That Strange New Voice at Times Op Ed
I first met Ross Douthat, the New York Times' newest columnist -- and, at 29, its youngest-ever and perhaps its first op-ed page conservative Catholic believer -- four years ago after reviewing his engaging and gutsy student's memoir, Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class. I've recently reviewed his book, Grand New Party. So herewith some thoughts about the Times' smart and telling but slightly risky choice.
The smart and telling part is that Douthat will outclass not only William Kristol but also a faithless, conniving, faux-populist neo-conservative strain of punditry, whose collapse has been evident recently in loud second thoughts from the historian Robert Kagan at the Washington Post and in the maunderings of David Brooks.
Ironically, Douthat's co-author of Grand New Party, Reihan Salam, worked for Brooks at the Times in 2003-4. But Douthat comes from somewhere else and is going somewhere else, and he is not alone. He may give serious left-liberals an adversary they deserve, because, unlike Kristol and Brooks, he has more beliefs than insecurities.
That brings us to the risky part of Douthat's hiring. Although I wrote about Grand New Party for the liberal Catholic Commonweal, which I've admired and written for occasionally since the early 1980s, I have no hosannas for that celestial railroad the HRC&AC (Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church). Myself a sometime carrier of the Hebraic strain in the early-American, republican civil religion, I find the Church perverse in too many ways to reprise here (i.e., Don't get me started.)
The Church does take a long view of things, usefully keeping the tragedy of the political before us. Sometimes it props up what looks like the serenity of its faith with unseemly, Grand Inquisitorial musings about (and exploitations of) the weaknesses of the flesh in a fallen world. Some of us Hebrews take an even longer and somewhat different view of how to balance the evil inclinations in the human heart with efforts to repair a world that isn't quite so fallen.
That Jewish orientation has its own risks, but this whole debate is lost on those who've been running the nervous, neo-liberal/neo-conservative Times for the past few decades. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. has found that his empire is a fragile craft in history's tides (and God's). So he has grasped for a pundit who respects the Catholic Bishops' well-known injunctions on behalf of the poor and against unjust wars, but not from a knee-jerk-liberal vantage point.
In Privilege, Douthat stood almost equidistant enough from the free-marketeering right and the liberationist left to see a perverse codependency between them, as I mention in my review. Conservative though he is, he confessed to a sneaking sympathy for his fellow students' Living Wage Campaign on behalf of Harvard's underpaid workers. That's the Dorothy Day part of him. Or maybe it's the Baltimore Cathechism, which is more Tory and corporatist in the conservative "we incorporate and care for everyone" sense of that term.
Conservative Catholics tend also to be statists of theocratic inclination and to be prissily or haughtily silent about their side's own sins -- a silence of the sort to which the usually congenial Douthat is not always immune, owing partly also to his inexperience in the business and political worlds. His hauteur flashed during a long and increasingly testy defense of the late conservative Catholic theologian Richard John Neuhaus in a series of exchanges with Damon Linker in the New Republic. That his casuistry has a longer arc than Brooks' sophistry makes Douthat a bit too ecclesiastical for my taste, but also, when he's at his best, more grounded and even profound.
It doesn't worry me that Douthat considers human life a sacred, inter-generational thread that is not to be broken by individual decisions or (as I hope he also thinks) by the state in capital punishment or in unjust wars. I do wonder what Douthat would think about capital punishment and lesser but noxious repressions if the state tended toward theocracy or just took sides on certain issues, in ways he considered beneficent.
But he's only 29. As he travels his Via Dolorosa from the Times op ed page toward the Kingdom of God on earth, Douthat may be an interlocutor who makes liberals think through their own long-unexamined assumptions and find the missing groundwork for some of their beliefs in government action and individual rights. Neo-conservatives have derided liberals for holding some of these beliefs at all, or for holding them badly, when in truth the neo-cons hold some of these beliefs themselves. It may be more rewarding to watch Ross Douthat transcend his conservative prematurity than it has been to watch David Brooks grow up politically so much later in life.
Jim, I almost always agree with you but not on this one.
I admit I am overly interested in one issue but on it, neoconservatism and Israel, this guy is worse than Kristol.
Why? Because even Kristol did not call Walt-Marsheimer anti-Semites.
