Andrew Sullivan Invites Us All Out Onto the Limb

“That commitment to truth seeking made Sullivan one of the earliest advocates for gay marriage and one of the most potent and consistent critics of ‘wokeness’ today.”

“I have never tried to be popular.” So writes Andrew Sullivan—the influential journalist and public intellectual, once of The New Republic, New York magazine, and now Substack fame—in the introduction to his new compendium of essays, Out on a Limb: Selected Writing, 1989-2021.

Indeed, he has not. Sullivan is an all too rare breed of public intellectual, one so unwed to a particular party or tribe that he consistently tells the truth as he sees it. A gay, Catholic, British immigrant and committed small-c conservative attached to small-l liberal principles, it is easy to see how Sullivan has never felt especially committed to a particular party or tribe in America. With the Republican Party prostrated at the feet of “an openly proto-fascist cult leader” named Donald Trump, in Sullivan’s words, and the Democrats overly enthralled by their own left-wing illiberal variant, Sullivan is a political man without a home.

He has made good use of that independence. For Sullivan, “the goal has always been the same: to look at the world, to make sense of it as best I can, and to tell the truth.” That commitment to truth seeking made Sullivan one of the earliest advocates for gay marriage and one of the most potent and consistent critics of “wokeness” today. It has left him vigorously advocating the Iraq War and then publicly disowning his previous support for it. It has motivated his critiques of hate crimes legislation and critical race theory but also his disgust with the illiberalism and conspiracism of Trumpism.