Certain writers, correct or not, are valuable and a joy to read. (G. K. Chesterton, for instance, with whom I agree less and less each year, but whose every page is sparkling.) Yes, style salvages substance, if one applies enough of it.
Andrew Sullivan has style. But he doesn’t have quite enough to cover his deficits of substance. My view of him, never very high, sank even lower on reading his New York Magazine Trump piece, and then seeing the follow-up interview with Chris Matthews. When a writer gets on the tube and call the presumptive Republican nominee a “neofascist” and “a Reality TV asshole,” one strains to compliment him on the nuanced elegance of his learned self-expression. Which, frankly, has been a stream of moral and intellectual incoherence for quite a while. Sullivan has been a cheerleader for George Bush and Barack Obama, The Bell Curve and the war in Iraq. He’s supported torture and Thatcher, and is a “faithful Roman Catholic” who,to quote Wikipedia, has incidentally “posted anonymous online advertisements for unprotected anal sex, preferably with ‘other HIV-positive men’.”
A record of sound judgements? Hardly. Sullivan doesn’t seem to arrive at sound judgements. He starts from personal preferences, then shores them up with a display of florid stylistics which every writer must admire, but before which every reasonable citizen must cringe. Regrettably, he has his fans and some are notable, such as Ross Douthat, who meditates on Sullivan’s recent abysmal performance at length in a recent Times column, and, alas, falls under Sullivan’s musical spell.
Take this selection of Sullivaniana that Douthat favored enough to quote:
As the authority of elites fades, as Establishment values cede to popular ones, views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehending. And when all the barriers to equality, formal and informal, have been removed; when everyone is equal; when elites are despised and full license is established to do “whatever one wants,” you arrive at what might be called late-stage democracy … And it is when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.
Lovely sentence. But is it even remotely in touch with reality? The “authority of elites” has faded? Try driving into a gated community without the code and see how long it takes to experience some authority. “Magnificently diverse”? We find it “magnificent” that Trump parties in Trump Tower while Ferguson burns? “Elites are despised”? Has anyone told the Kardashians, the Kennedys, the producers of Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous? Full license to do “whatever one wants”? Like, say the “N” word? Refuse to bake a cake for gays? Punch white cops? License, what license? Those things get you arrested, jailed, fired, shunned, sued and on occasion killed.
Till recently, the relation between elites and democracy in America recalled Frederick The Great’s bon mot: “The people say whatever they want. And I do whatever I want.” Ah, where are such benevolent tyrants now? In today’s triumphant democracy, say one wrong word and — unless you’re a real estate investor with very deep pockets and orange hair — your career is over.
Sullivan calls this coercive and inegalitarian society “late-stage democracy,” and fears the coming tyrannization? Look out the window, Andy. It’s here.
I doubt Andy is really disturbed about Plato or the supposed applicability of his notions to technological societies 2,400 years in the future. He just wants to throw some rich black mud at Donald Trump. The racist / sexist / homophobe / bigot chanting is getting old, so we need to come up with a new label: tyrant. The fascist label isn’t sticking, so let’s strike a new path, get classical, and drag in Plato for a dash of class. Mind you, Trump has never held any political power at all, but he’s Trump, so who cares? Hillary has held power, and if Libya is any indication, deployed it stupidly and brutally. Is Hillary a potential tyrant? — Hillary? Hillary who?
Ross Douthat, a far more consistent writer Sullivan, is not alone in suffering the same affliction as other readers and finding Sullivan’s style and show of learning seductive. They’re qualities that turn up nicely in Dothat’s own writing, and if the influence stopped at sentence structure, I’d be a happy reader. But the incoherence infects it too, when Ross gets too close, and it does so drearily. Thus, Ross:
Yes, maybe that wider elite, too, has lost the ability to coordinate against a demagogue;
Which is why all 1,399 (minus four, now) newspapers in the US oppose Trump? Why the whole of the mainstream media has been wallowing in the Hitler meme for months? Why Georgia and Colorado went for Cruz despite frustrated voter outcries? Why the super delegates that could put Bernie Sanders in first place put Hillary there before the race began?
…maybe it, too, is so disdained and dismissed by We the People that the public can be persuaded to replace our overclass en masse with Corey Lewandowski and his epigones.
That’s right, Ross. The world-encircling Hive Mind of the overclass, the full entirety of the 1%, is about to be booted onto the street as Corey Lewandowski and friends move in. Hopefully there’s room in your basement for Sheldon Adelson.
But despite (or because of?) its many vices, our power elite actually seems pretty unified and confident in its own cosmopolitan virtue, pretty good at steering public opinion on many controversial issues, and pretty determined to keep a force like Trumpism at bay.
