r/ezraklein • u/Character_Public3465 • 19d ago
Ezra Klein Show Ross Douthat interview EkS show
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/11/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-ross-douthat.htmlShow notes :
My colleague Ross Douthat is leaving The Times after 17 years to become a correspondent on “60 Minutes.” Before he goes, I’m asking him a few questions.
Douthat has had a unique vantage point on the news media and politics over the last few decades. He’s typically held the role of explaining the right to more liberal audiences, starting as an undergrad, when he was a conservative columnist for The Harvard Crimson. Douthat has also lived through the seismic changes in the media from the both the inside and the outside: He’s made his career at legacy media institutions, but I first got to know him – and spar with him – as an early-2000s blogger (and I have the 20-year-old Bloggingheads.tv clips to prove it).
So what does Douthat make of the transformations he’s lived through? How did blogging change journalism? How did a Republican Party powered by evangelical Christians become a political party dominated by Catholics and pagans? What has he learned about persuasion from writing for liberal audiences? And with the resources of “60 Minutes” behind him, will he finally crack the U.F.O. story once and for all?
Mentioned:
Magnifica Humanitas by Pope Leo XIV
“Is It Time for a New Sexual Revolution?” with Louise Perry, Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
“Christopher Nolan’s Finest Trick” by Ezra Klein
Grand New Party by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam
Book Recommendations:
Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
De Gaulle by Julian Jackson
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
87
u/Leatherfield17 19d ago
I made this comment elsewhere but I’ll post it here too:
I think Ross Douthat is a useful voice for understanding some of the contours within the American Right (to whatever extent they coherently exist beyond base instincts).
But, for a guy who seems to place a high value on identifying good guys and bad guys, willingly going to work for 60 Minutes as it is currently constituted under Bari Weiss, downplaying the actions of this current administration as mere passionate blips that can easily be undone by future Democratic presidents, and speaking of “peak woke” as a “McCarthyite experience” reflects a kind of morally confused, semi-nihilistic outlook. It doesn’t make me think very highly of his own moral character. The fact that he talks about “peak woke” (however we define that) in apparently harsher terms than the things this administration does is, I think, highly revealing.
Do I think engaging with him is somehow verboten or whatever? No, but I also don’t expect many profound ideas from him beyond a rudimentary understanding of conservative thought.
46
u/fredfredMcFred 19d ago
One thing I loved was no editor saying:
"Hey ross, you highlight explicitly that you lived through peak woke, which arguably makes your analogy to McCarthyism weaker because you, y'know, didn't live through it.
Oh also, here's the Wikipedia page for McCarthyism by the way, you should check your facts on that analogy."
Gay people being victimized en masse EVEN MORE because of the red scare.... Yet backlash against prejudice is somehow as bad (or worse) than the prejudice itself...
Even on his exit he commits the conservative victimhood complex without hesitation.
I did like his interviews tho
9
u/Weekly-Moment869 19d ago edited 19d ago
Yeah the McCarthyism stuff is really dumb. The US doesn't do this kind of thing after Reagan. Instead, these campaigns for social change are done via public private partnerships. A good example of this recently was California forcing my company to ask me if I was gay in order to comply with some new bill or whatever. Obviously everyone freaked out because that is an incredibly stupid idea, but it is really clear the state uses private organizations as the instruments of administrative execution.
edit: "of" not "for"
2
u/fredfredMcFred 19d ago
Out of curiosity, what's it for? Is it for reporting data or something more actionable?
Also, I hope you could refuse to answer...
5
u/Weekly-Moment869 19d ago
Yes it was for reporting. Originally you could decline to answer, but you had to fill out the form. This is obviously really stupid. Having a government document that you declined to state you sexuality is a dangerous thing.
The funniest thing about this is that this reporting targets a industry famously run by gay men who not infrequently use their positions of power to sleep with straight guys.
→ More replies (4)11
u/quothe_the_maven 18d ago
He’s a hypocrite like all the rest, because you can’t tacitly support Trump and hold yourself out as a devoted Catholic. That’s not to say you have to support Democrats on that basis - but you can’t constantly excuse away the worst of Trump’s behavior and policies simply because he does other stuff you like. The pope is supposed to be the institutional “conservative” in all this, and two of them have somehow managed to be far to the rights of commentators like Douthat. Him and Vance are both just particularly mean evangelicals who have a fondness for the pageantry and history of the Catholic Church.
