On Sun, 18 Jul 2004, mike larkin quoted Bradford Delong quoting Matt Yglesias quoting Andrew Sullivan:
> http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/001216.html
There is a delicious irony here. What made Andrew Sullivan famous -- what made him Andrew Sullivan -- was his single-handed attempt to invent a coherent gay conservatism, which before his book _Virtually Normal_ was considered oxymoronic, self-hating and delusional idea. Everyone took for granted that politically conscious gays had to be on the liberal left (an assumption which, because he was personally a political conservative, he naturally railed against). His argument in a nutshell was that (1) gays are like most other Americans -- they don't want to be political, they just want a normal life, and the left gay agenda, focused on mobilization and separatist displays, doesn't hold this out for them; and (2) there was one magic issue that would crystalized the virtues of his position, that would both describe and prescribe it -- something that was culturally inherently conservative, and which could conceivably galvanize the gay community the way AIDS activism once had by tapping into their deep desires for apolitical, conformist, normality: gay marriage.
When his book came out, it caused a huge debate, with most of the gay establishment not surprisingly saying he was self-hating and delusional. But he had the medium-term laugh: gay marriage became the center of the gay political agenda more quickly and utterly than he could have imagined in his wildest dreams.
However his larger goal -- that this would make gay political conservatism respectable (and allow a sizeable portion if not a majority of the gay community to define itself as Republican) because it framed gay politics in what he saw as the instrinsically Republican terms of family values -- this was indeend delusional. Completely, fantastically, almost clinically delusional.
And now he's not only getting hoist by his own petard but drawn and quatered by it. His attempt to conservatize gay cultural politics by making marriage its central agenda has been so successful that no one thinks of it as gay conservatism anymore. It's simply become mainstream gay politics. So no one gives him credit. And his goal of using this to *politically* conservatize gays has backfired beyond belief. Gay marriage has accelerated the mainstreaming of gay culture -- and it is precisely this that has driven Republican conservatives into paroxyms of anti-gay hysteria up and beyond what they had before and which will last for decades to come. I think it would be fair to say that gays and the Republican party would be less at loggerheads if he'd never invented the issue. The end result is that the thing he's now most famous for is exactly what he was trying to fix. He's the most famous delusional gay republican -- seemingly the only idiot in America who thought Republicans, and specifically this administration, would turn out to be gay people's best friends. It looks like he'll have to say mea culpa every day for the rest of his life until he folds his tent and becomes a Democrat.
If it wasn't so ludicrous you could almost make a Greek tragedy out of it. I can't think of anyone who was so totally his own nemesis in so short a time -- who seemingly reengineered the whole zeitgeist just so it could crush everything he believed in the most spectacular way possible.
Michael