What Happened to American conservatism?

newleftreview.org

Ross Douthat, Condition of America, NLR 152, March–April 2025

Nick Burns quizzes the New York Times columnist on the contradictory ideological forces and factions driving the second Trump Administration, the strengths and weaknesses of American liberalism and the state of the country that he’s described as sinking into economic and cultural stagnation.
newleftreview.org newleftreview.org

Not really a good thread to post this in, so I’ll do it here. Really interesting and wide-ranging interview with Ross Douthat in the New Left Review.

Paging @lawtig02 since you’re one of the only ones on the board who has the patience and interest to read it in it’s entirety.
 
Paine said:
newleftreview.org

Ross Douthat, Condition of America, NLR 152, March–April 2025

Nick Burns quizzes the New York Times columnist on the contradictory ideological forces and factions driving the second Trump Administration, the strengths and weaknesses of American liberalism and the state of the country that he’s described as sinking into economic and cultural stagnation.
newleftreview.org newleftreview.org

Not really a good thread to post this in, so I’ll do it here. Really interesting and wide-ranging interview with Ross Douthat in the New Left Review.

Paging @lawtig02 since you’re one of the only ones on the board who has the patience and interest to read it in it’s entirety.
Click to expand...
Thanks! Will read this afternoon. Appreciate the heads up.
 
Paine said:
newleftreview.org

Ross Douthat, Condition of America, NLR 152, March–April 2025

Nick Burns quizzes the New York Times columnist on the contradictory ideological forces and factions driving the second Trump Administration, the strengths and weaknesses of American liberalism and the state of the country that he’s described as sinking into economic and cultural stagnation.
newleftreview.org newleftreview.org

Not really a good thread to post this in, so I’ll do it here. Really interesting and wide-ranging interview with Ross Douthat in the New Left Review.

Paging @lawtig02 since you’re one of the only ones on the board who has the patience and interest to read it in it’s entirety.
Click to expand...
Ok, read it. Like you say, that covers a lot of ground, but here are a few initial thoughts.

1. I’ve always kind of liked Douthat and this is close to the best version of him. He’s an astute student of political history and does a good job putting the present in the context of western political traditions. These questions gave him a lot of opportunities to do that, which made for a good discussion.

2. Douthat’s critiques of modern liberalism are worth listening to. He’s often wrong, but he’s wrong intellectually instead of reflexively, which is how most current Pubs (and every one of them who posts here) tends to operate. I generally agree with his assessment that liberalism has been decadent and static for most of the last fifty years, and that post-modern liberalism (“woke”-ism) is no less decadent that Clinton-era neoliberalism. I personally struggle with this because I benefit a lot personally and professionally from our general state of decadence, but I certainly understand why a younger, more attractive version of Bernie is appealing to huge percentages of liberals, and especially younger ones.

3. I also really liked Douthat’s comments here on AI. Nothing terribly novel, but this part in particular resonated with me —

“On AI, I think it depends on how far the technology actually goes. If it stops where it is now, then I agree, it seems likely to resolve itself back into decadence, into internet slop—AI scriptwriters for terrible Netflix shows, no one ever speaking to a real person again, and so on. If it goes further, though, even if it has bad social effects—even if it destroys us all—it wouldn’t be decadent. If we’ve invented a robot mind capable of curing cancer, I don’t think that’s decadent any more. But there’s a related point, which gets us back to demographics. AI could deepen decadence to a point where it just yields collapse: a world of AI porn, AI girlfriends, AI entertainment, AI old-age retirement homes, and so on. That’s a world that gets everybody to South Korea really fast. It’s not a terrain of stagnation; it’s somewhere worse. Even a limited form of AI probably gets us somewhere worse than the decadence I was describing in 2018.“

4. There are two things about Douthat that I can’t stand, though. First, his Catholic fervor leads him way too close to arguing for a theocracy. Like Ben Shapiro and J.D. Vance, he’s one of those Catholics who automatically assumes every Catholic doctrine is correct, except of course for anything said by a Pope he considers to be too liberal. While I’m still deeply religious myself, I have come to think there are few things more dangerous to our democracy than people (especially people in power) who conform their religious beliefs to their political preferences rather than vice versa. Douthat falls into that trap frequently.

