00:01:06.240on none other than noted gender conservative Andrew Sullivan.
00:01:10.740It's an episode that we did back in the summer,
00:01:13.200and we're going to release one episode today and one on Friday.
00:01:17.200And yeah, it's an episode we remain very proud of.
00:01:19.920I think we really got into what makes this man so maddening,
00:01:23.800so interesting, and we were able to, I think,
00:01:25.480accord him a great deal of humanity and a great deal of understanding0.99
00:01:28.720while also really calling him out on all his, spoiler alert, copious bullshit.0.79
00:01:35.780Speaking of which, if this is the kind of content you like,0.96
00:01:39.880if you think like, wow, three hours of podcasting on Andrew Sullivan
00:01:43.580sounds awesome to me, or if you just like our style
00:01:47.260sort of more off the cuff on the Patreon and you're not yet a supporter,
00:01:51.220this might also be a good moment to subscribe at patreon.com slash embed with the right
00:01:57.800the patreon and the community that goes with it including on patreon itself and on discord
00:02:03.460is absolutely wonderful so if you're into that sort of thing why not you know like subscribe
00:02:10.020review us on itunes and then go to patreon.com all right well i'll leave it at that take care
00:02:16.400of yourselves. Have a wonderful holiday and can't wait to talk to you next week and the new year
00:02:22.480after that. Hello, I'm Adrian Dobb. And I'm Moira Donegan. Whether we like it or not, we're in bed
00:02:39.440with the right. So, Adrienne, today we are tackling one of the most significant forces
00:02:48.420in gender conservatism in my lifetime, I think. One of our white whales on this podcast,
00:02:55.880one of our bugaboos, and somebody we think is litigious and annoying enough that we decided0.52
00:03:03.000to put this one behind the paywall on the Patreon, so it's only for our true heads.
00:03:07.540Today we are talking about a gentleman named Andrew Sullivan.
00:03:12.120We're doing it. It's hot white whale summer. We're doing Schlafly. We're doing Enlightenment. We're doing Tar. And we're doing Andrew Sullivan.
00:03:21.520Yeah. Should we talk about our relationship to this man to start with, or do we want to weave that into the story?
00:03:28.440Let's get our caveats and disclosures out of the way to begin with, because Andrew Sullivan is a guy who has come after me personally.
00:03:36.780He is a British-born conservative pundit. He has worked at basically every major publication writing about politics. So he was most famously, in the early 90s, the editor-in-chief of the New Republic. He also worked for the New York Times magazine. He worked for the Daily Beast. He worked for Time, I think.
00:04:01.680And he is a Gen X, maybe late boomer, paragon of the political blogging generation.
00:04:09.740And he is somebody who has made his career as a conservative.
00:04:15.280We only have a couple of these people, like Katie Roy, if he does the same thing.
00:04:17.740Like they say over and over again the same point that they've been making since the 90s, which is like the left has gone too far, right?
00:04:24.320That is basically the substance of everything he has ever written.
00:04:28.420And he is like a malevolent Forrest Gump, right?
00:04:31.460We have a couple of these people where his is a story that touches on a lot of recurring themes in American politics, but more or less every big controversy that has arisen through media, through American conservatism, he has been there over the past 30 years, and he has been like a figure-shaping conservative thought about it, right?
00:04:57.580Sometimes in a kind of, you know, I think the nice word would be iconoclastic, the not nice word would be incoherent manner, right? He is like not a guy with a very legible set of principles and political commitments.
00:05:10.940But he does have this notion that there's one set of actors in American political life, and it is left. And then there is a passive right wing that doesn't really seem to be like ascribed much agency, right? And passivity is the one thing he seems to very, like, consistently believe in, right? He thinks the people acting to change the world, at least progressives, are always doing something wrong by doing so.
00:05:40.940So maybe we should justify what we're talking about this guy.
00:05:46.320So I think there are four reasons why I was interested
00:05:48.740and why, honestly, it's taken us this long
00:05:51.920and 14 pages of very small notes to get to the bottom of this.
00:05:57.080This might be a long one, folks, strap in.
00:05:59.440To talk about Andrew Sullivan is to talk about an era,
00:06:01.620which is a little strange given that he's still quite productive,
00:06:04.100quite influential, but in rereading his oeuvre,
00:06:07.020I'm just struck by how 90s this guy is, right?
00:06:10.940So many walks down memory lanes, like weird.coms, blogs, left-wing McCarthyism, The Bell Curve.
00:06:20.040I reread my colleague Paul Robinson's book, Queer Wars, which is in part a attack on Andrew Sullivan from like 2003 or 2004.
00:06:28.100So the first book to really think about what is gay conservatism.
00:06:31.900And there's a little bit in one of the chapters on Sullivan where he has to define what a blog is.
00:06:37.280And you're like, yeah, man, this is...
00:06:40.940Yeah. So Sullivan is, you know, we mentioned that he's been sort of everywhere. He's this blogger. He has been a opinion columnist and political commentator. We mentioned The Bell Curve, his sort of famous endorsement of a early 90s book that purported to show a link between race and intelligence, like heritable intelligence.
00:07:07.320He was a big proponent of the Iraq War.
00:07:11.280He was a very early proponent from the right of gay marriage.0.96
00:07:17.540He published his first argument for gay marriage, I believe in the New Republic, in like 1989.
