I recently came across Maria Bustillos’s short interview with Andrew Sullivan, a writer and thinker with whom I often disagree but whom I count as a mentor and friend all the same. The following passage caught my eye:

But the Dish is intelligent, rational, mannerly, and welcoming, in stark contrast to the common run of right-wing blogs. Here is a conservative who accepts me and my views freely, however much they may diverge from his. It was evident from the first that among the apparently limitless multitude of conservatives who will not, cannot, have a civil conversation with me about politics (among whom I can count a discouraging number of my own relatives) here is one who is willing to talk and listen in a condition of mutual respect and candor.

It occurs to me, however, that Andrew has a great gift for polemical writing, and that the defining spirit of his writing is not necessarily one of generosity towards those with whom he disagrees, who tend to be but are not exclusively self-identified political conservatives. Rather, I think Andrew’s fans turn to him for his passion and his sense of urgency, as evidenced by his exceedingly popular and at times unconventional coverage of the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. (I say “self-identified” political conservatives because in Andrew’s view, many conservatives who don’t share his views, including many if not most right-of-center critics of the Obama administration, are not best understood as conservatives, but rather as Christianists or as right-wing radicals.)

My take is that Andrew is sui generis, and as such that he shouldn’t be bound by the ideological categories that define most of the rest of us reasonably well.