5. Second, and much more importantly, Douthat comes nowhere close to holding conservatives, and especially MAGA, to the same standard he holds liberals. He’s not a complete sellout like Shapiro and Vance, but he’s pretty deep into the sanewashing business. Take this response —

“In hindsight, it was always unrealistic to imagine that you would get a successful Republican-led healthcare reform. What we ended up with, which was Obamacare reformed by Trump, was probably the more plausible path, but not one that a policy wonk in 2007 would sit down and design. Our view was: the libertarians are right that Medicare and Social Security need to be reformed, but we want to combine that with opportunity-enhancing Clinton-style programmes. Let Paul Ryan cut a deal on entitlements and then use the savings to do things on education, on family policy, and so on. But what Trump intuited was that voters actually want the big existing programmes. It’s more attractive to a lot of right-of-centre voters, who are not hard libertarians, to say we are not going to touch Medicare and Social Security, we’re going to protect them. If you map it, Trump found a different way to navigate between Christian Democracy and hard libertarianism than the one we were trying to push.“

That’s just revisionist bullshit mixed with a complete misrepresentation of everything Trump has ever said and done regarding healthcare. I really wonder if he would still give that answer to that question after the last month. If he would, then he’s moving closer to the sellout category with rapidity.

On the whole, I deeply, deeply wish there were a million more Douthats among the conservative commentariat, and even more among the Republicans leaders in Congress and the White House. If that were the case, I might very well still be voting Republican myself. But unfortunately, the distance on the political and intellectual spectrum between Douthat and Trump or Mike Johnson is about a hundred times greater than the distance between Douthat and, say, Bernie.
 
lawtig02 said:
Ok, read it. Like you say, that covers a lot of ground, but here are a few initial thoughts.

1. I’ve always kind of liked Douthat and this is close to the best version of him. He’s an astute student of political history and does a good job putting the present in the context of western political traditions. These questions gave him a lot of opportunities to do that, which made for a good discussion.

2. Douthat’s critiques of modern liberalism are worth listening to. He’s often wrong, but he’s wrong intellectually instead of reflexively, which is how most current Pubs (and every one of them who posts here) tends to operate. I generally agree with his assessment that liberalism has been decadent and static for most of the last fifty years, and that post-modern liberalism (“woke”-ism) is no less decadent that Clinton-era neoliberalism. I personally struggle with this because I benefit a lot personally and professionally from our general state of decadence, but I certainly understand why a younger, more attractive version of Bernie is appealing to huge percentages of liberals, and especially younger ones.

3. I also really liked Douthat’s comments here on AI. Nothing terribly novel, but this part in particular resonated with me —

“On AI, I think it depends on how far the technology actually goes. If it stops where it is now, then I agree, it seems likely to resolve itself back into decadence, into internet slop—AI scriptwriters for terrible Netflix shows, no one ever speaking to a real person again, and so on. If it goes further, though, even if it has bad social effects—even if it destroys us all—it wouldn’t be decadent. If we’ve invented a robot mind capable of curing cancer, I don’t think that’s decadent any more. But there’s a related point, which gets us back to demographics. AI could deepen decadence to a point where it just yields collapse: a world of AI porn, AI girlfriends, AI entertainment, AI old-age retirement homes, and so on. That’s a world that gets everybody to South Korea really fast. It’s not a terrain of stagnation; it’s somewhere worse. Even a limited form of AI probably gets us somewhere worse than the decadence I was describing in 2018.“

4. There are two things about Douthat that I can’t stand, though. First, his Catholic fervor leads him way too close to arguing for a theocracy. Like Ben Shapiro and J.D. Vance, he’s one of those Catholics who automatically assumes every Catholic doctrine is correct, except of course for anything said by a Pope he considers to be too liberal. While I’m still deeply religious myself, I have come to think there are few things more dangerous to our democracy than people (especially people in power) who conform their religious beliefs to their political preferences rather than vice versa. Douthat falls into that trap frequently.