00:07:22.860And then it became the subject of a book he published in the early 90s called Virtually Normal, which I think we're going to get into a lot.0.70
00:07:29.560and now he has since taken on the position that gay rights is over we won we did it and that
00:07:40.880anything that happens in this space now is substantively not just counterproductive but
00:07:47.960actively evil right yeah so that's i think the second reason to look at really the extent of his
00:07:53.840output because he contains these contradictions, as you say, that really build a bridge between0.62
00:07:59.640these sort of anti-PC discourse of the 90s and today's anti-wokesters, I feel like, right? He
00:08:04.280thrives on contrarianism and on conflict. But at the same time, as you say, there's something
00:08:12.320amazing about a mind that is able to find something of interest in the bell curve for 30 years. It's
00:08:19.220like move on man it just feels very stuck in some way he doesn't apply his own principles
00:08:25.040consistently right he clearly sees himself as this bold heterodox truth teller right same as
00:08:30.100what he thinks with about murray but as you say in his post 9-11 writings he seems absolutely
00:08:34.880allergic to people being heterodox truth tellers and seems very ready to like basically sick the
00:08:43.820feds on them. He is on the one hand, a very public man, but also like has, to my mind,
00:08:50.700an antiquated public-private distinction that seems very, very central to his own
00:08:55.540self-perception. Yes. And to his politics, this is something I want to talk about is like
00:08:59.360the maleness of his particular brand of gay conservatism and the sort of myopic0.98
00:09:04.860obliviousness to like the realities of women's lives that have allowed Andrew Sullivan to have0.61
00:09:09.560the worldview that he has. Yeah. And I think that's probably a third reason to look at him.
00:09:13.820Because the Supreme Court, again, seems to be using private rights of citizens to curtail the public rights of citizens who happen to be LGBT right now.0.52
00:09:25.560This is what this last term of the Supreme Court has wrought.
00:09:28.860And it's been going on for a while now.
00:09:30.760But it's very clear that they're saying private citizens' right to discriminate against gay people in public outweighs their right not to get discriminated against.0.99
00:09:42.920It's a position that really carried the day, but that now is really coming back to bite the movement in the ass.0.98
00:09:48.260Andrew Sullivan seems to take zero responsibility for that, even though he had a big hand in shaping this.0.95
00:09:53.740Another thing that's really interesting about Andrew Sullivan is that he is like the mold in which a lot of our subsequent reactionary centrists were cast, right?
00:10:04.320He's like a prototype of this kind of pundit that's now everywhere, right?
00:10:08.900There's a sense of being, like, victimized and aggrieved in his work. There's a lot of, like, moralism, like, normative moralism that, like, strives to, like, position itself as principal in his work.
00:10:26.440And these are things that, like, you really see being reproduced in, like, your John McWhorters, your Thomas Chatterton Williams, your, like, Jonathan Chates, right?
00:10:36.520There's, like, a posture that has now become, like, endemic to this certain kind of thought that I really do see him as being, like, patient zero for.
00:10:46.860I mean, people have had his number on this for a while.
00:10:49.380And researching this, I read a really good piece by Richard Goldstein in The Village Voice from 2001.0.57
00:10:54.400And he points out, quote, the fact is that launching an attack on gay, quote, orthodoxies is the surest route to celebrity for a homosexual thinker.
00:11:02.860Anyone who breaks with the movement is called courageous.
00:11:05.140Anyone who mocks queer mores is seen as a true individual.0.99
00:11:08.240In reality, writers like Papaglia and Sullivan are reassuring rogues, affirming the biases that straights dare not admit they hold.1.00
00:11:16.080I think that's very, very, very good.0.99
00:11:19.140And it's shocking how often people have called this guy on his shit and he just kind of keeps plugging away at it.0.99
00:11:27.380You don't want to hand it to a man, but, you know, he reads all these.0.99
00:11:43.340What is the world that created this man, Andrew Sullivan?
00:11:48.340The way I thought we'd structure this, or the way we agreed to structure this, would be that we're going to mostly focus on 10 essays, books, articles of his.
00:12:41.440but was not necessarily born into them.
00:12:43.100His mother, he said, has been in and out of mental hospitals.
00:12:46.380She appears to have been quite mentally ill, which I think does matter because Sullivan is at his most movingly conservative, I would say, as someone who thinks through the things that are just given in our lives.
00:12:59.920What you're getting at is that he does very consistently have a sense of fadedness or a resistance to a social or historical explanation for some sort of factors that he sees as like pre-social and fundamental to the human psyche and identity.0.59
00:13:17.000I believe he has once said that one of the ur scenes that ushered him into conservatism was an effort by the Labour government to integrate basically different streams in British schools. Keep that in mind.
00:13:30.920He was in a admissions selective school where he had been identified as promising or as different in some sort of superior way.
00:13:42.520And the school he was at, I believe it was like a secondary school or like a grammar school or something.
00:13:46.600The school he was at was integrated with another school or it was a tried, the officials tried to integrate it with another school that was not admissions selective.
00:14:41.900And it's the moment AIDS appears in the public record.
00:14:44.960This is when a young man of Sullivan's age would have found out about this, right?
00:14:50.160And, you know, college is when a lot of people start having the sex that defines their adult lives, right?
00:14:55.700So he is becoming a sexually active adult at the same time that this sort of, like, existential threat to people whose sexuality is like his is emerging.0.87
00:15:04.660Add one of the gayer places on earth.0.55
00:15:09.000And I think it might be interesting to talk briefly, and we might get into this later, about the role of AIDS in shaping his conservatism.
00:15:16.080Because it seems like it looms large for gay conservatives of that generation.
00:15:20.940And the other thing that I think I couldn't find confirmation on, but it does strike me that there is this, so he goes to Oxford and he's running in like circles that would define post-statuerite conservatism in the UK, right?
00:15:37.440he was on a trajectory to be part, not really to be a writer about the conservative movement,
00:15:42.940but to be a big political part of it, that doesn't end up happening. And I do wonder
00:15:48.260to what extent his homosexuality is basically the stumbling block, right? In Virtually Normal,1.00
00:15:55.280he speaks of, quote, those who grow up and find themselves different, and that's his problem.
00:16:00.140He could be a Thatcherite foot soldier, except he finds himself different. I do wonder whether
00:16:06.780his decision to go to the U.S. afterwards isn't sort of about that. So, after college, instead of,
00:16:14.780you know, going to work for a Tory MP or whatever the trajectory of such a young man might be,
00:16:22.400he instead goes to Harvard and he gets his PhD in government there.
00:16:27.520Exactly. He goes to Harvard Kennedy School of Governance and pursues a...
