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.
Ethics Alarms 