Andrew Sullivan
Andrew Michael Sullivan is a British-American conservative political commentator. Sullivan is a former editor of The New Republic, and the author or editor of six books. He started a political blog, The Daily Dish, in 2000, and eventually moved his blog to platforms, including Time, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and finally an independent subscription-based format. He retired from blogging in 2015. From 2016 to 2020, Sullivan was a writer-at-large at New York. He launched his newsletter The Weekly Dish in July 2020.
Sullivan has said that his conservatism is rooted in his Catholic background and in the ideas of the British political philosopher Michael Oakeshott. In 2003, he wrote that he could no longer support the American conservative movement, as he was disaffected with the Republican Party's continued rightward shift toward social conservatism during the George W. Bush era.
Born and raised in Britain, Sullivan has lived in the U.S. since 1984. He is openly gay and a practising Catholic.
Early life and education
Sullivan was born in South Godstone, Surrey, England, into a Catholic family of Irish descent, and was brought up in the nearby town of East Grinstead, West Sussex. He was educated at a Catholic primary school and at Reigate Grammar School, where his classmates included Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Keir Starmer and Conservative member of the House of Lords Andrew Cooper. He won a scholarship in 1981 to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was awarded a first-class Bachelor of Arts degree in modern history and modern languages. He founded the Pooh Stick Society at Oxford taking the office of Piglet, and in his second year was elected president of the Oxford Union for Trinity term 1983.After writing briefly for a newspaper, Sullivan won a scholarship in 1984 to Harvard University, where he earned a Master in Public Administration in 1986 from the John F. Kennedy School of Government and a Ph.D. in government in 1990. His dissertation was titled Intimations Pursued: The Voice of Practice in the Conversation of Michael Oakeshott.
Career
Sullivan first wrote for The Daily Telegraph on American politics. In 1986, he went to work for The New Republic magazine initially on a summer internship; among the most significant articles he wrote were "Gay Life Gay Death", an essay on the AIDS crisis, and "Sleeping with the Enemy", in which he attacked the practice of "outing", both of which earned him recognition in the gay community. He was appointed the editor of The New Republic in October 1991, a position he held until 1996. In that position, he expanded the magazine from its traditional roots in political coverage to cultural issues and the politics surrounding them. During this time, the magazine generated several high-profile controversies.While completing graduate work at Harvard in 1988, Sullivan published an attack in Spy magazine on Rhodes Scholars, "All Rhodes Lead Nowhere in Particular", which dismissed them as "hustling apple-polisher"; "high-profile losers"; "the very best of the second-rate"; and "misfits by the very virtue of their bland, eugenic perfection." "he sad truth is that as a rule," Sullivan wrote, "Rhodies possess none of the charms of the aristocracy and all of the debilities: fecklessness, excessive concern that peasants be aware of their achievement, and a certain hemophilia of character." Author Thomas Schaeper notes that "ronically, Sullivan had first gone to the United States on a Harkness Fellowship, one of many scholarships spawned in emulation of the Rhodes program."
In 1994, Sullivan published in The New Republic excerpts on race and intelligence from Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's controversial The Bell Curve, which argued that some of the measured difference in IQ scores among racially defined groups was a result of genetic inheritance. Almost the entire editorial staff of the magazine threatened to resign if material that they considered racist was published. Sullivan included lengthy rebuttals from 19 writers and contributors. According to Sullivan, this incident was a turning point in his relationship with the magazine's staff and management, which he conceded was already bad because he "was a lousy manager of people." He left the magazine in 1996.
Sullivan began writing for The New York Times Magazine in 1998, but editor Adam Moss fired him in 2002. Jack Shafer wrote in Slate magazine that he had asked Moss in an email to explain this decision, but that his emails went unanswered, adding that Sullivan was not fully forthcoming on the subject. Sullivan wrote on his blog that the decision had been made by Times executive editor Howell Raines, who found Sullivan's presence "uncomfortable", but defended Raines's right to fire him. Sullivan suggested that Raines did so in response to Sullivan's criticism of the Times on his blog, and said he had expected that his criticisms would anger Raines.
Sullivan has also worked as a columnist for The Sunday Times of London.
Ross Douthat and Tyler Cowen have suggested that Sullivan is the most influential political writer of his generation, particularly because of his very early and strident support for same-sex marriage, his early political blog, his support of the Iraq War, and his support of Barack Obama's presidential candidacy.
After the cessation of his long-running blog, The Dish, in 2015, Sullivan wrote regularly for New York during the 2016 presidential election, and in 2017 began writing a weekly column, "Interesting Times", for the magazine.
On July 19, 2020, after the unexplained absence of his column for June 5, Sullivan announced that he would no longer write for New York and would be reviving The Dish as a newsletter, The Weekly Dish, hosted by Substack.