00:16:34.720No, it's all right. We're getting the names of the fancy schools wrong, and I think it speaks to our populist authenticity. Look at us, salt to the earth, Stanford-employed San Franciscans.0.99
00:16:47.280Yeah, I have still not been. But yeah, so his dissertation advisor is none other than Harvey Mansfield, conservative author of a book on masculinity that he had not written then, but very smart guy. And he writes a dissertation entitled Intimations Pursued, The Voice of Practice in the Conversation of Michael Oakeshott. So this is on the then fairly unknown British philosopher Michael Oakeshott.
00:17:12.180So for our listeners who aren't familiar, can you just give us a brief gloss on Michael Oakeshott, this very influential thinker in the life of Andrew Sullivan?
00:17:19.460Yeah, so I'll try. I've read very little Oakeshott in my day. I read parts of Andrew Sullivan's dissertation about him.
00:17:29.480It came out like a couple of years ago in this like series on sort of Oakshot studies. And it's basically, I think, a conservatism is my read that's not based on natural law or revelation, right? Oakshot appears to have been a religious thinker, but it's not a religiously derived conservatism.
00:17:48.180And I think it's Neo-Burckian, but with a more pronounced kind of quietism, right?
00:17:57.380As Sullivan says in his book on conservatism, that, quote,
00:18:01.160there is no way, Oakeshott argues, to generate a personal moral life from a book, a text, a theory.
00:18:06.300We live the way we have grown accustomed to live.
00:18:09.300Our morality is like a language we have learned and deploy in every new instant.
00:18:13.340That's to say, for him, it's conservatism about sensibility.
00:18:16.100and I think that's true for Sullivan too at some points
00:18:19.180and it is about a way of being in the world
00:18:22.760it's not necessarily about precepts being applied
00:20:31.820His conservatism book is all about this kind of temperament
00:20:34.620that sort of stands back and takes stock.0.99
00:20:36.740Now, the first person to be surprised by that stance would be Andrew Sullivan, because unlike Pamela Paul, who I think comes by a very similar debombalizing ethic the old-fashioned way, she appears to just want to read some books in her nook and like, you kids to stay out of her goddamn yard.0.96
00:20:57.620She also wants to be congratulated for it, which is another.0.96
00:23:14.040In some ways, it's also his kiss-off to academia.1.00
00:23:17.000It is a look at these pointy-headed idiots, right, who aren't interesting.0.99
00:23:21.660like it's it's a first sort of self-articulation of what he will do differently from from them0.99
00:23:27.540is this when the guy with degrees from oxford and harvard uh makes a mockery of the out-of-touch
00:23:34.760elites no but it's also like the wrong elites right he says that they're lower tier right he's
00:23:40.640like they're not actually good enough yeah exactly yeah like he does seem to have a sense of there's
00:23:46.140a natural hierarchy and it is not the one that's represented in this case on the campus and i think
00:23:50.760that this all kind of hangs together like there is on the one hand this eligibility of uk class
00:23:56.100distinction to american audiences right like he this is something that that brits i feel like
00:24:02.020frankly exploit a lot in the u.s which is that like they come out of a system in which you locate
00:24:07.740yourself the moment you open your mouth when people know exactly where you went and what you
00:24:11.500did yes and you come across the pond and everyone's oh how fancy yes which also allows them to
00:24:16.820disappear their class privilege as well at times or enhance their sense of like elite credibility
00:24:24.440at other times. There's like micro gradations of class distinction that are legible
00:24:29.000to a British ear that make no sense to an American. I still think that he hit some sort
00:24:34.820of limit at Oxford, right? Like he could have swum in the Tory gay mainstream the way a character in0.99
00:24:42.000an Alan Hollingshurst novel would, but that was not what he did. It's noticeable that he emerges0.88
00:24:47.140onto the U.S. scene with a really white-hot hatred for outing. And I'm like, huh, I wonder
00:24:52.220if there's any causal connection there. Let's just make the implicit explicit. You think that
00:24:57.000he was outed at Oxford and that this destroyed his career ambitions. I will say one complicating
00:25:03.120factor is that Andrew Sullivan was writing about American politics for a British audience before
00:25:09.820he came to the US. That's true. So he already had at least one foot in this puddle. And sometimes
00:25:17.040British people come to the US thinking that they're going to be in a bigger pond. They're
00:25:21.980thinking like, I'm going to go where the real action is and leave what is now like a sort of
00:25:28.480like provincial island. I think this is something that Americans are increasingly going to be doing
00:25:32.940too. On the outing stuff, right? Like he comes to the US and he realized that outing is by that
00:25:39.240point a mostly left-wing activity right this is a tactic engaged in by gay rights activists0.74
00:25:45.960particularly by like hiv aids activists that's right to try and elicit change by pointing out
00:25:53.460the hypocrisy of powerful closeted people which was a robust tradition on the american right
00:25:59.920that's right and it's noticeable that like a lot of time when you get to sullivan's very strange
00:26:06.120sort of horseshoe theorizing where it's the extreme right and the extreme left if you basically
00:26:10.840substitute like the masthead of the village voice that's it he's basically like oh he the lefties
00:26:17.740do what the what right-wing tories do in the uk that appears to be the experiential core of this
00:26:24.260habit of his to be like oh actually it's this is where the far right and the far left meet and far
00:26:29.440left just means people who are more out than you are right is like focus on the family yeah and
00:26:34.200And like personally, Jesse Helms and people with a lot of money and seats of actual power.
00:26:39.880And the far left is, you know, a couple of guys in ACT UP.
00:26:43.800The equivalence of things that are actually very asymmetrical is a recurring theme in his thought that I think has been very influential for subsequent reactionary centrists.
00:26:54.560Although there's a bit of a misnomer because Andrew Sullivan is a true conservative.
00:26:57.360The other thing that all roads to nowhere got me to realize that with fascinations with race and IQ, that it's like a political ideology, but it's also part of a personality structure, isn't it? It's like the kind of person who somehow needs this to be true. And I think you get the impression, even from this early text, that Andrew Sullivan is just the kind of person who needs this to be true. He's obsessed with hierarchies. He has, as you said, with the comprehensive school of his childhood, he has a real hatred for the breaking down of distinctions, right?
00:27:27.020He's also got a deep investment in the notion that those hierarchies are biological, pre-social, not historically conditioned.
