Does the specific context even matter?
[Andew] Sullivan’s performance, in all its hyperventilating absurdity, is probably best received as an off-site contribution by a former editor to the New Republic‘s ongoing 100th birthday celebrations. Here is the spirit that the magazine embodied through the latter decades of the 20th century: tireless vigilance, in the face of an empowered reactionary movement, against any signs of excess on the left. Every outspoken liberal a Red Guard, every word about racial injustice an incitement to riot, every slope a slippery slope. Except the slope one is standing on.
Excessive misplaced commas aside, I think you get the point.