Ross Douthat's Peculiar Ideational Concerns

Some ideas prompt more worry from Douthat than others.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

This is going to be a critique of Ross Douthat’s not-entirely-even set of concerns about the state of American ideas. Before getting to that, however, I want to make something perfectly clear: I really like Ross and most of his columns. We’ve corresponded on occasion and have had coffee once or twice. He’s a gentle guy who is interested in ideas. He is a good conservative voice for the New York Times Opinion section precisely because he often makes his readers uncomfortable with their implicit assumptions. A few of his columns have enraged me over the years, but most of them have made me think harder than most of the punditry I read on a regular basis.

This was one reason why, when I wrote about Alex Garland’s Civil War, I closed by quoting Douthat’s column on the likelihood of that film being a harbinger of reality. Many folks, including my podcasting partner-in-crime Ana Marie Cox, found the film to be prescient. The gist of Douthat’s rebuttal is that the United States lacks the structural conditions for an actual, shooting civil war:

America’s ideological divisions don’t follow the kind of geographical or regional lines that lend themselves to secessionist movements or armed conflict. America’s political coalitions have become less polarized by race and ethnicity of late, not more. America is getting older and richer with every passing year, both of which strongly disincentivize transforming political differences into military ones. And such disincentives are especially strong for the elites who would need to divide into opposing camps: Texan or Californian power brokers, for example, both have far more influence as powerful stakeholders of the American empire than they would as leaders of a Lone Star or Bear Flag Republic.

Above all, a civil war needs people eager for the fight — a lot of people for continentwide war of the kind depicted in the movie, but a critical mass even for a lower-grade form of civil strife, like Northern Ireland’s Troubles. And relative to past eras of crisis in our history, from the 1860s to the 1960s, Americans today just do not display any great enthusiasm for politically motivated violence….

Instead, the gap between the Sturm und Drang online and the handful of Trump supporters at the courthouse this week is representative of one part of our condition: an enthusiasm for online conflict, virtual combat, rage tweets and hate clicks as substitutes for brawling and bombing in the real world.

I agree with Douthat to the extent that I also think Garland made lazy references to contemporary history and failed to think through how that would actually lead to a shooting war.

What is interesting to me, however, is that Douthat’s perspective here is somewhat at odds with the more general U.S. conservative belief that politics is downstream from ideas and culture.¹ Because let’s face it, there has been a shift in the rhetoric and ideas of U.S. conservatives, and it is one that is oriented more towards revenge politics and, to go all Carl Schmitt on this, defining one’s political enemy as domestic rather than international.

This has certainly been the tendency of the most Trump-y think thanks, like, say, the Claremont Institute or the Heritage Foundation. For years now, Claremont in particular has inculcated the kind of thinking that encourages the sort of thinking and doing that leads some Americans to, well, act like they did on January 6th. For some conservatives, promoting the idea of a U.S. domestic enemy that is worth resisting by any means necessary lays the groundwork for more violent resistance should they lose at the ballot box in November of this year.

Furthermore, as Charles Homans noted for the New York Times Magazine, there has been a shift in Donald Trump’s discourse that seems to track the more violent rhetoric that Claremont has been churning out. Consider this excerpt from a Trump speech from last November:

We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible — they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.

The real threat is not from the radical right. The real threat is from the radical left. And it is growing every day. Every single day.

The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous and grave than the threat from within.

Our threat is from within.

Homans writes that this represents a decided shift from how Trump talked back when he first ran during the 2016 cycle:

Trump’s critics were right in 2016 to observe the grim novelty of his politics: their ideology of national pessimism, their open demagoguery and clear affinities with the far right, their blunt division of the country into us and them in a way that no major party’s presidential nominee had dared for decades. But Trump’s great accomplishment, one that was less visible from a distance but immediately apparent at his rallies, was the us that he conjured there: the way his supporters saw not only him but one another, and saw in themselves a movement.

That us is still there in Trump’s 2024 speeches. But it is not really the main character anymore. These speeches, and the events that surround them, are about them — what they have done to Trump, and what Trump intends to do in return….

