Words matter. These are the best Ross Douthat Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
For all its deranging effects, I am always grateful to Twitter for the interesting ideas it surfaces.
It is not white nationalism to believe that countries like the United States would be better off with more babies. That belief can be held for racist reasons by racists, but it can also be held, reasonably and righteously, by people who worry about the economic consequences of demographic decline.
A diverse elite may be good in its own right, as a matter of justice and representation. But nothing about being a woman or a minority makes you immune to meritocracy’s ruthless solipsism.
If you live under a system that claims to have high ideals but seems ineradicably opposed to your own people’s flourishing, the desire for idealistic reform within the system has to coexist with an openness to more radical possibilities.
That the actual practice of meritocracy mostly involves a strenuous quest to avoid any kind of downward mobility, for oneself or for one’s kids, is something every upper-class American understands deep in his or her highly educated bones.
I think you can see a clear link between certain kinds of Christian nationalism and support for Trump. Then, I also think that Trump is benefiting from the weakening of religious participation. He’s winning evangelicals who aren’t in church.
As a generalization, fantasy writing has leaned more on political storytelling the more it’s tried to escape the inevitable influence of Middle-earth, and revise the Eurocentric and Christian tropes that Tolkien’s particular worldview bequeathed.
Liberalism has never done as well as it thinks at resolving its own crises.
My view of Trump is that, while he has done some extremely noxious things, in general his worst feature, his most authoritarian feature, really is his public presentation.
That clerical celibacy doesn’t guarantee asceticism is obvious, any more than attending Mass guarantees prayerfulness (trust me on that one). But it preserves the call even when the system is corrupted.
For American philo-Semites, the Jewish experience wasn’t just one minority experience among many, but a signal and elevated case.
Our immigrants joined a settler culture, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, that demanded assimilation to its norms.
Human beings seek community, and permanent openness is hard to sustain.
I think with artists and celebrities, you want to be simultaneously supportive of their conversions without putting too much hope and weight into it.
There are voters out there that a moralistic and populist conservative right might win but a flagrantly hypocritical and ethnonationalist conservatism cannot.
There are many families that want to raise kids on one income, or one income and some part-time work, and instead find themselves pressured, financially and culturally, to keep up with the dual-earning Smith-Joneses next door.
Jewish Americans weren’t just integrated, like other ethnic and religious groups. They also attracted a particular sympathy and admiration, rooted in Holocaust remembrance, affection for Israel, and a distinctive pride in the scope of their success.
There are all kinds of great things that megachurches and successful fundraising appeals can allow you to do, especially in terms of overseas charity work, and so on. I’m just arguing that American Christians need to recognize the temptations that can expose you to as well.
In general, I think that not voting is a perfectly honorable and civic-minded course in an election with two options that you consider unacceptable. I think casting a protest vote is a totally acceptable course. I have done both in my life.
The neoconservatives of the 1970s, former liberals who became Nixon or Reagan backers, eventually accepted the ‘neocon’ description instead of calling themselves ‘The Real New Deal Democrats’ forever.
It’s always good to have fears for your eternal soul.
I think that the politicians who were beaten by Donald Trump and then endorsed him, that’s something that they will carry and should carry, for the duration of their career.
If you’re too confident in assuming that America’s and God’s purposes are one, you tiptoe toward idolatry.
Our crisis of the house divided was a Christian civil war.
We have plenty of examples from twentieth-century history where, out of fear of liberalism or Communism, religious conservatives made alliances with secular populists and nationalists, and it ended up going pretty badly for everybody.
I didn’t really start writing about the church in earnest until the mid-2000s, so I wasn’t present for or a participant in a lot of the John Paul II-era debates about papal authority.
The American intelligentsia has been pretty secular for a long time. There have always been figures like Oprah Winfrey, let’s put it that way.
It’s an oversimplication to say that more monks and nuns are the answer to the Joel Osteen-ification of Christianity… but it wouldn’t hurt.
Our great national drama was a westward expansion that conquered a native population rather than coexisting with it.
When I started reading George R.R. Martin’s ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ novels, it was the late 1990s and obsessing over fantasy novels was (if painful memory serves) a super-nerdy thing to do.
On the evidence we have, the meritocratic ideal ends up being just as undemocratic as the old emphasis on inheritance and tradition, and it forges an elite that has an aristocracy’s vices (privilege, insularity, arrogance) without the sense of duty, self-restraint and noblesse oblige that WASPs at their best displayed.
In the end the recrudescence of racism on the right is conservatism’s problem to solve, and it has to be solved independently of whatever liberals and leftists happen to be saying. But the task of solving it still gets a little harder with every nonsense charge or bad-faith accusation.
There were times at Harvard when I actually longed to hang out with a few more Trotskyists, rather than yet another set of future consultants and investment bankers. At least the Trotskyists cared about the important stuff.
Where conservative Catholics have the power to resist what seem like false ideas or disastrous innovations they must do so.
I think Trump had this general populist agenda but has not been particularly adept at using the levers of power in Washington.
I think generally, Pope Benedict did a good job cleaning up the way the church handled abusive priests but didn’t go far enough in how he handled bishops who enabled them.
Even conservative columnists tend to prefer humor that isn’t fit to print.
I get the sense people sort of imagine that in my personal religious life I must be an intense rigorist wearing a hair shirt under my clothes while scourging myself. And, really, I’m not a rigorist by temperament.
I identify, I guess, as a conservative Catholic.
The rhetoric of anti-Catholicism, whether its sources are Protestant or secular, has always insisted that the church of Rome is the enemy of what you might call healthy sexuality.
