The Decline of Sullivan
Until recently, Andrew Sullivan’s blog used to be one of the 3 or 4 blogs I checked every day. He seemed to “tell it as it is” and had few if any sacred cows. This is no longer the case. This is not a matter of disagreeing with any of his positions as I’ve always disagreed with some but instead his transformation into a shrill ideological hack; a rigid believer rather than the questioner he was before. Kevin Holtsberry does a pretty good job summarizing this recent rhetorical decline:
It seems to me, that he rarely argues in good faith and his animus and personal obsessions color almost everything he writes.
Sullivan is a skilled polemicist. He is obviously smart and can be, or at least has been in the past, an effective advocate for a particular type of conservatism. It is not, nor has it been, the dominant form in this country, but it is a legitimate form worthy of debate and discussion.
But I am afraid I can no longer take his arguments seriously on a host of issues when he blatantly over-generalizes and argues from bad faith based on emotion and sloppy rhetoric rather than logic and first principles. As I noted above, Sullivan would not tolerate this type of argument from others regarding homosexuality or any of the issues important to him. His double standard is a mile wide: trust those who support your ideas and distrust everything the other side does.
