Quitting the Dish: A Reflection on Andrew Sullivan from a Bereaved Dish-Head
It’s hard to imagine life without Andrew Sullivan. He hasn’t died, but his decision to end his blog, the Dish, this month after 15 years has occasioned, in me and probably thousands of others, something akin to bereavement. To whom will we now go for a reliable, and reliably sane, perspective? Who’s going to bring us the latest from Cairo, Kiev, Tehran, or the most recent study on the alarming acidification of the ocean, while in the next breath apprising us of the bearded fellow modeling his ex-wife’s wedding dress on eBay?
The miracle of the Dish was that it managed to be both playful and deeply serious. It was a kind of master-guide to the internet—perhaps the single best roundup of news and commentary on the web. The sources it drew from, and the topics it covered, spanned the globe. The voices were intellectually and politically diverse, religious, poetic, philosophical. Letters (and photos) arrived from all over, with illuminating anecdotes or expertise. Nothing was off limits. There was Sullivan’s personal experience as a gay man living with H.I.V., and his decades-long quest for marriage equality. (A struggle that, under President Obama, saw more success than he thought he’d see in his lifetime.) There was his initial cheerleading for George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, and his public about-face as he grew disillusioned with a conservative movement that was becoming increasingly unhinged. He brought to bear his perspective as a conservative in the British Tory tradition, and that gave him a sharper knife with which to dissect the strains of fundamentalism and fear rampant in American life. When he was wrong, he not only admitted it, but struggled to understand why. And this intellectual honesty was what set him apart.
The Dish grappled incessantly with the problems this country faced. It took pains to air other perspectives rather than caricature them. Sullivan was one of the most consistent and important critics of contemporary conservatism; he saw the damage that ideological radicalism was doing to the G.O.P., how the right-wing media complex was preventing an honest reckoning with past mistakes and the challenges ahead. And this passion—having been on both sides of the crucial ideological divide—lent the Dish a fierce urgency. To miss Sullivan’s voice during the Bush and Obama eras would have been like following tennis without ever bothering to watch Rafael Nadal.
The Dish’s editors—seven were listed on the masthead—followed some 3,000 blogs. Each morning, after a mammoth amount of scouring and culling, they would produce a memo of links for Sullivan to consider posting. The result was a remarkably efficient machine. It provided a depth of coverage, and a sense of community, that made other websites feel two-dimensional by comparison.
“I almost always feel a little better after paying [the Dish] a visit, even when the news of the day is unusually depressing,” The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg wrote. “There ought to be a name for what the Dish is—'blog' doesn’t capture it, somehow.”
The Dish had more than a million unique visitors each month, and some eight million page views. It had had previous homes, on the websites of Time, The Atlantic, and The Daily Beast, but Sullivan forged a path of independence the last two years, relying on reader subscriptions. (The Dish was advertisement-free, and refreshingly devoid of the “sponsored” content that has been blurring the line between journalism and advertising.) Thirty thousand opted to subscribe, for unlimited access. They were charged an annual fee of 20 dollars but were allowed to pay more if they desired. And a sizable percentage did. One subscriber contributed the highest amount that could fit into the payment box: $9,999.
The Dish stayed comfortably in the black, but the operation was taking a toll on Sullivan’s health. For 15 years he’d been “on”, like a comedian or actor must be onstage, with little break save for sleep or illness. His doctors told him if he kept it up it could be the end of him.
He took the occasional vacation. But the blog wasn’t the same without him. And there was always some new outrage, some new state of insanity that called for his attention. Twenty first graders gunned down in Newtown couldn’t budge the NRA’s chokehold on the Senate. (Even though the gun-control measures defeated there were minor and widely popular.) A near-depression called for more stimulus, but the country remained mired in a shortsighted and counter-productive deficit hysteria. Increasingly dire reports from the scientific community stood no chance against demagogues who assured their audience it was all a hoax. The reports warned that if we continued business as usual, half the earth’s species could be extinct within 100 years, but Obama’s efforts to do something about this made him a dictator.
There was a mountain of madness in the way of sanity.
But Sullivan was a bulldozer, pushing mightily against the intransigence that loomed over American life. He confronted the ideological fundamentalism head-on. He argued for the culture wars to be put behind us. He linked to the studies showing the psychological reasons behind the denial of man-made global warming, so that readers could get a full sense of the challenges ahead, for it was human nature itself that was so tricky—our tendency to think tribally, to engage in motivated reasoning, to discount threats in the distant future. He argued eloquently for temperance to our imperialistic hubris; passionately against torture and with a disgust for its apologists that was as hot as running lava; for the Catholic Church to confront its sins of covering up the rape of children and come back to the teachings of Christ. He pushed and pushed and brought to bear everything that was within him. And over time he moved the earth.