That’s my prediction — based on his words.

Andrew Sullivan suddenly seems imminently readable again, now that he has unyoked himself from the “woke” at New York Magazine’s “Intelligencer” website.

A few weeks ago I reported that Sullivan suddenly penned a “farewell” column to readers of his New York Mag column saying a “critical mass” of staff and management of New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer wanted to associate with him in the “virtual space” of those organizations.  As a result, he left those organizations where he had written twice-monthly columns.

He’s now publishing his “Weekly Dish” column on his new website by the same name, and today he laid down a marker that seems to be pointed in only one direction — voting for Joe Biden is an untenable proposition.  Sullivan is all about debate as combat by other means.  But honest and meaningful debate of ideas requires civility and order.  Lack of order is disorder, the disorder is chaos, and chaos does not allow for rational decision-making.  He didn’t come right out and say “I’m voting for Trump” — he earnestly seems to despise him even though Trump is the best GOP President for gay rights ever.  But here is what Sullivan did say as a flaming arrow fired in the direction of the Democrat Party and its current embrace of Antifa/BLM under the false flag of “critical race theory” grievance politics.

But here’s one thing I have absolutely no conflict about. Rioting and lawlessness is evil. And any civil authority that permits, condones or dismisses violence, looting and mayhem in the streets disqualifies itself from any legitimacy. This comes first. If one party supports everything I believe in but doesn’t believe in maintaining law and order all the time and everywhere, I’ll back a party that does. In that sense, I’m a one-issue voter, because without order, there is no room for any other issue. Disorder always and everywhere begets more disorder; the minute the authorities appear to permit such violence, it is destined to grow.

Well, the bolded section seems to say it all.  He might despise Donald Trump — but if only Donald Trump and the GOP are pledged to maintaining law and order, then Donald Trump and the GOP will get his vote.

I’m not suggesting that Sullivan brings tens of thousands of votes with him based on what he writes.  But the Democrat Party is more stupid than even I think they are if they do not see Sullivan’s sentiment as carrying an implication for voters who are nominally under its tent but not chained to the “cause celebre” that is currently its guiding star. Controversial politics tends to “leak” more voters than it gains — the party just doesn’t realize it until those voters aren’t there anymore as revealed by the ballot box.

Back to Sullivan:

…[A]s I’ve watched protests devolve over the summer into a series of riots, arson expeditions, and lawless occupations of city blocks, along with disgusting and often racist profanity, I’ve begun to feel similarly. And when I watched the Democratic Convention and heard close to nothing about ending this lawlessness, I noted the silence.

I don’t think I’m the only one, as even the Democrats seem now to realize. And this massive blindspot is not hard to understand. When a political party finds itself so wedded to a new and potent ideology it cannot call out violence when it sees it, then it is walking straight into a trap. When the discourse on the left has become one in which scholars and editors and Tweeters vie with one another to up the ante on how inherently evil America has always been, redescribe it as a slaveocracy, and endorse racist books that foment the most egregious stereotypes about “whiteness”, most ordinary people, who love their country and are mostly proud of its past, will rightly balk. 

Years ago Sullivan became a “conservative” Pied Piper for the “Hopey & Changey” politics of Barack Obama.  But he has never quit criticizing the advancement of “grievance” politics that originated on college campuses, and he has long advocated against the teaching “critical race theory” in education.  CRT proposes that “white supremacy” and racial power are maintained over time, and in particular, that the law may play a role in this process. The Dr. Seuss level idea advanced from this concept is that the criminal justice system was created to control slaves both before and after emancipation, and continues to this day as a “white supremacy” institution meant to maintain control and subordination over people of color.  Hence the need to “defund the police”, eliminate “cash bail”, and empty out the prisons and jails of all minority inmates.

But Paul Manafort should stay, and Gen. Flynn should join him.  But I digress.

Back to Sullivan:

All this reassurance played out against a backdrop of Kenosha, which was burning, and Minneapolis, where a suicide led to a bout of opportunistic looting, and Washington DC, where mobs of wokesters went through the city chanting obscenities, invading others’ spaces, demanding bystanders raise fists in solidarity, with occasional spasms of violence. These despicable fanatics, like it or not, are now in part the face of the Democrats: a snarling bunch of self-righteous, entitled bigots, chanting slogans rooted in pseudo-Marxist claptrap, erecting guillotines — guillotines! — in the streets as emblems of their agenda. They are not arguing; they are attempting to coerce. And liberals, from the Biden campaign to the New York Times, are too cowardly and intimidated to call out these bullies and expel them from the ranks. 

Andrew “Unchained” Sullivan — I told you he was voting for Trump.  But there was more:

For the far left activists who now control [the New York Times], the imposition of order was seen not as an indispensable baseline for restoring democratic debate, but as a potential physical attack on black staffers. They saw restoring order within the prism of their own critical race ideology, which stipulates that the police are enforcers of white supremacy, and not enforcers of the rule of law in a liberal society. It was a sign that the establishment left were willing to tolerate disorder and chaos if they were directed toward the ideologically correct ends — which is how Democratic establishments in Minneapolis and Seattle and Portland responded.

THAT is what the vast majority of Americans see when they watch and hear morons like Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, and DC Mayor Muriel Browser applaud the “mostly peaceful protesters” while watching scenes of looting and carnage taking place in those cities night after night.  To them, everything we are seeing is “necessary.”

But for many Americans, all those things were happening many miles away in “Big Cities”, and things are different in Middle America.  Such change would never visit their hometowns.

And then came Kenosha — no one mistakes Kenosha for “Big City” America.

Back to Sullivan:

As Trump was eulogizing a murdered policeman [David Dorn], the leftist mob outside was in the midst of a “F**k The Police” demonstration. If the Dems want to fight an election on that choice — and some do — they’re engaged on a suicide mission.

I think Sullivan’s politics represent a significant slice of the electorate that is in between the Sanders-AOC wing of the Democrat party and the MAGA wing of the GOP.  There are 20% or so there in the middle whose politics don’t place them firmly on either side, and the current state of affairs could dictate their vote — the “one issue” voter that Sullivan identified at the beginning.  Sullivan’s observations reflect what a sizeable segment of that part of the electorate is seeing and reacting to.  His warnings should be flashing red lights to the Democrats and Joe Biden.

At the end of the article, he states that Biden is the only choice.  But it’s more of a lament than an endorsement.  He knows the trajectory of the race makes Biden a likely loser.  But even a win by Biden leads down a horrible path to governmental embrace of leftist fanaticism.

His personal antipathy to Donald Trump the person — and he presumes a Trump family dynasty which would certainly follow (I don’t see that at all) — makes it impossible for him to ever actually vote for the man.

But he sees what the next 75 days hold for the Democrats given the foundation they’ve built their campaign on.

“Taps” never sounded so beautiful.