Do-whatever did. Or came close.
http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/01/the_israel_lobby_and_its_criti.php
Precisely because he is not Jewish, I expect that he'll do even more damage than Kristol did. The Times filled the Safire/Rosenthal/Kristol with those guys natural successor.
March 13, 2009 9:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
MJ - In my opinion, the difference you've identified is not a substantive one.
Douthat belongs to a younger generation that is heavily influenced by the "in-your-face" language that is ubiquitous on the internet (including this web site, but of course it gets much worse out there).
I know you don't like him, but Kristol belongs to a classier generation that is a bit more careful about language, especially language that is accusatory. Also, Gentiles may feel more of a safety zone in identifying behavior as anti-Semitic than do many Jews - I know this is the case for me (my Jewish friends are sometimes worried about a "shanda" more than I think necessary. The Jews may also worry that the accusation will sound self-serving.) I doubt there is any substantive difference in Kristol's and Douthat's feelings about Israel, Israeli power, or anti-Semitism.
Also, to add another dissenting note, it may be healthy for many posters on this Board, as well as for other Americans, to see a non-Jewish figure that is a strong, uncompromising voice in support of Israel. It may help them realize that strong support of Israel need not be the disloyal, self-serving caricature that some of them seem to think it is. The truth is, there are millions of Christians in this country that are extremely strong supporters of Israel.
March 13, 2009 12:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
But what precisely was "in-your-face" about what Douthat wrote?
Here's the relevant passage:
"Echoes tropes of classical anti-Semitism - however innocently or unintentially" is not the same as "is anti-Semitic." It is obvious that Douthat's careful, elliptical phrasing is precisely intended NOT to accuse Walt and Mearsheimer of anti-Semitism.
And this is what MJ thinks makes him worse than Bill Kristol, who every week topped himself with disingenuous, pre-packaged predictable nonsense? I'm still trying to understand that one.
March 13, 2009 1:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
You're making a good point. I made the mistake of not looking at the original citation. My bad.
March 13, 2009 3:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
The more important point is that "echoes tropes of classical anti-Semitism" is actually a pretty good description of Walt/Mearsheimer. I won't presume to know whether it was unintentional or not, but the essence of the W-M thesis bears more than a superficial resemblance to ideas that have animated anti-Semites for centuries. The idea that there is a secretive Jewish cabal. The idea that "we" i.e. the ordinary non-Jewish types, are helpless in the face of it. Etc. You don't have to dig too far to find the same ideas in anti-Semitic literature through the ages.
I'm quite sure that M and W don't think they're anti-Semitic. I'm sure they have Jewish friends and colleagues who think the world of them. I'm sure they'd be OK if their daughter married a Jew. They're almost certainly not anti-Semites of the old school. What they are, as Douthat says, are polemicists - who won't let the fact that their arguments are mighty close to the anti-Semitism line stop them from making those arguments as long as it means they get the attention they crave.
March 13, 2009 3:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
I with you agree completely, Brad.
Incidentally, you may remember a similar dustup years ago about Pat Buchanan. In talking about the Gulf War and criticizing Israel's role in roping the US into fighting it, Buchanan said "There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East-the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States". He then gave a list of Jewish names in government and in the think tanks. He also said that the war would be fought by "kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales, and Leroy Brown".
These comments, among many others, led to a whole book edited by Bill Buckley called "In Search of Anti-Semitism". In Buckley's own piece, he opined that Buchanan may not be personally anti-Semitic, but he employs the language of anti-Semitism. To quote Buckley "I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it: most probably, an iconoclastic temperament." This is extremely similar to what Douthat quite correctly said.
Who will be the Buckley of the progessives? Who will step up to the plate? How about you, Jim - you have the right resume.
March 13, 2009 4:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
Let me re-translate that passage for you two:
"I may be young, but I also know how the establishment works. As a non-Jew, my articulate insinuations of anti-Semitism could be very useful to a publication like the NY Times.
I know how to play ball, I have great ambitions for my career, and I respectfully submit my application in the event that a role of goy toy opens up in the future.
March 13, 2009 5:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
Goy toy? Hadn't heard that one, quite the chuckle.
