I like Andrew Sullivan. Which is to say, I like his work, I like it a lot, and I’ve liked it for a long time. I used to read his old Daily Dish blog religiously after he publicly and emphatically broke with the modern right, turned on his former political paramour George W. Bush, came out against the Iraq War, accepted responsibility and expressed contrition for having been so spectacularly wrong about same and for supporting same and for excoriating liberals for not supporting same. In fact, in my memory he was the first high-profile pundit of any political stripe to publicly state that in the forthcoming Democratic primary, “I’m supporting Barack Obama.” He said that in 2007 on Real Time with Bill Maher, before writing this piece for the Atlantic.
But now that the Obama presidency is over, and Andrew has had the opportunity to rekindle, re-experience, revive and retrench his virulent, intemperate, white-hot hatred of the Clintons and particularly of Hillary, Andrew has “fallen off the wagon,” so to speak. Although he is not quite back to the sort of vicious caricaturing and loathing of liberals and liberalism that pervaded his writing before the Bush break, he’s backslid into Both-Siderism and has taken not so much to caricaturing, but to just making sh** up about the left in order to illustrate why (all together now) Both Sides® are Just as Bad™.
The other day I wrote a lengthy diary dissecting Charlie Sykes’ current Newsweek cover story that essentially blames the right’s descent into frothing madness on the “fact” that liberals were just so darned obnoxious during the Obama presidency, which was itself an unending assault on conservatives in the form of “liberal overreach”:
First there was the massive stimulus package, which threatened to balloon the national debt [no it didn’t]. Then the Democratic Congress rammed through Obamacare [no it didn’t] with the barest of partisan majorities [because Republicans refused to even consider it irrespective of its content or merit]. These moves came at a time when conservatives felt their free speech and religious liberty were under assault [which they weren’t, and never have been], when the Internal Revenue Service was targeting Tea Party groups [which it wasn’t, no matter what “targeting” means], and on university campuses activists began enforcing their demands for ideological conformity, complete with lists of microaggressions, trigger warnings and safe spaces [more fantasy elements here than Game of Thrones]. Later, Democrats began dismantling the filibuster [with good reason], while Obama, frustrated by gridlock in Congress [with good reason], started issuing a dizzying array [not even close] of executive orders on issues ranging from immigration to clean power.
And there’s more where that came from. “Decades of liberal contempt … calling their opponents bigots, deriding their religious faith,” and on and on and on. The bottom line, in Sykes’ view, is that from 2009-2016 conservatives “felt attacked” — not criticized, not scrutinized, not challenged, attacked — so they reacted to this relentless, unbearable, excessive and, of course, unfair and undeserved mistreatment by nominating and electing a self-evidently vulgar, ignorant, demented racist gangster to the Presidency of the United States.
As we all know and understand, and as illustrated by the blockquote above, these “feelings” they say they have of being “attacked” are built on a mountain of bullsh**. Conservatives “felt attacked” during the Obama years not because of anything the President, his party or their supporters were actually doing or saying, but because that’s how their favorite, trusted pundits on the teevee and the radio and the Inter-net machines told them to feel. The pundits, and even the politicians, told them they were being “attacked” and “targeted,” being “called bigots” having their “faith” unfairly “derided,” that “liberals” and “elites” had “contempt” for their “values.” They. Made. It. All. Up. Even if any of that did contain a kernel of truth, it was distorted and exaggerated beyond recognition to the point of creating a whole alternate reality, consisting of 2% fact + 0% context + 98% wishful thinking. The fact is that by the year 2000 conservatives could not justify themselves without making sh** up about the left, and they still can’t.
Which brings us to Sullivan’s new piece in New York magazine, “Can Democracy Survive Tribalism?” Driftglass has already gone over this, so I’ll defer to his genius and experience on the subject of Both-Siderism, but I wanted to highlight a couple of things. I should say that Sullivan’s piece is a lengthy, and worthy, read, and the excerpts quoted below are few and far between. Yet it bears pointing out that the author, although he tries gamely, cannot extoll the equivalence he needs to make his argument that both of our political “tribes” — i.e., Both Sides® — are Just as Bad™, just as cynically hypocritical, just as dangerous, just as serious a threat to democracy, without making sh** up about the left.
The intellectual right and the academic left have long since dispensed with the idea of a mutual exchange of ideas.