00:27:34.740He's like, no, this is something that we are born into.
00:33:12.520And this idea of oblivious life, I think,
00:33:14.600he's raging against this kind of Reaganite consensus
00:33:18.820that basically this isn't really worth talking about.
00:33:21.600Still, I think in an interview with Anderson Cooper a couple of years ago,
00:33:24.800he made the obvious comparison to Vietnam.
00:33:26.280And he's like, more people were dying that decade than did in Vietnam,
00:33:29.680but it just didn't happen to the same Americans.0.92
00:33:31.760It happened to gay men as gay men.0.91
00:33:33.280And drug users as drug users, right? And these were identities that were discarded as outside of the respectable vision of like American aspiration, right? And that is something that he was able to see the injustice of, which is why it is enraging that he cannot apply that same logic to other fights.0.66
00:33:56.160But I do want to dwell for a minute on this moment of gay conservative reckoning with AIDS, right? Because what AIDS did was make explicit this cleavage within the gay community of like different ways of responding to the AIDS crisis, right?
00:34:15.960And one way that I think Andrew Sullivan really typifies was a move towards social conservatism.0.51
00:34:23.880You could see a gay man of Andrew Sullivan's generation being drawn to the right basically through libertarianism, right?0.80
00:34:30.720Like, leave us alone. Stop rating our bars.1.00
00:34:33.320Like, get the government out of my bedroom.
00:34:35.040That kind of stuff, which is a line that Andrew Sullivan will take subsequently.
00:34:39.300But that's not really what he does in the wake of the AIDS crisis.0.77
00:34:42.120What he does in the wake of the AIDS crisis is go much more in like a gay version of social conservatism, right?0.65
00:34:48.300A gay version of an assimilationist, pro-family, anti-promiscuity vision of gay life that tries to make gay life almost as a retreat from AIDS into like as close as possible a mimicry of straight life, right?0.76
00:35:10.440And this is where I think he becomes most passionate about gay marriage, not as a matter of dignity for an oppressed minority, not as a matter of the evolution of the institution of marriage to be more encompassing of relations of equality, but about making gay people something different than they were at the time.0.80
00:35:32.440And that's, of course, what's happening in the famous 1989 text on the case for gay marriage.0.74
00:35:39.380He does two things, right? On the one hand, he's saying he's trying to put the issue of gay marriage on the front burner. He's trying to say this will, to some extent, solve some of these problems, and it addresses some of the iniquities that the AIDS crisis has brought to the fore.
00:35:56.220at the same time he's also not so subtly chiding the gay movement for not attending to this enough0.76
00:36:04.800as with gay life gay death frankly we'll get back to that in a second there is a very beautiful part
00:36:10.000to that argument where he's like passionately pleading for dignity in a way that would literally
00:36:16.340find its way into the majority opinion of anthony kennedy another conservative catholic in the
00:36:22.940Obergefell decision almost 30 years later. But on the other hand, there is this less remembered
00:36:29.140part to both of these texts where it's like, well, activists are doing it wrong. He's saying
00:36:33.160the gay movement should really focus on gay marriage and gays in the military. And for those
00:36:37.940of our listeners who are too young to remember, that is pretty much exactly what happened. That's
00:36:41.940important that this man who keeps beating up on the gay movement shaped what it did for like 200.79
00:36:47.260years. You got your wish. And abandoned other projects to do this, not just AIDS research,0.90
00:36:54.380which he sort of declared was no longer necessary in 1996, but also like non-discrimination in
00:37:00.900employment. That was the big gay movement legal push beforehand. And then it became marriage
00:37:08.780largely due to the intervention of people like Andrew Sullivan. That's right. On the one hand,
00:37:13.180he makes an argument that the reason gay marriage isn't enough of a topic is that gay people haven't0.93
00:37:22.160chosen to make it one now you might say like well yeah because it turns out when you did
00:37:26.400uh conservatives ran on that and like won a bunch of elections like it could have been smart to be
00:37:32.020like maybe we just shouldn't die and we discriminated against um feels like this is down the
00:37:37.020line kind of thing like who knows you can have a debate about that but that's not how he sees it
00:37:42.380he thinks the reason that queers didn't go for gay marriage is that they were too libertine and
00:37:47.520too in love with being not normal man and whatever. It's like, yeah, whatever, go hippie punch someone0.98
00:37:53.020else. Like, this is so stupid. Like, of course that exists. Like that Michel Foucault was probably1.00
00:37:57.540not a huge proponent of gay marriage, I'll allow, but like, fuck off. When I was a young gay person1.00
00:38:04.100once upon a time, the people giving us lectures about how marriage was the wrong goal were like0.72
00:38:10.440a fringe group of, like, septum-piercing kids from Oberlin, and there were maybe 2,000 of them
00:38:17.040in the whole country, and Andrew Sullivan blows up their influence. Like, this is a guy whose whole
00:38:22.980political philosophy is about incrementalism and quietism and passivity. Now, with this issue
00:38:32.240taking up a really maximalist outsider stance when he first advances it in the late 80s,
00:38:38.120And that is very revealing to me, right? Because I think it shows what his actual beliefs are, which are less about passivity than like affirmative investment in hierarchy, right? The things that he says the radical queers don't like about marriage are the things that he does like about marriage. He's admitting his own investments by like strawmanning a supposed opposition that didn't really exist.
00:39:02.440yeah these are the kind these are the kinds of arguments you would encounter in grad school but
00:39:06.260not even and here it comes in the kind of grad school he attended like if he'd gotten the phd
00:39:11.220in comparative literature sure but he didn't even do that it's like you you had to look these people
00:39:16.520up in order to find them and to disagree with them so he says for instance in the case for gay
00:39:20.560marriage quote the gay movement has ducked this issue primarily out of fear of division much of
00:39:25.820the gay leadership clings to notions of gay life as essentially outsider anti-bourgeois and radical
00:39:31.860Marriage for them is co-optation into straight society.0.81
00:39:34.500That's the transition that he's tracing here.0.86
00:39:36.480And that's the transition that is supposed to be effectuated by the push for gay marriage.
