The Decline and Fall of Andrew Sullivan

The conservative commentator appears to have finally lost (or abandoned) his mind.

I thought long and hard about whether I wanted to devote yet another newsletter--or, for the matter, another iota of my mental energy--to a takedown of Andrew Sullivan. I’ve spent far too much time over the past year ranting about his disingenuousness, his toxic political beliefs, and his intellectual dishonesty. Should I really do so again, I wondered? Weren’t there more important things, and people, to write about? However, the sheer effrontery of his most recent newsletter, in which he engages not only in his typical both-sides nonsense but also takes some truly disgusting potshots at Ibram X. Kendi and other prominent Black thinkers, forced my hand. I refuse to keep silent while Sullivan continues to propagate his thinly-veiled racism, all under the guise of protecting “liberal democracy.” 

To be sure, liberal democracy is a thing that we should all be committed to, and I think that most people--excluding a vocal minority on the left and an increasing majority on the right--would agree. In Sullivan’s telling, however, we’re facing a cultural revolution imposed by some shadowy establishment of crazy lefties who want to inflict a whole host of changes on American society, including (gasp!) biological sex being “replaced by socially constructed gender so that women have penises and men have periods.” In his diatribe, Sullivan abandons all trace of nuance or depth, going straight for the jugular with a crudity that would be more at home on Breitbart or Reddit. In fact, reading it I had to double-check to make sure that it was Sullivan I was actually reading and not some right-wing troll or provocateur. 

He saves his greatest opprobrium for Ibram X. Kendi, the writer and activist whose work has regularly appeared in The Atlantic and who currently heads the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. Sullivan clearly sees Kendi as the avatar for everything that he finds terrifying about the elevation of Black voices, because he engages in some of the most disgusting low blows that I’ve seen from a supposedly professional journalist. After bemoaning the fact that Kendi is “feted across the establishment,” Sullivan concludes with the following unflattering comparison of the scholar with President Obama: “He is as dumb as Obama is smart; as crude as Obama is nuanced; as authoritarian as Obama is liberal.” It’s a statement that’s as vulgar as it is false.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by Sullivan’s vitriol. He’s made no secret of his contempt for Black people, including most notably his near-constant peddling of the “model minority” myth. Even given all of that, it’s still pretty staggering, and repulsive, to see a White writer call one of this country’s foremost Black intellectuals “dumb,” a remark that clearly intends to put Kendi in his “proper place.” I suppose this is what happens when you don’t have an editor over your shoulder reminding you of why it’s decidedly not a good look to engage in this sort of rhetorical posturing. It’s especially puzzling for Sullivan to engage in this sort of invective, given that he is (supposedly) so invested in restoring some measure of dignity to American political discourse. Then again, we all know that that’s not really his project anyway, so in launching this broadside against Kendi, he’s really just telling on himself in the most obvious (and odious) way imaginable.

Reading this lengthy screed, I couldn’t help but wonder: has Andrew Sullivan finally lost his mind? After his departure from New York Magazine (which he also alludes to in this piece), he has leaned into all of his worst instincts as a writer and a thinker. In addition to his flirting (and sometimes outright embracing) of racist ideologies, he’s also engaged in all sorts of transphobic nonsense, including peddling the absurd lie that we’re suddenly facing a decline in the lesbian population because they’re all now turning into trans-men. 

All of this wouldn’t trouble me so much if Sullivan were just another crank shouting into the void, but the truth of the matter is that he’s a public intellectual (if we can grant him that much credit) of substantial influence. His Substack newsletter is currently one of the most popular on the site, with tens of thousands of subscribers. Peruse his Twitter feed, and you’ll find that there are quite a few people who agree with his toxic approach to analyzing our politics and our culture. 

For these reasons, it’s important, indeed necessary, for those of us who expect our thought leaders to be intellectually honest to call Sullivan out when he’s engaging in the sort of behavior that he so vehemently condemns in other members of the commentariat. 

The sad part of all of this is that, once upon a time, I actually respected Sullivan’s intelligence and his wit. Though I disagreed with him about a lot of things--most notably his neo-conservative beliefs, made most obvious in his support of the Iraq War--I also recognized that there were times when he hit the nail right on the head. His piece for New York entitled “The Madness of King Donald” was one of the most searingly intelligent things I’d read about Trump, and it made me think that maybe, just maybe, there was something to his fan base after all. 

Unfortunately, all of that seems to have gone by the wayside, and now his curmudgeonly approach to commentary seems to have consumed all of his critical instincts. These days, it seems that he’s only out to get more and more clicks (and, presumably, newsletter subscriptions) by indulging in the sort of ugly rhetoric that one expects from the seedier parts of the internet. If, as he claims, Sullivan wants to see a restoration of a liberal democratic society, I fail to see how hurling caustic barbs at prominent Black intellectuals and grossly overstating the influence of elite universities--to say nothing of his lazy use of the term “critical race theory”--is going to accomplish that. If anything, it’s going to do the exact opposite. 

Going forward, I hope (probably in vain) that Sullivan will rein in his more toxic instincts and instead engage with the actual ideas of those that he disagrees with--including Kendi--rather than restoring to childish insults and name-calling.