Really? Is that true? The only evidence of this that Sullivan presents is the alleged ratio of college professors who vote Democratic to those who vote Republican (which, I would add, no one ever seems to ask or consider why that might be). And the broad generalization, which he has been unable to resist mentioning in everything he’s written for at least the past year and a half, about:
“safe spaces,” speech regarded as violence, racially segregated graduation ceremonies, the policing of “micro-aggressions,” the checking of “white privilege” — are now embedded in the institutions themselves.
Maybe it’s me, and the fact that I’ve been out of college for a very, very long time, but as I mentioned above, this strikes me as more fantasy than fact; more abstract than concrete. The use of passive verbs in particular suggests that these are abstractions, a figment of collective imagination, not actual, documentable, verifiable events that one can point to, or that if it is real, is anything more than anecdotal, not “embedded in the institutions [which institutions?] themselves.” I’m sorry; I may be wrong and I may be naïve, but I’ve been hearing and reading this meme for a while and I’m just not buying it. Moreover, the fact that I’ve been out of college for so long and have never witnessed any of this (and would probably have felt free to ignore it if I had) makes me wonder why any of this is a problem for anyone who’s not in college, let alone such a serious problem as to justify nominating and electing a self-evidently vulgar, ignorant, demented racist gangster.
Sullivan goes on for several paragraphs about these “institutions”’ appalling mistreatment of conservatives who were viciously punished, abused, castigated, blacklisted and barred from campus just because they were conservatives and had, or expressed, conservative “views.” This is a classic rhetorical tactic that I like to call the “understatement-overstatement technique.” Take a political/ideological ally and a political/ideological adversary, in conflict with each other, where one has reacted to the other or to something the other has done or said. If the one reacting is the adversary, vastly overstate the reaction, and severely understate the provocation. If it’s the other way around, do the opposite. Exaggerate the other side’s perceived excesses, and dilute your own down to something benign or even admirable. It’s what schoolchildren do when they had a fight and have to explain what happened to the principal.* And it’s as old as politics itself.
[* — I was a high-school teacher for over a decade; I can’t count how many times I was told by a student that someone else’s action in response to his/her own behavior was taken, quote, “for no reason”.]
Nor is it an unusual rhetorical tactic to extrapolate anecdotal evidence of a thing that happened once into a thing that generally is happening everywhere all the time. Sykes does that in his piece, in another example of why conservatives “felt attacked”:
[C]onservatives were inundated with stories, links and video clips of protesters chanting “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it? Now!” and “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon.”
There are few things easier in political rhetoric than simply changing verb tense from past to present in order to assert and/or believe that something that happened is something that happens. That’s where Mitt Romney’s unfortunate “47%” remark came from; in 2009, 47% of U.S. households did not owe federal income tax. Change the tense from past to present, change the verb from “owe” to “pay,” and the benign “did not owe” becomes the malignant “do not pay”; drop all the adverbial modifiers, and voilà, “47% of Americans do not pay taxes” at all, ever.
And let me just say one more thing before moving on from this topic: If the worst thing the modern left can credibly be accused of doing involves “’safe spaces,’ speech regarded as violence, racially segregated graduation ceremonies, the policing of ‘micro-aggressions,’ [and] the checking of ‘white privilege’” on college campuses, is that really comparable to, or on par with, the worst things the modern right is actually, openly and admittedly doing?
Here’s where the really irritating false equivalencies start, and they’re all grounded in pure, Grade-A, USDA Prime conservative bullsh** about the left:
No tribe [is] more federalist when it [comes] to marijuana laws than liberals; and no tribe [is] less federalist when it [comes] to abortion.
Oh, boy, here we go. Most liberals I know regard marijuana and abortion the same way: they should both be available and used safely, legally, and rarely. (OK, maybe not so “rarely” in the case of marijuana, but I digress...) What Andrew is trying to say is that liberals want the states to be allowed to de-criminalize marijuana, but they don’t want the states to be allowed to criminalize abortion. This is supposed to be evidence of the left’s equally-cynical shoe-on-the-other-foot hypocrisy, or as Sullivan put it, cribbing Orwell, “self-contradiction and indifference to reality.”
Apart from downplaying and papering over the significant and substantial difference between criminalizing something and de-criminalizing something else, Sullivan, given the urgent need to present these wholly-consistent (and eminently-reasonable) views as hypocritical or contradictory, completely ignores the fact that while the states’ ability to de-criminalize pot is an issue at least partly grounded in federalism, given federal drug laws, abortion is not. The states cannot criminalize abortion because reproductive choice is a substantive constitutional right that the Supreme Court — not the federal government — has held that the states cannot deny to the women who live there. There is no federal statute, no act of Congress, no Executive Order, instructing the states that abortion must remain legal.* Liberal views on abortion — and the Supreme Court decisions recognizing and upholding the right thereto — have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with federalism.
