Walter Isaacson On Ben Franklin

Remembering one of the greatest Americans — and the dangers of arbitrary power.

(It’s the July 4th holiday. The full Dish — including my weekly column and the window contest — will return next Friday. Happy Independence Day!)

Walter is the Leonard Lauder Professor of American History and Values at Tulane. He’s the former CEO of the Aspen Institute, where he is now a Distinguished Fellow, and he’s been the chairman of CNN and the editor of Time magazine. He’s currently a host of the show “Amanpour and Company” on PBS and CNN, a contributor to CNBC, and the host of the podcast “Trailblazers, from Dell Technologies.” The author of many bestselling books, the one we’re discussing this week is Benjamin Franklin: An American Life.

As Walter says on the pod, my invitation to him to come talk about Franklin spurred him to propose writing a new, second brief book on Franklin’s meaning for America, especially his hatred of “arbitrary power.” For two clips of our convo — on why Franklin opposed a one-person presidency, and his brutal rift with his son William — head to our YouTube page.

Other topics: raised in NOLA in a diverse neighborhood; his work during the recovery from Katrina; Michael Lewis and Nick Lemann as NOLA contemporaries; Harvard in the ‘70s; the benefits of being an outsider; Franklin as the 10th son of a Puritan immigrant in Boston; indentured to his brother as a printer’s apprentice; running away to Philly; his self-taught genius; his 13 Virtues; his many pseudonyms; Poor Richard’s Almanack; poking fun at the elite; his great scientific feats; giving away the patents for his inventions; becoming the most famous American abroad; leaving his wife in Philly; his philandering; struggling to hold the empire together as a diplomat in London; humiliated by elites in the Cockpit in Westminster; returning to Philly as a fierce revolutionary; seeing his son William stay loyal to the Crown as governor of NJ; embracing William’s abandoned son; securing an alliance with France and its crucial navy; the deism of the Founders; balancing faith and reason; power vs arbitrary power; Trump’s daily whims (e.g. tariffs); the separation of powers; judicial review; private property as a check against tyranny; the commons; Posse Comitatus; the Marines in L.A.; Congress ceding power to Trump; the elites’ failure over Iraq and Wall Street; and the dangers of cognitive sorting.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Edward Luce on America’s self-harm, Tara Zahra on the revolt against globalization after WWI, Thomas Mallon on the AIDS crisis, and Johann Hari turning the tables to interview me. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

The response from regular gay and lesbian readers to my piece in the NYT last Thursday and Sunday (in print) has been shockingly positive. From the professional queers? The usual ad hominems — but also an essay in the Advocate, a formerly gay, now transqueer, magazine. It’s essentially an overwrought confirmation of my description of the gender revolution.

The author, Marcie Bianco, has long had a theme of opposition to equality in the liberal sense. She’s a revolutionary. After various insults — my essay is “ahistorical, factually inaccurate, and illogical nonsense” — she tries to rebut a few actual points.

Here is her case against gay marriage: it ‘“hasn’t stopped queer folks from being abducted by ICE agents and deported.” Actually, of course, many gay men and lesbians are protected from deportation precisely because they are legally married to an American citizen, a right they didn’t have before Obergefell. No, marriage equality didn’t solve climate change either, but it’s a massive advance for gay couples here and across the world.

Here is her response to another concern: “[Sullivan] is worried that trans girls on puberty blockers will never get to experience orgasm (as if orgasms are the only or ultimate forms of sexual pleasure).” So she’s fine with that, it appears. Perhaps worried that this wasn’t very persuasive, she accused me of pedophilia: “Like, excuse me, sir, why are you thinking about kids having orgasms? What in the actual patriarchal and revolting fuck am I reading?”

You’ve got to give her credit for that line.

On ending the biological distinction between men and women: “what is this ‘biological distinction’? It’s a slippery slope to claim that penises are just chromosomes by another name.” A slippery slope to where?

And that’s it. That’s the entire substantive rebuttal. The rest is queer and gender theory regurgitation, reminding the faithful of the creed, and decrying “Sullivan and his ilk of Mattachine Society-revering assimilationist gays.” Yes, this is her refutation of my view that the gay and lesbian rights movement has been taken over by a bunch of critical queer and gender theorists: “Long live the new queer regime!” Q.E.D.