00:39:40.980A need to rebel has quietly ceded to a desire to belong.0.80
00:39:44.220To be gay and to be bourgeois no longer seem like such an absurd proposition.
00:39:48.740Certainly since AIDS, to be gay and to be responsible has become a necessity.0.99
00:39:52.760So he's like, we used to be run by these crazy screaming queens.0.98
00:39:56.520And now we're going to be run by the adults in the room, right?
00:39:59.420And our friends over at Bad Gaze, who devoted only their fifth episode ever to Andrew Sullivan, do point out that this is just a massive—it's a great episode.
00:43:41.400And who's to say that marriage doesn't endow me with the right to beat my wife, you know, like the mystifying, like we need to draw a shroud over the private sphere and not allow either outside critique of other people or like any kind of obligation to the law to interfere with this special privacy realm is a recipe for abuse, right?0.99
00:44:06.320Because where there is no law, the strong rule, and who tends to be most strong versus most weak in a home, is a very gendered question.
00:44:14.820Sorry, I thought you asked me a different question.
00:44:17.540I was speaking as Andrew Sullivan here, yeah.
00:44:19.460I have also noticed about Andrew Sullivan in particular is that whenever he refers to gay marriage, he always qualifies it as civil marriage.
00:44:25.780He's got this, like, almost hands-up defensiveness and, like, deferentialness to the religious marriages from which he and, like, us are excluded.
00:44:35.900Like, he is being very, very specific about what he means in a way that almost seems meant to, as a lot of the kind of marriage activism he was participating in in the 90s, was meant to be, like, almost obsessively non-threatening to the Christian right.
00:44:53.540Yeah, that's another point that we'll have to make when we get to virtually normal, which can be a really baffling book until you realize it's not written with you and me in mind.
00:45:01.140It's not meant to convince gay people.0.60
00:45:03.740This was from a time when, I guess, ostensibly social conservatives still read books written by people who were not complete psychopaths.0.97
00:45:12.780Are we calling Andrew Sullivan not a complete psychopath?
00:45:16.700But I think there's no way that a televangelist today would be reading a book written by David Brooks.
00:45:26.120This is a book addressed to fellow conservatives. This is his pitch to fellow conservatives to get on board with this project. It's not pitched at us, and this article probably isn't either.
00:45:37.300Look, I can lead the way in assimilating this group of people who you don't like because they're not domesticated. Like, quite literally domesticated, right? Like cats. We're going to put them in the home and we're going to give them a nice little, like, leave it to beaver with his and his instead of his and hers, right?
00:46:00.060The vision of marriage that Andrew Sullivan was proposing for gay people in the 1990s is something that it had long since stopped being for straight people.0.96
00:46:12.160The thing about gay marriage is that in reality, gay marriage became thinkable because straight marriage had ceased to be as uniform and effective tool of social control of women, right?
00:46:24.740And it became something that was more accommodating towards these partnerships of equals rather than a property relation of one person over another.
00:46:34.140And Andrew Sullivan is like offering to evangelicals a vision of marriage that turns back the clock on their own straight marriages, right?
00:46:41.020nice yeah as you say he's doing something quite radical and like props to him to some extent
00:46:47.280but he then almost reflexively flips to like oh the reason you don't have it is because of the
00:46:54.460sex radicals and you get this in gay life gay death as well where he does these very interesting
00:47:01.160kind of observations about gay activism basically and it's really interesting that this text kind
00:47:08.100of alternates between really as you say beautifully empathetic passages about individual sufferers
00:47:14.540including from all races and backgrounds he's very careful not to just interview uh the kinds
00:47:19.720of people that show up at act up meetings like that's great to these kind of long passages where
00:47:26.360you can just tell he just doesn't like those activists he doesn't like the way they talk
00:47:30.620about aids he doesn't like the way act up confronts people it doesn't like he doesn't like that the
00:47:37.420protests they did in churches he's annoyed about the fact that act up uses outing i'll give you one
00:47:42.520example uh in the hands of out week a new magazine closely allied to act up outing has become a way
00:47:48.280of enforcing ideological conformity on illiberal lines like this is just an anti-pc screed right
00:47:56.400it speaks to the same notion that sex should be private and like beyond anybody else's critique
00:48:05.400which is hostile both to, like, feminist and to, like, radical queer visions.
00:48:12.100No, sexuality is actually implicated in politics.0.97
00:48:14.480It's used to limit certain kinds of freedom and repress certain kinds of people.
00:48:20.460And what he wants is sex completely insulated from politics,0.95
00:48:24.400which makes sense if you're a gay conservative, right?0.98
00:48:26.620If you want to be like, no, no, no, this part of my life doesn't count.0.97
00:48:29.200Do not look behind this velvet rope I've put up.
00:48:33.120Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
00:48:36.960At the same time, I mean, this is someone who does openly write as a gay man and even comes out about his HIV status at a time when that was definitely not self-understood.
00:48:45.960At the same time, so I think my problem with this is not so much that it's convenient.
00:51:17.720Yeah. Whenever anybody has a broad pronouncement to make about the Jews, you know it's going to go great.1.00
00:51:24.120Yeah. You know it's an AI trained on Twitter.0.99
00:51:29.760So Andrew Sullivan was, and I must say completely unprompted, a very, very big proponent of this book.
00:51:40.860In particular, he was a big proponent of what has now gotten termed like the race realist assertions of this book, right?
00:51:49.340So these people who claim that this, and I have to really emphasize, like repeatedly and thoroughly empirically debunked data reveals this underlying fact about hierarchies being ordained by a kind of like fate that is cemented in biology or nature.
00:52:12.460And that because this is nominally grounded in numbers, which again have been debunked, that it's somehow not bigotry, that it's somehow just a like mere scientific revelation of reality.
00:52:27.620Well, and more, it's a corrective to sort of liberal wishful thinking, right? That fails to grapple with what's ultimately the thesis of the bell curve, which is the biological impossibility of multiculturalism, right?
00:52:40.480The way affirmative action programs, the way American society sought to remake itself across color lines, basically in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, was doomed to failure due to the bedrock biological origin of all these distinctions, right?
