PanThe BafflerMaking your way through the barrage of lies, half-truths, innuendoes, and provocations that characterize this 576-page miscellany of Sullivan’s career has all the appeal of plunging an overfull toilet: you just know shitty water’s going to soak the bathmat. … Sullivan, however, has spent the better part of forty years clinging to fantasies of a rational, compassionate conservatism ‘dedicated to criticizing liberalism’s failures, engaging with it empirically, and offering practical alternatives to the same problems’—as though this is a thing that has ever existed anywhere in the history of the world … At the beginning of this book you get the sense that Sullivan’s gaslighting his readers, but the deeper you go you start to wonder if he’s actually gaslighting himself … That’s right, folks: as many as a million people were killed in a pointless war that Andrew Sullivan hawked like a fishwife for no other reason than his need to punish as many Muslims as possible for 9/11, but what’s important to remember is that he feels really bad about it … he doesn’t realize his alienation stems from wanting to belong to clubs whose members hate him not for what he says or what he does but for what he is.
