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Ross Douthat Profile picture
@DouthatNYT
Sep 21, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read • Read on X
It's a "lasting" disadvantage that has currently lasted for six years (since the last Dem Senate majority) or ten (since the last time Dems had a supermajority), and it may not outlast 2020.
The Senate's rural bias disadvantages a very specific Democratic Party ideological formation that has existed since the middle of the Obama presidency.
The electoral college, meanwhile, disadvantages the Democratic Party formation that existed in 2016, but not the formation that existed in 2012, 2008 or 2004.
The Trump-era GOP enjoys a lot of countermajoritarian advantages that liberals have good reasons to attack, but several of those advantages are a feature of a *very* short span in US politics, and an ideological alignment that may not even last through the coming election.

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More from @DouthatNYT

Ross Douthat Profile picture
Dec 26, 2024
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)
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
Ross Douthat Profile picture
Oct 3, 2024
Interesting thread on contemporary versus older fantasy from @Scholars_Stage, but if you divide fantasists between myth-makers and systematizers it's a mistake to place Tolkien fully on the myth-maker side; the reason he looms so large is that he's both:
Indeed a big part of the challenge for Tolkien's contemporary heirs is that some of his systematizing cannot possibly be equaled - no one is likely to match the philological substrate he builds for Middle-Earth.
So the most successful non-Tolkien fantasists, including some that @Scholars_Stage lists, often succeed by refusing the challenge, relying more on the style he calls "mythic" or "vibes based" so as not to compete with Tolkien's hard-to-equal depth of world-building.
Read 8 tweets
Ross Douthat Profile picture
Jul 30, 2024
Speaking as someone who's been a pro-natalist since I was assigned an "overpopulation" project in high school in 1997 and realized where we were actually heading, a problem for pro-natalism is that it is inherently quite weird.
It is quite weird that we seem to need some kind of ... movement? ... policy revolution? ... cultural revolution? ... to sustain something that seems natural to the human species, so natural in fact that it's conventionally associated with efforts at "control."
For that reason the population control movement, while at best hubristic and at worse brutal and cruel, never seemed WEIRD; the idea that there could be a crisis driven by people having too many babies just fit naturally with typical assumptions about human nature.
Read 7 tweets
Ross Douthat Profile picture
Dec 19, 2023
On the implications of the Vatican document on blessings for same-sex couples, a brief thread. 1/X
In the pontificate's 1st stage I worried about Francis pushing the church over a "precipice" w/attempts at doctrinal change. But in the 2nd stage, after the family synods, there was a retreat to a strategy of ambiguous liberalization that avoided sharp doctrinal confrontation.
This still seemed to me to inevitably exacerbate tensions in the long run, widening gaps between liberal and conservative practice, encouraging liberals to always push further - a "slow road" to schism.
nytimes.com/2019/09/14/opi…
Read 10 tweets
Ross Douthat Profile picture
Jun 12, 2023
Let's do a thread about UFOs. Here's my Sunday column (with exactly 666 comments, I see, hmm):
nytimes.com/2023/06/10/opi…
And here's the interview, with @NewsNation and @rosscoulthart, that the would-be whistleblower, David Grusch, did over the weekend:
newsnationnow.com/space/ufo/we-a…
Pretty strong stuff in there: Not just alien crafts in US government hands, but alien bodies, malevolent aliens, private-contractor research, a coverup dating back to an alleged UFO recovery in Mussolini's Italy, and more.
Read 20 tweets
Ross Douthat Profile picture
Mar 1, 2023
Excellent @mattyglesias though naturally I don't think it goes quite far enough:
slowboring.com/p/why-are-youn…
To pick up the argument I made here, it's not just a cultural accident that current-era progressivism tends toward a catastrophizing, depressive mood; some of that unhappiness was baked in by the triumph of social liberalism that preceded the current era:
nytimes.com/2023/02/18/opi…
Social liberalism favors self-invention and damns "normativity"; it's not formally against religion but in practice it's a secularizing force. "Create yourself in an uncreated world" is the message; that's a big lift for anyone but esp for teens set loose in a virtual reality:
Read 6 tweets

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