Old School Vs. New School? Leon Wieseltier’s Epic Battle With Andrew Sullivan

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This hardly stilled the controversy. It is not an everyday thing, seeing a venerable reviewer of books try, with one vicious pounce, to destroy a former friend’s reputation. In the three-day interval between thrust and riposte, the chattering class took up a ringside seat at the fight, braced to pick sides. As it turned out, picking sides was mostly a formality. In the The Atlantic Wire’s tally, 6 notable commentators sided with Wieseltier, while 14 went against him. Wieseltier “ow[ed] Andrew an apology” (Time‘s Joe Klein). His essay was “intellectually sloppy” (The Conservative‘s Daniel Larison), “shabby and incoherent” (Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald).  Brad Delong proposed that the only civilized course still availing TNR was to sack Wieseltier as hastily as possible.

That the lion’s share of the sympathy went to Sullivan didn’t exactly silence his former colleague.  On Thursday Wieseltier published another piece, “The Trouble with South Park” – a reply to Sullivan’s rebuttal.  If it was intended as an apology, or in the hope of détente, it certainly didn’t read that way: “[Sullivan] contributes precisely to the fetid atmosphere of polarization in which complexities of argument and commitment are increasingly hard to sustain, in which many people conclude that you really cannot criticize Israeli policy without despising Israel.”  And so it goes, and may go for a while.

What is striking about all this is how it inverts our expectations of conduct in old and new media.  Typically – stereotypically – one goes online to read rants, raves, the gung-ho and the bozo of the opinion-makers.  Whereas one looks to the old media – magazines, journals, newspapers – for understatement, decorum, moderation.  Rickety as it may be, the general assumption is that print journalism is more accountable than its online cousins.  Yet in this instance, the opposite holds.  The man in print is the mudslinger, the paranoiac, the screed-scribbler; while the blogger ends up looking not only right but restrained, old-fashioned, even.  And we are able to judge this easily enough for ourselves — we don’t have to take it on authority — precisely because of that most bewitching novelty of the net, the hyperlink.

How to explain this?  What we have here is a classic case of the rogue emeritus.  Wieseltier is untouchably senior at TNR.  He bows to no editor.  (As Sullivan writes, “On this, as on so much else, Wieseltier accuses someone of something he hasn’t bothered to do even the faintest due diligence on.  He should try getting an editor.”)  Over the years, this has putatively landed him in a lot of tense tete-a-tetes with TNR’s Editors-in-chief, who publish but scarcely control him (Sullivan, of course, once held this title, served up one end of these tete-a-tetes; hence the old grudges).  It has also led to him gaining notoriety for repeatedly seeking to flay his peers alive in print.  In recent times, Wieseltier has visited a maiming on, among others, Martin Amis, Platon, Norman Podhoretz, and Louis Menand.  This, evidently, was just Sullivan’s turn to get maimed.

Among other things, what this episode illustrates is how obnoxiously notions of hierarchy still operate in print journalism.  It is a top-down buisness, where the top — i.e., Wieseltier — is empowered by a credible brand — i.e., TNR — that cannot monitor that top tier, must take it on trust.  Unlike in the blogosphere, where rants are swiftly exposed — are rarely treated as more than rants — print magazines have no choice, at these moments, but to let rants masquerade as something more serious.  If one of their senior staff goes rogue, or, for that matter, temporarily nuts, it compromises the entire brand.  And brand lustre is among the few remaining reasons people shell out for magazines.  Looking on at this squabble, as on a car-wreck, bloggers should be grateful for the benignity of what power structures they are obliged to work within.