I have been aware of Ross Douthat since he became the youngest NYT columnist back in 2009, as the opinion page sought to find a replacement conservative with William Kristol’s exit (see Politico from the time: Douthat enters new Times zone). I still kind of think of him as “the young one,” although he is now 46 years old and has a middle-aged vibe rather than that of a wunderkind (see the photo the Times used in the story linked below about his new job if you need a visual of the vibe in question).

I never found Douthat especially intellectually stimulating, but also never found him especially off-putting (although the notion that he wrote a “memoir” right out of school struck me as, well, a bit presumptuous). He has, at least, been marginally anti-Trump, meaning that I have been more willing to hear from him than had he been MAGA. Still, like all NYT columnists, I have often thought that he exemplified the notion that there should be a term limit on the office (not that I wouldn’t happily be paid large sums of money to write 800-word columns a couple times a week for a major publication). Douthat has term-limited himself as he is taking a job with 60 Minutes, as the NYT reports: Ross Douthat Joins ‘60 Minutes’ as a Correspondent.

I must admit, taking a job from Bari Weiss is a definitive mark against Douthat’s judgment. Further, it speaks poorly of the new 60 Minutes that it is hiring an opinion columnist instead of an actual investigative reporter.

All of this led me to read Douthat’s last column, Who Are the Good Guys and the Bad Guys? I’m No Longer Sure. For someone who is supposedly a deep thinker about American politics, it is rather problematic that Douthat doesn’t know who the bad guys are. The column is worse than the title.

His premise is as follows.

The columnist’s job contains multitudes, but it’s useful to have a primary antagonist, a specific worldview that you think needs to be challenged and critiqued. For me, for many years, that worldview was the elite consensus of the early Obama era — a mostly left-of-center perspective that also belonged to Silicon Valley moguls, centrist politicians in the style of Michael Bloomberg and portions of the Republican consultant class.

I actually find the notion that a writer needs a “primary antagonist” to be an odd approach, but I guess if you are writing weekly, you need an angle. But worse is that the antagonist he names is ever so vague. There may well be some “elite consensus” from 2009 to argue with, but what I find lacking in this column is an adequate description thereof.

For example:

It was a perspective that was morally permissive and self-consciously cosmopolitan, uniting multilateralism and hawkishness in foreign policy, and optimistic that a meritocratic elite could guide a globalizing world toward prosperity and harmony.

In part, I opposed this worldview on substantive grounds. I was religious where it was largely secular, I was pro-life where it was pro-choice, I had doubts about its approach to issues as various as mass immigration, marijuana legalization and the Middle East.

In part, I opposed it on political grounds. A lot of Republicans were convinced that the G.O.P. needed to adapt to the consensus to survive, effectively becoming a second culturally liberal party but with free-market vibes, and I was certain that was wrong.

This strikes me as grouping some vague generalities with a couple of specifics.

He goes on.

And finally, I critiqued the elite consensus because it desperately needed elite critics, and lacking them it was constantly tempted into overreach. Even when it started out in a reasonable place it didn’t know when to stop, and there was too much about human nature that it didn’t seem to know.

I see hints of certain foundations of classic conservatives, and likely Catholic theology, in his reference ot human nature, but one is left to guess, not actually understand.

As a general matter, I find his “elite consensus” formulation to be a lot of intellectual-sounding, but largely vacuous, hand-waving.

Across the last decade in Western politics, this elite consensus came to grief for some of the reasons that I expected. It failed to anticipate the downsides of expert-driven policies, it was unprepared for the darker effects of technological change, it took social liberalism so far that it left vulnerable people adrift or abandoned to their vices, and it blundered in foreign policy because it didn’t expect the non-Western world to push back so hard against its plans.

The whole “expert-driven policies” critique makes no sense and is overly vague. I mean, one could credibly argue that “expert-driven policies” have been dominant globally since the end of WWII (if not before), mostly to good effect as hallmarks of modern governance. On balance, therefore, I am not sure what he is talking about (does he want to go back to the spoils system?). Mostly, I would note that all of this “it” didn’t do this or that to be wildly over-broad. I would also note that the most significant foreign policy blunders of recent memory belong far more to the Bush (and now Trump) administrations than any others (suggesting that the issue is more which experts are trusted than it is about problems with expertise as a general matter).

