Tag: Ross Douthat

We’re Still in Nixonland: 20 theses about the state of politics today

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. Here’s my summary of these weeks that were. Merrick Garland 1. President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland as the replacement to Antonin Scalia was accompanied by this tweet from the White House. “Merrick Garland would take no chances that someone who murdered innocent Americans might go free on a technicality.” —@POTUS #SCOTUSnominee — The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 16, 2016 Last Sunday I said we were still in Reaganland. Now I think we’re still in Nixonland. 2. That tweet was no errant message. When it comes to the rights of criminal defendants, Garland is no judicial liberal: The former prosecutor also has a relatively conservative record on criminal justice. A 2010 examination of his decisions by SCOTUSBlog’s […]

Ross Douthat Channels Georges Sorel

Ross Douthat, writing in today’s New York Times (“The Decadent Left“): Yes, Occupy Wall Street was dreamed up in part by flakes and populated in part by fantasists. But to the extent that the movement briefly captured the public’s imagination, it was because it seemed to be doing what a decent left would exist to do: criticizing entrenched power, championing the common good and speaking for the many rather than the few. The union rallies and the Keystone demonstrations, by contrast, represented what you might call the decadent left, which fights for narrow interest groups rather than for the public as a whole. … Whatever your politics, there’s arguably more to admire in the ragtag theatricality of Occupy Wall Street […]

News of the Book

It’s been a while since my last round-up of news about The Reactionary Mind. Here’s what you missed: Reviews Two reviews of the book have recently appeared. In The American Conservative, John Derbyshire—the British-born conservative who also happens to be a contributing editor at National Review—didn’t agree with or like the book. But he did have this to say (alas, the review’s behind the firewall): On the positive side, The Reactionary Mind at least does not snarl or sputter. It is a thoughtful, even-tempered sort of book. The old maid tendency that dominates liberal polemic in the U.S.—the shrieking, clutching at skirts, and jumping up on kitchen chairs that one gets from a Joe Nocera, a Maureen Dowd, or a […]

The Mile-High Club: What the Right Really Thinks About Sex

Ross Douthat, the conservative New York Times columnist, and Dan Savage, the liberal sex columnist, recently had a Bloggingheads conversation about sex, lies, and videotape. It’s a fascinating discussion, mostly because of what it reveals about the conservative mind and its attitude toward sex. Toward the end of the conversation (48:16 in the video link above), Savage poses a hypothetical to Douthat: Imagine a couple in which one partner—for the sake of simplicity, let’s say it’s the husband—is a foot fetishist. His wife is physically repulsed by his fetish—feet gross her out—but she wants him to be happy. So she sends him to a professional, who can satisfy his fetish without involving her. Savage asks Douthat: What’s so wrong with […]

Sam’s Club Republicanism Died Because It Never Had a Life to Live

Now that Tim Pawlenty’s candidacy is dead, the media is performing an autopsy on “Sam’s Club Republicanism.” That’s the notion—made famous by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam in a 2005 Weekly Standard article, which they later turned into a book—that the GOP needs to reconnect with the working-class and independent voters who made it a majority party under Nixon and Reagan. These voters are conservative, but they’re worried about paying their bills and making ends meet. They’re not opposed to government: they just want it to do something for them, as opposed to for the rich. As Pawlenty put it in 2002, the GOP needs “to be the party of Sam’s Club, not just the country club.” Thus was an […]