Post

https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1308065912185073665

More from @DouthatNYT

Ross Douthat

@DouthatNYT

Mar 26

I guess it was too much to hope that we were finally past this kind of rubbish.
newyorker.com/magazine/2025/…

Adam Gopnik portraying the debate about the historicity of the gospels as an argument between Elaine Pagels and the Jesus-didn't-exist crowd, I don't even know where to begin.

Just one bread crumb, since Gopnik gives oxygen to the claim that the Testimonium Flavianum in Josephus is a forgery in its entirety (!), I hope the New Yorker will give similar attention to this forthcoming work on the subject:
barnesandnoble.com/w/josephus-and…

Read 6 tweets

Ross Douthat

@DouthatNYT

Mar 9

This is an effective @Noahpinion rant against the idea of Trump and his movement as agents of national renewal; two thoughts below:

1. The idea of Trumpism as a largely virtual and performative rebellion, not a real reformation, was basically my own take on his first term; it was an attempted rebellion against decadence that felt decadent itself. The landscape of the last couple of years, though, has felt somewhat different: You could see both Trump and the pandemic as having accelerated the collapse of a prior order AND having cleared space for rebuilding. And from a conservative-leaning perspective there was some cultural and economic building going on. In education the booming classical-school movement and conservative-leaning beachheads in (red-state) higher ed. In demographics a mass movement to red states, esp. by families with kids, after Covid, and some indicators of birthrates ticking up in those states after Dobbs. In religion the end, for now, of a period of secularization and some stirrings of revival. In media the emergence of alternatives to the consolidated, woke-dominated establishment of the social-media age. In Silicon Valley/tech a partial transition from the virtual to the physical -- self-driving cars, space travel, etc., with Musk at the vanguard. Not a renaissance but (again, from a conservative perspective) green shoots. That's why I keep writing columns warning against the ways in which Trump and Musk might be squandering the moment -- because I think there really is an interesting moment here, something promising but also quite easy to let slip away.

2. Later in his post @Noahpinion leans hard on the idea that it's all technological change, not liberal ideas or the post-war liberal consensus, that's yielded the anxiety and anomie and pessimism that characterizes our own time. I think this is slightly overdrawn (though I agree with him that the conservative critique of post-war "open society" liberalism is also overdrawn), and it's better to see a more dynamic interaction, with technology as a force that leads liberal societies to express tendencies that were latent in the system -- like a gene that only turns on under certain environmental conditions. But either way my suspicion is that we are going through a shift now where the same technological forces that yielded hyper-individualism will increasingly create evolutionary pressures in *favor* of different kinds of communitarian/familial/religious tendencies, call them "post-liberal" or not, because those tendencies will be required for cultures and families to survive under conditions where otherwise the combination of distraction and obsolescence will lead to literal extinction. But that's on more of a 50-year timeline, and Trump is probably not a primary player in that story -- except as a signifier of the turn from the age of liberal dominance to the next phase of the story.

Read 5 tweets

Ross Douthat

@DouthatNYT

Feb 11

It’s publication day for “Believe,” so let’s answer an obvious question: Why write a book making a case for religious belief as a general matter, rather than just the specific religion that I practice and believe? /long thread
zondervan.com/p/believe/

Fergus McCullough, a Protestant annotating my conversation w/Tyler Cowen (link further down), suggests the degree of difficulty of “Believe” is unusually high, since I have to justify so many “different religious experiences and perspectives. Far easier … to focus on the case for Christianity, which I think is both unique and the most plausible of all religions.” Sensible! However …

… there are a few reasons it might make sense for someone convinced of Christianity’s truth to nonetheless start at a more general level, most of them having to do with ways our cultural moment differs from other eras in which Christians have made their case. Let me explain.

Read 28 tweets

Ross Douthat

@DouthatNYT

Jan 31

Okay I will bite: The moral duties of a Christian are as @JDVance describes them, but with duties to God first that can override the natural duties (one good reason why priests and nuns are celibate), and as with the Good Samaritan, immediate duties to people outside your normal circles who present themselves in serious need. The questions of how the latter cashes out in a globalized age and how it shapes the moral obligations of a superpower's government are not, I think, actually all that easy to answer.

Telescopic philanthropy a la Mrs Jellyby is not a Christian virtue, and the US sometimes behaves in a Jellyby-ish fashion. That said our current foreign aid budget (whatever bad ideas it contains) is not large enough to constitute a real Jellybyan dereliction of natural duties.

The Biden administration's immigration policy is much more vulnerable to a anti-Jellybyist critique, in the sense that it strained primary obligations to citizens (shelter, housing, medical, schools, public safety) for the sake of secondary obligations to non-citizens.

Read 4 tweets

Ross Douthat

@DouthatNYT

Jan 25

I wrote my Sunday column on key divisions within the Trump administration/imperial court, and the ending is a little peculiar and worth unpacking:
nytimes.com/2025/01/25/opi…

I've written before about a "tech-trad" convergence, an alignment on anti-wokeness or birthrate concerns or just basic optimism about the intelligibility of the universe; I think that description makes sense when you're talking about JD Vance + Elon Musk.
nytimes.com/2024/07/19/opi…

But when you're talking about the further-out transhumanists of Silicon Valley and the maximally trad or (like RFK Jr.) the maximally holistic/crunchy/anti-corporate, you're talking about constituencies that are deeply, deeply in tension with each other.

Read 7 tweets

Ross Douthat

@DouthatNYT

Dec 26, 2024

https://x.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1872312139945234507

I don't think this is an accurate description of the American situation, the evolution of our educational system and cultural priorities, or our traditional strengths. (1/X)

https://x.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1872312139945234507

American society and youth culture have become *much* friendlier to nerds and valedictorians since the 1990s (trust me on this one), and the American educational system expects and demands more extracurriculars and math tutoring and weekend science competitions than ever before.

Nobody hangs out at the mall anymore (because they're all on their phones); the gospel of STEM is preached from every major pulpit; it's the humanities that are hemorrhaging students not computer science or related fields.

Read 9 tweets

Share this page!

Enter URL or ID to Unroll

Ross Douthat

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

More from @DouthatNYT

Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Send Email!