ANDREW SULLIVAN HATES THE AMERICA THAT ANDREW SULLIVAN HELPED CREATE. As Jim Geraghty wrote on Tuesday: “The sub headline of Andrew Sullivan’s lengthy essay in New York magazine on the state of American democracy declares, ‘America is a breeding ground for tyranny:’”
Who is responsible for this new tyranny? The rich, the elites, the powerful, the well-connected, and the Republicans. That, of course, is a heavy judgment — and one that Sullivan never quite gets around to proving. Sure, he makes the case that Donald Trump is on the verge of riding some ugly sentiments to the Republican nomination, but it almost seems as though Sullivan hasn’t noticed that a progressive trailblazer — Barack Obama — has been working from the Oval Office these last seven-and-a-half years. Tyranny is generally described as a repressive and arbitrarily cruel regime; and to be a tyrant, you need power. The subset of Republicans who are voting for Trump are driven by their sense of powerlessness — that’s not exactly your prototypical foundation for tyranny.
Trump’s fans are coming out because they feel like they have so little control over their own lives, and they fear this might be their last shot. Even Donald J. Trump — reality-TV star, erstwhile bankrupt, and sometime real-estate mogul that he is — isn’t all that powerful, at least not yet. Trump has wealth, and when he talks, the media broadcasts it, but he can’t make the laws. For all of his flaws — you may have noticed National Review pointing them out from time to time — he didn’t create this mess of a government, and he’s only one economic actor among millions in the modern economy.
Of course, Andrew has been thumping the “America is a breeding ground for tyranny” theme for quite some time; in 2007, he excoriated then-President Bush as “The Weimar President.”
Since that would mean that President Bush was the 21st century equivalent of Paul von Hindenburg, as I wrote at the time, “I can only guess that Andrew believes that President Bush is an elderly figurehead leading a weakened but relatively benign quasi-socialist administration suffering the ravages of hyper-inflation and that Hillary, Obama or whoever his successor is, is the next Hitler, about to install a terribly malevolent war machine and concurrent massive welfare state?”
OK, 2016 isn’t that bad.* But in a new article at City Journal, Fred Siegel adds, “Most of the maladies Sullivan attributes to Trump were incorporated into American politics by the man he deeply admires, the man whose face alone, Sullivan suggested, proved his worth—Barack Obama. Sullivan rightly sees the danger of ‘democracy willingly, even impetuously,’ repealing itself. That repeal began under the man sitting in the Oval Office today.” Siegel’s article is titled “Andrew Sullivan’s Blind Spot.”
How big is that blind spot?
Following the equation of Bush to Hindenburg, Andrew described a speech by Obama in May of 2009 as “a conservative one by a conservative president.” In 2004, when John Kerry was running for the White House, he described John Kerry as “the right man – and the conservative choice – for a difficult and perilous time.” If those are Andrew’s best examples of conservatism, perhaps, as Jim Geraghty writes, he might just be looking for tyranny in all the wrong places.
* But the year is still young!