Tuesday, September 1, 2020

Ritual Denunciation and the Mau-Mauing of the Former Magazine Editors

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.

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