Pretty good at steering public opinion? Of course they are. That’s why roughly two out of three Americans don’t want any more Muslim immigrants, don’t want any more immigration at all, don’t want NAFTA, don’t want any more foreign military involvement, and do want Trump.
Now If Ross were to say that our power elite is transparently good at making the media organs they own put out the message they want put out, with monolithic uniformity, that might be an accurate statement. The problem is, the uniformity is so monolithic and so gross and so obviously an expression of elite, not public, interests that the public just doesn’t believe it any more.
Douthat rightly and sagely points out that a democracy’s culture doesn’t necessarily translate into a democracy’s politics. He might better have read Martin Gilen’s study on how the elite works to shape democratic culture through politics. Where, for instance, is the burning, overwhelming public groundswell to open girls’ bathrooms to guys? But sexual idiosyncrasy is now sacrosanct, a given for a bored elite ever ready for new diversions; and while trickle-down economics is passé, trickle-down morality is mandatory.
Ross doesn’t explore this particular aspect of our democracy — true, it supports his perception that the elite are far from down and out, but it might appear to question the axiomatic liberal morality of the Times. That way lies madness, and worse: a pink slip. So he dithers:
Which major donor to the left of Michael Bloomberg is going to sit on their hands rather than give to Hillary, the way that many Republican donors sat on their hands rather than go all-in for Cruz and Kasich and even Rubio?
“Sat on their hands”? Here’s a NY Times list of a hundred donors dropping at least a million apiece on the candidates. One single candidate other than Trump donated to Trump; all the rest went to Cruz and Kasich and Rubio and Hillary.
How many mainstream media figures are going to go all-in for Trump in the style of Sean Hannity or certain segments of talk radio?
Um… several hundred? (Y’know, it’s really easy to research these things, Ross.)
(Trump will get obsessive mainstream media coverage, but he already gets that, and all those hours of CNN and the nightly news have delivered him a 30 percent approval rating.)
Uh… no. He just took the Northeast and Indiana with roughly 60% and more. He got more than all his opponents put together. Remember?
Which apolitical gurus are going to go to work to build his turnout operation, his voter targeting, his web presence, his ad campaign?
Given that all those conventional things were deployed to the max by Trump opponents from Bush to Cruz, and they all failed miserably, should Trump really care?
Which retired generals and foreign policy hands are going to line up behind him, vouching for his soundness of mind and seriousness of purpose?
I was not aware that retired generals dictated who is to be our President, or are so versed in Freudian psychoanalysis as to sit in judgement on our candidates’ soundness of mind. Though I must wonder why Ross is neglecting to cite former Navy Secretary Jim Webb, who has been on Trump’s shortlist for VP for a while now. And I also wonder why Ross is also not looked at actual military service members, who, according to one poll, prefer Trump over Hillary by nearly three to one. Is there a gap between elite and rank-an-file there too? Yes, yes, Ross we all know you can write. Some evidence, please?
Which pundit-intellectuals are going to channel their Hillary-skepticism into a full-throated support for Trump? (Not Sullivan, clearly …)
Well, no, not Sullivan. He has other intellectual things to do — put out ads for unprotected anal sex and the like. As far as pundit-intellectuals go, however, I suppose Ross is unaware of a major schism among the more esoteric intellectuals, like the American Straussians, a significant proportion of whom appear to be Trumping rather heavily. He entirely ignores the Alt Right, of course, and the neoreactionaries, the paleoconservatives like Paul Gottfried, dissident rightists like Ann Coulter and John Derbyshire. They’re 100% pro-Trump, but the New York Times won’t publish them (though, holding their nose, they’ll grudgingly print rankings of Ann’s ten NYT best sellers). And, you know, if the Times won’t touch you, then there’s just nothing more to say: you really are a mere common bozo, and Ross Douthat and Andrew Sullivan don’t need to take note of you.
“But Ann Coulter sells more books and has more readers than both of you put together!” Oh shut up. (Bigot.)
Ross winds up his argument by saying, in contrast to Sullivan, that It Can’t Happen Here, because here The Responsible Media — valiant American patriots like Ross and Andrew and Carlos Slim — are unified and foursquare in their policing of Neanderthal yawps burbling up from the Populist underbelly in the misshapen form of lurching humpbacks like Donald Trump, the Cthulhu from the caucuses. No, the real danger, warns Ross, would be a President who has the complete blessing of the Fourth Estate, our noble cultural guardians. Such a President could order assassinations willy-nilly; have drones obliterate entire villages just to torch one suspect; commit troops all over the world without any Congressional approval at all; engage in covert activities hidden from all public scrutiny; defy Congress; ignore laws; such a man would be the sort of President — why, the sort of President who looks a lot like our current President, come to think of it.
Oh, that would be bad!