5. Second, and much more importantly, Douthat comes nowhere close to holding conservatives, and especially MAGA, to the same standard he holds liberals. He’s not a complete sellout like Shapiro and Vance, but he’s pretty deep into the sanewashing business. Take this response —

“In hindsight, it was always unrealistic to imagine that you would get a successful Republican-led healthcare reform. What we ended up with, which was Obamacare reformed by Trump, was probably the more plausible path, but not one that a policy wonk in 2007 would sit down and design. Our view was: the libertarians are right that Medicare and Social Security need to be reformed, but we want to combine that with opportunity-enhancing Clinton-style programmes. Let Paul Ryan cut a deal on entitlements and then use the savings to do things on education, on family policy, and so on. But what Trump intuited was that voters actually want the big existing programmes. It’s more attractive to a lot of right-of-centre voters, who are not hard libertarians, to say we are not going to touch Medicare and Social Security, we’re going to protect them. If you map it, Trump found a different way to navigate between Christian Democracy and hard libertarianism than the one we were trying to push.“

That’s just revisionist bullshit mixed with a complete misrepresentation of everything Trump has ever said and done regarding healthcare. I really wonder if he would still give that answer to that question after the last month. If he would, then he’s moving closer to the sellout category with rapidity.

On the whole, I deeply, deeply wish there were a million more Douthats among the conservative commentariat, and even more among the Republicans leaders in Congress and the White House. If that were the case, I might very well still be voting Republican myself. But unfortunately, the distance on the political and intellectual spectrum between Douthat and Trump or Mike Johnson is about a hundred times greater than the distance between Douthat and, say, Bernie.
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Thanks for taking the time. I appreciate your thoughts on this.
 
What is this? The first thing out of Douthat's mouth in the interview:

Those resources can be self-regenerative. I don’t fully buy the argument that, with the advent of Locke, there is an automatic decline into hyper-individualism. American history provides plenty of evidence that a liberal superstructure doesn’t necessarily prevent great awakenings. To the extent that it does so, it is under particular technological conditions. The vindication of the older conservative critique of liberalism as atomization—which looks more potent today than it did when I was at Harvard in the early 2000s; and looked more potent then than it did in, say, 1955—is technologically mediated. There have been technologies that accelerate individualism, ranging from things we take for granted, like the interstate highway system and the birth-control pill, through to the internet, a particular accelerant. As a metaphor, you can think of individualism’s tending towards atomization and despair as a gene within the liberal order, which gets expressed under particular environmental conditions, but doesn’t necessarily emerge if those conditions are not present. In recent years, the internet in particular has helped that gene be expressed more fully than it was.

Fucking meaningless drivel, that. "To the extent that it does so, it is under particular technological conditions"? Yeah, everything occurs under particular technological conditions. Is Douthat going to tell us what technologies? He will not, but he will say stuff is technologically mediated because someone once taught him the word.

Oh, he will mention the interstate highway system, which I suppose you could maybe consider a "technology" if you strain. The interstate is about individualism? Who knew. Because in most situations, roads are seen as bringing people together. Consider a prospector who went from LA to CA in the 1840s. That's less individualistic than someone who makes the trip today knowing they can visit everyone?

Birth control is about individualism? Fascinating. I thought it was about sexual liberation, which is very much not the same thing except maybe to a prude like RD. And that metaphor is completely unhelpful. You could also think of it as a light bulb that only gives off light under particular conditions as well, the condition of electricity flowing through.

Ugh. Should I continue, or is it not going to get better?
 
Interesting. I’ve got Paine on ignore so I have no idea what he’s on about. But reading through the responses from Super and lawtig02 tells a story.
 
I kept going. Fortunately, I didn't have to go far before running into this nonsense:

He would essentially agree with the conservative critique, but argue that this means you need a liberalism that is not just managerial but ambitious, Promethean, committed to self-creation and exploration. And that form of liberalism, in my view, is subject to strong and dangerous temptations. Sometimes they’re necessary temptations—a culture may need a little Prometheanism—but they can quickly lead it badly astray. The liberalism I described in Privilege tended towards a spiritually arid form of hyper-ambition; not Whitman and Emerson communing with the glories of creation, but: how do I get a job at McKinsey? Under conditions of prosperity, liberalism as a world-view had been transmuted into a purely instrumental, self-interested meritocracy.

Apparently the desire to work as a management consultant is a strong and dangerous temptation. Who knew? What the fuck is he ever talking about?

A culture may need a little Prometheanism? Does he know what that word means? I mean, it's not actually a word but I think he's trying to say that creativity is good. I'd agree. I'd say it in three words.

It's very weird to think of "liberalism as a world view" is about McKinsey. Pete Buttigieg did work there briefly, but then he left, right? I mean, if he's going to McKinsey hoping to find liberals, maybe someone gave him the wrong map. McK is, I think, in the world trade center these days. GroupM is there too, and it's full of creatives. Maybe Douthat should talk to some of them.
 
More Douthat: here is where I try to figure out what he means by liberal or if he's just using it as an all-purpose boogeyman:

The reactionary case against liberalism in Europe finds its strongest purchase in the French Revolution and Soviet Communism—instances where there was a radical takeover, a lot of people were killed and a lot of priests were killed, too.
To the extent that liberalism was a thing in the 18th century, it was associated with Locke and Adam Smith. So there's no sense in which the French Revolution is liberal. Communism being liberal is a joke.

Hey Ross, weren't you just talking two paragraphs ago about how liberalism is hyper-individualistic? And now it's the French Revolution and communism? Maybe I missed the lecture where you explain that "liberte, egalite, fraternite" is actually hyper individualism? Oh, there's more?

When I was writing Privilege, it wouldn’t have made sense to claim that Harvard in 1999 was run by Marxist radicals bent on destroying all of America’s traditional hierarchy, because clearly the liberalism of that era was fully adapted to American hierarchy and invested in the preservation of elite power. So, to the extent that I felt alienated from that, it was much more about what I saw as its moral and spiritual limitations, as opposed to its radical tendencies.
It has never been the case in America that Harvard was run by Marxist radicals bent on destroying all of America's traditional hierarchy. I do not recognize the liberalism he describes in 1999 as about the preservation of elite power.

Oh, I think I get it now: education = elite. Cool. Who knew that funding scientific research was inherently elitist? Let's see, more highlights? Ooh:

"I’m a newspaper columnist, and my fundamental role is to try to help my readers understand the world in which they live. I continued to be a critic of the Pope, but I tried to shift tone when writing about the Francis era—to write less about it, honestly, and not get in fights with liberal Catholic theologians where I call them heretics. It’s not that what I said was wrong. But a columnist is mostly trying to understand and describe history, rather than to change it. "

Oh, but Ross -- who better to judge heresy than a NYT columnist?

Sorry, Paine, but this is utter tripe.
 
"Plus, Protestantism. American Catholicism is important to our history, but America is a Protestant country that has a theological suspicion of hierarchy and authority, which extends to bureaucratic liberalism. People ask, why are Southern evangelicals so hostile to the government doing good things for the poor? Why don’t Southern Baptists support foreign aid? The reality is that some of them do—it’s not the case that Christian conservatives are all hard-edged libertarians—but if you’re asking, why are people who are deeply Christian so unusually hostile, by global standards, to the government redistributing wealth, I think it comes back to a low-church Protestant suspicion of all hierarchies, and of hierarchical power-wielding moral authority. That goes really deep."

Sorry, one more. I know how to answer those questions about Southern evangelicals, and it ain't got nothing to do with low-church Protestantism. The idea that southerners don't like public swimming pools or AFDC because of suspicion of all hierarchies -- I mean, seriously? It's because they are trying to preserve hierarchies.

What he's saying in this interview, literally, is that Southern evangelicals are opposed to hierarchy and liberals are very fond of it. Again, this is National Review argle-bargle.
 
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Last bit: this is obviously a nit but has Ross Douthat opened Netflix in, oh I don't know, the last 15 years?

Modernity grants life without children more extensive pleasures than existed for most people in the past—you can take a vacation, you can summon up any movie ever made on Netflix.
 
superrific said:
More Douthat: here is where I try to figure out what he means by liberal or if he's just using it as an all-purpose boogeyman:

The reactionary case against liberalism in Europe finds its strongest purchase in the French Revolution and Soviet Communism—instances where there was a radical takeover, a lot of people were killed and a lot of priests were killed, too.
To the extent that liberalism was a thing in the 18th century, it was associated with Locke and Adam Smith. So there's no sense in which the French Revolution is liberal. Communism being liberal is a joke.

Hey Ross, weren't you just talking two paragraphs ago about how liberalism is hyper-individualistic? And now it's the French Revolution and communism? Maybe I missed the lecture where you explain that "liberte, egalite, fraternite" is actually hyper individualism? Oh, there's more?

When I was writing Privilege, it wouldn’t have made sense to claim that Harvard in 1999 was run by Marxist radicals bent on destroying all of America’s traditional hierarchy, because clearly the liberalism of that era was fully adapted to American hierarchy and invested in the preservation of elite power. So, to the extent that I felt alienated from that, it was much more about what I saw as its moral and spiritual limitations, as opposed to its radical tendencies.
It has never been the case in America that Harvard was run by Marxist radicals bent on destroying all of America's traditional hierarchy. I do not recognize the liberalism he describes in 1999 as about the preservation of elite power.

Oh, I think I get it now: education = elite. Cool. Who knew that funding scientific research was inherently elitist? Let's see, more highlights? Ooh:

"I’m a newspaper columnist, and my fundamental role is to try to help my readers understand the world in which they live. I continued to be a critic of the Pope, but I tried to shift tone when writing about the Francis era—to write less about it, honestly, and not get in fights with liberal Catholic theologians where I call them heretics. It’s not that what I said was wrong. But a columnist is mostly trying to understand and describe history, rather than to change it. "

Oh, but Ross -- who better to judge heresy than a NYT columnist?

Sorry, Paine, but this is utter tripe.
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Not endorsing any positions he takes in the piece. It’s just interesting to probe his arguments in the way you’re doing here. It’s also what I hoped lawtig would do and he did.
 
donbosco said:
Lincoln was pro-worker: "Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."
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Karl Marx was supporter of Lincoln and a writer for the nation’s most prominent Republican newspaper at the time.

I’m really not sure how one would cast Lincoln as a Conservative. He wasn’t a big “States rights” guy, made the most progressive social change in the nations history and was the first to levy a federal income tax.

The most militant Lincoln/Republican supporters in the 1860s were a group called the “Wide Awakes” which bares a striking similarity to a 4 letter word the modern Republican hates.
 
superrific said:
Why would you have Paine on ignore?
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Honestly no idea. Don’t recall anything specific. May have been mistaken identity… picked the wrong dude out of the police line up? Was it sports related? Hell, I don’t know. Need to go back and check who all I do have on ignore… and even “super” ignore…
 
1moretimeagain said:
Karl Marx was supporter of Lincoln and a writer for the nation’s most prominent Republican newspaper at the time.

I’m really not sure how one would cast Lincoln as a Conservative. He wasn’t a big “States rights” guy, made the most progressive social change in the nations history and was the first to levy a federal income tax.

The most militant Lincoln/Republican supporters in the 1860s were a group called the “Wide Awakes” which bares a striking similarity to a 4 letter word the modern Republican hates.
Click to expand...
Yeah Lincoln was pretty much a classic liberal - not a leftist, but a liberal - in that he had left-leaning tendencies but eschewed radical political solutions and wanted to see slow and steady progress in reforming and evolving government and society. Some of the things he said and believed in seem conservative today, but only when taken out of the context of their time.

The only thing about Lincoln's presidency that I would really consider conservative is his expansion and use of wartime executive powers. I think that Lincoln generally understood and believed that those were truly "break glass in case of emergency" powers and I don't think anyone would deny that the Civil War was such an emergency. But many conservatives look at the way Lincoln - and even FDR - used executive power and see a model for how executive power should work all the time (not just in case of emergency). Certainly I think that's how the Project 2025 types see it. The Project 2025 types basically see "Enlightened Despotism" as the governing ideal, except that they have a very different view of what is "enlightened" compared to me. (I.e., their version of a perfect American state appears to be one where more people have jobs doing things like assembling iPhones and sewing jeans and fewer people have jobs where they sit in an air-conditioned office and work comfortably.)
 
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