No room for mavericks: One-of-a-kind thinker Andrew Sullivan falls from favor over race issues

PROVINCETOWN, MASS. – The only restaurant open late on this sandy tip of Cape Cod is Spiritus Pizza, and men have long gathered on the mottled bricks in front to hang out, gossip and cruise. One night last week, some were blasting disco onto Commercial Street when a slightly stoned Englishman with a salt-and-pepper beard approached them and demanded politely but forcefully that they turn it down.

It was Andrew Sullivan, seeking order.

Sullivan hasn't changed much since he arrived in Washington in 1986 with an internship at the New Republic and a veneration for Margaret Thatcher. Among many other convictions, he believes in safe, lawful and relatively quiet streets. I was sitting with him on the back porch of the tiny, yellow cottage he owns here when videos of unrest from Kenosha, Wis., crossed his Twitter feed.

"If the civil authorities are permissive of violence, then that's a signal to people to commit violence," he told me, winding himself up for the dire newsletter he would write later in the week.

I came to Provincetown to better understand why Sullivan, 57, one of the most influential journalists of his generation, is not as welcome as he once was at many mainstream media outlets. But my visit helped me see something more: how Sullivan is really a fixed point by which we can measure how far American media has moved.

Sullivan finds himself now on the outside mostly because he cannot be talked out of views on race that most of his peers find abhorrent. I know, because I tfarried.

He was a star in his 20s, when he ran the New Republic, so celebrated that he posed for Annie Leibovitz in a Gap ad. He was a master of provocations there that included one that defined him, arguing long before it was part of mainstream political debate that same-sex couples should have the right to marry. But he also published a cover story, an excerpt from "The Bell Curve," that claimed to show a link between race and IQ, a decision that has increasingly consumed his legacy.

But Sullivan is, as his friend Johann Hari once wrote, "happiest at war with his own side," and in the Trump era, he increasingly used the weekly column he began writing in New York magazine in 2016 to dial up criticism of the American left.

When the magazine politely showed him the door last month, Sullivan left legacy media entirely and began charging his fans directly to read his column through the newsletter platform Substack, increasingly a home for star writers who strike out on their own.

He was not, he emphasizes, "canceled." In fact, he said, his income has risen from less than $200,000 to around $500,000 as a result of the move. "I just think it's a shame that readers of mainstream newspapers and magazines can't hear a dissent."

Sullivan isn't really vulnerable to cancellation. He has been around too long, wielded too much influence even to be easily summarized.

Sullivan was in his way among America's first out gay celebrities, and his largest impact was on gay rights. He seems especially grounded here in Provincetown, where he first spent a summer in 1989, the same year he published the cover story making "The Case for Gay Marriage" in the New Republic. He returned in 1994, joining other HIV-positive men who moved here at the time expecting to die from AIDS. He worked on a book on same-sex marriage that he hoped would be his legacy.

The marriage question is so settled now that Sullivan's role feels like ancient history. It's also rarely noted these days that he played as large a role as any journalist in the rise of Barack Obama. His 2007 Atlantic cover story "Why Obama Matters" arrived while many Democrats were on the fence about the Illinois senator, and it helped sway elite opinion and money his way.

The admiration was mutual. When the Dish was moved behind a paywall in 2013, a White House aide passed on a complaint to Sullivan: Obama was locked out of a favorite blog. Sullivan scrambled to set up a special account for the president.

The president and other readers clearly relished what was always exciting about Sullivan: He was a contrarian, but an intellectually alive one, with eclectic views on Catholicism and social media and beagles that saved him from monotonous provocation. Editor Adam Moss, who ran New York until last year, viewed him as a rare talent and helped him keep his big platform.

But as the American examination of racism has intensified, one of Sullivan's convictions has grown further out of step and more unsettling even to those inclined to disagree agreeably with him.

When the Times published an article as part of its "1619" package last year about how old racist beliefs about Black people's pain tolerance linger in modern medicine, Sullivan sent the author, Linda Villarosa, an arch note through her website. She'd written in passing of the stereotype "that Black people had large sex organs," and he asked whether there was data on sex organs that "show that it is a myth." She forwarded the e-mail to the project's leader, Nikole Hannah-Jones, asking if the note might have been a prank. In fact, Sullivan was up late, and tipsy, in London when he sent it, he told me, and meant it as a kind of "gay joke."

Then Hannah-Jones hit him with it on Twitter in the course of a dispute on the 1619 Project.

The flap reminded his colleagues and critics of Sullivan's original sin, his decision to put on the cover of the Oct. 31, 1994, New Republic a package titled "Race and I.Q." The package led with an excerpt from the book "The Bell Curve" by political scientist Charles Murray and psychologist Richard Herrnstein. They claimed that IQ test results are in large part hereditary and reveal differences among races; it produced piles of scientific debunkings. Many — including contributors Sullivan invited to object — saw the piece as a thinly veiled successor to the junk science used to justify American and European racism for decades. Politically, it offered elites an explanation for racial inequality that wasn't the legacy of slavery, or class, or racism, or even culture, and thus absolved them of the responsibility to fix it.

When George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis in May, Sullivan said, his editors asked him to "be careful," suspecting that his views on race in America would not be palatable to their audience in that moment, two senior New York employees told me. He decided instead to take the week off from column writing.

In the previous year, Sullivan had focused his ire on the politics of race and identity, seemingly relishing the chance to challenge what he saw as an increasingly "woke" mainstream media. But "The Bell Curve" excerpt — which Sullivan always says that he published but did not embrace — lingered over those pieces and framed criticism of him. One fellow writer, Sarah Jones, called him the "office bigot" on Twitter.

The new editor of New York, David Haskell, didn't push him out because of any new controversy or organized staff revolt, the two New York employees said. Instead, the shift in culture had effectively made his publishing of "The Bell Curve" excerpt — and the fact that he never disavowed it — a firing offense, and Haskell showed Sullivan the door before the magazine experienced a blowup over race of the sort that have erupted at other publications.

I tried out my most charitable interpretation of his view on race and IQ (though I question the underpinnings of the whole intellectual project): that he is most frustrated by the notion that you can't talk about the influence of biology and genetics on humanity. But that he's not actually saying he thinks Black people as a group are less intelligent. He'd be equally open to the view, I suggested, that data exploring genetics and its connection to intelligence would find that Black people are on average smarter than other groups.

"It could be, although the evidence is not trending in that direction as far as I pay attention to it. But I don't much," he said.

But he also can't quite stop himself, even as I sat there wishing he would. "Let's say Jews. I mean, just look at the Nobel Prize. I'm just saying — there's something there, I think. And I'm not sure what it is, but I'm just not prepared to accept the whole thing is over."

I've been reading Sullivan too long to write him off. I've been influenced deeply by him on marriage, torture and other big questions; and I'm aware of how deeply he shaped how we all write for the web.

I wish Sullivan would accept that the project of trying to link the biological fiction of race with the science of genetics ought, in fact, to be over.

But his exit out of big media is a very American story. His career, with all its sweep and innovation, can't ever quite escape that 1994 magazine cover.