Editor: Another question: what can the reader make of the utterly talentless Douthat, that conflates the iphone as a threat to Men an Women , and the declining birthrate?
May 29, 2025
introduction
Interview with Ross Douthat
Claims that left and right, terms born during the French Revolution in the divisions of the National Assembly of 1789, are becoming, or are already, anachronisms have been a recurrent political trope since the last century. If there is no more reason to credit it now than there was in the past, evidence of confusion between the two has been visibly increasing, in an ideological flux dramatized in Brazil by Roberto Schwarz, historicized by Christopher Clark in Britain, and enacted daily in the cross-cutting populisms of Europe and America. Scenes like these speak to a slow erosion of the liberal order, with no clear-cut alternative to challenge its rule, whose upshot is the jumbled discourses cartwheeling through social media and broadcast politics, open feedstock for clinical scrutiny.
The world of ideas proper, where articulated systems of thought confront each other, is another matter. There, a serious left needs to respond, not with self-segregation or withdrawal to any Abgrenzung of its own, but with open-minded curiosity and principled critique, where these are in order. In that spirit, we lead this issue with an interview with Ross Douthat, the conservative columnist who is the most consistently original mind writing about American politics in the pages of the New York Times. In doing so, the journal continues a tradition of treating thinkers and writers of an outlook antithetical to its own with respect—and, if merited, admiration—that started with Michael Oakeshott in the sixties, and from the nineties onwards continued with Francis Fukuyama, Giovanni Sartori, J. G. A. Pocock, Karl-Heinz Bohrer and others. Author of some seven books on a wide range of subjects, covering class and culture, demography and religion, technical progress and economic stagnation, the organizing subject of Douthat’s writing is the condition of his own country, America, placed within the setting of the world. In the Victorian era there were equivalents in the press of Britain, France, Italy and elsewhere, writers about their time enjoying significant public authority. But today’s Europe lacks any real counterpart, and in the United States itself there is no journalist of comparable imaginative scope. A firebrand of the student right in his youth—incendiary entries in the Harvard Salient, an inaugural salvo of ‘Cheney for President’ in the nyt of 2009—by the time Trump ran in the primaries of 2016, Douthat was one of his sharpest critics. At no point part of what became the Never Trump brigade, Republicans—Cheney’s daughter in the lead, along with Kristol Jr and the like—scandalized by his lack of regard for Cold War pieties, Douthat would develop into one of the astutest analysts of the trajectory of the current President, whose zigzagging threats of an all-round trade war he judges condemned to failure. Here our contributor Nick Burns questions him about his intellectual formation, political evolution, international horizon and the gains and limits of his role as a tribune on America’s leading newspaper. The result is a portrait, perhaps unlike any other so far available, of a far from typical conservative intelligence.
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii152/articles/ross-douthat-condition-of-america
What would make you want to have more children? This week on “Interesting Times,” Ross Douthat speaks with Dr. Alice Evans, a social scientist who is as concerned about the global decline in fertility as Ross is. The two discuss why this isn’t just a gender issue — it’s “a solitude issue” — and whether there’s a way to bring relationships back.
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Ross Douthat: From New York Times Opinion, I’m Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times.
Fifty years ago, the world feared a population bomb, an explosion of population growth that would yield famine, war and disaster. But for most of my career, I’ve been trying to persuade people that actually, population decline is now the greater peril. And in the last few years, the world has finally caught up with my once eccentric anxieties. We’re undeniably headed toward a period of global population collapse, one that threatens to maroon today’s children — mine, yours, if you have them, and by the way, you really should — in a world of emptying cities and slowing economies.
Our guest today has literally traveled the world studying this issue, trying to answer the hardest question, not just why birthrates have declined, but why they’ve declined so far and so fast in so many different places. Alice Evans, welcome to Interesting Times.
Editor: The above Mr. Douthat at near full screech! Mr Douthay of 2012, you can’t accuse him of inconsistaney !
Ross Douthat: Low birth rates, Modernism and Decadence by Philosophical Apprentice
Posted on December 3, 2012 by stephenkmacksd
To characterize Ross Douthat, in his essay of December 1, 2012 titled More Babies, Please, as sounding like some turn of the century Germanic prophet of doom and inevitable decadence. This, as more and more people realize that their lives are important in themselves, set free from a ‘civilizational’, religious, nation state, even biological context: the realization of the possibilities of human freedom, is revelatory of his linkage of the sine qua non of growth, in Capitalism, and the Catholic Church’s belief in unfettered procreation.
Philosophical Apprentice
What I missed in my 2012 comment on More Babies, Please Douthat resorts to the crime of decadence, and the rehabilitation of ‘individual choice’: it attempts to hint as some kind of ‘revelation’ that Douthat dare not speak its name @NYT!
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Beneath these policy debates, though, lie cultural forces that no legislator can really hope to change. The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion — a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.
Such decadence need not be permanent, but neither can it be undone by political willpower alone. It can only be reversed by the slow accumulation of individual choices, which is how all social and cultural recoveries are ultimately made.
Philosophical Apprentice.
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