By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, September 01, 2020
Ritual denunciations are a necessary part of ritualized
politics. And so Ben Smith has written a ritual denunciation of Andrew Sullivan
in the New York Times, a column that contains an extraordinary bit of
moral reasoning that a cynic might take as an exercise in self-interested
journalistic ass-covering.
Sullivan was the editor of The New Republic in the
1990s, and probably the most famous American political magazine editor since
William F. Buckley Jr. As Smith’s article notes, Sullivan was so celebrated a
figure that he was photographed by Annie Leibovitz for a Gap advertisement — a
pretty big deal for a print journalist in the 1990s. (The musician Henry
Rollins appeared in a Gap ad, too. It was a weird time.) As editor of The
New Republic, Sullivan published an excerpt from Charles Murray and Richard
Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve, a book about the social functions of
intelligence. It was a book more written about than read, because one of its
chapters discussed differences among the median IQ scores of different racial
groups. The Bell Curve may have been the last American non-fiction book
to provoke a genuinely national intellectual controversy, coming, as it did,
just before the emergence of our new post-literate mass culture.
Sullivan published that excerpt in 1994. He joined New
York magazine as a contributing editor in 2016 — 22 years later. In 2020,
four years after hiring him, New York magazine fired him for the
editorial decision he made decades before in 1994. Smith writes:
The new editor of New York,
David Haskell, didn’t push him out because of any new controversy or organized
staff revolt, the two New York employees said. Instead, the shift in
culture had effectively made his publishing of “The Bell Curve” excerpt — and
the fact that he never disavowed it — a firing offense, and Mr. Haskell showed
Mr. Sullivan the door before the magazine experienced a blowup over race of the
sort that have erupted at other publications.
(The most relevant part of that paragraph are the words
that follow “before,” i.e., the statement of institutional cowardice.)
Smith is writing here in the contemporary
moral-confessional mode. His article is headlined, “I’m Still Reading Andrew
Sullivan. But I Can’t Defend Him.” And that is, of course, to the point. A
great many prominent American journalists and cultural leaders with impeccably
progressive credentials have praised Sullivan to the heavens over the years and
welcomed him into the inner circle. The denunciations are necessary for them
for an obvious reason: If an editorial decision in the 1990s can become a
“firing offense” ex post facto owing to a “shift in culture,” then it
would not be outrageous to suggest that all those nice progressives who did so
much to advance the career of Andrew Sullivan, pariah, are eligible for
professional sanction as well. Surely their hands are not clean.
Here, for example, is what New York’s editor at
the time, Adam Moss, said upon hiring Sullivan:
I have had the privilege of working
with Andrew from the beginning of his career (mine too). He is a major (deep
and elegant) thinker and writer whose work has had tangible consequence, and he
has written some of the more influential essays I have ever had the honor to
publish. He also happens to be a true innovator ― one of the first and best
political writers online. . . . Since he stepped away from his blog in 2015,
his voice has been greatly missed in our national dialogue. I’m grateful that
he will return to writing at New York.
Moss hired Sullivan and said those things knowing that
Sullivan had in 1994 published an excerpt from a controversial book. It is, of
course, too late to treat hiring the moral monster Andrew Sullivan as a “firing
offense” for Moss, who announced his departure from New York last year
and became a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School. But why should the transitive
property of moral monstrosity stop there? Charles Murray is a mild-mannered
sociologist, but if we imagined him to be the white-supremacist villain of the
Left’s imagination, a figure whose villainy is sufficient to reach over the
decades and justify firing Andrew Sullivan in 2020, then why should the
publishers of New York magazine escape punishment for having platformed
the naughty platformer? Why should the people and institutions who advanced
Adam Moss’s career — the New York Times, Esquire, etc. — get off
the hook, having platformed the platformer of the naughty platformer?
Sullivan’s problem, in Smith’s judgment, is that he
“never disavowed” publishing a controversial book excerpt. And so Smith is here
to disavow Sullivan, and to offer a little bit of self-justification as well:
I came to Provincetown to better
understand why Mr. Sullivan, 57, one of the most influential journalists of his
generation and an obvious influence in my own career, is not as welcome as he
once was at many mainstream media outlets. But my visit helped me see something
more: how Mr. Sullivan is really a fixed point by which we can measure how far
American media has moved. He finds himself now on the outside, most of all,
because he cannot be talked out of views on race that most of his peers find
abhorrent. I know, because I tried.
I have no doubt that he did indeed try his best. All
decent people are in his debt.
And perhaps he even heard a quiet voice whispering, Ego
te absolvo.
No comments:
Post a Comment