After reminding me of my shameful neoCON phase,
asked me,Is part of your story Andrew Sullivan -? - King of the post 9/11 neocons and war mongers. Indeed quite a first mover blogger-wise. Pre 9/11 a "blog" was pure tech guy talk weB - LOG - (get it? = BLOG) mostly high level tech talk - some guys transitioned into more personal space - Sullivan was one of the the first to take it into the current events space - InstaPundit was another. Both are still out there - not sure how their neocon affiliations have evolved.
Andrew Sullivan - there’s a name I haven’t seen or even thought about in years. Even though he was once so important to me. He wasn’t the reason I became a neoCON, but he was certainly a strong influence.
To explain how he became part of my story, I have to backtrack to my political beginnings.
I grew up in Democratic-dominated Hawaii. I had no childhood exposure to the Right. I just ‘knew’ that Republicans were evil. When my class learned that a classmate had a Republican father, I felt sorry for her.
But that didn’t mean I thought Democrats were good. I have always regarded Hawaii - at least within my lifetime - as dysfunctional. And with the elephants having almost no power here, clearly the blame rested with the Donkeys of the One Party.
I sought solutions outside the two-party paradigm - in Communism, socialism, anarchism, and then Objectivism. Throughout those years I regarded the Right as anathema. I thought of Republicans as Christian White supremacists. My enemies.
This imaginary album cover that I drew in 1990 symbolizes what I thought of the US government under the first Bush administration. I was listening to a lot of Metallica, Megadeth, and Anthrax at the time.
I did not vote for either Bush. I opposed the elder’s Gulf War. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, I correctly predicted that the younger’s war in Afghanistan would be a multiyear disaster.
And yet just a year later, I was supporting not only that war but the upcoming Iraq Attaq.
What changed?
I was unemployed. Isolated. Prey for influencers, though that term wasn’t used back then.
I started blogging and dove head first into an acquaintance’s corner of the online neoCON world. Which was so unlike my stereotype of the American Right. No mention of Christianity, of traditional values. The vibe was very South Park, a show I had been enjoying for years. Irreverent, not stiff, formal, and stale.
I felt I had found my people. I got deeply invested in parasocial pseudorelationships with bloggers. I quoted them, and they linked me back, boosting muh stats. I no longer felt alone.
I fell for the neoCON narrative because my new ‘friends’ had also fallen for it. You are who you hang out with.
And my imaginary buddies were all progressive in the sense that we thought our libertarian ideology was pointing toward The Glorious Future - and that the war would drag Iraq, Afghanistan, and - we hoped - the entire Moslem world toward technoutopia.
I still disliked Bush, but I saw him as a means to an end - what I now call Globalism 4.0, a posthuman paradise. Yes, I used to believe in transhumanism too. I’ve changed a lot in two decades.
Two decades ago, Andrew Sullivan was my kind of guy:
In 2003, he wrote that he could no longer support the American conservative movement, as he was disaffected with the Republican Party's continued rightward shift toward social conservatism during the George W. Bush era
I felt he described me:
There's a new group of people out there who are socially liberal but also foreign policy realists, especially among those who have been awakened to political engagement by September 11. Some of these used to be Scoop Jackson Democrats, but today's breed doesn't buy into the big government liberalism of the 1960s and 1970s either. Some are neocons who don't love the social right. Others are just Generation X and Y, who simply accept the social diversity of modern culture and want to see it defended against theocratic barbarians. These people are not comfortable with the Republicans' flirtation with the religious right, or their prosecution of the drug war or mixing of church and state; and they're not impressed by the Democrats' lack of seriousness in foreign policy or enmeshment with public sector interest groups. They're politically homeless, these people - but were probably key swing voters in the last election. Instead of hawks and doves, call these people "eagles." I think they'll play a key part in shaping the politics and culture of the next few years.
I proudly started calling myself an “eagle”. The one and only time I adopted USSA imagery.
Cringe … but not for long, because by 2005 I ditched not only the term but neoCONnery as a whole for reasons that deserve their own post.
I lost track of Sullivan after that.
By 2013 his Daily Dish was getting less traffic than I have sometimes gotten on Facebook:
[… A] quick scan of the Daily Dish front page, which holds around 40 individual posts, reveals that (as of this writing Friday afternoon) only one post has received more than a hundred Facebooks “Likes,” and 24 have fewer than ten. These days, connecting with social media is absolutely crucial to clicks and readership. If those Facebook numbers are the norm, the Dish is severely lacking in all-important social media traction.
And that was the last I heard of him. No idea what he’s doing now. Haven’t read his entire Wikipedia entry yet.
As for Instapundit, maybe I’ll write about him later.
Thanks for the inspiration, RegretLeft!