The Dish

In general, I tend to agree with Tyler Cowen that off-the-cuff remarks by academics at conferences should not be vulnerable to political use and abuse. We need spaces where we can riff and think out loud without being held responsible for every phrase. But then again, this is 2014, where nothing anyone has ever said or written can be forgotten if you have a dogged web researcher to root it out. And when those remarks come from someone who helped design and write the ACA, and speak to the way in which it was constructed and sold to the public, it’s a legitimate gotcha.

Of course, a large amount of what Gruber said is hardly unusual in Washington. Gaming the CBO scoring, framing the pros and cons in deceptive ways, making it easy for congressmen to vote for something without being hit by 30-second ads in the next election cycle: all this is part of messy governance. But Gruber’s remarks about the stupidity of the American electorate are so typical of a certain Democratic mindset they’re worth unpacking.

And as we noted earlier, Chait makes the point that Gruber really means ignorance rather than stupidity:

Very few people understand economics and public policy. This is especially true of Obamacare — most Americans are unaware of the law’s basic functions or even whether their state is participating. Since people know so little about public policy in general and health-care policy in particular, they tend to have incoherent views. In health care and other areas, they want to enjoy generous benefits while paying low taxes and don’t know enough details to reconcile those irreconcilable preferences. Gruber’s error here is that, by describing this as “stupidity” rather than a “lack of knowledge,” he moves from lamenting an unfortunate problem both parties must work around to condescending to the public in an unattractive way.

I actually think this makes it worse. The only reason Americans are ignorant about the ACA is that they were never clearly told what it was designed to achieve and how it would work. The debate was had among elites, using often technical language – who really knows what a vague “public option” means, for example? – and then sold to the public with either blanket reassurances (if you have an insurance policy, you can keep it) or terror stories about a government take-over (which it wasn’t). The reason for this failure by both sides to lay out the actual plan in ways anyone could understand was political. Neither side wanted a free-wheeling debate with unknown consequences; one was aiming for passage (something never achieved before), and the other was rooting for failure (for rank partisan reasons). Neither side was really interested in a real debate about the pros and cons.

This remains a huge disservice to democracy and it helps explain why our elites are so despised. I mean: why couldn’t Obama or leading Democrats actually make the simple case: we’re going to give subsidies to the working poor to get private health insurance and force insurers to take anyone regardless of pre-existing conditions. We’re going to make this affordable for the insurance companies by mandating that everyone get insurance, thereby including more young, healthy people in the risk pool to offset the costs of the sick. And we’re going to make sure that insurance is better than in the past, and is not subject to lifetime caps or getting booted off the minute you get sick.

That wasn’t that hard, was it?

Most people understand that there are trade-offs in life; most people have insurance of one sort or another and are cognizant of how insurance works – the bigger the pool the better. And to my mind, the trade-offs are worth it. If someone were willing to explain the ACA in simple, clear and honest terms, I think most Americans would back it. What’s maddening is that American politicians never speak this way. A proposal is either all honey or all vinegar. And each side assumes that that’s the only kind of argument Americans are prepared or able to understand. So, it isn’t really ignorance that’s the problem – because that can be fixed. It really is a cynical assumption of most Americans’ stupidity.

The Republicans are shameless in their deployment of this – tax cuts always good! no trade-offs ever! – but so too are the Democrats. There really is a mentality out there that sees politics as finding a way to deceive voters to give them what they need but for some inexplicable reason don’t actually want. They really do treat people as if they were stupid. If some smidgen of honesty could be used against a politician in a sound-bite, he’d prefer bullshit. The most obvious example was Obama’s categorical pledge that no one with insurance would ever be forced to change – even though the minimal benefits of an ACA plan were greater than those in many existing private sector plans. You can call this a lie – which it was – or you can call it a cheap dodge to get what you want with a little flim-flam. But no one would ever have said such a thing if they had bothered to make the good faith argument that change for the better requires some trade-offs, that some will benefit and others may take a hit. Obama pledged to be that kind of honest, straight-talking president. Often he is. On the most important domestic policy achievement of his presidency, he wasn’t.

I support the ACA; but I cannot support the kind of politics that made it happen. And I refuse to believe that a democracy has to operate this way for change to occur. Gruber’s arrogance and condescension are just meta-phenomena of this deeper dysfunction. Someone needs to treat Americans as adults again before this democracy can regain the credibility it so desperately needs to endure.

Any writer who wants to tackle touchy subjects in this day and age will be subjected to constant and often colorful insults, attacks, smears, ad hominems and general abuse. I’m used to it and don’t whine. And so I am resigned to the fact that any post or essay I might write will be condemned at some point (whatever its subject) because of my support for the Iraq War (despite countless mea culpas, including a whole e-book), or for the sentence in 2001 about a potential “fifth column” (for which I have also apologized), or for asking for some minimal documentation of the story of Sarah Palin’s astonishing fifth pregnancy (for which I see no reason to apologize), or for doubting that gender, sexual orientation or ethnicity can be entirely explained by social constructionism. And look, this is fair enough. I had my say; people also get to have theirs’ about what I wrote. Just because you’ve apologized for something doesn’t mean others have to accept it.

But one meme that crops up eternally whenever the left side of the spectrum wants to take a whack is my alleged sexual hypocrisy from as far back as 2001. A recent Gawker piece – after ticking off the usual accusations that I’m a racist, a misogynist, etc. – prompted the following reader comment:

Anyone remember when he was criticizing gay men for their “libidinal pathology” while posting ads for himself on a bareback sex site?