More to the core point, I would note that the main reason we got Trump 1.0 is the Electoral College, not some massive policy failure. We got Trump 2.0 because of global inflation after the pandemic and a Republican Party unwilling to reject Trump as a nominee (starting with Mitch McConnell’s unwillingness to do the right thing after January 6th). Douthat so wants to blame Democratic administrations and vague “elites” (and “wokeness”–more on that below) that he is ignoring reality.

I guess in the following he is trying to acknowledge that some of those he thought were the “bad guys” might not be, but he is a bit obtuse about it:

But watching this crisis unfold, I find that I’ve lost my sense of which contemporary worldview is most in need of criticism or opposition, where the good guys and bad guys are. Each major faction seems potentially dangerous, tempted toward the dark side in some unique way, contested or cross-pressured to a degree that makes me uncertain where the side of the angels really lies.

Start with the populism that has risen to power because of the elite consensus’s failures. For many conservatives who shared my critique of the Obama-era establishment, the populist rebellion has been the vessel for their hopes. But in Donald Trump’s second term populism has displayed most of the vices that its critics anticipated. It has been corrupt and bullying and destabilizing. It has rewarded hacks and cronies. And it stumbled into a Middle Eastern war with even less preparation than its establishment predecessors.

Let me note that it strikes me as simply incorrect to note that each side is equally dangerous. I also find the notion that Trump’s populism is to be blamed on previous elites, instead of being blamed on the GOP, Trump, and his voters, to be an ongoing frustrating position that many hold. I find the notion that the Obama administration is responsible, somehow, for Trumpian populism to be a strain on logic (although I do see how the election of a Black man to the White House triggered a lot of white nationalists).

Really, the following was the main inspiration to write about this, especially the bolded part.

For many liberal readers, these sins make populism the maximum danger, the singular emergency. But as Trumpism has flailed and failed, it hasn’t consolidated the kind of authoritarian power anticipated by its most alarmed opponents. At the moment, Trump 2.0 has no great popularity, no legislative capacity, no policy legacy that a Democratic successor can’t easily roll back. The president himself might still be a dangerous figure, there might be darker forces waiting in the wings — but I don’t think that justifies making anti-populism the measure of all things.

That sentence confirms a thought I have had about Douthat before: he is not a very deep thinker. He is dismissing a great deal of damage being done by this administration. Not only is he ignoring things like the deaths directly caused by dismantling USAID or the immigrants in concentration camps, but he is also ignoring Trump’s corruption, his subversion of the rule of law, and the way in which Trump has transformed the office. His assessment is decidedly not conservative, as he is utterly ignoring the unintended consequences of all of these actions by Trump. He is further soft-pedalling the actions in question. He does not, in my view, seem to be taking any of this very seriously.

He goes on.

there is what remains of the center-left establishment, some of whose vices look less serious in light of Trumpism — self-satisfied technocrats might be preferable to self-dealing hatchet men — but that remains culpable for the mistakes that led to populism’s rise and at sea amid changed political conditions.

Again, he is not taking Trumpism seriously, nor does he make clear what the alternative is to technorats or what mistakes they made. He goes on with more vagueness and some concern about “wokeness 2.0” and then asserts this:

But I lived through the years of peak woke, and it was a McCarthyite experience. I lived with the blue-state governance that doctrinaire progressivism encouraged, and it yielded civic and educational collapse. And I would prefer not to give the far left the power to regulate and prosecute and rewrite the federal budget.

This is, well, absurd. Whatever he means by “woke,” peak or otherwise, it was not McCarthyism. I don’t recall there being woke-driven hearings in Congress. I don’t recall blacklists or the like. Indeed, the most recent example of anything even vaguely McCarthyite was Anthony Fauci being dragged before Senator Rand’s committee to be harassed for hours.

