Neckbeard Ross Douthat Leaves Letter For Future Generations About How He Survived 'Peak Woke'

Andy Rooney's eyebrows are spinning in his grave.

Hawt. Sexy. Ross.

It has been a minute since we paid any attention to droopy-eyed neckbeard Ross Douthat, the cloistered New York Times columnist with hang-ups about liberalism and everyone else’s sex lives that he has spent the last 17 years exploring on the Times’s opinion page, much to the detriment of the brain cells of anyone who has ever chosen to read him.

You may have heard that Douthat is leaving the confines of the editorial page of the world’s most widely read newspaper so that he may become a talking head on 60 Minutes, the onetime jewel of network news that the similarly untalented Bari Weiss is trying to remake into something that appeals to people for whom Inside Edition is a bit complex.

Douthat’s move is hilarious for many reasons, the main one being that if you have ever watched Douthat on his podcast or in any other video, you can see he has all the dynamism of a wad of chewing gum that has been stuck to the underside of a high school desk since 1982. One hopes for at least the tiniest of tiny spark of charisma from broadcast journalists; it’s something of a prerequisite for the job. To say Ross Douthat lacks that spark is like saying that a rainstorm lacks dryness. He’s going to have longtime 60 Minutes fans running to the Necronomicon to try and raise the spirit of Andy Rooney.

This weekend saw the publication of Douthat’s final Times column before he rode off into the sunset and left Bret “Bedbug” Stephens as the token conservative on the editorial page. This last epistle was classic Douthat: whiny and self-important with assertions so arrogant you can practically hear the writer sniffing like a Beacon Hill Brahmin.

At the outset, Douthat is very proud to announce to his readers that he has spent his 17 years at the Times fighting the “elite consensus,” by which he means the “social liberalism and technocratic ambition” of the Barack Obama era. That a New York Times columnist, even a conservative one, is sneering about society’s elite consensus is hilarious enough; it’s like King Charles claiming he’s rebelling against the existence of the British monarchy by sitting atop it.

Douthat saw himself as a bulwark against the elite consensus, a sort of fifth columnist within its highest temple. What he has always been is a clueless scold who likes lecturing people about the left’s alleged moral failures. Like the time he proved to everyone that the point of the #MeToo movement had gone so far over his head that he’d need a hot-air balloon to reach it.

Anyway, to this last column:

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.

So what did the GOP do instead in order to survive, Ross? Any thoughts on the party it became — a transformation you midwifed through your perch at the Times — instead of one that is culturally liberal?

[Elite consensus] blundered in foreign policy because it didn’t expect the non-Western world to push back so hard against its plans.

This is one hell of a sentence to write when we’re mired in Donald Trump’s foreign policy of violent bullying and random undeclared wars. It’s one hell of a sentence to write when Western countries, our traditional allies, are also vocally opposed to our renewed imperialism to the point that it threatens 80-year-old alliances. It’s one hell of a sentence to write when global approval of the United States is at an all-time low.

Say what you want about the technocratic approach of Barack Obama and the centrists that Douthat is sneering about, but Obama did try to be more multilateral in foreign policy than the administration before him. It has taken Donald Trump to pretty much shred our standing.

But as Trumpism has flailed and failed, it hasn’t consolidated the kind of authoritarian power anticipated by its most alarmed opponents. Trump 2.0 has no great popularity, no legislative capacity, no policy legacy that a Democratic successor can’t easily roll back.

Jesus H. Christ and a communion wafer, have you been in a coma in a ship orbiting Alpha Centauri for the last few years? Trump has made it very clear he would love to consolidate authoritarian power, that’s why people got alarmed in the first place and pushed back on him. You don’t wait until after the dictator has consolidated his power to sound the alarm, that would defeat the purpose.

As for Trump’s policy legacy, the list of wrecker shit this administration has pulled off— rolling back regulations that touch all aspects of health and human life, blowing up international alliances, just to name two — is too vast to list here. It’s going to take 100 years to roll back some of Trump’s legacy.

And no, a Democratic successor can’t easily roll anything back, because a) Congress won’t be nearly as acquiescing even if Democrats control it at the same time, and b) the Supreme Court has made it obvious it will strike down anything a Democratic president wants to do. Nothing is happening absent SCOTUS reform, and we can’t begin to handicap the odds of that. We’d bet money Douthat is opposed to it, though. Why wouldn’t he be? He’s a conservative and the Court has given conservatives tons of victories.

[T]he Biden era just gave us a more left-wing version of meritocratic hubris, replacing experts with interest groups.

It’s very rich for a conservative to be complaining that the Biden administration was too invested in interest groups when the current administration has fired every expert at anything from government and replaced them with Trumpist toadies whose only qualification is praising everything Dear Leader says and does. Whatever else they might have done wrong, the Biden people were smart enough to not wreck everything and hope for the best.

We’d much rather have that level of mediocre left-of-center views than this clusterfuck we have now. And given Trump’s approval ratings and polls for the midterms, we think that’s the consensus of most of America, not just the elites.

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.

Man, you were free to move your family from Connecticut to Alabama anytime you wanted if that blue-state governance was so unbearable. Anyway, we spend a lot of time in Connecticut, and we have not seen this alleged civic and educational collapse. Maybe Ross should leave his house in New Haven a bit more often.

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.

In American politics today, there are basically two sides writ large. One side dislikes democracy to the point of actively trying to sabotage and undercut it in a zillion different ways. One side is being led by a demented blowhard propped up by the worst sorts of bigoted reactionaries enacting an agenda that rolls back 100 years of liberal gains that tried to make the country a more equitable place for everyone.

The other side wants people to have access to affordable healthcare and to lessen the levels of income inequality that have destabilized society in the past. And for people to not be such dang bigots. And taco trucks. Everyone loves taco trucks.

That Ross Douthat can only do his same old “view from nowhere” bit is proof he’s spent his 17 years at the Times not bravely standing against the rising tide of liberal technocracy, but rather with his head so far up his own ass that he can’t see what the right has become in that time. He’s no better than any other alleged elite, no matter what he and Ezra Klein tell each other in between podcast tapings.

[NYT]

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