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.
But there’s much more to Sullivan’s blog than friendly traffic. Andrew is passionate, and even when he’s infuriatingly wrong about something, I always trust that his sincerity is intact. He’s introduced me to an extraordinary range of ideas and writers and, hell, just to the art of blogging, all of which has been invaluable to me as a writer and political thinker and human being. I can say quite honestly that no other blogger has had as much of an impact on my blogging as Andrew has. For all these reasons and more, I’m profoundly grateful.
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:
his very early and eloquent advocacy of marriage equality, as well as his brave choice, undoubtedly benefiting many people, to live a public life first as an openly gay man and then as someone with HIV — both made at a time when those choices were far rarer (and thus more difficult) than they are now, especially in the conservative world on which his career then depended. His work on torture was profoundly principled and genuinely important. He pioneered much of political blogging and inspired countless bloggers. And as many others pointed out, his capacity for self-reflection, his willingness to acknowledge error, and his habitual airing of dissent should be used as a template for political discourse.
I’ve gotten to know the non-blog Andrew fairly well over the past several years, and there – in real life – these virtues are heightened and his flaws minimized. Even now when he annoys me most with what I think are some of his most misguided views — perhaps especially then — I consider his blog to be a unique and irreplaceable source of debate and analysis. Nobody can question his authenticity. We’ll all benefit if he continues blogging for another decade.
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. …
Sullivan has kept himself relevant by avoiding an obvious shtick. If for no other reasons than he chases any bouncing ball, publishes any well-phrased and relevant dissent, and links to any charismatic blogger or off-beat news item, he's never let himself be pigeonholed. He's been accused of ideological wandering and triviality and so forth, but that's far beside the point given the nature of his work. Many people who score better on those scales–of ideological consistency, gravitas, and whatever else–contribute a good deal less to a thinking person's self-education in the world of ideas and events simply by virtue of being predictable and boring.
So cheers, and jeers, to you, Mr. Sullivan, for helping to keep us sputtering and nodding and emailing all these years, and for breaking much of the ground that we narcissistic bloggers/twitterers/facebook denizens plow with such studied ease. Would that we all did it as frankly and humbly as you.
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.
But that is neither here nor there, really- because what really matters with a blog is whether or not it is interesting. And I think Sullivan is always interesting, he always writes with a personal touch, you know how he is feeling (even when it drives you insane), and he’ll never shy away from a fight. In addition, the traffic he (along with Kos and others) sent to this blog really made it what it is. A lot of you would not be readers here if it were not for Sully- you know who you are. And he has always been respectful and pleasant to me.
So here is a roast and a toast for Sully – happy tenth. I’m still a fan.
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 is the way his site functions as a gateway from the relatively cozy community of the blogosphere to the big world beyond. When I was first building my own audience and an acquaintance came up, started talking about a piece I'd written, and exclaimed something along the lines of, "I had no idea you were a journalist!", nine times out of ten, they'd seen my work linked at Andrew Sullivan.
I know I'm just one of the many young writers who've been handed a ticket to wider readership thanks to a timely reference from Sully.
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.
He thought Hawaii was soon to be the first state in the US with same-sex marriage; the first such state was Massachusetts in 2004, and Hawaii still doesn't have it. He didn't do a great job at predicting the future, but his message still has great resonance today.
I was going to find some choice moment of this video, transcribe it, and quote it here to draw your attention to it. But I would have felt like just transcribing the whole thing. So please, watch the whole thing. To say this is Sullivan at his best would be an understatement.
I love how he starts by giving definitions of homosexuality and heterosexuality that seem so uncontroversial as to be hardly worth explaining — and then leverages those definitions into his case for same-sex marriage (both as something that should happen and as themost important front in the gay rights movement).
Though he's often criticized as overly emotional about political issues, he took the political issue he feels the most strongly about in his life and made his case with lucid logic. He did it when it was a lot less popular than it is now, and he did it over and over. Thank you, Andrew Sullivan. You have made a difference.
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. […]
Sullivan has a reputation for honesty that is both deserved and undeserved. It's deserved in this sense. Once you realize that he lacks foundation, and that his opinion is merely the disconnected expression of likes and dislikes, you can see that he is honest about that. His affection for the Pet Shop Boys and his abhorrence of torture are both sincerely held. But where the reputation is undeserved is in the illusion of ideological continuity which he creates for himself. He thinks the following makes sense. Invading Palin's privacy: Good. Invading Sullivan's privacy: Bad. Betsy McCaughey's lies about Hillarycare: Good. Betsy McCaughey's lies about Obamacare: Bad. Ignorant interventionism in the 1980s: Good. Ignorant interventionism now: Bad. Provincial conservatives hating the "decadent left": Good. Provincial conservatives hating Blacks: Well, not so good but maybe Blacks are stupid. Provincial conservatives hating homosexuals: Bad.
As a long time fan, I have to ask, has no one bothered to roast Andrew today? Seriously, this is getting duller by the minute. At least there is tomorrow …
Please send roasts to cbodenner@theatlantic.com. I am sincerely searching for good ones. C'mon, people. He's a pretty easy target after 10 years of content.
The Dish 