00:53:00.420And therefore, aspirations to equality that we might try and express through like a constitutional form of government or through the law or through redistribution, these are not just like misguided, but they're unnatural, right? They're contrary to the law of nature and by extension, the law of God.0.79
00:53:20.000Yeah. And I mean, Sullivan, I think, is very strongly invested in the sort of anti-affirmative action part of the Murray-Hernstein argument. The other one, of course, is about mass incarceration. Basically, the bell curve is saying mass incarceration is inevitable and will inevitably target African-Americans.
00:53:38.260I don't know if he's, I think for him again, like this is probably a guy who doesn't go to prison that often goes to Harvard quite a lot.
00:53:44.860He's really upset about someone who might be in his graduate program who he feels doesn't belong there.
00:53:50.300That's the world where he encounters IQ differences or what he thinks are IQ differences.
00:53:56.240Still mad that he had to share a classroom or was threatened with having to share a classroom with the proles back in Surrey.
00:54:01.200Sometimes in our discussions of American politics, people will make a distinction between like genteel racism and what they call gutter racism. Right. And I think that Andrew Sullivan, who excerpts the bell curve in the New Republic when it is published, who puts the bell curve on the cover of the New Republic, who repeatedly over like overrules the objections of like basically the entire editorial staff at the New Republic to do so,0.67
00:54:29.660and has been defending this choice for 30 years since
00:54:33.720reveals that there's not actually a meaningful distinction
00:54:38.080between gutter and genteel racism, right?
00:54:40.480This is a very fancy guy motivated by rank bigotry
00:54:44.260and a sense of his own superiority that is just bone deep.
00:54:47.520Yeah, he wrote, I think in like the 2010s,
00:54:50.020one of my proudest moments in journalism
00:54:51.540was publishing an expanded extract of a chapter
00:54:54.080from The Bell Curve in the New Republic
01:02:52.480And you can see in things like Virtually Normal, in, like, his broader effort to use the AIDS crisis as a means to, like, change gay culture, this effort to make HIV and death of AIDS, like, less random, to make it, like, something that is, it's almost a reach for control, right?0.91
01:03:13.920What if we all settle down and get married and stop having sex at these bathhouses?0.91
01:03:19.080Like, maybe then we can survive, right?
01:03:21.760There's an impulse there. This is a guy who's full of malice, right? But I can see something more human at the bottom there.
01:03:29.920Yeah, yeah. Even his recollections of the AIDS era are laced with this kind of resentment as well, which again, it's not unique to Sullivan, frankly, and it's understandable, frankly.
01:03:44.620It's an understandable resentment to have lost all these people and to feel like the culture moved on.0.93
01:03:49.820But the main thing is, of course, other gays moved on, right?0.97
01:03:53.100It's the younger gays that moved on.0.93
01:03:54.860He points out that the victory was, quote, a very tainted one, right, with even the ones who survived being absolutely messed up by it.
01:04:02.460But he's also kind of possessive of the experience, upset that sort of younger gays and presumably other groups within the LGBT umbrella don't care anymore, right?
01:04:12.700That's really a common complaint in that generation, I think, and it is in its own way both understandable and kind of conservative. It takes ownership of this identity and starts policing it out of, as you say, out of a woundedness that is perfectly understandable, but that nevertheless, I think, amounts to withdrawal of empathy, right?
01:04:33.920The thing you've been describing where he cannot somehow make the leap that other people deserve
01:04:38.820liberation in exactly the same way he deserves liberation, that other people deserve to live
01:04:44.800the same way his friends deserve to live. The fact that he cannot make that leap, there is a
01:04:49.080narcissistic wound at the center of it. And I don't mean narcissistic here. I mean, diagnostically,
01:04:53.060not as a value judgment. I get it. These are people, you close your eyes at night and you
01:04:57.480see them. Obviously, they're going to be closer to you. I totally get that. But it does blind you
01:05:02.960do things i think it creates massive blind spots and unfortunately he's been dwelling in those for
01:05:07.640the last for the last uh 25 years 30 years one way to deal with grief that i think is maybe not
01:05:18.580always useful but is to me understandable is to to get mad at the dead right how dare you leave me
01:05:25.200you were irresponsible you should have worn a condom now you've abandoned me to live without0.93
01:05:30.000you is something that I could see a gay man of Sullivan's generation enduring.1.00
01:05:35.840Another way to deal with grief or to deal with the aftermath of your suffering is to0.97
01:05:41.000resent those who don't have to suffer the same way.
01:05:42.900This was a big recurring theme in Me Too, where older women who had endured like almost0.97
01:05:49.560incessant sexual harassment when they entered the workforce were like, what do you mean1.00
01:05:53.340you want us to change the world because you can't handle your boss grabbing your ass?1.00
01:05:58.220To which the answer from younger women is like, well, yes. But the sense of like, I have, my suffering has ennobled me or it has given me this legitimacy that these coddled younger people haven't earned and I am not being recognized for my status as somebody who has suffered is I think also like a feeling that can drive people towards conservative politics.0.98
01:06:24.220politics because when younger generations come around and maybe they were never dating in an
01:06:33.920era when you couldn't be out at work maybe they were dating in an era where you couldn't get
01:06:37.820married maybe they were never having sex and having to worry that the sex that they were having
01:06:44.260would also get them or somebody else killed that is something that can seem
01:06:49.900and I mean this in the way like of judgment it can seem like privilege right it can seem like
01:06:55.600an obliviousness to the realities of the world and an ease in the world that I think it's very
01:07:02.840easy to resent. Maybe we'll get get to the the book that sort of comes out of this crucible both
01:07:08.160of AIDS of the gay marriage debate and sort of like what the steps after AIDS might be like0.51
01:07:13.260which is virtually normal an argument about homosexuality from 1995 and I think that gives
01:07:19.120you a good sense of where sullivan sees himself in terms of his political project and it's helpful
01:07:25.160for people living in the wake of obergefell etc etc get a sense of the ideological extraction of
01:07:31.980that push like where did it come from and i think more has already been alluding to this but it might
01:07:36.480be worth pointing this out in detail so he distinguishes four ways of approaching homosexuality
01:08:42.320uh yeah but it's a very common argument right that you don't want to prohibit homosexuality
01:08:48.860but you have some notion that some things are promoting it and you want to cut down on the
01:08:54.020promotion of it the examples of this are kind of weird this becomes a more common view on the right
01:09:01.380as gay marriage becomes more reality by 1995 there aren't many people arguing about this
01:09:06.400uh his example i think is john finnis who is neil gorsuch's dissertation advisor
01:09:11.500I know in the sort of end-of-term tea-leave reading that people do about the Supreme Court justices, one thing that always comes up is that Neil Gorsuch was very close with this gay mentor, and maybe that's why he wrote Bostock, but then why'd he vote the way he did in Scrimetti?
