Andrew Sullivan's Confusion

Let’s see. Andrew Sullivan writes an extended critique of the Democratic Party, lamenting the fact that the party cannot do better as nominee than a man who is suffering from senile dementia.

He trashes the Democratic program, pins the current wave of violence and rioting on Democrats, and then declares that he is going to vote for Joe Biden. To each his own.

Confusion on parade.

Take the following graph, from near the end of the essay. Ask yourself: what’s wrong with this picture:

Yes, we still have an election. But barring a landslide victory for either party, it will be the beginning and not the end of the raw struggle for power in a fast-collapsing republic. In a close race, Trump will never concede, and if he is somehow forced to, he will mount a campaign from the outside to delegitimize the incoming president, backed by street-gangs and propaganda outfits. If Biden wins, we may have one last chance for the center to hold — and what few hopes I have rest on this.

It pops out of the page. Sullivan accuses Trump of doing what Democrats have actually been doing for the past three plus years. Aside from the fact that that incompetent fraud, Hillary Clinton, just told Biden never to concede, the fact remains that Democrats did mount a campaign in order to delegitimize the president, and that they have been backed by street gangs and propaganda outfits. Black Lives Matter and Antifa are street gangs. The mainstream media is a propaganda outfit. 

Given the Democratic Party reaction to Trump, you have to admit that the center of American politics has not held. And that Democrats are largely responsible for it, for having defied and trampled the norms of democracy.

So, Sullivan is correct in his analysis. The only problem is: he is confused about who is committing the crimes and who is destroying democracy. You can’t have everything.

As for his observation that when rioters are allowed to destroy cities and when the police have been ordered to allow them to do so, opposing groups will inevitably take to the streets to try to restore order. It should not be a controversial thought. It does not, as Sullivan does not, prejudge what happened in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Besides, Victor Davis Hanson made precisely the same point a week or two ago. 

For his part Sullivan tries too hard to be fair and balanced. He fails to notice that the source of the violence is a domestic insurgency mounted by leftist enemies of democracy. At the same time, he rejects the basic premise of the BLM movement:

But I’m equally repelled by the insistent attempt by BLM and its ideological founders to malign and dismiss the huge progress we’ve made, to re-describe the American experiment in freedom as one utterly defined by racism, and to call the most tolerant country on the planet, with unprecedented demographic diversity, a form of “white supremacy”. I’m tired of hearing Kamala Harris say, as she did yesterday: “The reality is that the life of a black person in America has never been treated as fully human.”

So, the dogmatic truth, one that you must accept lest you be harassed in public by BLM demonstators is that America is a racist country, the worst ever. To his credit, Sullivan calls out BLM for trafficking in nonsense.

Moreover, Sullivan rejects any justification for rioting and lawlessness. If only he had limited his analysis to blaming the people who are committing the vandalism and who are mounting the current insurrection, we would be cheering more loudly. But still, his point is well taken:

But here’s one thing I have absolutely no conflict about. Rioting and lawlessness is evil. And any civil authority that permits, condones or dismisses violence, looting and mayhem in the streets disqualifies itself from any legitimacy. This comes first. If one party supports everything I believe in but doesn’t believe in maintaining law and order all the time and everywhere, I’ll back a party that does. In that sense, I’m a one-issue voter, because without order, there is no room for any other issue. Disorder always and everywhere begets more disorder; the minute the authorities appear to permit such violence, it is destined to grow. And if liberals do not defend order, fascists will.

Obviously, he has provoked a gale of outrage by using the word fascist in the last sentence. He might have said that the National Guard can restore order, as it did, to Kenosha, and that it is not a fascist organization. In truth, a few representatives of the Proud Boys, an extremist group, have been out trying to confront Antifa, but, the damage done by the rioters so vastly exceeds anything that the citizen militias have done that the word “fascist” is simply misplaced. The McCloskey’s, who waved guns at marauding BLM rioters, rioters who tore down their front gate and threatened them with violence, are not a fascist mob. 

Sullivan seems to want to tell his fellow traveler Democrats that the current domestic insurgency is costing them votes and will likely cost them the election.

And as I’ve watched protests devolve over the summer into a series of riots, arson expeditions, and lawless occupations of city blocks, along with disgusting and often racist profanity, I’ve begun to feel similarly. And when I watched the Democratic Convention and heard close to nothing about ending this lawlessness, I noted the silence.