March 14, 2009 2:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
This is all that needs to be said about Douthat. From the horse's mouth even:
"An Admission
30 Aug 2008 05:08 pm
At the moment, I'm probably rooting harder for Sarah Palin to succeed than I have for any politician in recent memory. Just something to keep in mind while you're reading my commentary."
http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/08/an_admission.php
March 13, 2009 10:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
Damn, after sharing that quote, I will now never be able to read him seriously.
29 years old? Forgive me but didn't once upon a time the NYtimes columnists were supposed to be a little seasoned. I mean Safire had a lifetime of work behind him, even kristol had decades of editing conservative rags. 29? What could they not sign the 13year old CPAC freak?
March 13, 2009 11:38 AM | Reply | Permalink
Radical, so called conservative, columnists are going to lie and push the right wing talking points; that is evidently what the New York Times wants. The New York Times is owned by wealthy people, so they push the Republican line.
March 13, 2009 11:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for the heads-up on this guy!
March 13, 2009 12:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
Jim -
I find one of your comparisons somewhat unfair. Even if we disagree with many of its ideas, the neoconservative movement is a serious movement of ideas and beliefs. You just have to read the writings of Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, (among many others), as I'm sure you have done, to know this.
The fact that the recent political implementation of some aspects of the neoconservative program by the Bush administration has been less than successful doesn't mean that, as you say, it is a movement of nervous instincts rather than beliefs. It is a vibrant intellectual movement, worthy adversaries of us as progressives, which needs to do some retrenching currently. I'm sure they'll be back, and we'd best be ready for them. Meanwhile, I continue to read Commentary and often find it better written and better argued than the many progressive journals I read.
March 13, 2009 12:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Why is Catholicism any more perverse than Judaism (or any other religion)?
When any religion has the capability, it shows its true nature. Catholics torture and harass Jews in Spain, Jews murder and disposess Arabs in Palestine.
March 13, 2009 2:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
Isn't it more about unchecked power than religion per se?
Look at the Nazis and Stalin's communists, neither of which was a religion or even religious at all, and both of which engaged in mass murder on a scale previously unknown to the world.
Also, your comparison of the actions (many of them defensive) of democratic Israel to the tortures of the Inquisition is inaccurate as well as being highly offensive. Anyway, do you believe that the state of Israel is a religion? You should have spent more time in Sunday School as a kid. Perhaps you could try to be more sensitive to our Jewish friends and neighbors, as well as other supporters of Israel (you could also wise up - your comparison is an inane one which shows that your grasp of history is not strong).
March 13, 2009 5:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
Don't worry, MJ, Douthat and his fans won't take my post as an encouragement or a very warm welcome. Even the New York Review of Books was critical of Mearsheimer and Walt, and I don't think Douthat was over the top on them. I don't say that M & W's basic thesis about the Israel lobby is wrong, but there's a lot they don't get, and this isn't the place to go into it.
Yes, Douthat was briefly taken with Palin, and at other times he's been far too credulous about Republican politicians. I chalk this up to his political inexperience, one of his greatest liabilities. He hasn't really been out in the real world either corporate or political. He'll have to work very hard to overcome this.
Who is "The Progressive Conscience," and why are his posts so weird? In the first one here, he claims that Kristol outclasses Douthat, a far more nuanced, temperate, and intelligent writer than any neo-conservative writer I've read, from Podhoretz on down. Commentary stopped being interesting years ago, when all of its pieces began to read alike and its affectations of decorum ("Mr So and So seems to be unaware of the fact that he is wrong," etc.) were increasingly lacking in dignity. I could start with Podhoretz's defense of Pat Robertson and then of the Bush doctrine, but, again, this isn't the place. Douthat will give liberal and leftist readers more of a run for their money than Kristol ever did, and "The Progressive Conscience" might want to tell us why he is the only writer claiming the name "progressive" who thinks otherwise.
March 13, 2009 2:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
My identity is secret, but I am well known to all of you.
March 13, 2009 3:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well now you got me curious.
Any hints?
March 13, 2009 3:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
I have two initials.
March 13, 2009 3:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
Also, you might be able to figure it out from my writing style.
March 13, 2009 3:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
Maybe....AB? Arrogant Bastard?
Come on, "The Progressive Conscious?"
Dreams of Grandeur much?