01:09:25.860Because these guys have so much unaccountable power, we wind up doing shit like this, being like, oh, it's all about his feelings to determine whether or not we have rights.0.93
01:09:33.700Great system you got there, where like 10 decaying brains get to decide whether you have rights or not.0.87
01:09:39.940But this is something that gay conservatives do point to, is these gay, like, really only men who were, like, quasi-closeted over the course of the conservative tradition.0.77
01:09:53.160The next option that he talks about in terms of how public policy and homosexuality can be said to relate is liberalism.
01:09:58.640This is basically, it's kind of a misnomer.
01:10:01.300He's thinking of, like, the human rights campaign, right?
01:10:03.200The idea of using the civil rights regime to secure gay rights.1.00
01:10:08.500You want a non-discrimination in housing provision, like you want non-discrimination in employment, which is what HRC was working on for a long time.
01:10:17.740And then all these institutions reoriented themselves, not long after he wrote this book, towards his hobby horse of gay marriage.
01:10:30.780Richie now thinks the gay rights movement has gone off the rails again because it did other things after that.
01:10:36.200But in each case, he does this debate society thing where he points out that there are inconsistencies in each of these views.
01:10:44.720The prohibitions have to say it's about procreation, and it's very obvious, and philosophers have been pointing this out for hundreds of years, that old people can get married who will not procreate.
01:10:54.940We don't check whether people can or have the intention to procreate before we let them get married, so clearly that doesn't work.
01:11:01.220The problem with the conservative case, he thinks, is ultimately that it both can't articulate why treating gay people with dignity would rend the social fabric.
01:11:11.000And the problem with liberalism is basically that homophobes would feel they're forced to support something that they don't, which is an argument that like...
01:11:20.340Now very popular on the Supreme Court as well.
01:11:22.960This notion that homophobes have been oppressed by gay marriage, yes.
01:11:26.980By the possibility that America's homophobic web designers live in constant fear of that phone ringing and being like, can you make me a wedding website?
01:11:34.980Well, this is also a recurring theme of Andrew Sullivan's thought, the fact that he equates, on the one hand, like legal repression of vulnerable minorities, particularly like gay and queer people, to like the social disapproval that homophobes and other bigots might feel by an occasional liberal, right?0.99
01:11:58.360Like that these are supposed to be equal in like weight and consideration as we like evaluate competing interests is, oh, you might be oppressed by the state versus, oh, somebody might tell you that you're an asshole for doing what you're doing.0.99
01:12:11.620Exactly. And the final approach is what he calls liberationism, meaning I think he's mostly arguing with like, act up again, queer theory and, you know, I'll put an air horn in here, Michel Foucault.0.95
01:12:28.360Hmm. God damn it. Anyway, I was told there'd be no Foucault in this episode.0.98
01:12:37.720There's a specter haunting in Bedwitha, right?
01:12:40.260I know. Get out of my brain, Michelle. But so there are three things about this particular,
01:12:46.820right? So this is the, you can imagine that this book reserves a lot of ire for these people,
01:12:50.960because these are the people that, frankly, he, like, he's most annoyed by.0.98
01:12:55.880yeah yeah yeah and he's and he gravitates towards picking fights with them as i say the gay life
01:13:00.860gay death moves from very moving descriptions of like here's what being gay and living with hiv is
01:13:07.380like to like annoyed an opinion that maybe a hundred people in the united states have yeah0.72
01:13:14.020he's annoyed at one point in gay life gay death about how democratic an act up meeting was like0.75
01:13:19.200people went on forever and it's like okay so you just don't like activism you've never been to a0.77
01:13:23.980community organizing meeting or any kind of activism meeting like ever like this guy would
01:13:28.380go to the park slope food co-op and kill himself but also like come on like you're saying these0.51
01:13:34.400people are liberal like mccarthyites but you know they're letting people talk way too much okay pick1.00
01:13:40.240a fucking lane my friend they're they're both totalitarian and so inefficient yeah yeah so0.99
01:13:46.680three things about that in a move that will come as a shock to exactly zero of our listeners0.99
01:13:50.900Sullivan proposes that this spectrum, right, running from prohibitionism to liberationism is actually, we're going to need another air horn here, a horseshoe.
01:15:35.640The other thing that's really telling is that, like, in another move that has become tiresomely familiar, Sullivan sort of takes this, what's essentially an academic position, right, queer theory, essentially, and equates it to ACT UP, kind of activist position, where, like, there are overlaps, but they're definitely not, they're not the same.
01:17:18.820Because there are academic approaches to that question that conclude that the category is like functionally meaningless, right?
01:17:27.540Or that you cannot actually find something that unites all the people who use it.
01:17:32.800And that can be used if you really wanted to, as I think like the likes of Matt Walsh do, to undermine any feminist claim, right?
01:17:40.380But that is a different project than the feminist political project of trying to unite the shared interests of those who are living under that category.
01:17:48.820They're different questions, right? I don't think it's illegitimate to say, if you follow the question of what is a woman down to its absolute conclusion, it turns out to be pretty inconsistent. I just think that reveals something about gender that is not necessarily demobilizing politically the way somebody like Andrew Sullivan would, I think, want it to be.
01:18:09.400Well, I also think these right-wingers who nevertheless lay claim to these identities, right, do practice a very strange form of identity politics, I would say, in the sense that they approach, and I think Sullivan is very open in this, this whole thing in the spirit of an internal or an imminent critique, right?
