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Ross Douthat Profile picture
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8 Mar, 5 tweets, 2 min read
A self-promotional thread:
The Decadent Society is out in paperback in about a week. It's new and improved! It has new material, not just a new subtitle! It addresses the rather un-decadent events that intervened just as the hardcover was coming out!:
amazon.com/Decadent-Socie…
I'm grateful to everyone who purchased The Decadent Society in hardcover. But I'll be honest: I think more of you would enjoy the book. So I've done what self-promoters do nowadays: Start a Substack with posts on the book and its themes. Here's the first:
douthat.substack.com/p/the-pandemic…
There will be, time permitting, about 10-12 more posts on decadence coming in that space over the next 2-3 weeks. After that, it will become a space for intermittent posts about TV, books and movies. If that sounds attractive, please subscribe.
douthat.substack.com
But crucially, all posts will be free, so if you want to encourage me to write about, say, The Mandalorian or the novels of Susanna Clarke, the best way to do that is to buy The Decadent Society, so that I feel obligated to deliver content in return.
amazon.com/Decadent-Socie…
Thanks for listening, we'll see how the experiment goes.

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More from @DouthatNYT

Ross Douthat Profile picture
7 Mar
My Sunday column: Do Liberals Care If Books Disappear?:
nytimes.com/2021/03/06/opi…
One further note: Far from being a minor controversy this strikes me as a really important and complex one; I could have easily written another thousand words just on similar questions around The Adventures of Tintin.
I'm not a free-speech absolutist and the arguments I've applied to pornography in the past have applications to certain forms of racist speech and publication.
Read 11 tweets
Ross Douthat Profile picture
13 Jan
It can be replicated with mass conversions to a stringent Dutch Calvinism.
As @TPCarney has noted, this is a national pattern:
politico.com/magazine/story… Image
Strong, institutionally-rooted religious subcultures provide some inoculation against the worst Trumpism. Unfortunately we don't have many of them any more.
Read 4 tweets
Ross Douthat Profile picture
11 Jan
Mulvaney is an extraordinary hack but for much of the Trump era his supporters really did accept a vast gulf between the president's promises and what actually happened in the real world.
It's interesting to think about what has made the election-fraud narrative different from the Wall, the joke of infrastructure week, the replacement for Obamacare that was always two weeks away ... to say nothing of the QAnon narrative and its constantly-unfulfilled promises.
As @matthewwalther wrote, part of the appeal of the Q story was precisely that it claimed that Trump was secretly winning amazing victories even as his official promises were so often unfulfilled:
theweek.com/articles/91585… Image
Read 7 tweets
Ross Douthat Profile picture
5 Jan
One response to this strong @mattyglesias take is that it's useful to think of the GOP's current position in terms of 18th-century "country party"/"court party" dynamics, where the key division is all about who rules rather than what is done with power.
slowboring.com/p/unhinged-mod…
This has always been part of the story of movement conservatism, which emerged in response to the growth of of technocracy and in opposition to its rule. But as the ideological sorting of the parties has become a geographic/class sort the dynamic has become more pronounced.
Since the end of the Cold War and the victories of Reaganism, especially the right has been an anti-liberal blocking coalition that's temporarily captured by various policy entrepreneurs -- compassionate cons, neocon hawks, Tea Party, etc.
Read 7 tweets
Ross Douthat Profile picture
11 Dec 20
I suppose I think one mistake here is the belief that the American right as currently constituted can out-compete liberalism or the left in a war of competing myths and dreampolitiks and useful fictions:
amgreatness.com/2020/12/10/pla…
The one zone where the right is competitive with liberalism is in hard-power politics, and in power politics the advantage generally goes to the movement/statesman most in touch with actual reality (which is one reason why Joe Biden is the president-elect).
A conservatism that lives by fictions about its own situation can crash the American system (which seems to be what some ppl want) but it cannot govern it. And the hope of actually governing is the only non-nihilistic opportunity the right has in its conflict with progressivism.
Read 4 tweets
Ross Douthat Profile picture
2 Dec 20
I would mildly suggest that this @JZmirak piece is missing an acknowledgment that a key temptation losers face is the temptation to tell themselves, "actually, we didn't really lose."
stream.org/why-we-refuse-…
I would argue that conservatism in the United States is deeply afflicted by this temptation, with the voter-fraud fixation only the starkest case.
A conservatism of winners, of the kind @JZmirak calls for, would look at the fact that the right keeps stalling out at 46, 47, 48 percent support and say, "we need to get up to 52 or 53 or 54 percent so that we actually do the things that seem so desperately needful."
Read 7 tweets

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