=D
March 13, 2009 10:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
Mr. Bwakfat - I'd be happy to have a dialogue with you. But you would have to abjure childish name-calling. I'm used to talking with adults, and I'm not sure I could make the adjustment.
March 14, 2009 8:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
And in answer to your final question, maybe because I think for myself? Is that forbidden to progressives?
Also, I didn't say Kristol outclasses Douthat, I said he belongs to a more classy generation, which is certainly true. (You should know, you're a bit older yourself.) I don't personally know either man, and they both may be very classy for all I know.
March 13, 2009 3:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
One more thing - I very much enjoyed your book "Liberal Racism", and I wish more progressives would have this type of insight. (I'm not saying you're a progressive - I don't know whether you identify yourself as such).
My introduction to TPM posting came in MJ's thread's, where I strongly opposed threads that appeared to be taking an anti-Semitic turn. (This was before MJ put his foot down). I believe that anti-Semitism, like racism, belies everything that progressives have ever stood for. (Seems obvious - weird that it has to be said). I will spare no effort to eliminate it, even if it makes me sound like a broken record.
I didn't at all intend to offend you by cavilling at the comparison you made in your writeup. If you took offense, I sincerely apologize.
By the way, did you read the piece "The Meaning of Sarah Palin" in a recent issue of Commentary, by Yuval Levin? I thought it was extraordinarily insightful, and it made points I hadn't seen anywhere else. I hate to say it, but I don't remember the last time that I could say that about an article in The Nation. That's what I mean when I praise Commentary. We can learn from our opponents more than from our friends, to garble a Talmudic dictum.
March 13, 2009 3:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
Jim:
I am not sure if I understand at least one point in your review of Douthat's Harvard memoir. Please allow me a substantial quote:
'And he [Douthat] warns that his privileged crowd's breezy divorce of sex from love and commitment pulls a moral rug out from under decent, struggling poor people who can't afford the consequences: 'We practice safe sex . . . because [it] requires only motivation, self-control, and a healthy self-regard, which we have in abundance. These motivations don't exist everywhere, but it's not our fault if other people don't have our bright futures to remind them. . . . We live in a meritocracy, don't we? We deserve to be where we are, don't we? . . . We don't get pregnant young or married too early . . . we don't have to have abortions" or bear ''the fatherless children . . . we're generous enough to tutor . . . in Harvard's admirable after-school programs.'
[Your analysis immediately follows:]
"Thus equidistant from free-market right and liberationist left, Douthat notes a perverse codependency. Gestures against racism and sexism reconcile some liberals to their complicity in deeper inequities they can't bring themselves to oppose."
For example, how does a Harvard's student's practice of safe sex involve a failure to fight deeper inequality or inequity. Does Douthat mean to argue that sex must be limited to marriage? I assume that by commitment, he means marriage.
If not, why bring it up? (I am 50 years old, we had these arguments in my Jesuit high school.) Do you agree with him? Or do you have to really really like someone to go to bed with him/her? Do poor people have sex because Harvard students do? (The history of the world would seem to refute that claim.)
Why shouldn't we be happy that college students avoid pregnancy? If I understand him, Douthat feels that Harvard student intercourse will cause the poor to become pregnant because they will not use contraception. If that is true, wouldn't education about contraception help? Bristol Palin is not poor. She grew up in a right-wing household. Oddly, neither her family's relative wealth nor her ideology protected her from pregnancy.
Conversely, the educated parents who tell their children to practice safe sex and use contraception produce better results than Palin style parenting. There is no reason to be defensive about that.
If the problem is class-based (it was not in Bristol Palin's case), then it should be addressed upon economic and political grounds. I suspect that Douhat would oppose many of the actions that would effectively narrow the class gap.
Perhaps, I misunderstood your review. I would like to know.
March 13, 2009 8:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Bill, this is a good and important question. Yes, of course Douthat means marriage; his book Privilege made pretty clear how depressed and even horrified he was by sexual mores at Harvard.
