a “spectrum”; Ukraine is about to win the war; Russia’s economy can be sanctioned to death; political violence is entirely on the far right; children can meaningfully consent to sex changes; the only thing holding black Americans back is white bigotry; the mainstream media is fair; and women have penises. Yes, Trump is a shameless liar. But the left’s propaganda has muddied the waters. When NBC’s higher-ups took Morning Joe off the air this week, it was a real moment. Even the muckety-mucks couldn’t take the lucrative propaganda anymore.

Wait, I thought. This sounds like Andrew Sullivan…and so it was!

I have some cavils with that section: Fox News, infantile as it is, is nowhere near as dishonest, biased and shameless as MSNBC; I question whether Sullivan has spent any time watching either. Nonetheless, he proved that the same hypocrisy and totalitarian tendencies that I’ve flagged (among many other observers) haven’t escaped his attention. (Uh, doesn’t all that mean that the elites are corrupt, Andrew?)

And then, like someone had turned on a light switch, he was back to Trump Deranged crazy talk. “I will never vote for Trump,” he wrote, “because he is so psychologically disturbed and so contemptuous of the rule of law that he remains a danger to us and the world.”

The whole piece is like this: whiplash. Sullivan is an honest analyst about everything else, but he doesn’t enlighten us on how Trump is “psychologically disturbed,” any more “contemptuous of the rule of law” than the party Andrew will vote for, and “a danger to us and the world.” This is the watermark of one who is hopelessly Trump Deranged, and to any one who isn’t, it makes Sullivan look foolish.

He’s fallen into the trap so many have, like George Will, Mitt Romney, my sister, and the majority of my friends. At the core, it is snobbery. These are all well-educated, smart, civil, cultured, mannerly people, and the idea that this boorish asshole who crawled to wealth, fame and prominence in the slime pits of real estate, construction, hotels, casinos and international wheeler-dealing and who talks like street corner huckster dared to aspire to be President was and is repulsive to them. They are, after all, better than he is. Bias has, in a very real sense, made them stupid—blind and stupid. I would have thought that Andrew Sullivan would be able to resist the malady, but alas, he has not. That tells us how powerful it is.

Finally, at the end of his essay, the switch clicked once more, and Sullivan was rational, analytical and erudite again. He concludes,

One final thing: a critical conservative reformulation took place this past week. It was the argument that America is not just an idea but a home. And in the past few decades, the value of that idea on the right has subsumed the reality of that home. Trumpism is an adjustment back to the center in that respect. And a conservatism that cannot grasp why home is important is not a real conservatism.

Is this election over? Probably — as I’ve thought for a while now. Is the liberal regime that has governed both party elites since the Second World War also over? Probably as well. But in so far as that represents a response to truly changed circumstances, and to the evident failures of neoliberalism, that’s not so bad. A largely unified, uniparty blob in DC needed disruption. Trump disrupted. Now Trumpism may have a chance to prove itself in government … or not.

Can the Democrats respond with the skill, poise and energy required? If Biden goes, and an open convention can showcase newer, younger talent, there’s still a chance. But it will take nerve to seize it.

Get well, Andrew. We need you.