In praise of a music critic who knows his history, even if he doesn’t know his politics.
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The Losing Side
I can imagine the reaction I’ll be getting when I say that the latest issue of The Economist has been released, and I’ve been working on it since March.
Here’s the background. During the course of his career, Andrew Sullivan has become an intellectual icon to young conservatives and the conservative movement at large. He has written incontrovertibly conservative books, done important radio interviews, and has been a prominent voice on college campuses. His blog has been read by many millions of people; as he says in most of his books, the blog is all he is known for. So as important as he was at the beginning, it is now more important for him to be regarded as an intellectual and intellectual leader in the conservative community.
I’ve been writing an occasional piece online about the conservative movement, about issues he has written about, and about his life, including his marriage, with three friends. I had also recently been writing a few pieces about my life, and I had written a profile of the conservative movement after it had gotten back into power, and was in opposition to the Obama administration. These articles had been getting lots of press, and it had been nice to have my name in the paper again.
Then it happened: I was fired.
On the blog, I wrote on April 20th, 2012,
So it is with great sadness that I am resigning from the role of editor of The Economist. I have thought long and hard about this decision, and I have come to the conclusion that it is the right thing to do. Indeed, I have long believed that, if I do not have a seat at the table, I am making it more difficult for our great magazine to have a seat at the table.
I’m not out of a job–I still work for the magazine, and I still have a blog there. I’m out of the business of publishing books, and I’m out of writing for the magazine–I’m not a contributing editor anymore. The last two years, the position has been one of growing and developing for the magazine, and I feel I have played a pivotal role.
I’ve also said that the reasons for my firing were political. I have argued that they had a number of
