Like the man he replaced at the New York Times, Ross G. Douthat was a conservative voice in the wilderness during his undergraduate years at Harvard (’02).
And like William Kristol (’73), he seemed to delight in throwing buckets of cold water on Cambridge’s hottest orthodoxies.
During the early 1970s, Kristol was known to walk around campus wearing a Spiro Agnew T-shirt just to provoke that era’s anti-war activists (he was later quoted as saying he didn’t even really like Agnew).
Likewise, Douthat (pronounced DOW-thut) enjoyed taking potshots at former Harvard professor and public celebrity Cornel West and supporting the U.S. invasion of Iraq (even though he would subsequently retreat from that position) in his regular column for the Harvard Crimson called Decline and Fall.
But in other ways, the Times’ new columnist could not be more removed from Kristol. For one thing, he is 29 years old - the youngest columnist ever to appear on the Times op-ed page - and as such, brings a different generational perspective to his musings on politics and life.
For another, Douthat’s writings for The Atlantic (where he was an editor, writer and blogger until last week) and the National Review (where he was a film critic) demonstrate a voice that is opinionated, but not partisan in the strictest sense of the word. That is to say, he takes potshots at conservatives too.
At the very least, Douthat, the son of a New Haven malpractice/personal injury lawyer and a stay-at-home mom, is expected to be provocative in his role as one of the nation’s most visible conservative commentators.
In one of his last blogs for The Atlantic, for instance, he talked about how the tea party protests that took place April 15 are “likely to reconfirm the majority in its opinion that American conservatism is increasingly wacky, echo-chamberish, and out-of-touch” - a surprising acknowledgement coming from a conservative.
But then, he juxtaposes those tea parties with the early protests against the Iraq War, noting that in the war’s sixth year, those protests, “their excesses and stupidities notwithstanding, look a lot more prescient in hindsight than they did (to me, at least) when they were going on.
“So if you’re inclined to sneer and giggle at the Tea Parties, keep in mind that just because a group of protesters looks ragged, resentful, and naive, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re wrong to be alarmed.”
Not surprisingly, Douthat’s former jousting mates at The Crimson were fawning in a recent piece about his hiring.
The succession of Mr. Douthat to Mr. Kristol’s post perhaps represents a larger movement within conservatism. As the American right, hammered by two consecutive electoral defeats and without a clear political or intellectual leader, struggles to find its identity, Mr. Douthat will be able to articulate a fresh vision and sound principles in which his moribund movement may rediscover its raison d’être.
Liberals here at Harvard and throughout the country indeed may find Mr. Douthat’s positions and philosophy no less objectionable than his predecessor’s. Yet Mr. Douthat, a captivating author who appreciates nuance and spurns unsophisticated ideology, will contribute not only his perspective, but also, perhaps more importantly, a respectable approach and attitude that conservative pundits too often have lacked. Mr. Douthat is no Rush Limbaugh—for better or worse, conservatives in this country and on this campus will have a smart and rational exponent around whom they can rally.
Douthat, a history-literature major at Harvard who also wrote for the school’s conservative paper, the Salient, is expected to start his tenure at the Times with a blog, before beginning regular columns for the paper’s Op-Ed page.
Before hitting 30, he is already the author of two books, Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class, and, with Reihan Salam, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.
Expect to hear some of those arguments unfold in the pages and blogs of the Times’ editorial section.
Click here to sign up for the Muckety Newsletter
0 Comments
There are no comments yet, be the first by filling in the form below.
Leave a Comment