The Luxury of Andrew Sullivan

Alla Nazimova in Salome (1923), via Pinterest.

Shorter David Brooks ("The Future of Nonconformity"):

The trouble right now is intellectual segregationism, where conservatives are excluded from academic life, working class voices are excluded from mainstream media, the Marxist left and theological right are marginalized, groupthink is practiced by all, and writers are expected to act as the representatives of a group, the left even more conformist than the right, and 62% of Americans are afraid to share their beliefs. Fortunately there's an obvious solution, in which the voices of nonconformity exclude everybody who doesn't want to subscribe to their SubStack or Patreon site and make lots of money from their self-selecting audiences.

It's intellectual feudalism replacing intellectual capitalism, a landscape dotted with castles dominated by figures of daring and resistance like Yascha Mounk, Andrew Sullivan, Judd Legum, Matt Taibbi, Jonah Goldberg, and David French defending themselves from behind their moats and battlements. That'll show those segregationists. Or, as David Brooks says,

Online writers don’t have to chase clicks by writing about whatever Trump tweeted 15 seconds ago. They can build deep relationships with the few rather than trying to affirm or titillate the many.

I would like the record to show that Judd Legum did not leave ThinkProgress, which he founded, because of its relentless cancel culture, but because he got sick of being an editor in chief, with which I can certainly sympathize:

NYT Book Review: Sentence them to the galleys!

Right, "Intel" gave him a call 10:30 Sunday night after leaving him hanging for 48 hours. "Hi, Mr. President, Intel here, we got a line on that report that we've been collecting evidence going back to January that GRU has been paying Afghan militants to kill NATO troops since 2018, and it turns out when we had that emergency National Security Council meeting on the subject last March, as reported in The Times, WaPo, and Wall Street Journal, among other places, we apparently decided the evidence wasn't credible, so we didn't want to bother you. We suspect the New York Times Book Review of fabricating the whole thing."

With their field critics in Helmand, who planted the story with the militants ("Just tell the interrogators Russians were paying you, and in turn we'll get you lunch with an agent to pitch your manuscript"). No, the @nytimesbooks bit must be a bizarre Autocorrect. But in general he's once again gotten out ahead of where the cleanup crew can follow him, simultaneously acknowledging that the reports exist, "based at least in part on interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals", and claiming that The Times made them up.

And in other cheap shots:

Cheap shots but not *that* cheap

Sully, via YouTube.

Paying my respects to the late

I have to say when Andrew Sullivan said in January 2013 that his readers would have to fork over $20 a year to partake of his Dish I respected that.

In fact I respected it enough to not go over there, standing on my own principle that nothing he wrote could possibly be worth that much, or any, money, except once in a great while when driven by the exigencies of some Brooksological problem (because Brooksy definitely dipped into Sully from time to time for the heavyweight intellectual material, including for his epic tour of early 20th-century Russian philosophy and his tragically doomed attempt to grasp the thinking of the psychoanalyst Adam Philipps). If it was really important to him, I figured, to keep his readership down to the class of those who were willing to commit, I'd stay away.