Politics

It was daunting preparing to meet Andrew Sullivan, considered one of the cleverest, most fearless journalists of his generation. There is the academic pedigree: the scholarship at Oxford — where he was also president of the union and a celebrated actor — followed by the PhD in political theory at Harvard, where he produced an iconic treatise on the work of British mid-century philosopher Michael Oakeshott, performed the entirety of Hamlet all by himself — "a whacked-out mid-1980s" version — and modeled for Gap. And there is the journalistic firepower. At twenty-eight, in 1991, Sullivan became the youngest ever editor of the New Republic, America's most august political magazine.

I see that my National Review friends are writing their letters to Santa a bit early. Some, like Rich Lowry's recent paean to Ron DeSantis, are asking for that shiny new firetruck all the cool kids want. Others, like Charles Cooke’s febrile King Lear-like anti-Trump expostulation (“never, never, never, never, never”) hearken back to NR’s infamous "Against Trump" issue and are mostly negative: “No coal, please, Santa, and especially No More Trump!” I remember when I first heard the expression that Donald Trump “lived rent-free in the heads of his opponents.” “Vivid,” I thought, “and quite right.” Jennifer Rubin, Bill Kristol, Max Boot — the list of people obsessed with the forty-fifth president of the United States is long.

No showdown over KBJ? Recent Supreme Court nominee hearings have been box office Washington events. But there’s little to suggest that, when Ketanji Brown Jackson appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee next week, the event will be anything but a low-key and temporary distraction from the war in Ukraine. But the likelihood of a confirmation process that fails to capture much attention isn’t just a product of the enormity of what is happening elsewhere in the world. It’s also because, in Brown Jackson, the White House appears to have chosen a difficult-to-get-outraged-about jurist. Yes, she’s liberal (as you would expect), but she’s also steady, reasonable and consensus-oriented in disposition.

Last night, as is his custom, Cockburn was ingesting his daily dose of news in the most palatable way possible — by washing it down with a stiff drink. The television behind the bar was tuned to Fox News, and Cockburn was happy to cease sipping for a moment as the attractive visage of Florida representative Maria Salazar appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight. The respite was short-lived, as the interview dragged on for a full eighteen minutes, and when Tucker derailed the debate toward the end of the segment with an outlandish analogy, Cockburn nearly spat out his gimlet. (Remembering his manners and the ever-inflating cost of Beefeater these days, he restrained himself.

In all my years covering right-wing politics, I’ve met an odd cast of characters: ethnonationalists, archeofuturists, transhumanists, sedevacantists, Austrofascists, neo-reactionaries, incels, identitarians, Proud Boys, Groypers, even Jeb Bush. Yet I’ve never met a Putinist. Not a one. Before we go any further, I want to be clear on this point: Putinists don’t exist outside the former Soviet Union. How could they? Putin himself is a pure nationalist. He embraces the whole ball of contradictions that is Russia. He’s equal parts tsarist and Leninist. Whatever hodgepodge ideology you want to call Putinism, it can’t be applied to the United States. You may as well try golfing with a shovel. Now, I’m sure you’ve encountered a Putin fanboy on the internet.

The media are abuzz these days about a purported “return to the 1970s.” Generally speaking, such chatter is not intended kindly, for many today would likely agree with the sardonic assessment of the Seventies made by the editors of New West magazine as that decade wound down: “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.” And not just because of the popularity of bell-bottom pants, platform shoes, and disco music. In the Seventies, we had problems far more troubling — more troubling even than the pop group ABBA. For starters, we saw a quadrupling of real oil prices between 1973 and 1979. We suffered high rates of both inflation and unemployment, which hitherto varied inversely, leading to the creation of the portmanteau “stagflation.