An open letter to Andrew Sullivan, concerning the ongoing struggle to “see what is front of one’s face.”

Mr Sullivan:

In the fall of 2001, soon after the terrorists attacks of 9/11, you inaugurated the “Sontag Award” on your blog, The Daily Dish, as part of your journalistic battle against “decadent,” radical left-wing intellectuals, bent on destroying the United States through their ill-considered attacks on the Bush administration and their criticisms of the Iraq War. The award was named in honor of Susan Sontag, who had the temerity to suggest in the early days following the attacks that the United States was not, in fact, a blameless actor on the world stage, and that U.S. citizens needed to be more critical of the government’s response to the attacks. In the months and years that followed, you frequently dispensed the Sontag award upon those who, in your words, were guilty of “glib moral equivalence in the war on terror and visceral anti-Americanism.” (I note in passing that to argue for self-reflection and self-critique does not require that one engage in “glib moral equivalence” of any sort. A better example of the latter, I should think, would be to, say, create a label for one’s right-wing domestic opponents--something like, oh, I don’t know, like “Christianist,”--that is clearly meant to suggest a structural similarity between such people and the “Islamisists” who bombed the Trade Towers. But back to the matter at hand...)

You no longer mention the Sontag Award. Indeed, it is difficult to find any kind of evidence on your blog now there was ever any such thing. You list a “glossary” of snarky awards that you continue to promote, but they mostly refer to right-wing figures like Michelle Malkin and Hugh Hewitt. This change mirrors your own (obvious though unstated) political conversion. Now that you are a prominent supporter of a Democratic president and an opponent of the War on Terror, the danger from effete, latte-sipping, socialistic fifth-columnists is no longer quite so alarming, apparently. Instead, good Americans all need to fear knuckle-dragging, pickup driving, gun-toting Southern Baptists: moral monsters who believe neither in evolution nor gay marriage. Right-wing caricature, in short, replaces the previous left-wing caricature. Andrew Sullivan is not at war with the Susan Sontags of the world. Andrew Sullivan is at war with the Michelle Malkins of the world. Andrew Sullivan has always been at war with Michelle Malkin.

One piece of evidence remains from those early years, however. About the same time that you came up with the Sontag award, you also invented the Von Hoffmann award. This award is given out for “stunningly wrong political, social and cultural predictions.” The origin of this award is the warning by columnist Nicholas Von Hoffmann, in late fall of 2001, that the war in Afghanistan would turn into a quagmire, a claim that you found, given the early apparent success of Western troops in defeating the Taliban regime, to be self-evidently risible.

I’m sure you realize the problem. The war in Afghanistan is now almost eight years old, with no foreseeable end. Eight years is longer than the United States’ participation in both World Wars. Nicholas Von Hoffmann’s 2001 prediction was not “stunningly wrong;” it was pretty much spot-on.

Andrew, you need to get rid of the Von Hoffmann award. I suggest that you do so as soon as possible, in a similar manner to how you made the Sontag award disappear. Simply remove it from the website, and never mention it again. There is no need to apologize to Mr. Von Hoffmann, nor any admission of fault on your part. Repeat after me: the Von Hoffmann award does not exist. It has never existed.

Don't Hate Him Because He's Intelligent

There are all sorts of reasons that I could give as to why I think John Derbyshire has surpassed Gore Vidal and Ron Rosenbaum as the biggest asshole now working in American journalism, but I would suggest that this recent piece of his in the National Review serve as Exhibit A. At the top of the article, he cites a recent essay by William Deresiewicz in which Deresiewicz recounts having had some trouble talking to his plumber. This inability to communicate across class levels becomes, for Derbyshire, an anecdote supporting the idea of a natural elite, based mostly, he seems to think, on intelligence. So you see, when the hoi polloi start moaning about elitism, it's really just a complaint that some folks are smarter than them.

First of all, any time you start talking about "inherited" intelligence you beg all kinds of pretty basic questions: including, what intelligence really is, how we know we have measured it, how we could ever control for various environmental influences with any degree of influence to make any sort of claim about innate abilities, and whether it is the case that intellectual skills are represented by a single trait, or (more likely by far) that some people have mental capabilities that make them good for dealing with some sorts of tasks, and others have capabilities to deal with other sorts of tasks.

But the really rich irony here is that Derbyshire has completely misunderstood (or mis-represented) the essay that he quotes from. William Deresiewicz isn't arguing that he can't talk to the plumber because he, Deresiewicz, is just so damned smart. He's arguing that he can't talk to him because he is not competent to do so. There's no natural hierarchy at play here; there's a failure of the educational system. Which any reasonably intelligent reader might have guessed from the title of the essay: "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education."

One of the ways that Ivy League schools deform their students, Deresiewicz argues, is by pampering them both intellectually and emotionally, so that they get an undeserved sense of superiority:

"There are due dates and attendance requirements at places like Yale, but no one takes them very seriously. Extensions are available for the asking; threats to deduct credit for missed classes are rarely, if ever, carried out. In other words, students at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances...Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls 'entitled mediocrity.'"

In other words, John Derbyshire, unafraid to speak the Truth that all us cowed liberals cannot accept--that there are truly superior people in the world, who are just more intellectually gifted than all the rest--isn't even bright enough to figure out the point of the stuff that he quotes. He has taken almost the exact opposite meaning from Deresiewicz's essay than the one the author obviously intended it to have. And then he's broadcast that perverted interpretation to his readers, most of whom probably won't probably bother to read the original. So now, an insightful, provocative commentary on the relationship between education and class in modern America gets turned into some lame defense of elitism, thanks to Derbyshire. What a tool.

This isn't really media commentary, but I had to get it off my chest.