But even here, in the wokest of woke mags, in the comments, there was dissent — plenty of it and quite blunt at times. Many commenters disagreed with Bianco when I looked at it a few days ago. Yesterday, however, all the comments disappeared. Not a sign of intellectual confidence, don’t you think?

A Dish reader responded to the Advocate piece:

“as if orgasms are the only or ultimate forms of sexual pleasure.” Good lord.

Aside from all the more obvious things that are wrong with this, it is also verbatim the kind of language postmodernists in academia were using 20 years ago to defend “subaltern” practices like clitoridectomy of girls in the Horn of Africa from the “problematic” condemnation of human rights organizations (including, of course, local activists and NGOs as well — those Malinchistas).

Another writes:

It’s the “everything is everything” brain virus that has utterly destroyed the contemporary progressive movement. Gay marriage has no value if it doesn’t solve every unrelated leftist preoccupation. Biden’s accomplishments mean absolutely nothing in the face of his support for Israel. Nothing is worth doing unless it solves everything, which is of course tantamount to saying that we shouldn’t do anything at all. Except tweet about revolution, I guess.

And another:

This is all so stupid. Being gay married allowed my wife to have health insurance (and we didn’t have to pay taxes on the employer contribution) in the years that we had three kids under five at home, including at the height of the pandemic, and I was working a bazillion hours a week at the hospital. Thank god for gay marriage. It helped our gay family immensely. But I’m just a normie lesbian trying to raise three kids with my wife.

Several dissents over my NYT piece (“How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized and Lost Its Way”) arrived in the in-tray, including:

In your argument against gender ideology, I couldn’t find a mention of Trump’s recent order to fire all trans people from the military (where is the blanket employment protection you cite?) — or the blatant misgendering of, and denial of bathrooms to, my congressperson Sarah McBride (whom you mention) by her colleagues.

Yes, the trans-kids movement went too far, too fast, as far as medical interventions, but believe me, there are trans kids out there who have a tough row to hoe without being denied bathrooms or sports participation, not to mention pronouns. When you make an argument, you sometimes seem blind to realities and nuances that complicate your thesis. Trans people are not deliberately trying to take your rights; they just want them too. And theirs’ is a smaller minority than yours.

I made my view on treating trans people with respect using the pronouns of the sex they identify with in the essay itself. The military ban is a little more complicated. It’s not a civil right; there are all sorts of exceptions for a variety of reasons, and there may be some roles that the medical regime of some trans people make difficult. But yes, I oppose Trump’s ban; and said so at the time.

Another dissent:

How could you write an entire piece like that and exclude bisexual people from your every single reference?? I think you used the word once, but not even in the context of our being a legitimate part of this movement you reference again and again and again. Every single time, it’s “gay, lesbian, and transgender.”

What’s wrong with you? You are such a smart human. I’m a member of the LBGT community who over the years has so often appreciated and related to “contrarian” voices within the movement such as your own; who appreciates so many facets of conservatism (whose flippin’ grandfather ran for VP on the ticket with Barry Goldwater back in 1964); who has, frankly, defended you so many times over the years in the company of less nuanced and, frankly, less intelligent gay folks.

Dude, how could you (but probably much importantly, why would you) be so wantonly cruel to us — real, actual, bisexual human people who are caused such enormous and searing pain when subjected to the psychic and existential violence of erasure; you literally just refused to say our name.

In so far as bisexuals have in the past been discriminated against, it is by virtue of their behaving as homosexuals, not as heterosexuals. So I’ve always seen the fight for full bisexual rights as essentially indistinguishable from the fight for gay rights — which we have now won. And the piece was not about bisexuals as such. As for the “psychic and existential violence of erasure,” I can understand the frustration (although I think that’s way over the top), but I’m not about token expressions of inclusion when irrelevant to the question at hand.

This next dissenter quotes me:

I gotta pick a nit: “Their existing rights should be defended and expanded to public accommodations” and “fighting a losing battle to allow … biological men to be in women’s intimate spaces … is dumb” are mutually contradictory. Except for those in private homes, “women’s intimate spaces” are “public accommodations” under the law. Any space open to the general public (even if an admissions fee must be paid, or if there is some form of screening) counts as a “public accommodation” — e.g., changing rooms and showers at any gym that sells memberships.

