Andrew Sullivan: The Permanent Stain

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Icky Mettle said:
Oops! Haha. Sorry. Somehow I neglected to include the link when I posted the message. I added it that post and here it is as well: Andrew Sullivan: Trump Could Win

He also appeared frequently on Bill Maher’s show back then excoriating Trump.
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If there’s a founding idea of America, it’s that monarchy is unacceptable. You and I hear in everything Donald Trump says that he is the would-be dictator. That those are his instincts. Why do so many of his supporters not hear that monarchical tone in his speech?

"Well, I think some of them do and like it. And some of them just don’t take him seriously. There’s something that I’ve noticed in people who support him is just that they will say they support him, but then they say, “Well, I don’t really think he’s going to be able to do all those things he says.”

And there is a sense also that he himself by completely reversing himself within minutes on what might appear to be solid platform planks also kind of adds a sort of element of unseriousness to his policy proposals. But I think both are compatible in a way. The vagueness about policy is simply because he’s not interested in policy. What he’s interested in is power. And I think it was [Trump campaign chairman] Paul Manafort who said, he’ll deal with policy after he gets elected, but we’re not going to debate that before.

So he’s really, really interested in the wielding of his own power. And that’s not the American way. It’s not a democratic way of being. It’s an anti-democratic notion of being. And I think there’s also an element in the culture in which Washington is viewed as entirely broken. And therefore they want to blow it up and use this guy to blow it up."

And then to do whatever he wants. And so I think that at the root of this is a very un-American desire to abolish self-government. To say, OK, we live in such a divided, fractured, polarized society, we can’t really solve our own problems through our traditional constitutional processes. We’ll elect this tyrant and he will just do it somehow."
 
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Icky Mettle said:
Oops! Haha. Sorry. Somehow I neglected to include the link when I posted the message. I added it that post and here it is as well: Andrew Sullivan: Trump Could Win

He also appeared frequently on Bill Maher’s show back then excoriating Trump.
Click to expand...
Thank you for the link . Andrew correctly predicted what Trump would do should he win in 2016 , and yet he was lukewarm saying he would vote for Hillary even though he confessed that he was a Hillary hater.

Again, Andrew being Andrew... I believe Trump is a bad guy so I will hold my nose and vote for the lesser of two evils... rinse and repeat in 2024
 
heelinhell said:
Thank you for the link . Andrew correctly predicted what Trump would do should he win in 2016 , and yet he was lukewarm saying he would vote for Hillary even though he confessed that he was a Hillary hater.

Again, Andrew being Andrew... I believe Trump is a bad guy so I will hold my nose and vote for the lesser of two evils... rinse and repeat in 2024
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Point is, he’s always spoken out/sounded the alarm against Trump.

And to be fair, to get a guy who made a living by being a staunch political conservative admit he would be willing to vote for a democratic presidential candidate, including one he has always hated, it says a lot. It doesn’t have to be enthusiastic.
 
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heelinhell said:
a damning with faint praise endorsement :

the venal vs the vacuous
the awful vs. the empty
the malignant vs. the mediocre

Yeah, that "endorsement " really inspired folks to turnout and prevent a 2nd Trump term...

Andrew being Andrew... give me a break
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I'm not sure what we're discussing here. I disagree with a lot of stuff Andrew Sullivan says. But you asked if he had been sounding the call about Trump before the article, and the answer is yes, he has - and it goes back much further than 2024. He has identified Trump as an extremely dangerous threat to our constitutional democracy for years.
 
Sullivan also identifies the pro-authoritarians, i.e., the MAGAs quite pointedly...

"Why do so many of his supporters not hear that monarchical tone in his speech?

"Well, I think some of them do and like it."

"And so I think that at the root of this is a very un-American desire to abolish self-government. To say, OK, we live in such a divided, fractured, polarized society, we can’t really solve our own problems through our traditional constitutional processes. We’ll elect this tyrant and he will just do it somehow."

Yet even today he's OK enough with that to continue identifying himself as conservative appears despite his own perception in 2016 and proven over and over again in the years since...that such an impulse/ideology is pro-monarchy and un-democratic, i.e., authoritarian.
 
donbosco said:
Sullivan also identifies the pro-authoritarians, i.e., the MAGAs quite pointedly...

"Why do so many of his supporters not hear that monarchical tone in his speech?

"Well, I think some of them do and like it."

"And so I think that at the root of this is a very un-American desire to abolish self-government. To say, OK, we live in such a divided, fractured, polarized society, we can’t really solve our own problems through our traditional constitutional processes. We’ll elect this tyrant and he will just do it somehow."