I do!

Except I wasn’t. That phrase – which appeared in countless articles asserting my hypocrisy – comes from Love Undetectable. It’s used in a section on circuit “rave” parties in the gay male world, and the debate they provoked in the 1990s. Here’s the full context of that phrase, and you can judge for yourself whether I was “criticizing gay men for their ‘libidinal pathology'”:

Slowly the proliferation of these events became impossible to ignore, and the secrecy that once shrouded them turned into an increasingly raucous debate on the front pages of newspapers across the country. Despite representing a tiny sub-subculture, and dwarfed, for example, by the explosion of gay religion and spirituality in the same period, the parties seemed to symbolize something larger: the question of whether, as AIDS receded, gay men were prepared to choose further integration, or were poised to leap into another spasm of libidinal pathology.

I am not criticizing gay men for “libidinal pathology” at a circuit party. I am describing a “raucous debate” about the possibility of them signifying the revival of such a thing. My own actual answer to that question was the following:

What these events really were about, whatever their critics have claimed, was not sex … what replaced sex was the idea of sex; and what replaced promiscuity was the idea of promiscuity, masked by the ecstatic high of drug-enhanced drug-music.

It also makes little sense for me to be slamming circuit parties for “libidinal pathology,” when I am describing my attendance at one – and not as a reporter but as a participant. In fact, the section is a celebration in part of unabashed gay sexuality:

What would the guardians of reality think, I remember asking myself, if they could see this now, see this display of unapologetic masculinity and understand that it was homosexual … [I]t was hard not to be struck, as I was the first time I saw it, by a genuine, brazen act of cultural defiance, a spectacle designed not only to exclude but to reclaim a gender, the ultimate response to a heterosexual order that denies gay men the masculinity that is also their own.

As to circuit parties as a whole, I have long gone to them, and, as you can see if you actually read what I wrote, celebrated them as one way I found liberation in a dark time. I met my husband at that very same party a decade later. I went to one last year. Yes, in that essay, I was trying to understand them in the AIDS era and to explain them to an outside world – and I was prepared to address some of the issues around them, including the very issue of promiscuity itself that hovered around the AIDS question. But the notion that this proves I was a sexual Puritan is ridiculous. A reviewer even lamented that in the book, “Sullivan drones on and on about his sexual encounters.” Well which is it: am I boring you with an account of my own promiscuity or condemning others for it?

Another sentence was routinely hauled out to condemn me for hypocrisy and pops up from time to time. Here is Richard Goldstein’s phrase of accusation:

[Sullivan] considers gay marriage the only healthy alternative to “a life of meaningless promiscuity followed by eternal damnation.”

Again, go check the original context. It’s from the same book. It comes from a section where I am impugning the idea of “hate the sin, love the sinner” and the failure of the churches to offer moral direction of any kind to gay men, leaving us for millennia vulnerable to, yes, sexual pathologies born out of desperation or the need for relief from the contradictions of our lives. Here’s the full passage:

If you teach people that something as deep inside them as their very personality is either a source of unimaginable shame or unmentionable sin, and if you tell them that their only ethical direction is either the suppression of that self in a life of suffering, or a life of meaningless promiscuity followed by eternal damnation, then it is perhaps not surprising that their moral and sexual behavior becomes wildly dichotic; that it veers from compulsive activity to shame and withdrawal; or that it becomes anesthetized by drugs or alcohol or fatally distorted by the false, crude ideology of easy prophets.

It’s clear from this passage that I am actually criticizing those who hold the belief that Goldstein and countless others ascribed … to me! You can watch the debate at the New School in 2002 where I directly confronted Goldstein about this … and he had nothing to say in his own defense, as the very lefty crowd discovered to their shock and mounting anger. I could go on. In the same book, I wrote explicitly about my own first experience of sex without rubbers with another survivor of HIV and a good friend. So in a book published in 1998, I recount details about my many sexual encounters and also unprotected sex with another man with HIV … and yet three years later I am a hypocrite for doing exactly the same things.

To be sure, the essay was about finding a way between no sexual boundaries and more humane ones for gay men. It does contain an implicit critique of compulsive sex – but in the context of my own experience of it. It revealed things about the gay subculture that are not usually told to heterosexuals or a general reader. It’s a raw book, written in a much more fraught time for the gay community. But it was also a memoir that placed myself in the middle of that struggle – and not above or outside it. And yes, I used terms like “hairy-backed homos” which critics took to be condemnatory – when it was anything but (as any Dishhead surely knows by now)! And, yes, arguing for marriage equality was also about ending the psychic wounds that led so many gay men into such painful places for so long. My only criticism of promiscuity per se was Randy Shilts’: when the AIDS epidemic first showed up and there was resistance to shutting down bathhouses. And Randy got slut-shamed as I was for taking what now seems like an honorable, brave and prescient stand.

Then the alleged irresponsibility. We know for certain that one of the most effective ways of curtailing HIV transmission is what we now call sero-sorting – i.e. HIV-positive men having sex only with other HIV-positive men. I was an early proponent and practitioner of it – as an informed act of responsibility. For this act of responsibility, I was hauled out to be condemned and humiliated and accused of rank hypocrisy.

This is a very old story but also a very old lie. It rests on misrepresentations of what I wrote and what I believe. Every now and again, since it is a lie that won’t die, it is perhaps necessary to remind people of this.

(Sidebar image by Marc Love)