More to the point of your question, the sociologist Christopher Jencks wrote long ago that when "upper class" mores decline, they often pull the rug out from under the poor I quoted Jencks in a long essay, "Behind the Deluge of Porn, a Conservative Sea Change," --http://www.jimsleeper.com/search.php?cx=004886188597674089345%3A3zp6jcjztou&cof=FORID%3A11&q=jencks&sa=Search#176 -- and in my book The Closest of Strangers, saying that that “in poor communities as in rich ones, clergymen, teachers, mothers, and other moral leaders must continually struggle both to limit and to redefine self-interest… The unwritten moral contract between the poor and the rest of society is fragile at best… But the solution cannot be to tear up the moral contract…. The only viable solution is to ask more of both the poor and the larger society.”
Yet now, in Ivy undergrad culture and in the pornification of commerce and news itself, self-styled libertarians of every cultural political persuasion – civil, sensual, other – teach the poor that blame itself is taboo. With such guidance, Jencks noted, society can “hardly expect the respectable poor to carry on the struggle against illegitimacy and desertion with their old fervor. They still deplore such behavior, but they cannot make it morally taboo. Once the two-parent norm loses its moral sanctity, the selfish considerations that always pulled the poor parents apart often become overwhelming.”
March 14, 2009 3:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
Within two to three years, the New York Times editorial page might well be out of business. It is a relic of a dying media infrastructure. In a world full of easily accessible free opinion, much of it of higher quality than appears in the NYT, there is no longer much purpose for the Times antiquated star system.
March 13, 2009 9:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
Dan K meant to cite this TPM column of mine, which he is quoting -- or at least channeling!
http://edit.talkingpointsmemo.com/cgi-bin/mt-current/mt.cgi
March 14, 2009 3:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
Oops, wrong link. Here it is:
http://edit.talkingpointsmemo.com/cgi-bin/mt-current/mt.cgi?__mode=view&_type=entry&id=251300&blog_id=14
March 15, 2009 6:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
Oops again. Here's the right link to the column that makes the same point Dan is making, and a ew others.
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/01/12/a_noteworthy_anniversary_at_the_ny_times/index.php
March 15, 2009 10:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
Roy Edroso reviews Ross's Greatest Hits here:
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2009/03/ross_douthat_new_times_rightwing_columnist.php
March 13, 2009 9:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
The Sovereign Self versus the Self as essentially a social construct; or by extension, the Totally Sovereign State or the State within the confines of a Community of Nations. Finally, the Sovereign Will Of God (who is e.g. free to will anything right or wrong, law or not) or The Will of God within the confines of reason and reasonableness.
The atomic individual wondering through life as a pure existential project of self-invention, or the citizen who is a free and equal participant in a greater human project. Disjointed factions pursuing their own internal interests or people motivated by a Volkgeist if not an outright Weltgeist
These have been the issues we have been grappling with since ancient times.
If this new fellow at the NYT can contribute meaningfully to the dialectic it would be welcomed. What we don’t need on either side is rigid ideologues merely rooting for their side.
March 14, 2009 12:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
of course it should be wandering, but wondering is not bad either, I think.
March 14, 2009 6:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
Jim:
Thank you for your answer to my question. I appreciate it. I have heard the claim before that when middle class mores become looser, that the poor suffer. (My former CC teacher at Columbia, Myron Magnet, has also made that argument.)
I would not deny it outright, but I am somewhat dubious. Since my undergrad days, my interests have included labor history and some areas in social history. I believe that there is good evidence that there was alot of non-marital sex among the working class and the poor during many periods of the 20th century. During the spring semester in 1981, David Montgomery (who was visiting that day from Yale) delivered a lecture that dealt with working class sexual activity. (I believe that he focused primarily upon the 1920s, but he may have included the teens. It was a long time ago.)
Sexual activity was not as open as it is today, but it seems to have been going on. (I am not trying to be funny.) I would not argue that it was as frequent as it may be today, but it was not rare. Conversely, my sense is that the evidence would show that the middle classes in the teens and twenties were much less likely to engage in non-marital (particularly pre-marital) sex.
Another strict decade, the 1950s, had the highest percentage of teenage mothers. However, most of them were married before giving birth. (I think that 1957 was the year with the highest percentage, but I am working from memory.)
What is today described as "hook-up culture" did not exist in the past. But in that case, I wonder how much of the hype is real. I am dubious about the claims in articles that appeared starting about 2003 that teenage girls frequently engage in oral sex casually.
Again, thank you for continuing the conversation.
March 14, 2009 5:43 AM | Reply | Permalink