The Dish was among the first to add The League to its blogroll, and sent a huge swath of our readership our way. So in purely mathematical terms, Sullivan has been a huge asset to this blog’s (and this writer’s) success over the past two years. While many established bloggers have very little time for unimportant, unestablished bloggers, Sullivan doesn’t flinch at bringing new and often unheard voices into the mix. This is invaluable. It keeps the conversation alive. And as one of the very first bloggers out there, it is remarkable that he maintains such an open door to latecomers like myself.
One of the most raucous reader debates ever provoked at my blog was when, in 2007, I favorably reviewed The Conservative Soul and argued that “the virtues of Sullivan as a political commentator easily outweigh his sins.” For me, the balanced though intense debate which ensued between Andrew-lovers and Andrew-haters underscored my point: the strong feelings he evokes are a tribute to his candor, passion, independence, and ability to provoke, all highly desirable attributes in a political commentator.
I’ve frequently conceded to his critics that if I had been one of the people whom Andrew was maligning back in 2003 as a Saddam-allied, Terrorist-loving fifth columnist, it’s possible that I would never be able to forgive those transgressions, notwithstanding his obviously sincere, thoughtful apologies and resulting evolution. But it’s very difficult to find anyone with decades of public advocacy who is entirely free of serious error, and Andrew certainly has his share. But it’s also difficult to find many people who have learned and grown as much from his errors as Andrew.
Flawed though he may be (as we all are), there are aspects of his public life for which he receives far too little credit:
Sullivan is the kind of figure that a lot of us have spent good chunks of time agreeing with, disagreeing with, and ridiculing. His retrospective, linked above, is unsurprisingly self-involved. Not just unsurprising because Sullivan has always been kind of solipsistic, but because anyone with a lot of archives (as it happens I do) will learn more about themselves than about the events of the past by reading through them.
I don't read Sullivan like I used to, partly because my politics and his have diverged, partly because I'm interested in different things, and partly because it's a much more diverse media landscape than it was in 2000-2001. He was and remains a quick trigger finger on impressions, suspicions, and judgments, which whether to his credit or not is unlikely to look like a wise strategy over time. But that's not what a blog is or was for. It's more about documenting a moment and the debate around it than putting down something for the ages. It's merely a technological irony that makes the medium more easily preserved than any newspaper or book. Moreover, Sullivan's blog was and is a collective project to a considerable degree. I don't email him any more, but I have fond memories of tossing him a quote from T.S. Eliot or C.S. Lewis in those early weeks after 9/11 and getting a response and a post (and during a Reihan residency, that blog gave me my biggest link evar). And to his great credit, his work today is heavily driven by feedback, both positive and negative. …
Like many of you, I have a love/hate relationship with Sullivan’s blog. Some days, I’m ready to throw my monitor out the window- especially on days where he links to glibertarian economic analysis that has been debunked hundreds of times, yet he buys into it and calls it “interesting.” Other days, I’m standing up cheering, thrilled that he is standing up for something (I think we can all agree he has been a solid voice from the right on torture). And then the next day, I’m back to wanting to chuck my computer monitor out the window again, when he decides that the real villain in the gay rights debate is… the Human Rights campaign. Or wondering what exactly he thinks he is accomplishing changing the color of his blog to show “solidarity.” Changing the color of your blog to show solidarity with people who are going to get killed for their actions is slacktivism and wanking at its best. And then, the next day, he rips far and wide into the fraud that is the modern GOP. He gives me whiplash every time I open his blog.
Andrew Sullivan's blog is many things to many people, and I continue to count it as one of my favorite daily reads. He's taught an awful lot of people how to blog, many of which have then gone on to teach others how to blog, and so on. But what I appreciate most about him … Continue reading Toast Or Roast: Ryan Avent
Today, [Andrew Sullivan is] running "Toasts or Roasts": other bloggers say what they like or don't like about his blog. So far, he's posted 10 men — including Reihan Salam, Ezra Klein, Tyler Cowen, and Ben Smith – and 1 woman: my mom, Ann Althouse. …
Sullivan was one of the first blogs I read on a regular basis — along with Talking Points Memo, Kausfiles, Instapundit, and Metafilter — circa 2000-2001. It's impressive that they're all still thriving, though you could also say there's a problem here: the blogs that got big early on tend to keep dominating the blogosphere. There isn't the space for some new brilliant person to come along and be a Sullivan or a Kaus or an Instapundit.
Of those 5 blogs, I still read 3 regularly: Kausfiles, Instapundit, and Metafilter. … And in contrast to my mom's roast/toast to Sullivan, I can't say I always keep reading him no matter how matter how much he changes. The truth is that I don't read Sullivan regularly anymore.
Oh, I'm sure his blog continues to be excellent. But he got too passionately moralistic about every issue — especially when he would flip-flop on foreign policy without bothering to dampen his moralistic fervor. … Self-righteousness and dogmatism are generally not a perfect fit with foreign policy. Sullivan's style is what it is. It isn't perfect, as even he admits. But he has done far more good than most cheerleaders for the Iraq war by exposing and analyzing his own shortcomings in thinking about war.
But when I think of Sullivan's political voice, I won't think first about foreign policy. I'll think about the issue he showed me how to think about. His opening remarks about same-sex marriage in this video (back in 1997, before he was a blogger) are dated.
While many ordinary gentlemen respect and admire Andrew Sullivan, despite occasional or even regular disagreements, I don't. I despise the man–ironically, I despise him more and more as his views become more and more in accord with my own. […]
The only thing that's changed between 1993 and 2009 is Andrew Sullivan's mind, but he can't seem to accept that. Which is, in the end, why I find Sullivan so genuinely despicable. He suffers from a profound and incorrigible solipsism. In Sullivan's worldview, the one true and enduring doctrine, the one First Principle, is always and only …. Andrew Sullivan's mind. It can never be that, say, conservatism maintains certain characteristics and an appeal to certain populations across generations while Sullivan has changed. No, it must be Sullivan who is fixed in the firmament while conservatism changes. Even though, as he himself seems to now dimly acknowledge, almost all the characteristics he now deplores were both present and prominent all the time he was perfectly comfortable in the conservative movement. […]
As far as I'm concerned, The Daily Dish is the reason the Internet was invented. Congratulations on ten years. Read John at McSweeney's Internet Tendency.
Andrew Sullivan, Patrick Appel, Chris Bodenner, Conor Friedersdorf, and Zoe Pollock are celebrating the 10th anniversary of The Daily Dish, and I just wanted to say a quick congratulations and thank all of them, and especially Andrew, for so many years of great blogging. I am a fickle blog reader, and there are few blogs I always read, but the Dish is one of them.
Joyner toasts and roasts: Andrew has some hobby horses that annoy the bejesus out of me, most notably the bizarre Trig Palin conspiracy theory that he won’t let go of. But the obsessiveness that makes that happen is what fuels one of the few truly indispensable blogs out there. He’s simultaneously ridiculously cynical and hopelessly … Continue reading Toast Or Roast: James Joyner
