In the guise of Political Observer, my attempt to satirized Mr. Douthat: I missed the actual thinker/writer of his books, rather that his opinion columns in The New York Times?
Apr 26, 2025
Editor:
For the occasional reader of Mr. Douthat’s New York Times columns, what Nick Burns, in his interview, is the political/intelletual sophistication of Douthat’s books, as related to his columns, which execises a kind of political blandness! A selections of examples is instructive:
Editor: Mr. Burns first question:
Your first book, Privilege, is at once a devastating take-down of Harvard, as a bastion of a self-satisfied elite careerism, and a rueful love letter to it. Since those days, you’ve always unmistakeably been an adversary of American liberalism, yet in some ways continue to be a beneficiary of it. Where would you locate yourself—politically, then intellectually—on the map of the contemporary American scene? What is it in liberalism, beyond obvious hypocrisies, that you dislike?
Editor: Mr. Douthat’s reply:
Ishare the fairly conventional conservative view that the strongest case for liberalism is as an effective technology for managing social peace in a complex society—but one that depends upon sources of meaning and purpose deeper than itself, which it struggles to generate on its own.
Editor: Mr. Burns : Liberalism as feeding off non-renewable moral resources?
Douthat:
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.
An alternative theory of liberalism is that it is an ambitious way of life in its own right. That would be the argument of my friend Samuel Moyn, with whom I’ve taught classes on this. 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.
Liberals themselves subsequently decided this was true. A whole spate of books came out after Privilege, from Harry Lewis’s Excellence Without a Soul—he was dean of Harvard when I was there; he wrote it as soon as he retired—to William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep, Daniel Markovits’s Meritocracy Trap, Michael Sandel’s Tyranny of Merit. So in a sense, I was early to a critique of meritocratic liberalism that many liberals came to think was probably correct. Of course, I was already stealing things from Christopher Lasch.
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Political Observer : call this revelatory of what Mr. Douthat is capable of thinking/writing/considering ! More time is needed to fully grasp this interview in its entirety
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii152/articles/ross-douthat-condition-of-america
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