The Public Sphere & "Civility": HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES
From 2018-05-29: When Andrew Sullivan’s definition of “civility” means “you know and stay in your place”, or good faith for me, bad faith for thee. A fond memory of “generous argument” dissolves when you ask who had to swallow what to stay in the room. And do recall Sullivan’s post‑9/11 denunciations of a domestic “fifth column” of the “decadent left” from its “enclaves along the coasts”, and his cheerful embrace of strategic dishonesty over the Bush tax cuts. The through‑line is simple: the people who demand civility for themselves have rarely felt bound by it. Those who challenged the arithmetic—or the racism—never got reciprocity…
“Civility” looks very different depending on where you stand...
From here <http://crookedtimber.org/2018/05/23/neo-marxism/> I have excerpted three short paragraphs very much worth reading and thinking about:
Andrew Sullivan: ‘This bloggy exchange Ta-Nehisi and I had in 2009, on the very subject of identity politics and its claims.... there was a civility about it, an actual generosity of spirit, that transcended the boundaries of race and background.... The Atlantic was crammed with ideological opposites then, jostling together in the same office, and our engagement with each other and our readerships was a crackling and productive one. There was much more of that back then, before Twitter swallowed blogging, before identity politics became completely nonnegotiable, before we degenerated into these tribal swarms of snark and loathing. I think of it now as a distant island, appearing now and then, as the waves go up and down. The riptide of tribalism can capture us all in the end, until we drown in it...
And:
Ta Nehisi Coates: ‘I got incredibly used to learning from people... quite good at their craft, who I felt, and pardon my language, were fucking racist. And that was just the way the world was. I didn’t really have the luxury of having teachers who I necessarily felt, you know, saw me completely as a human being.... You can go into The Atlantic archives right now, and you can see me arguing with Andrew Sullivan about whether black people are genetically disposed to be dumber than white people. I actually had to take this seriously, you understand? I couldn’t speak in a certain way to Andrew. I couldn’t speak to Andrew on the blog the way I would speak to my wife about what Andrew said on the blog in the morning when it was just us.... I learned how to blog from Andrew. That was who I actually learned from. That was who actually helped me craft my voice. Even recognizing who he was and what he was, you know, I learned from him...
And:
Henry Farrell: ‘In juxtaposition, Sullivan’s and Coates’s pieces provide a miniature history of how a certain variety of self-congratulatory openness to inquiry is in actual fact a barbed thicket of power relations. What Sullivan depicts as a ‘different time’ when ‘neither of us denied each other’s good faith or human worth’, is, in Coates’ understanding, a time where he was required to ‘take seriously’ the argument that ‘black people are genetically disposed to be dumber than white people’ as a price of entry into the rarified heights of conversation at the Atlantic. The ‘civility’ and ‘generosity of spirit’ that supported ‘human to human’ conversation is juxtaposed to Coates’s ‘teachers’ who didn’t see him ‘completely as a human being’. What was open and free spirited debate in Sullivan’s depiction, was to Coates a loaded and poisonous dialogue where he could only participate if he shut up about what he actually believed. Juxtaposing these two gives us a very different understanding of Sullivan’s claim that ‘identity politics [have become] completely nonnegotiable’, and we are all being pulled down by the ‘riptide of tribalism’...
Finished? Good. Perhaps I should simply say that Henry Farrell has written everything that needs to be written here.
Or perhaps I should note that, back in The Day, it was not us, their adversaries on, say, the 2001 tax cut, who were denying George W. Bush’s and Andrew Sullivan’s good faith in the debate. It was Andrew Sullivan himself glorying that neither George W. Bush nor he was arguing in good faith:
The fact that Bush has to obfuscate his real goals of reducing spending with the smoke screen of ‘compassionate conservatism’ shows how uphill the struggle is.... A certain amount of B.S. is necessary for any vaguely successful retrenchment of government power in an insatiable entitlement state.... I just hope the smoke doesn’t clear before the spenders get their hands on our wallets again...
Sullivan felt himself under no obligation to be honest or civil back when he thought he was riding high. Rather the reverse. And it was not just Black people—although it was far stronger there. Those of us who thought that, like, arithmetic in the public sphere should be accurate were also not worth engaging in good faith.
Let me venture to generalize: Andrew Sullivan was always an interesting thinker, in that “civility” was something that others needed to extend to him but not that he was under any obligation to extend to anybody else. Most of all, we remember Andrew Sullivan after 911:
The middle part of the country—the great red zone that voted for Bush—is clearly ready for war. The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead—and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column...
and:
We might as well be aware of the enemy within the West itself-a paralyzing, pseudo-clever, morally nihilist fifth column that will surely ramp up its hatred in the days and months ahead...
It was not just Ta-Nehisi Coates but everybody who had doubts about the rush to conquer Iraq who had good reason to think they were regarded by Sullivan as something less than partners in argument and discernment.
Brad in 2026 here: Hoisting this because I ran across Andrew Sullivan’s intellectual footprints today for the first time in—it feels like years. It has been years! That is quite a blessing!
But it is not an end. I see Helen Pluckrose being easily grifted, and Andrew Sullivan makes her his mark and victim today.
I have a response <https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-272926583>:
Dear Ms. Pluckrose—
I remember Andrew Sullivan...
I remember Andrew Sullivan back in 2001...
I remember him writing: “The fact that Bush has to obfuscate his real goals of reducing spending with the smoke screen of ‘compassionate conservatism’ shows how uphill the struggle is.... A certain amount of B.S. is necessary for any vaguely successful retrenchment of government power in an insatiable entitlement state.... I just hope the smoke doesn’t clear before the spenders get their hands on our wallets again...”
Thus when I see you put the words “Andrew Sullivan” and “good faith” together in the same sentence, the words that come to my mind are “easily confused”.
And then I run into your: “‘queer’ refers to a set of political and philosophical beliefs about sex, gender and sexuality which holds that having categories for these is an oppressive social construct which should be disrupted as a form of progressive political activism...”
And I think: some people I run across do use ‘queer’ that way; others do not and use ‘queer’ to simply mean “not 100% heterosexual”; to refer to someone as ‘queer’ is to sometimes attribute a political identity to them, but more often, in my experience at least, is not.
Dollars will get you doughnuts that Mamdani means it in the latter way, that Sullivan knows that Mamdani does so, but thinks that by claiming Mamdani is celebrating those who demonize gay men and lesbians he can put one over on you.
And it worked, didn’t it?
I do know that a willingness to presume good faith is one of the glories of liberalism. And that one should be proud that people can easily grift one in this way—that it is a lot better than the alternative.
But, please, may I ask you not to be so be gullible when Andrew Sullivan or others of his ilk try to pick your pocket again in this way? And may I comment to you a piece by my friend John Holbo, “Vavilovian Philosophical Mimicry” <https://crookedtimber.org/2019/12/03/vavilovian-philosophical-mimicry/>?
I do get a lot from your writings. I hope you and yours are well, or, rather, as well as one can be in a world in which while one may well be, personally, quite comfortable, we live in a world in which no man is an island.