[5][6] In 2003, he wrote that he could no longer support the American conservative movement, as he was disaffected with the Republican Party's continued rightward shift toward social conservatism during the George W. Bush era.

[8][9] Sullivan was born in South Godstone, Surrey, England, into a Catholic family of Irish descent,[10] and was brought up in the nearby town of East Grinstead, West Sussex.

"[T]he sad truth is that as a rule," Sullivan wrote, "Rhodies possess none of the charms of the aristocracy and all of the debilities: fecklessness, excessive concern that peasants be aware of their achievement, and a certain hemophilia of character.

"[18] Author Thomas Schaeper notes that "[i]ronically, Sullivan had first gone to the United States on a Harkness Fellowship, one of many scholarships spawned in emulation of the Rhodes program.

"[18] In 1994, Sullivan published excerpts on race and intelligence from Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's controversial The Bell Curve, which argued that some of the measured difference in IQ scores among racially defined groups was a result of genetic inheritance.

He has continued to speak approvingly of the research and arguments presented in The Bell Curve, writing, "The book ... still holds up as one of the most insightful and careful of the last decade.

The fact of human inequality and the subtle and complex differences between various manifestations of being human—gay, straight, male, female, black, Asian—is a subject worth exploring, period.

[22] After the cessation of his long-running blog, The Dish, in 2015,[23] Sullivan wrote regularly for New York during the 2016 presidential election,[24] and in 2017 began writing a weekly column, "Interesting Times", for the magazine.

He has supported a number of traditional libertarian positions, favouring limited government and opposing social interventionist measures such as affirmative action.

[28] But on many controversial public issues, including same-sex marriage, social security, progressive taxation, anti-discrimination laws, the Affordable Care Act, the U.S. government's use of torture, and capital punishment, he has taken positions not typically shared by conservatives in the United States.

During the 2012 election campaign, he wrote, "Against a radical right, reckless, populist insurgency, Obama is the conservative option, dealing with emergent problems with pragmatic calm and modest innovation.

[38][39] He argues that the Republican Party, and much of the conservative movement in the U.S., has largely abandoned its earlier scepticism and moderation in favour of a more fundamentalist certainty, both in religious and political terms.

[43] In 2018, after Sarah Jeong, an editorial board member of The New York Times, received widespread criticism for her old anti-white tweets, Sullivan accused her of being racist and calling white people "subhuman".

"[17] In the wake of the United States Supreme Court rulings on same-sex marriage in 2013 (Hollingsworth v. Perry and United States v. Windsor), The New York Times op-ed columnist Ross Douthat suggested that Sullivan might be the most influential political writer of his generation, writing: "No intellectual that I can think of, writing on a fraught and controversial topic, has seen their once-crankish, outlandish-seeming idea become the conventional wisdom so quickly, and be instantiated so rapidly in law and custom.

[51] In 2014, Sullivan opposed calls to remove Brendan Eich as CEO of Mozilla for donating to the campaign for Proposition 8, which made same-sex marriage illegal in California.

He said the "gay rights establishment" was making a tactical error by insisting on protections for gender identity, as he believed it would be easier to pass the bill without transgender people.

[56] In a September 2019 Intelligencer column, Sullivan expressed concern that gender-nonconforming children (especially those who are likely one day to come out as gay) might be encouraged to believe that they are transgender when they are not.

[61] Sullivan supported the United States' 2003 invasion of Iraq and was initially hawkish in the war on terror, arguing that weakness would embolden terrorists.

He was "one of the most militant"[17] supporters of the Bush administration's counter-terrorism strategy immediately following the September 11 attacks in 2001; in an essay for The Sunday Times, he wrote, "The middle part of the country—the great red zone that voted for Bush—is clearly ready for war.

"[62] Eric Alterman wrote in 2002 that Sullivan had "set himself up as a one-man House Un-American Activities Committee" running an "inquisition" to unmask "anti-war Democrats", "basing his argument less on the words these politicians speak than on the thoughts he knows them to be holding in secret".

[63] Later, Sullivan criticised the Bush administration for its prosecution of the war, especially regarding the numbers of troops, protection of munitions, and treatment of prisoners, including the use of torture against detainees in U.S.

"[17] On the 27 October 2006 episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, Sullivan described conservatives and Republicans who refused to admit they had been wrong to support the Iraq War as "cowards".

On 26 February 2008, he wrote on his blog: "After 9/11, I was clearly blinded by fear of al Qaeda and deluded by the overwhelming military superiority of the US and the ease of democratic transitions in Eastern Europe into thinking we could simply fight our way to victory against Islamist terror.

[70] In January 2010, Sullivan blogged that he was "moving toward" the idea of "a direct American military imposition" of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with NATO troops enforcing "the borders of the new states of Palestine and Israel".

[72] In February 2010, Leon Wieseltier suggested in The New Republic that Sullivan, a former friend and colleague, had a "venomous hostility toward Israel and Jews" and was "either a bigot, or just moronically insensitive" toward the Jewish people.

[74] In March 2019, Sullivan wrote in New York magazine that while he strongly supported the right of a Jewish state to exist, he felt that U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar's comments about the influence of the pro-Israel lobby were largely correct.

[87] Similarly, Gavin Evans wrote in The Guardian that Sullivan "was one of the loudest cheerleaders for The Bell Curve in 1994" and that he "returned to the fray in 2011, using his popular blog, The Dish, to promote the view that population groups had different innate potentials when it came to intelligence.

He believes recognition of same-sex marriage is a civil-rights issue but expressed willingness to promote it on a state-by-state legislative federalism basis, rather than trying to judicially impose the change.

[98] In July 2020, Sullivan announced that The Dish would be revived as a weekly feature, including a column and podcast;[99] he published there and elsewhere a notable obituary of Queen Elizabeth II.

[110] Following the statutory and administrative repeals of the HIV immigration ban in 2008 and 2009, respectively, he announced his intention to begin the process of becoming a permanent resident and citizen.