So you still have not come to grips with the bathroom issue that kicked all of this off back in 2016. My position is simple: I do not want men in women’s intimate spaces, especially those that are “public accommodations” — period. And I do not want women in men’s intimate spaces — period. I am quite confident that this is a majority position of the American people.

It’s also my position. And it is perfectly possible to extend protection from discrimination in public accommodations — excepting those accommodations where women’s and men’s intimate privacy rights are involved.

Another reader writes:

I can’t thank you enough for your words in the Times. You wrote what I have been feeling but had trouble expressing, especially since there is no real forum for civil discussion on this topic (as you know). I will disseminate this necessary piece to as many in my circle who might gain insight from your eloquent words. Keep it up.

Another:

That was a terrific and very straightforward summation of the sane person’s response to the TransWoke Revolucioné — and, even better, a tangible sign that the NYT is creeping back from its ideological capture. This shit is simply nuts. People can’t defend it with a straight face, so they resort to deflection, minimization, or simply smearing their opponents. It recalls the old joke: what’s the definition of a sexist, racist, homophobic bigot? Someone who just won an argument with a progressive.

Keep up the great work. It’s starting to pay off. The wheel is turning back to pragmatic moderation and away from the avant-garde identity tourists.

From a doctor:

I congratulate you on finally identifying the hijacking of the gay rights movement by the gender-identity crazy left. I’m a proud and longtime gay leftie, the first out gay man to lead the national medical students’ organization within the Association of American Medical Colleges in 1976, so I have a modicum of cred. I’m also a physician, and I share your reservations about “gender-affirming care” for minors.

In spite of what its advocates say, kids are not small adults. Their brains are still myelinating, still growing and developing neural pathways, and the cognitive functions that go with that growth are not fully developed. If a nine-year-old can’t decide what flavor ice cream he or she wants, how is it responsible or ethical to let them make an irreversible life choice about gender?

From a parent:

I wrote to you last November about our gender dysphoric child who is currently 9. He’s had signs of gender dysphoria since age 3, and it’s a true struggle to decipher what is best for our child.

On one hand, as a liberal, I reflexively recoil at the efforts of my red state (Missouri) to interfere with decisions that must be made by myself as a parent for my child with the advice of doctors. I am instinctively angry at Jamie Reed and others like her for building an alliance with the worst types of Republicans on this issue. I do not trust that they have the best interests of children like ours in mind.

On the other hand, you articulate the problem quite well in your NYT essay, just as you have for us Dish readers for years. Because my gender dysphoric child is male, I resonated with the way you explained it:

[H]ow do today’s parents, teachers and doctors know for sure that a 10-year-old child isn’t, well, like me, and really is trans? How can they know for sure that the gender dysphoria isn’t instead a manifestation of being gay or lesbian and wanting to change it? How do they know for sure there isn’t another complicating personal or psychological factor? […]

If there is a risk that some people will be denied sexual pleasure for their entire lives because they transitioned very early, is it worth it? And how can a child understand what giving up orgasms for life might mean when he hasn’t experienced a single one? The obvious answer is that he can’t, and it’s profoundly unethical to put him in that situation. And who exactly is looking out for these kids? Certainly not the L.G.B.T.Q. organizations.

It’s one of the most difficult moral struggles of our times. It’s a political struggle because it’s a question of who you trust less to protect kids: the GOP, or the LGBTQIAWXYZ+ activist alphabet soup that has caused the destructive backlash you described in your essay? I can’t trust either of them.

But it is also a personal struggle for families like ours every day, with no black-and-white answers about what is best for our child. Since I know you are a religious man, all I can do is ask you to pray for us as we determine what is best for our child. Thank you as always for helping readers like me with the constant struggle of recognizing what is in front of our own noses.

I will certainly pray. But remember: it’s perfectly possible to support your son through adulthood, when he can make up his own mind. Don’t be pressured by the ticking biological clock of puberty. This is the last thing to be decided in a hurry.

Here’s another reader on Congresswoman McBride:

I’m glad to hear that the response to your excellent NY Times article has been positive. But I have a caveat about your reference to Representative Sarah McBride, whom you described as happy to “allow an actual debate in the community about the direction we are headed in and treat dissenters less like bigots and traitors.”