It is not just silence; it is active collusion. Democratic political leaders in the cities and state effected have actively stopped the police from intervening.

When a political party finds itself so wedded to a new and potent ideology it cannot call out violence when it sees it, then it is walking straight into a trap. When the discourse on the left has become one in which scholars and editors and Tweeters vie with one another to up the ante on how inherently evil America has always been, redescribe it as a slaveocracy, and endorse racist books that foment the most egregious stereotypes about “whiteness”, most ordinary people, who love their country and are mostly proud of its past, will rightly balk. One of the most devastating lines in president Trump’s convention speech last night was this: “Tonight, I ask you a very simple question: How can the Democrat Party ask to lead our country when it spends so much time tearing down our country?” A cheap shot, yes. But in the current context, a political bullseye.

So far, so good. An astute analysis, one that collapses as Sullivan essays to make the Republican Party seem to be equally demented and equally disgraceful.

Sullivan cannot resist suggesting that Republicans are really Nazis:

The key theme of the RNC was reminding people of the American narrative that once was. Yes, it was unbelievably vulgar. Yes, it looked like a cross between a sophisticated CGI video-game and a crude car dealer ad with a dollop of Leni Riefenstahl. But it was extremely effective. To see that, you have to remove your frontal cortex and put it in a jar, accept that it’s all going to be a series of lies so massive they stupefy us into stutters, and then cop the feels.

Having offered the usual pro forma denunciations of Republicans, Sullivan continues to trash the Democratic Party:

All this reassurance played out against a backdrop of Kenosha, which was burning, and Minneapolis, where a suicide led to a bout of opportunistic looting, and Washington DC, where mobs of wokesters went through the city chanting obscenities, invading others’ spaces, demanding bystanders raise fists in solidarity, with occasional spasms of violence. These despicable fanatics, like it or not, are now in part the face of the Democrats: a snarling bunch of self-righteous, entitled bigots, chanting slogans rooted in pseudo-Marxist claptrap, erecting guillotines — guillotines! — in the streets as emblems of their agenda. They are not arguing; they are attempting to coerce. And liberals, from the Biden campaign to the New York Times, are too cowardly and intimidated to call out these bullies and expel them from the ranks.

The fanatics are in fact the face of the Democratic Party. And, right now, they have become an albatross. So much so that commentators on CNN are whining in their latte about how Democrats are throwing away the election.

Sullivan is not finished with his critique of the American left. He explains that the principle behind cancel culture is being played out on the streets of Democrat-run American cities:

Remember the pivotal moment earlier this summer when the New York Times caved to its activist staff and fired James Bennet? It’s no accident this was over an op-ed that argued that if New York City would not stop the rioting in the streets, the feds should step in to restore order. For the far left activists who now control that paper, the imposition of order was seen not as an indispensable baseline for restoring democratic debate, but as a potential physical attack on black staffers. They saw restoring order within the prism of their own critical race ideology, which stipulates that the police are enforcers of white supremacy, and not enforcers of the rule of law in a liberal society. It was a sign that the establishment left were willing to tolerate disorder and chaos if they were directed toward the ideologically correct ends — which is how Democratic establishments in Minneapolis and Seattle and Portland responded. The NYT, CNN and the rest tried to ignore the inexcusable, and find increasingly pathetic ways to dismiss it. This week, their staggering bias was exposed as absurd.

But then, Sullivan denounces Republicans, not one of whom has been running a cancel culture at a major American newspaper. Leftist democrats are not being canceled. Republicans and conservatives are. After all, the New York Times allowed its staffers to harass Bari Weiss for being Jewish. And precious few people cared.

So, Sullivan wants to vote for the cerebrally defective Joe Biden. It is his right. His effort to balance badness between both ends of the political spectrum is ultimately unpersuasive. Simply put, the domestic insurgency mounted against America was produced and aired by the Democratic Party. Obviously, in certain quarters you are only allowed to say such a thing if you add that Donald Trump is the root of all evil.

In the end, the reason for defaming Trump is simply that you can use his evilness as an excuse for mounting an insurrection against America. Thereby you can shift the blame and declare that whatever Democrats have been doing, Trump really wants to do it. Sullivan does not see it, but his analysis still has value.