Leon Wieseltier created a stir this week when he floated the
idea that Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan’s harsh
attacks on Israel may be motivated by anti-Semitism.
For good reason, many argue that Sullivan should not be taken
seriously and deserves to be ignored. Yet he still drives
political debate on the Internet, and is widely read —
even by President Obama.
And so, in an otherwise slow political news week as Washington
was crippled by snow, Wieseltier’s verbose essay for the New
Republic sparked a
round of debate among Sullivan defenders and critics.
The anti-Semitism charge isn’t one to be thrown around lightly
and so I’ll set it aside, because all one has to do to make a
case against Sullivan is simply to evaluate him on the basis by
which he evaluates others.
For instance, in one of his more controversial posts, Sullivan
lamented last month that he was “sick” of Israelis and
Palestinians. And then he offered this solution: “My own view is
moving toward supporting a direct American military imposition of
a two-state solution, with NATO troops on the borders of the new
states of Palestine and Israel.”
This is clearly an unworkable idea, a fact that should be obvious
to anybody with a shred of understanding of the conflict,
regardless of ideological inclinations. But if anybody should
recognize this, it should be Sullivan himself, who consistently
bashes neoconservatives for arrogantly and naively believing that
America can use its military might to impose its vision on the
world.
Here is Sullivan, in 2008,
explaining why he was wrong to support the Iraq War:
I heard and read about ancient Sunni and Shiite divisions, knew
of the awful time the British had in running Iraq but had never
properly absorbed the lesson. I bought the argument by many
neoconservatives that Iraq was one of the more secular and
modern of Arab societies, that these divisions were not so
deep, that all those pictures of men in suits and mustaches and
women in Western clothing were the deeper truth about this
rare, modern Arab society; and believed that it could, if we
worked at it, be a model for the rest of the Arab Muslim world.
I should add I don’t believe that these ancient divides were
necessarily as deep as they subsequently became in the chaos
that the invasion unleashed. But I greatly under-estimated them
— and as someone who liked to think of myself as a
conservative, I pathetically failed to appreciate how those
divides never truly go away and certainly cannot be abolished
by a Western magic wand.
It’s very difficult to square this epiphany — which he claims as
a central aspect of his break with modern conservatism — with
his rather draconian proposal to have U.S. troops invade Israel
in order to impose a two-state solution that neither side has
agreed to. He might recall, for instance, that the British had a
pretty “awful time” occupying Palestine before the establishment
of a Jewish state, and it’s fair to say that the divisions
between Israelis and Palestinians are quite deep. And this
doesn’t even take into account that the Palestinians themselves
are divided between Hamas and Fatah.
Another frequent argument that Sullivan gives for his break with
conservatism is President Bush’s reckless spending. Here’s what
he wrote in a 2005 column
for the Times of London:
President Bush has added $1 trillion (£520 billion) to the
national debt in only four years and is proposing to add at
least another $2 trillion with his social security reform. With
his Medicare prescription drug benefit, about whose massive
expense he deceived Congress, he has enacted the biggest new
entitlement since Lyndon Johnson. Bush has increased spending
on medical care for the poor by 46%. He has doubled education
spending in four years; federal housing spending has gone up
86%.
At the time Sullivan wrote that, the largest annual deficit run
up by the Bush administration was $412.7 billion in 2004,
according
to the Congressional Budget Office. By contrast, the lowest
deficit Obama expects to run were he to serve two terms is $706
billion, according to the White House’s
own budget projections. When the Times column
was published, Bush-era spending had never gone above 19.6
percent of gross domestic product, and yet, if Obama were to
serve two full terms, outlays would never fall below 22.8 percent
of GDP.
While Sullivan may still try to blame Bush for all deficits Obama
may incur through 2017, the same logic could be used to absolve
any president from any responsibility for anything. Bush, for
instance, came into office in the wake of the bursting of the
tech bubble, eventually corporate scandals exposing malfeasance
originating during the Clinton-era rocked Wall Street, and Bush
“inherited” the problem of terrorism that necessitated a defense
buildup. But in the real world Bush does deserve blame because
instead of responding to the new realities by curtailing his
domestic agenda, he continued as if nothing had changed, and put
us on a fiscally reckless path that Obama is exacerbating.
Though he once decried the creation of new entitlements, Sullivan
has become a tireless advocate for Obamacare, which adds 15
million people to Medicaid programs that are bankrupting the
states, while providing subsidies for millions more. Ironically,
as the prospects for Obamacare dimmed, the same Sullivan who once
criticized Bush for “increased spending on medical care for the
poor,” last month
condemned the “glee with which the GOP is greeting the end of
any access too [sic] health insurance for millions of the working
poor…”
Sullivan has also
echoed the Obama administration’s line that it’s necessary to
pass the health care bill to control costs. In
one post he argued that it would be a “huge mistake” to
abandon the health care bill, which he called “a necessary start
on a critical reform without which we hurtle toward bankruptcy
even more quickly.” To give up, he wrote, would be “surrendering
to forces that are as proto-fascist as any we have seen in recent
times.” He explained: “This is about more than health reform and
we have to see it in that context. This is about a cynical
nihilist attempt to break this presidency before it has had a
chance to do what we elected it to do by a landslide vote.”
Yet the skepticism of Obamacare opponents is rooted in mounting
empirical evidence that passing health care legislation as
proposed would not actually control costs or help our nation
avert bankruptcy. Democrats have relied on a raft of
accounting gimmicks that obscure the true costs of the
legislation. The Congressional Budget Office
noted in December that even if the proposed cuts to Medicare
go into effect, they cannot be double counted, meaning that
either they can be used to pay for the health care bill, or to
extend the solvency of the program, but not both. The Centers for
Medicare and Medicaid Services — the agency that tracks national
health care expenditures — has analyzed both the
House and
Senate health care bills. The chief actuary found that not
only would the bills not contain the growth of health care
spending, but each of them would actually raise national
expenditures to a higher level than under the currently
unsustainable pace. But engaging these empirical arguments would
require more thought and study than Sullivan’s prolific writing
schedule allows, so instead he lazily heaves ad hominem attacks
at his opponents in an effort to delegitimize them. It is, in
fact, the exact opposite of the kind of rational analysis on
which Sullivan supposedly prides himself.
While Sullivan has blasted
Rovian tactics meant to divide people against each other, he
regularly engages in character assassination against those who
disagree with him. If you reach a different conclusion from him,
you aren’t just wrong, you’re a “nihilist” or “proto-fascist” or
part of the “Goldfarb-Krauthammer
wing” of Judaism. Though he regularly attacks the “birther”
movement of those who don’t believe Obama is a U.S. citizen,
Sullivan himself is a birther — only in his sense the term
applies to
raising doubts about the maternity of Trig Palin. Like the
nutty Obama birthers and all conspiracy theorists, Sullivan still
insists he’s merely asking questions that nobody else will.
What’s ironic is that Sullivan portrays himself as an island of
sanity in a sea of madness. He’s a writer who claims he wants to
have an adult debate over the important issues of the day while
regularly resorting to juvenile name calling (Sarah Palin, for
instance, was recently called “Coughlin
with boobs“).
So, while one can only speculate as to what motivates Sullivan’s
views on Israel, even giving him the benefit of the doubt and
judging him strictly by his own standards, his daily ratings are
philosophically incoherent, intellectually lazy, and increasingly
insane.