No major American presidential candidate has talked like this — not Richard Nixon, not George Wallace, not even Trump himself. Before November 2020, his speeches, for all their boundary crossings, stopped short of the language of “vermin” and “enemies within.”

When I asked the political historian Federico Finchelstein what he made of the speech, he replied bluntly: “This is how fascists campaign.”….

Some prominent historians of authoritarianism who resisted describing Trump as a fascist throughout his presidency publicly changed their minds after Jan. 6. Finchelstein was among them — almost. His current preferred term for Trump and like-minded figures like Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, and the title of his forthcoming book about them, is “wannabe fascists.”

Like Douthat, I am hopeful that structural conditions in the United States constrain the possibility of violence given the nature of conservative cultural rhetoric. My point is that it is unusual, as a conservative, for Douthat to stress structural factors over cultural and ideational ones.

Because this is something he does not do in his latest column, “What Students Read Before They Protest,” which links the Columbia protests to the changes in Columbia’s core curriculum. Indeed, in this column he is back to the more traditional conservative emphasis on ideas and culture dictating behavior:

[Columbia’s core curriculum] gives a clear look into what kind of “ideas and theories” the current consensus of elite academia deems important to forming citizens and future leaders — including the future leaders currently protesting at Columbia and other campuses around the country. It helps pin down, in a particular syllabus, general impulses that anyone with eyes to see will notice all across the meritocracy, from big Ivies to liberal arts colleges to selective high schools and middle schools.

I want to look in particular at the syllabus for “Contemporary Civilization,” the portion of the core that deals most with political arguments and authors. The pre-20th century readings follow traditional patterns (Plato, Aristotle, Augustine; Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau) with specific supplements that diversify the list: more Islamic writers in the Middle Ages, Christine De Pizan alongside Machiavelli, a raft of readings on the conquest of the Americas, the Haitian Declaration of Independence and Constitution alongside the American Declaration and Bill of Rights.

But then comes the 20th century, and suddenly the ambit narrows to progressive preoccupations and only those preoccupations: anticolonialism, sex and gender, antiracism, climate. Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault. Barbara Fields and the Combahee River Collective. Meditations on the trans-Atlantic slave trade and how climate change is “colonial déjà vu.”

Many of these readings are absolutely worth engaging. (Some of them I have even assigned in my own limited experiments in teaching.) But they still embody a very specific set of ideological commitments….

If you’re willing to simplify and flatten history — 20th-century history especially — it is easier to make these preoccupations fit Israel-Palestine. With its unusual position in the Middle East, its relatively recent founding, its close relationship to the United States, its settlements and occupation, Israel gets to be the singular scapegoat for the sins of defunct European empires and white-supremacist regimes.

Douthat is not entirely wrong in his critique of the syllabus — if it was my course I’d probably want to add some things on the politics of technological innovation and neoliberalism and the populist backlash to neoliberalism. But in this case, Douthat is inferring that students are protesting what they are protesting primarily because of what they learn in their classes. As a college professor, possessing such power sounds awfully alluring, but in my experience that is not how either higher education or college protests work.

[I don’t want to wade too deeply into the drivers of student protests, but I want to note three things here. First, given current public opinion polling, at least some of the sentiments of protestors to, say, reduce military aid to Israel are hardly out of the mainstream. Second, even given that sentiment, it does not seem as though student protestors are representative of their campuses, which suggests that maybe the impact of the bleeding-into-anti-Semitic discourse has been wildly exaggerated. And finally, given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara, and Israel’s behavior in Gaza and the West Bank, colonialism and anti-colonialism seem pretty damn relevant for the 21st century!]

In other words, over the past two weeks Douthat has simultaneously argued that MAGA ideas and culture will not foment violence because of the structure of the American political economy, but postmodern ideas are entirely responsible for college student protests about Israel. In other words, for Douthat, liberal politics are downstream from culture, but conservative politics are rooted in material factors.

I’m sorry but that dog won’t hunt. Pick a lane.

1. Even conservatives who push back on this notion acknowledge, “Walk into any room full of Christian conservative donors, and someone will say, ‘Politics is downstream of culture.’ Every head in the room will nod. Nothing is more entrenched as conventional wisdom among Christian conservatives.”