It should be underscored that during the years in question he had a sinecure at the NYT with a 6-figure salary and rather advantageous working conditions. He was hardly blacklisted and sent to work in the fields.

I am also not certain where we are seeing “civic and educational collapse.” The closest I can come up with is the Trump administration bullying higher education, or states like Florida and Texas trying to control curriculum. But that’s not because they are too woke.

On one level, I guess I should hand it to Douthat for admitting he isn’t sure who the “bad guys” are insofar as it suggests that he is willing to evaluate his own side. On another note, the fact that he cannot see with more clarity how bad the current administration is and where the blame lies is a blight on his record. That he is now willing to work for Bari Weiss deepens that blight.

Why write any of this? I can think of at least two reasons.

Partially, I think it is because whenever I think too much about elite-level opinion writers I often come away wondering exactly why it is that I should turn to them for their views. I guess I think too highly of experts and technocrats or, at least, people with relevant training and expertise (none of which Douthat has). But, as a friend notes, perhaps I am too harsh in my critiques and too hard to impress.

Another reason is that I think Douthat is a sign of the times. He doesn’t cleave to Trumpism, but he is clearly flirting with its allies and its spaces. This reminds me of an incident right after the debate in which Biden showed his age in a catastrophic manner. Douthat was on a Times podcast, and he sounded, in my interpretation at least, kind of giddy about how bad Biden did, all the while professing to wanting Trump defeated.  It was a partisan moment, in my mind, and not one that was flattering to Douthat. I would get it if Scott Jennings, for example, thought that Biden’s performance was funny.  But Jennings is a clear partisan hack.  Douthat wanted us to believe that he was a Serious Conservative who understood the perils of Donald Trump.  But anyone who was concerned about a second Trump term, regardless of ideology, should have seen that performance and come away with a pit in the stomach, not a gleeful lilt in the voice.

Further, while Douthat has every right to derive his worldview from his religious beliefs, I find thinkers who do so to be off-putting, as they often are not relying on reason and evidence, but on faith. For example, I listened to Douthat promote his most recent book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, on The Ezra Klein show a little over a year ago.  In that conversation, Douthat displayed the kind of “argumentation” that I remember from my Evangelical youth, which was the smugness of “knowing” the truth because of one’s faith not because of reason, logic, or sound argumentation.  I am not going to comb through the transcript to find the exact moment, as I recall less the actual words than I do the tone and attitude.  I simply have no time for people who base their positions in politics on an immutable faith in things that only the faithful can understand. It is simply tautology hyper-fueled by faith that works as an “argument” only when utilized with fellow travelers. 

I have little patience for such approaches, because, ultimately, such a person is not trying to persuade me of the logic of their position via evidence, but instead needs me to adhere to their faith to accept their arguments.  I think that this is why I have come to find people like Douthat and David Brooks (and others who base their foundational positions in faith and not reason) hard to fully stomach (although, in fairness, Douthat seems to have done a better job of living out his faith than has Brooks).  Not only does it mean that they are arguing from faith, which leads to unprovable propositions, but it also means that they can’t change their minds on certain issues, which I think is requisite for anything that aspires to scientific discourse, even of the social science variety.

I realize, by the way, that we all have beliefs about how the world works, and values that drive our preferences.  I, for example, am of the view that liberal democracy is the superior form of governance as opposed to the alternatives.  But I don’t, ultimately, hold that view because I was told it was true by a divinely inspired text, prophet, or deity.  I hold to this view as a result of years of study of data, persuasive arguments, and the unfolding of history. I will also note that I remain open to the possibility that I am wrong and that some level of evidence and argumentation could persuade me to change my mind.

I do not get that sense from Douthat, not when it comes to his Catholicism, which is the ultimate foundation of his political positions.

For an even harsher critique, see Noah Berlatsky: Ross Douthat Knows the Fascists are On His Side. For a somewhat kinder treatment, see Dan Drezner: Ross Douthat’s Pivot to Video.

Update: I would also recommend Brien Beutler: Propaganda With Better Manners Is Still Propaganda.