Over the years, I’ve watched fellow bloggers take their voice legit. My old pal Radley Balko went from being the Agitator to being a WaPo columnist and writing two books of exceptional importance to criminal law.
My friend and former colleague, Cristian Farias used to write on the intersection of criminal law and immigration at Fault Lines, before anybody outside of lawyers gave a hoot about such matters, and then wound up doing a stint on the New York Times’ editorial board, and writes for Vanity Fair and New York Magazine. I’m particularly proud of Cf, as he still thinks in Spanish, yet he writes brilliantly in English. I am amazed at his skills, and thrilled for him that his issues on immigration have finally captured the public’s attention.
And then there was Andrew Sullivan, whose blog, Sully’s Dish, went dark as he became a regular columnist at New York Mag in 2016. Last Friday was his final column, as his “values” no longer aligned with his employer’s.
What has happened, I think, is relatively simple: A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me, and, in a time of ever tightening budgets, I’m a luxury item they don’t want to afford. And that’s entirely their prerogative. They seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space. Actually attacking, and even mocking, critical theory’s ideas and methods, as I have done continually in this space, is therefore out of sync with the values of Vox Media. That, to the best of my understanding, is why I’m out of here.
Whether you share Sully’s disdain for critical theory isn’t the point. The point is that there is no room for any commentary that does not affirmatively extol critical theory. Maybe he mocked too well. Maybe his attacks were too on point. Maybe he made the “critical mass” that refused to associate with him feel foolish or outraged. After all, he was not a true believer in the progressive religion. He was conservative.
Two years ago, I wrote that we all live on campus now. That is an understatement. In academia, a tiny fraction of professors and administrators have not yet bent the knee to the woke program — and those few left are being purged.
Not the deplorable MAGA-hat wearing, confederate flag-toting kind of conservative, though.
And maybe it’s worth pointing out that “conservative” in my case means that I have passionately opposed Donald J. Trump and pioneered marriage equality, that I support legalized drugs, criminal-justice reform, more redistribution of wealth, aggressive action against climate change, police reform, a realist foreign policy, and laws to protect transgender people from discrimination. I was one of the first journalists in established media to come out. I was a major and early supporter of Barack Obama. I intend to vote for Biden in November.
Some on the conservative side of the spectrum might even argue that he wasn’t really much of a conservative, more bent on the ideals of conservatism than its tribal warfare. But still, what he was not was a card-carrying sycophant of the woke, and since he wasn’t with them, he was against them. And he was against them.
It seems to me that if this conservatism is so foul that many of my peers are embarrassed to be working at the same magazine, then I have no idea what version of conservatism could ever be tolerated. And that’s fine. We have freedom of association in this country, and if the mainstream media want to cut ties with even moderate anti-Trump conservatives, because they won’t bend the knee to critical theory’s version of reality, that’s their prerogative.
If ever there was a conservative that progressives could find sufferable, it was Andrew Sullivan. He shared many of their goals, and hated Trump as much as they do. There was common ground, but that ground was a minefield that no one but a sycophant of the untenable ideology of critical theory could navigate. Even Sully’s flavor of conservatism was too “foul” for his peers to stomach.
It wasn’t his writing skills. Sullivan was a brilliant writer, along the lines of a Hitch or maybe even an Oscar Wilde. To the unwashed, he might come off as snarky, but there was a wit to his writing that few possess anymore. One didn’t have to share his views to appreciate his biting wit.
But wit is no longer valued, and indeed, is anathema to the unduly passionate. They don’t see it. They don’t get it. They are offended by it, not just because wit requires a depth of thought that they prefer not to endure, but because it was not in service of their cause. They would much prefer to applaud an irrational position, replete with logical fallacies and laden with jargon of no meaning, than suffer the hard and painful work of thinking about an idea that they knew wasn’t going to confirm their bias.
If the mainstream media will not host a diversity of opinion, or puts the “moral clarity” of some self-appointed saints before the goal of objectivity in reporting, if it treats writers as mere avatars for their race and gender or gender identity, rather than as unique individuals whose identity is largely irrelevant, then the nonmainstream needs to pick up the slack.
Sully is going to resurrect his Dish. It won’t be as big a soap box as he had with New York Magazine. He will no longer get to wrap himself in the attributed cred of a mainstream media pundit. But he’ll get to speak his mind without having to worry that the “critical mass” of his former colleagues are embarrassed to share the same space with him. That’s Sully’s prerogative. And in case you were wondering, mine too.