[* — Congress could not outlaw abortion nationwide even if it were not a constitutional right; at most, Congress could prohibit crossing state lines to obtain or provide an abortion. If it did, this might be a federalism issue, but it hasn’t, and it can’t, so it’s not. Conversely, the federal courts have never recognized a substantive individual right to buy, sell, possess or use marijuana, so unless and until they do it will remain a federalism issue so long as Congress and the Justice Department are in conflict with the states.]
Here’s the next one:
For the right-tribe, everything is genetic except homosexuality; for the left-tribe, nothing is genetic except homosexuality.
I won’t speak for or ask about the “right-tribe,” but does anyone actually know anyone who believes, who has ever said or written, or even suggested, that “nothing is genetic except homosexuality”? Anyone? Anyone?
During the Bush years, liberals inveighed ceaselessly against executive overreach; under Obama, they cheered when he used his executive authority to alter immigration laws and impose new environmental regulations by fiat.
When and where did this “cheer[ing]” take place? I didn’t cheer; did you cheer? Did you witness or attend the cheering? Does anyone have photos or videos of the cheering? Anyone? Anyone?
Of course, Obama never “used his executive authority to alter immigration laws.” Every word of every immigration statute on the books in the U.S. Code remains exactly the same as it was when Obama took office, including the words that grant the Justice Department discretion to prioritize deportations, which is in any event a practical necessity. And even if Obama did “impose new environmental regulations,” bear in mind that law and regulation are two different things; Congress does the former, the Executive Branch does the latter, by design. Sullivan throws in the words “by fiat” to make it seem like there’s something wrong with this, to do what conservative pundits did throughout the Obama administration: make the benign and routine seem malignant and unprecedented, and thus a legitimate target of unbridled outrage.
... today’s Democrats must believe that different outcomes for men and women in society are entirely a function of sexism.
Does anyone here know anyone who believes that different outcomes for men and women in society are entirely a function of sexism? Anyone? Anyone? Does anyone know of any Democrat who believes, has said, has written, or has suggested, that different outcomes for men and women in society are entirely a function of sexism? On what page of the Democratic Party platform is it stated that Democrats must believe that different outcomes for men and women in society are entirely a function of sexism? Where is this rule written? How, and by whom, is it enforced? What is the consequence to any of today’s Democrats if he or she believes, thinks, says, writes or suggests that different outcomes for men and women in society might in some cases be a function of something other than sexism?
Have I made my point yet?
Democrats cannot say the words illegal immigrants or concede that affirmative action means discriminating against people because of their race.
Really? They cannot say that, or concede that? Assuming it’s true that no living Democrat has ever in his or her life actually said those words or conceded that point — which Andrew neither alleges nor proves — the next question is, Why should they?
Why should Democrats use the phrase “illegal immigrants” when, in reality, there is no such thing? People cannot be illegal; only acts can be illegal, and people who commit illegal acts are not illegal people. American citizens who break the law are not “illegal citizens” or “illegal Americans” or “illegal” anything else’s. To immigrate to the U.S. is not in itself an illegal act; to the extent people immigrate illegally, viz., beyond or in conflict with immigration laws and procedures, “illegal immigration” is a fine and proper term, and I believe Democrats can say, and often do say, those words. There’s no need or reason to say the words “illegal immigrants” except to validate the prejudices and assuage the resentments of anti-immigrant conservatives.
And why should Democrats “concede that affirmative action means discriminating against people because of their race” (again, assuming that no living Democrat has ever done so)? I think a fair and reasonable argument can be made that that is not a fair or reasonable characterization of what “affirmative action means.” Taking race into account is not, in and of itself, “discrimination against” anyone. Why are Democrats required to agree with and repeat conservative spin? Again, apart from validating the prejudices and resentments of conservatives? And why is that shoe only on this foot?
Like Sykes, Sullivan does not by any means go easy on the right, the GOP, the conservative movement, &c. Again, it’s a lengthy and trenchant piece that I highly recommend reading. And in its midst he provides us with this, which is both a salient observation…
Liberals should be able to understand [tribal entrenchment and polarization] by reading any conservative online journalism and encountering the term “the left.” It represents a large, amorphous blob of malevolent human beings, with no variation among them, no reasonable ideas, nothing identifiably human at all.
...and makes us wonder why Sullivan, like Sykes, keeps using that term in precisely that way.
