Ross Douthat Profile picture
NYT columnist, author of Believe, https://t.co/knRQn31ehz, and The Falcon's Children, https://t.co/f6R0ZYvOWS
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Mar 26 6 tweets 2 min read
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.
Mar 9 5 tweets 3 min read
This is an effective @Noahpinion rant against the idea of Trump and his movement as agents of national renewal; two thoughts below: Image
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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.
Feb 11 28 tweets 6 min read
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 …Image
Jan 31 4 tweets 1 min read
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.
Jan 25 7 tweets 2 min read
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…Image 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…
Dec 26, 2024 9 tweets 2 min read
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.
Oct 3, 2024 8 tweets 2 min read
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.
Jul 30, 2024 7 tweets 2 min read
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."
Dec 19, 2023 10 tweets 2 min read
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.
Jun 12, 2023 20 tweets 5 min read
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…
Mar 1, 2023 6 tweets 2 min read
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…
Dec 1, 2022 7 tweets 3 min read
Reading @DKThomp on AI is particularly interesting if you pair the piece with ...
theatlantic.com/newsletters/ar… ... @DKThomp on how quantitative efficiency ruined baseball:
theatlantic.com/newsletters/ar…
Nov 17, 2022 5 tweets 2 min read
Michael Gerson, RIP. A good man and a beautiful writer whose support for PEPFAR contributed to some of the most actually-effective altruism ever carried out by the US government. Here he is writing on his cancer, ten years ago:
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2013/… Gerson on sending your kids to college (I can attest that contemplating sending one to middle school is hard enough):
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/…
Nov 13, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
No need to choose a single scapegoat, Republicans can have simultaneous problems (a polycrisis?) with:
1) Trump's toxicity
2) base's preference for unelectable candidates
3) unpopularity of full pro-life position post-Dobbs
4) lack of middle-friendly economic agenda The impact of each then varies by region/candidates -- e.g. economic disconnect maybe looms larger in Fetterman-Oz - - abortion in MI/WI where pre-Roe laws are on books, Trump wherever stop-the-steal candidates are running, etc.
Nov 10, 2022 13 tweets 4 min read
With so much focus on Trump, a short thread on other explainers for GOP underperformance. First, here's @SohrabAhmari in our pages arguing that the GOP still doesn't have a "worker's agenda" to fit its working-class base:
nytimes.com/2022/11/10/opi… I'm more skeptical than Sohrab that Republicans can hope to gain much ground with the post-grad precariat, but he's broadly right about the problem, and crucially even though inflation helped the GOP it also creates problems for would-be populists by making deficits matter again.
Nov 9, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
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Nov 2, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
My Wednesday column: How the Right Became the Left and the Left Became the Right: nytimes.com/2022/11/02/opi… An acknowledgment/caveat: Obviously anti-institutionalism and the paranoid style existed on the right before Trump, and intense pro-institutionalism among progressives is not a novelty either.
Oct 26, 2022 5 tweets 2 min read
This is a good little essay by @moveincircles whose working definition of "post-liberal" is instructively different from my own:
reactionaryfeminist.substack.com/p/blasphemy-is… If a "post-liberal" order is one in which ultimate questions are openly contested and factions compete to infuse the West's political system with spiritual ideas, then we are definitely post-liberal. But ...
Oct 16, 2022 5 tweets 1 min read
Good to see every new playoff evolution predictably making baseball worse:
The fact that a bye week is a disadvantage in baseball, not an edge, should be obvious to a ten-year-old fan, let alone the people running the sport.
Oct 5, 2022 6 tweets 3 min read
This piece from @michaelbd, nationalreview.com/2022/10/our-nu…, and this thread from @davidfrum, provide two different ways that very smart people might think their way through the risks of nuclear war:
Fundamentally the key point of divergence is here - one imagines a Western world responding to nuclear use with a mix of outrage and strategic sangfroid, the other imagines panic-from-below scrambling the ability of statesmen to manage the crisis:
Sep 26, 2022 6 tweets 2 min read
Relevant to NatCon debates, a predictably interesting review of Conservatism: A Rediscovery by @SWGoldman:
isi.org/modern-age/con… I think one possible rejoinder to this criticism is that the Founding-era conservatism @yhazony admires was sustained by the semi-political institutions of the Protestant semi-establishment, whose influence tends to be underrated in these genealogical discussions: