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
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.
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.
