Ross Douthat. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Ross Douthat wrote his last column at the New York Times today. It’s Who Are the Good Guys and Who are the Bad Guys? I’m No Longer Sure.
Douthat’s high-flown but completely addled discourse over the years is a perfect example of why a conservative mind is so disgusting. As I have said many times before, all conservative discourse is derp. Conservative discourse, inevitably, contains intentional deception, or self deception, or both.
In this column Douthat includes a list of why non-conservatives are the bad guys. He states each charge as though it is self-evidently true, not even open to argument.
• The Obama “establishment” was morally permissive and smugly cosmopolitan.
• It failed to anticipate the downsides of expert-driven policy.
• It was caught flat-footed by the darker effects of technological change.
• It pushed social liberalism so far it left vulnerable people “adrift or abandoned to their vices.”
• It blundered in foreign policy by not expecting the non-Western world to push back.
• The Biden “establishment” repeated the same “meritocratic hubris” in a more left-wing key.
• It swapped experts for “interest groups.”
• It “maxxed out” on social liberalism.
• It “unraveled completely in the end.”
• The old elite has “no blueprint suited to contemporary governance.”
• “Peak woke” was “a McCarthyite experience.”
• Blue-state governance “yielded civic and educational collapse.”
Douthat doesn’t feel the need to present any evidence for any of this. To Douthat, it’s just self-evidently true. It serves a propaganda purpose — slandering the left as crudely and deceptively as any meme you’d find on X.
And it all boils down to this: It’s the left that is to blame for American fascism, and it’s no wonder that so many Americans turned to fascism given just how unbearable the Obama and Biden America was.
And then there is his main point: He’s still not sure who the bad guys are.
He does have some criticisms of the Trump regime, but he hedges them all, as though Trump is just some mild sort of person with no real power: “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.”
So we just roll it back (easily!), and it was nothing but a nothing-burger?
At least we’re rid of Douthat at the Times. I don’t watch television. I don’t have any insight into how much harm people like Douthat can do at CBS’s “60 Minutes.”
It’s both baffling and hilarious. Minds exist that think Donald Trump is noble, wise, godly, and admirable. And minds exist that think Ross Douthat is smart.
Such is the conservative mind.