The End of an Internet Era: Personal Blogging Loses a Giant

GELFAND’S WORLD-Andrew Sullivan (photo) has an unusual background to be a liberals' hero. He authored a book titled The Conservative Soul, supported Republican presidential candidates including Ronald Reagan up through the first George W. Bush campaign, and supported Bush's invasion of Iraq. So why has he achieved heroic status to this and other liberals? It's both a long and a short answer, and worth telling. 

To give some of the flavor of Sullivan's work, let's start with a feature that he ran on his blog The Daily Dish during the miserable depths of the recent Bush-Cheney recession. Sullivan had been doing a photo series called The view from your window, and he took off on the old title to run The view from your recession. This series reprinted letters from people who were miserably out of work, as well as from business owners who saw the results in the form of floods of job applicants. The series detailed stories of people who were desperate to work for half of what they had previously made. As in so many things, reality trumps theorizing, and Sullivan was willing to set forth the facts. 

Sullivan began his internet career in the millenial year 2000. He came to this from an academic and writing background, having grown up in England, studied at Oxford, and finished his doctoral work at Harvard. His own hero is the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, about whom Sullivan has written extensively. Sullivan was also the editor of The New Republic magazine in the early 1990s. 

Andrew Sullivan is also somewhat of an outlier in the conservative nation, being an HIV positive gay man who married another gay man, and who has been a leader in the movement for marriage equality. Michael Huckabee he is not. That is just one of his transgressions against modern American conservatism. 

Sullivan seems to be beset with the one thing that doesn't work within movement conservatism in this country. He represents intellectual honesty and shows it on the internet. His independent spirit became clear to internet readers when he began to express his disillusionment with the Iraq occupation. 

The big break happened when he became the leading spokesman in opposition to the use of torture by American occupiers. Nearly alone among American conservative leaders, he held the U.S. to a moral standard, consistent with his views of what conservatism ought to be. 

His disillusionment with the Bush-Cheney administration resulted in a break with Republicanism when he supported Bush's defeat in 2004 and supported Obama in 2008. 

Sullivan's political evolution wouldn't be that much of an issue, all other things being equal. Lots of people go through changes. But Sullivan communicated his views, both traditionalist conservatism and his increasing anger over torture and war, in the pages of his blog, which was becoming one of the most influential blogs of this first major generation of bloggers. 

There have been two characteristics of The Daily Dish that allowed it to hold onto readers such as yours truly over the years. The first is the quality of writing and the breadth of the subject matter. Sullivan writes about everything from his own Catholic faith to all manner of political issues. In recent years, his blog began running poetry, an opening to those of us who aren't all that enamored of this art form. 

He had long since pioneered a contest called The View from your Window, in which readers have been challenged to identify the location from which a photograph was taken. This inspired a worldwide group of people to take up photo interpretation as a hobby. (A little bit of disclosure: I have never attempted to compete, have never submitted an entry, and find the whole thing somewhat mystifying. But the fact that numerous readers could recognize the old communist era sports complex in a Balkan nation, or could tease out the location using Google Maps, is kind of amazing, and tells you something about the intellectual abilities of the readership.) 

Sullivan has been a leading public intellectual who has not been afraid to communicate interests that most of us would not otherwise have thought about. 

The other characteristic that has been most endearing about The Daily Dish is that in any tendentious topic, both sides have gotten a fair shake. Sullivan would write a piece laying out his thoughts and put it up on the blog. The next day, he might run another piece with a title along the lines of A Reader Responds, quoting an entire letter from somebody who took the opposing point of view. 

The Daily Dish became known for these extended debates in which Sullivan entertained the best competing arguments. This is, of course, quite the opposite of an alternative internet trend that was also developing over the same era, in which blog owners found the weakest opponents to quote and then mock. You didn't see that in the Dish. Sullivan wrote of his own religious faith and then allowed atheists and members of other religious groups to provide their own thoughts. He opened the dish to comments from liberals, conservatives, and the non-partisan. 

Sullivan made a point of admitting to his own history of political change, in particular his regrets over his early professed views on the Iraq invasion. Sometimes it has been akin to watching somebody rip off a scab and bleed out in public. 

Sullivan also extended the new form demonstrated earlier in The view from your recession. He would raise a topic such as abortion, and proceed to publish personal accounts from readers about their own experiences. In this, he took advantage of how the internet allows for extended texts. Publishing a few hundred extra words, or a few thousand, does not require the purchase of more newsprint or higher postage costs. Sullivan made sure to give people their full say. 

The sad and dramatic news is that Sullivan is retiring from blogging and folding The Dish. It's the blogging equivalent of losing the New York Times. 

Sullivan's announcement in turn created ripples on the internet pond, perhaps the best being the comments by Kevin Drum which are the subject for the rest of this discussion. 

Drum, who is known around the blogging world by his first name Kevin, defines what he calls old school blogging. Kevin, like Andrew Sullivan, was one of the first bloggers to build a name for himself and gain an internet following. He points out that in the early days, bloggers were generally amateurs. Kevin was one of the first to be offered a chance to do blogging professionally, at first for the Washington Monthly, and later for Mother Jones Magazine. 

Andrew Sullivan attached his blog to various publishing groups over the years, not the least of which was the Atlantic. But more recently, Sullivan took his blog independent and invited readers to subscribe. As Kevin points out, Sullivan has been pretty much the only political blogger who could run a business like that on a subscription basis. 

Kevin makes another point which seems to be the more important to him. He sees the old school blogs, with their single authorship, as being a conversation between writer and reader. Kevin suggests that it is a lot harder to have that conversation when a blog has multiple authors. It is a more distanced sort of thing. 

Single author blogs, at least the successful ones, are beset by human stress and strain. Being constantly involved, sometimes seven days a week and hour by hour, takes its toll. Doing updates and comments, sometimes several times a day, gets wearing. It's fun to have that kind of pulpit and to know that you have a readership, but it must be terribly exhausting over the years. Sullivan has done the job better and longer than almost anyone else, and we will miss him. 

Addendum: I had my moment when Sullivan, much to my surprise, published comments I made about the culture of Rugby Football, back on February 5. 2007. For me, it was a brief 400 word note, and he printed the whole thing, maybe the highlight of my writing career.

 

(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])

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CityWatch

Vol 13 Issue 10

Pub: Feb 3, 2015