I appreciate McBride’s moderate tone and her emphasis on the need for “grace” in talking with her opponents. At the same time, in discussions of trans issues, she talks about the need “to walk people to a place.” She says, for example, “We should be ahead of public opinion, but we have to be within arm’s reach. If we get too far out ahead, we lose our grip on public opinion, and we can no longer bring it with us.” That’s not the description of a respectful debate between two adults with differences of opinion. That’s the description of a patient adult leading a child to a destination the adult has already decided upon.

This is where the analogy between same-sex marriage and “trans rights” falls apart. The majority of Americans ended up accepting same-sex marriage because they realized that it wouldn’t affect their lives. “Live and let live” is a winning argument in this country. But trans activists don’t just want freedom from discrimination in employment, housing, and other areas (which the vast majority of Americans were happy to grant). They want everyone to radically revise their notions of sex and gender so that, instead of sex being regarded as a fixed biological fact and gender as a mutable cultural construct, the difference between men and women is seen as artificial: something “assigned” arbitrarily at birth. And they want everyone to act in accordance with this radical, transqueer ideology in countless aspects of their lives.

Does McBride anywhere disagree with transqueer ideology? What happens when the people she is trying to guide toward the deconstruction of sexual difference wrench their hand from hers and say, “No, sorry, I don’t want to go there. I want biological sexual differences to determine who gets to be on that softball team, who gets to enter that locker room, and who gets to be in that prison”? Like a lot of people nowadays, McBride doesn’t want to talk about concrete trans issues. She wants to talk about her constituents’ bread-and-butter concerns — but she still wants biological men to be treated like women if they choose without anyone noticing.

I would be interested to see a theory of trans rights that doesn’t demand that everyone deny the reality of sexual difference, but I haven’t seen it yet.

Agreed. I noted McBride’s failure to offer a single policy compromise. She wants to change the tone but not the substance. I want to change both.

Here’s another reader, on the ever-changing Progress flag:

I’m really overjoyed by your opinion piece. I know you’re a busy man, so I just want to share one rant: how powerful symbols are degraded and co-opted by idiots.

The original Pride flag was a beautiful symbol of inclusiveness. It embraced tolerance and support for people of as many stripes as all the colors of the rainbow. In other words, everyone.

Then some late-arriving, bossy, moronic person or group came along and just HAD to make it “better” — and the beauty and simplicity of that flag, as a symbol, was lost. Black people aren’t represented! There’s no black stripe! Well of course not, dipshit. Do you think the flag discriminates in favor of purple people??? Why do you think green people get a stripe? Green supremacy?

And then that chevron. If I live long enough, I expect to see today’s phrenologists — the gender studies people — add at least 72 more stripes. As they continue to unweave that rainbow, it may end up looking like a fucking paint deck from Benjamin Moore. It makes me cringe.

The latest cringe:

From a trans reader who is sick of the far left and the far right:

Although I identify as Bi-Gendered or Trans, I think the radicals in the LGBT community endanger us all. Trans folk (especially, non-op M2F) want to be completely accepted as the gender they present as, but there is a problem: different experiences and bodies.

Most people I’ve met are comfortable treating trans people as the gender in which they present, as long as they don’t look or sound foolish doing so. When one tries to blend in, people will often help that person do so. Sadly, many trans people try to bring their non-trans privilege with them and cause ill feelings in cisgender people. Rub enough people the wrong way, and there will be pushback. And we’re seeing that now.

I’m afraid of what our president is doing. He is demonizing the whole LGBT community, trying to erase our history as if we do not exist. This happened in Europe 90 years ago, and look at what happened there. Authoritarians tend to go after the easiest people to demonize while they trash the systems that allow people to live free. Over time, they trash their economies, and even start wars when they need to gin up nationalist pride and anger at “the others.”

A feminist perspective:

It pains me to write this, but as a feminist, I’ve found my forays into the world of LGBTQ+ rights to be quite disturbing and rampantly misogynistic. I’ve heard groups of gay men flippantly say some of the worst things I’ve ever heard uttered about women. In my twenties, I left the liberal activist circles for good after another event I went to in support of women’s rights (anti-rape and domestic violence) was hijacked by gay men and turned into an LGBTQ+ rights event (the REAL victims in 2010s San Francisco): total women erasure.

When I see JK Rowling getting death threats for things she said (although she gives millions every years to run shelters for battered women), whereas Neil Gaiman’s serial rape allegations are met with conversations about separating the art from the artist, it says a lot about the value of women to the LGBTQ+ movement. It’s striking that in the debate about youth sports, the losers are girls who can be hurt playing on the field with boys. In the debate about trans rights, I hear “trans women are really women” but rarely ever hear “trans men are real men.”