Politics
Sullivan describes himself as a conservative and is the author of The Conservative Soul. He has supported a number of traditional libertarian positions, favouring limited government and opposing social interventionist measures such as affirmative action. But on many controversial public issues, including same-sex marriage, social security, progressive taxation, anti-discrimination laws, the Affordable Care Act, the U.S. government's use of torture, and capital punishment, he has taken positions not typically shared by conservatives in the United States. In 2012, Sullivan said, "the catastrophe of the Bush–Cheney years... all but exploded the logic of neoconservatism and its domestic partner-in-crime, supply-side economics."One of the most important intellectual and political influences on Sullivan was the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott. Sullivan describes Oakeshott's thought as "an anti-ideology, a nonprogramme, a way of looking at the world whose most perfect expression might be called inactivism." He argues "that Oakeshott requires us to systematically discard programmes and ideologies and view each new situation sui generis. Change should only ever be incremental and evolutionary. Oakeshott viewed society as resembling language: it is learned gradually and without us really realising it, and it evolves unconsciously, and for ever." In 1984, he wrote that Oakeshott offered "a conservatism which ends by affirming a radical liberalism." This "anti-ideology" is perhaps the source of accusations that Sullivan "flip-flops" or changes his opinions to suit the whims of the moment. He has written, "A true conservative—who is, above all, an anti-ideologue—will often be attacked for alleged inconsistency, for changing positions, for promising change but not a radical break with the past, for pursuing two objectives—like liberty and authority, or change and continuity—that seem to all ideologues as completely contradictory."
As a youth, Sullivan was a fervent supporter of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. He says of that time, "What really made me a right-winger was seeing the left use the state to impose egalitarianism—on my school", after the Labour government in Britain tried to merge his admissions-selective school with the local comprehensive school. At Oxford, he became friends with prominent conservatives William Hague and Niall Ferguson and became involved with Conservative Party politics. Sullivan has declared support for Arnold Schwarzenegger and other like-minded Republicans. He argues that the Republican Party, and much of the conservative movement in the U.S., has largely abandoned its earlier scepticism and moderation in favour of a more fundamentalist certainty, both in religious and political terms. He has said this is the primary source of his alienation from the modern Republican Party.
In 2009, Forbes ranked Sullivan 19th on a list of "The 25 Most Influential Liberals in the U.S. Media". Sullivan rejected the "liberal" label and set out his grounds in a published article in response.
In 2018, after Sarah Jeong, an editorial board member of The New York Times, received widespread criticism for her old anti-white tweets, Sullivan accused her of being racist and calling white people "subhuman". He also accused Jeong of spreading eliminationism, the belief that political opponents are a societal cancer who should be separated, censored, or exterminated.
Presidential elections
From 1980 through 2000, Sullivan supported Republican presidential candidates in the U.S., with the exception of the 1992 election, when he supported Bill Clinton. In 2004, he was angered by George W. Bush's support of the Federal Marriage Amendment designed to enshrine in the Constitution marriage as a union between a man and a woman, as well as what he saw as the Bush administration's incompetent management of the Iraq War, and supported Democratic nominee John Kerry.Sullivan endorsed Senator Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination in the 2008 United States presidential election, and Representative Ron Paul for the Republican nomination. After John McCain clinched the Republican primary and named Sarah Palin as his running mate, Sullivan began to espouse a birther-like conspiracy theory involving Palin and her young son Trig. Sullivan devoted a significant amount of space in The Atlantic to questioning whether Palin is Trig's biological mother. He and others who held this belief, dubbed "Trig Truthers", demanded Palin produce a birth certificate or other piece of medical evidence to prove Trig is indeed Palin's biological son. Sullivan eventually endorsed Obama for president, largely because he believed Obama would restore "the rule of law and Constitutional balance"; he also argued that Obama represented a more realistic prospect for "bringing America back to fiscal reason" and expressed hope that Obama could "get us past the culture war." Sullivan continued to maintain that Obama was the best choice for president from a conservative point of view. During the 2012 election campaign, he wrote, "Against a radical right, reckless, populist insurgency, Obama is the conservative option, dealing with emergent problems with pragmatic calm and modest innovation. He seeks as a good Oakeshottian would to reform the country's policies in order to regain the country's past virtues. What could possibly be more conservative than that?"
In the 2020 United States presidential election, he supported Joe Biden. During the 2024 United States presidential election, he supported Kamala Harris, despite having reservations about doing so. He strongly opposed Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign, citing his rhetoric towards immigrants and accusing him of embracing "anti-American tropes" and promoting "old-school anti-Semitism".