01:21:29.380He basically winds up advocating, at least in terms of sexuality, the kind of libertarianism that he accuses the Foucaultian libertarians of indulging in.
01:21:42.520This is actually like maybe a better description of his own position.
01:26:47.500Yeah. Just read a goddamn book of postmodernism. Yeah. So I'm going to make a proposal. I think we were very ambitious in saying that this was going to be our episode on Andrew Sullivan. I think it is becoming fairly obvious that it is, in fact, the first part of our episode on Andrew Sullivan.1.00
01:27:07.520Yes. Adrienne and I have this recurring debate, which I still haven't totally decided my position on, which is, is it acceptable to do a two-part episode, right? Because at a certain point, I think people stop listening. I think they're very less likely to open up something where it's part two. It's like, should we really discipline ourselves and just say what we have to say?
01:27:30.040But, you know, Andrew, I think he just commands a lot from us.
01:27:32.600He's just such a big presence in our lives and clearly in our minds.
01:27:36.880This guy does live in our heads run free.
01:27:38.880And I mean, that's what you were saying earlier with the Forrest Gump metaphor.
01:29:04.980There's a very good case to be made for your skepticism.
01:29:08.040The other thing that's really interesting to me is that final point about the liberalism,
01:29:13.160right, where he says, oh, these are attempts to marshal the resources furnished by the
01:29:17.580Civil Rights Act of 1964 to advance gay liberation.
01:29:21.060Now, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but by 1996, those attempts were few and far between. I mean, there are some non-discrimination ordinances, but there's not a whole lot. And they're not on the whole particularly successful.
01:29:33.460I think this is probably not about his distaste for the human rights campaign, which, as you said, like ultimately did end up following his advice.
01:29:43.380It's about his distaste for the civil rights act of 1964 and the kind of and the kind of changes that it wrought in the field of gender and race.
01:29:55.040Well, the notion that there might be legal interventions to challenge established hierarchies really does seem contrary to Andrew Sullivan's vision of nature.
01:30:06.560Yeah, exactly. I think he does this odd two-step where he calls the use of civil rights litigation into question with regards to a characteristic that you can hide, right? Like who you sleep with, who you're married to, who's waiting for you at home.
01:30:23.260Some of us hide it better than others.
01:30:25.040Right. Important and obvious point, yes. But the point being, like, the difference of race,
01:30:48.800Particularly in the American context where there's kind of only two options.
01:30:52.340That's right. Yeah, I mean, like, ask any South Asian person whether they're comfortable walking into a Home Depot right now.
01:30:58.700Did you see that amazing Zoran Mondani tweet that they unearthed from, like, 2014, where he's,
01:31:04.140I held the door open today for an old white man, and he turns to me, and he looks like he's got this big grin because he's so proud of himself, and he says, gracias.
01:31:13.440Like, this is, you know, Zoran Mondani, famously illegible in American racial discourses, yes.
01:31:17.940So that's the thing. Paul Robinson points this out in this book. He's like, this is a bizarre argument to make. Race is also socially constructed. It also is not obvious.
01:31:28.340But if you believe that Charles Murray was right about there being biologically distinct races that have different average IQ scores, that's probably an argument that's going to fall on deaf ears.
01:31:37.680Exactly. I think that's it. This is an argument that presumes the facts of the bell curve to be, in fact, in evidence. It only makes sense if you are essentially a race realist. The limits he wants to place on gay liberation then are identical with his objections to the civil rights regime post-1960s.
01:32:00.140I think that's really important that like this book has its, and I think our friends over at Bad Gays have made this very clear, has a very deleterious effect on the movement itself and on gay liberation as a cause.
01:32:11.780But it's important to note that it also has terrible implications for gender and racism in the United States.
01:32:18.740And then the third point I wanted to make is that there is this meliorism here that is really strange, even within its own time, right?
01:32:29.020But Sullivan seems to genuinely believe that kind of this public equality, private autonomy version of gay liberation will mollify the straights, which.
01:32:41.780Yeah, this is a common refrain in Andrew Sullivan's work in particular.0.75
01:32:45.340One of the critiques he makes of more like radical liberation politics is not just that he finds them wrong, although he often also says that.
01:32:54.940He says they're wrong on the merits, but he'll also say that they're tactically wrong.
01:33:14.400Yeah, it just seems like a bizarre argument given that, like, conservatives had no trouble readjusting to the new approach that Andrew Sullivan helped pioneer.
01:33:24.400And they seem to be on the verge of overturning that, too.
01:33:27.160He's assuming that there is an ask small enough that it will not provoke backlash, that we'll both be like a more appropriate and right-sized ask because of its lack of ambition, right? Like, give us access to traditional marriage. Give us access to serving in the army, right? How aggressively conservative these ambitions are. How rigorously in line with traditional American visions of honor and the good life they are.
01:33:54.320And he assumes that ostentatious cooperation with conservative values will lead to conservative acceptance. And that is not, in fact, the case, right? You cannot make an ask small enough that will get these people not to attack you, right? You have to either accept that you have enemies or capitulate.
01:34:14.060exactly and part of that is just that ultimately homophobia springs from the same
01:34:21.300source as heterosexism as misogyny and as racism which is an investment in hierarchies
01:34:31.460something again Sullivan would know if you read any queer theory ever anyway so maybe we'll leave
01:34:37.980it there i'm excited to come back next time and talk about andrew sullivan and the iraq war
01:34:45.220andrew sullivan and the achievement of gay marriage with obergefell and andrew sullivan
01:34:50.960and the menace in his mind of trans rights and the gay rights movements embrace of them i think
01:34:57.940there's a lot of meat here and in typical in bed with the right fashion we will stop with
01:35:03.660virtually normal. And we will not pick up with Love Undetectable, which is the follow-up essay
01:35:10.100he wrote. But we will follow up with a post on Bareback City from 1998. Anyway.
01:35:15.380God help us all. He is a fascinating figure. And hopefully, we'll see you guys next time
01:35:23.560on your favorite podcast, In Bed With The Right. See you next time.