Now, I’m not even a real woman; I’m a “cis-woman”, a “menstruator”, a “chest feeder”. Trans women are the REAL women. Men are not being subjected to being called “inseminators”, “penis-havers”, or any such dehumanizing nonsense. It’s fighting against thousands of years of progress towards women being recognized and treated as full human beings. It’s painful to admit, but the LGBTQ+ movement is every bit as capable of bigotry and hatred as every other group on the planet, and they shouldn’t be impervious to being called out for it.

Sorry for this long email, but I just wanted to thank you from the bottom of my heart and let you know that your essay really does touch at a salient point about women’s rights. If you didn’t already know it, I think your essay is really important for women, and I wanted you to know how much it meant to me to read it. Thanks again, and please never stop writing your mind.

That made my day. It’s important to remember that many of the braver, earliest opponents of the genderqueer movement were and are left-feminists. Another woman:

I’m a Canadian living in Vancouver, BC, and because I have been in conversations with a friend in Portland about what I call the trans juggernaut, he sent me your opinion piece. Thank you for writing this important reflection and analysis.

As a sex-based rights activist and feminist, I have been experiencing the loss of sex-based rights we have achieved in Canada, and an erasure of language, specific to women and girls. This sex-based category is being disappeared, and gender ideology has taken over the biology of sex. As your op-ed describes, no space for discussion has been permitted, and most mainstream media have enabled the takeover by refusing balanced reporting instead echoing trans talking points, language, and ideology with politicians in lockstep passing laws.

You know what has happened to anyone in the US daring enough to voice a critical opinion or even question the prevailing trans ideology or the recommended affirmative care model for children who express sexual uncertainty. Same here in Canada. Such brave people have at best been derided or ignored, and at worst been cancelled, fired, discredited, physically threatened, and beaten. Canada and the US have denied the important UK Cass Review that has resulted in the UK, Norway, Finland, Italy, Sweden, and Denmark all abandoning “affirmative care” for people under 18.

What your article did not discuss is the dreadful outcome on half the world’s population resulting from changes to laws demanded by trans activists throughout the world. The 10-minute video below is a report given by Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against women and girls, delivered a few days ago to the UN Human Rights Committee. You won’t see it aired. It’s alarming!

Thank you for your honesty, common-sense analysis, and explaining how rights won for gays and lesbians are now threatened by the overreach of trans activists. Women and girls are already losing or lost theirs, so I salute your bravery.

Et cum spiritu tuo. One more email:

I’m an 18 year old from NYC, and for a long time I have known I was gay but have struggled to inform my parents. They are immigrants from Jamaica and India — two nations that are notorious for their homophobic beliefs. (The unofficial anthem for the major political party in Jamaica in 2001 was “Chi Chi Man” — a song about burning gay men.)

Despite this, I often found solace from my school peers who considered themselves allies. They were raised at home and at school with the importance of being respectful and supportive, no matter who their friends were attracted to. But since COVID and this leftward shift that you highlight, their enthusiastic support has dwindled. I can safely say I never faced violence or anything of the sort, but people would often associate my nature to love other men with the zee/zer movement or the two-spirit belief, much to my chagrin.

I would talk about this with my gay friends, who would join me in their confusion and reluctance to embrace these ideas that seemed forced upon us with no discussion. But of course we never dare say this publicly, because we would face backlash from those promoting these topics. We were, in a way, closeted once again.

If you come out, you are viewed as being a member of the group of people wanting 5-year-olds to have gender-affirming care, or people who believe that trans women and women are the same. And if you try to distance yourself from this, you are viewed by your own “community” as a traitor or sellout.

This verbose email was simply to say thank you. I appreciate your words dearly and hope they can spark a national conversation. It feels as if in order to be gay I need to sign some sort of contract agreeing to these terms and conditions, when I desperately want to simply live my life and not subscribe to things I do not believe in.

In my view, the point of the gay civil rights movement was not to enable more people to be gay, but to enable people to be simply themselves. Virtually Normal is 30 years’ old this year. I stand by almost every word. If you’re interested in the argument that helped bring gay marriage to the world, check it out.

Happy Fourth from a first (and last!) generation American. See you next Friday.

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