Yet even today he's OK enough with that to continue identifying himself as conservative appears despite his own perception in 2016 and proven over and over again in the years since...that such an impulse/ideology is pro-monarchy and un-democratic, i.e., authoritarian.
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I hate defending Sullivan this much but I think he’s one of the people who still identifies as conservative because he feels so strongly that MAGA, and even non-MAGAs who are ok with Trump, are not. The label is not that important to me.

I do think his comment that you quoted here is a good, if now obvious, one. I always notice today’s Republicans, including those who post here, never even talk about fidelity to the constitution or the political process it enshrined. They seem astonishingly comfortable with living in a post-constitution America. The social contract has been thoroughly broken, perhaps irrevocably.
 
Skip through the commentary to get to George Will in multiple segments. He lays it out in 2016 and today with crystalline clarity:

 
SnoopRob said:
Blah, blah, blah. Words, words, words. Digital ink spilled by the e-bucket telling us how terrible Trump and how he's destroying America.

Except that all thinking people know that already and don't necessarily need to be reminded. (Although this is a good, well-written summary of Trump's evil.)

Sullivan says that democracy is folding. He's wrong, although not by a lot. Democracy has not yet folded. The Republican Party has folded. Conservatism has folded. Those directly targeted by Trump have folded. But democracy still has a chance although the odds are looking worse by the day.

And if democracy is to survive, it will have to be conservatives and Republicans who step up to save it. Democrats are a minority party in our government and don't have the numbers to do anything except offer significant assistance on their own. It will need to be both Republicans leaders and rank-and-file Republican Senators & Representatives who decide to put country over party and, in some cases, country over their own careers in order to pull us back from the end of democracy in this country. It will have to be Republican donors and "media" who tell the masses it's ok to oppose Trump because he's an evil tyrant and it will have to, ultimately, be Republican voters who end his reign at the ballot box.

So, at this juncture, I don't really care to read another conservative tell me how bad things are; I can see that with my own eyes and hear it with my own ears. What I need is a Republican who can convince other Republicans to actually put actions to their concerns and get those in the Republican Party to put a stop to Trump. Anything else is from these panicked conservatives is, to borrow a phrase, "a tale told by an intellectual, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing".

To Sullivan's credit he did give me my first full belly laugh of the day. To have the ability to type this and not be so embarrassed as to immediately delete it was strikingly funny to me:

"Conservatism is prudent, diligent care for the inheritance of the past, and the shepherding of constitutional democratic governance away from the shoals of dysfunction and ideology."

And then to follow it up with this absolutely sent me over the edge:

"conservatives killing the Constitution they love..."

In an article where the author complains about the mendacity of the leader of the Republican Party, for a conservative to try to sneak those whoppers by us is unintentional satire of the highest level.
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I actually like Andrew Sullivan and thought that was a well-written piece, but I can't disagree with this post, particularly the last few sentences...
 
Zoo_View said:
Will MAGAts even listen to the Andrew Sullivans, George Wills, etc.?

They’ve already excoriated and excommunicated the Liz Cheneys and Adam Kinzingers.

The Lincoln Party, The Bulwark, and similar center-right entities carry little-to-no sway among Republicans.
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I’ve always respected Will and Sullivan (still do) and enjoy their opinions and insights. On the other hand, I have no use for the sell out Lincoln Party and Bulwark. They’re simply never Trump grifters.

…and I won’t even utter the names of the gruesome twosome ex elected Rs you mentioned.
 
Ramrouser said:
I’ve always respected Will and Sullivan (still do) and enjoy their opinions and insights. On the other hand, I have no use for the sell out Lincoln Party and Bulwark. They’re simply never Trump grifters.

…and I won’t even utter the names of the gruesome twosome ex elected Rs you mentioned.
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The lack of self awareness needed for a Trump supporter to deride literally anyone else as a grifter is utterly staggering.
 
rodoheel said:
Also, it's always good to have a reminder that this is, of course, Andrew Sullivan, in the form of the line "conservatives killing the Constitution they love because they hate the left more." Gee, Andrew, it's almost like most "conservatives" never loved the Constitution at all, it was just a convenient vehicle for them to articulate a legal justification for being opposed to progressive reform.
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Well said, with just the right amount of wry...
 
donbosco said:
Many years ago on ACCBoards.com there was a lot of Sullivan discussion, often coupled with Christopher Hitchens -- both contrarians with a knack for phrasing. Kind of modern H.L. Menckens of a sort.
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I've said it before, but I'd give a lot to hear what Hitchens (or Mencken, for that matter) would have to say about Trump...
 
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