Andrew Sullivan (Officially) Leaves The Right And ‘Nutjobs’ Like Glenn Beck
Andrew Sullivan is leaving the Right. Officially. Sullivan penned a longish post yesterday noting numerous reasons why he doesn’t feel he can align himself with the party anymore. Says Sullivan: “there has to come a point at which a movement or party so abandons core principles or degenerates into such a rhetorical septic system that you have to take a stand.”
That point has apparently officially arrived, though regular readers will be forgiven for assuming it also arrived about two years ago in the form of Sullivan’s fairly dedicated and unrelenting support for Barack Obama. Anyway, Sullivan is now not just a supporter of Obama (a more critical one of late, truth be told) he is an angry and disgusted unsupporter of the Right as a whole. Sullivan lists 16 reasons why this is so and manages not to mention Sarah Palin once (by name, a reader points out), though he does say “I cannot support a movement that refuses to distance itself from a demagogue like Rush Limbaugh or a nutjob like Glenn Beck.”
Will it make a difference? Andrew Sullivan is an enormously powerful blogger, he may be the single most powerful blogger out there, actually, and if he keeps up the sort of battering ram against the current state of the Right has he did against Bush post-2006 he might actually have some effect. It’s hard to imagine he’s the only conservative that feels this way. And yet this is a different media landscape than it was even last year.
That said, if this turn does turn into a trend it may also be the beginning of something larger. The extremely popular right-leaning blog Little Green Footballs made a similar pronouncement the other day in a post titled ‘Why I Parted Ways With The Right’ which also created waves across the blogosphere. The objections in the LGF list are similar to Sullivan’s, though this time around Palin does get a name check:
5. Support for homophobic bigotry (see: Sarah Palin, Dobson, the entire religious right, etc.)
6. Support for anti-government lunacy (see: tea parties, militias, Fox News, Glenn Beck, etc.)
Considering there is still three years left to go before the next presidential election these sorts of high profile decampments could be cause for concern in the GOP as they could signify the beginnings of a larger, national intolerance of the more extreme wing of the party. That said, what should probably be of greater concern to every single person involved in the party is the utter lack of support from voters under the age of 30.
