“How we loved you then,” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote of Albert Camus during their acrimonious split in 1952. This simple but deeply sad phrase sprang to mind the other day when I was informed of Andrew Sullivan’s latest descent into unreason. The occasion was, of course, Sarah Palin’s new book; and Sullivan’s missive went, in part, like this:

This is only the second time in its nearly ten-year history that the Dish has gone silent. The reason now is the same as the reason then. When dealing with a delusional fantasist like Sarah Palin, it takes time to absorb and make sense of the various competing narratives that she tells about her life…. She is a deeply disturbed person which makes this work of fiction and fact all the more challenging to read. And the fact that she is now the leader of the Republican party and a potential presidential candidate, makes this process of deconstruction an important civil responsibility.

As many, including myself, expected, this “deconstruction” was in fact driven by what Sullivan called Palin’s “fantastic story of her fifth pregnancy”; that is, Sullivan’s conspiracy theory that Sarah Palin faked her pregnancy and the child known as Trig is actually someone else’s, most likely one of her daughters.

Many others have had their fun commenting on Sullivan’s slow immigration to the land of the bizarre. Even one of his own co-writers appears to be less than comfortable with the direction he has been taking, saying, “I strongly believe that there is nothing to this story.” And one could simply dismiss all of this as yet another symptom of the liberal derangement surrounding the figure of Sarah Palin. For me, however, the entire pageant of Sullivan’s precipitous journey to the edge of sanity cannot arouse anything other than a sense of tragedy and even, perhaps, pity.

I do not know him personally, but like many other people who write about politics for a living—especially online, and especially on the right of the political spectrum—I owe Andrew Sullivan a thing or two. Back in the heady days after 9/11, when I was just another struggling young blogger, Sullivan provided me with some very welcome and very generous links to his wildly popular blog. Without them, I would not have been noticed by the editorial staff of a Jerusalem political and cultural journal; I would not have eventually been hired as their assistant editor; and I would have been noticed, hired, and published by the website you are reading now. I will not say that I owe my entire career—such as it is—to Sullivan, but there is no doubt that his willingness to promote and encourage young and unknown writers gave me a start that would have been much more difficult to come by if he had not done so. I know that there are many other writers working today who could say similar things.

In those days, however, there was a great deal more to Sullivan’s appeal than his generosity. It’s easy enough now to forget that, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, some of the ugliest political rhetoric ever to emerge from the political left seemed to be taking over the zeitgeist faster than anyone could stop it. Academics, journalists, critics, self-appointed experts, and relics of America’s Vietnam-era past were telling us that America deserved what it got, that Israel and the Jews were the cause of it all, that we should embrace our justifiably embittered enemies and convince them of our generosity and goodwill, etc., etc.

Against this collective derangement of the establishment, Sullivan seemed to be a one-man Maginot Line (an unfortunately prophetic comparison, now that I think about it). His blogging was hyperactive, and he seemed to have an uncanny knack for gabbing hold of the latest piece of leftist idiocy and eviscerating it before its authors even knew what had happened. His writing had a clarity, a moral certitude, a sense of humor, and—most importantly—a joy of combat that was infectious. Even his more personal musings seemed to express a kind of knowing embrace of his own weaknesses and eccentricities rather than shallow egomania.

There was also a certain insecurity, a lack of absolutism, about Andrew’s writing that was unquestionably appealing. Unlike some of the saber-rattling rightwingers flying around talk radio and the blogosphere, he was refreshingly non-dogmatic. He was a conservative, and deeply opposed to radical Islam; but he was also an open homosexual, a sufferer from an incurable and likely fatal disease, and seemed determined to emulate his hero Orwell’s unwillingness to allow the psychopathologies of his own side to go unchallenged. He seemed to strive, as Orwell did, to be aware of his own prejudices. Moreover, his political heterodoxy was profoundly welcome to those of us who were convinced that America (as well as Israel, and the West—for want of a better word—in general) was a fine place and worth fighting for, but were not necessarily in sympathy with the entire spectrum of conservative beliefs. We found in Sullivan a model we could emulate and a voice we could try and make our own. His very presence convinced us that, if there was room on the political spectrum for him, there was room for us as well.

Of course, there were always rumors; rumors about his supposedly heroic consumption of soft drugs, his tendency toward hysteria and hyperbole, his inability to separate the political and the personal, and his sometimes unpredictable turns of opinion. I didn’t then, and I don’t now, think that any of these things were necessarily significant, even if true. We all have our vices. Whether they are or were connected to his current decline, I do not and cannot know. What is clear is that, over time, Andrew Sullivan did indeed start to come apart at the seams.

I am not certain at what point it all began to unravel. Certainly, Sullivan’s turn against George W. Bush over the issues of gay marriage and the use of torture played an enormous part. His feeling of disillusionment over the Iraq War (which I share) and his sense of betrayal by the neoconservatives (which I do not share) were certainly major factors as well. But I don’t think there was any one moment at which Sullivan finally crossed the line into derangement. It was a slow accumulation of twists and turns that resulted in an ostensibly libertarian conservative endorsing Barack Obama, demonizing his opposition, and ultimately deciding—against all available evidence—that the former Republican vice presidential candidate is not only politically disagreeable, but a demented, pathologically lying monster who faked the birth of her fifth child.

For me personally, however, the problem was underlined by a confluence of events. Nearly a decade ago, Sullivan sent me an email in which he said that to him the defense of the Jewish people was the defense of humanity itself. A bit maudlin, perhaps, but an encouraging thing to hear in the midst of a very nasty terrorist war. Then, last year, Sullivan hit back at Jonah Goldberg for calling Barack Obama an elitist by saying that Goldberg’s own status as a member of a privileged, moneyed elite made him a hypocrite on the issue. It was an attack that was just vague enough, but I couldn’t help feeling it was Goldberg’s Judaism that Sullivan was talking about. We are taught from a young age to have little faith in the kindness of gentiles. This is often unfair, but over time one learns enough bitter lessons to admit that there is at least something to the idea. Unfortunately, I fear that for me this was one of them.

For everyone else, however, it was Sullivan’s Sarah Palin obsession, or rather the obsession with her fifth child, and whether or not she actually gave birth to it, that marked the end of Sullivan as a serious or even sane writer. This is understandable. To throw out one’s previous principles is sometimes the result of a difficult and honest change in one’s beliefs; to hurl Occam’s Razor, common sense, and basic human decency out the window in favor of an inscrutable personal vendetta is something else entirely.

Why Sullivan has persisted in his conspiracy theory, and why he holds himself to such persistent ridicule for doing so, is a matter for speculation. What is not in question, however, is that the loss of Andrew Sullivan to conspiracy theory and political derangement is nothing to be celebrated. In this age of style over substance and irrational hope over solemn assessment, we need voices like he once had. That voice is gone now — and the saddest thing is, it was silenced by Sullivan himself.

And this, Andrew, is something you do have to answer for. To change your mind was not a betrayal; to express your disillusionment and disappointment was not a betrayal; but to embrace unreason — to gleefully assent to the political psychopathology you once denounced so eloquently — that was a betrayal. In crossing the line between the sane and the mad you yourself once defended, you committed treason against all of us — left and right — who believe in that line, and try to defend it against those who, for the sake of their own fantasies of power and control, would erase it.

Sadly, I doubt very much that, having crossed that line, you will ever find any reason to cross back over again. Goodbye, I suppose, to all that. How we loved you then. How we mourn you now.

Benjamin Kerstein is Senior Writer for The New Ledger.