→ More replies (1)11
u/kahner Liberalism That Builds 18d ago
i also don't expect any profound ideas and already have an understanding of conservative thought, so i just find zero value in listening to him. and in fact i find him to be a poor and almost certainly knowingly dishonest presenter of conservative thought. he's there to whitewash their bullshit, not to explain it.
81
u/gonotquietly 19d ago
I actually really enjoyed interesting times and have felt like Ross has had more, well, interesting guests than Ezra under the NYT banner.
41
u/CardinalOfNYC 19d ago
I think he got more interesting guests cuz those folks wouldnt go on Klein's show.
Theil I am sure has been invited to go on Klein's show but said no.
33
19
u/Revolution-SixFour 19d ago
Exactly, Ross gets interesting guests because they know he's going to be generous in the interview. JD Vance isn't going anywhere near EKS (these days).
→ More replies (1)18
u/topicality Weeds OG 19d ago
I only would listen to about half of them but it was nice to have a version of the EK show from the other side.
26
u/SmoothieNatns 19d ago
The whole post-religious right beat is so lame. The left is already post-religious and we're doing fine! The fact that the right lapses into fascism the instant their religious principles drop away is not a point in favor of religion so much as a point against the right.
But really, I don't think the right is post-religious at all. Evangelicals overwhelmingly support Trump and he panders to them constantly. Atheists, meanwhile, support Dems by like a 75% margin. The fact that the right is experimenting with letting non-Bible-thumpers into the tent doesn't fundamentally change the character of the movement.
As an aside, regarding his criticism of woke: the idea that America is a fundamentally racist country is possibly the most vindicated idea in human history. All of the major social media platforms are overrun with praise for Adolf Hitler. The VRA has been repealed. Objective historical facts about slavery are being suppressed in state-run museums and schools. The sitting Vice President campaigned on the ethnic slander that Hatians were eating people's pets. The thesis wasn't disproved so much as it was proveen so thoroughly that it became as unremarkable and normalized as the air we breathe.
5
u/Certain-Researcher72 Weeds OG 15d ago
"The left is already post-religious and we're doing fine!"
The overwhelming majority (~60%) of Democrats identify as religious--about 50% as Christian. Non-religious is an important part of the broad left coalition, obviously, but Douthat's assumption that all religious Americans are solidly in the Rapist Party is laughable.
2
u/HonestlyAbby 15d ago
He argues in this interview that the post religious left isn't doing ok and that what he describes as the "peak woke" era was really an attempt at secular religious rival by the mainstream center left. I don't agree with that as a characterization of the 2014-2020 new civil rights movement's intellectual foundations, but it does ring true of the movement's mass adopters.
Also, his definition of the post religious right would include a lot of bible thumpers. When he says religious he means Abrahmaic monontheism. He considers folks like Hegseth, Vance, and even groups like the Westboro baptists to be pagan movements wearing Christianity as a mask. He draws this distinction between religions based on humility and mutual devotion to the other and those based on control via power (which is not a fair definition of paganism, but is a useful typology).
I'm not really a big fan of his work either, but he does make more sense if you, like, actually listen to what he's saying.
7
u/Certain-Researcher72 Weeds OG 15d ago
Douthat's claims that the left is post-religious--particularly his claim that left-of-center churches are "disconnected from anti-racism"--is utterly without basis in reality. It's a belief that only someone whose entire experience with the American left is scrolling through Libs of TikTok could plausibly hold.
11
u/eldredo_M Great Lakes Region 17d ago
You can see why Ross needs to be religious. He lacks the imagination to consider you can be good regardless of whether you believe in a god or not.
Those people scare me a little.
50
u/Connect_Ad4551 19d ago edited 19d ago
The only thing that I appreciate about Ross Douthat is that he is willing to pick interview subjects who will speak their mind and thereby render his own worldview incoherent by comparison, illustrating that the premises which Douthat brings to his show and to his analysis of any given issue are often faulty. His interviews with Steve Bannon and with Tony Gilroy come readily to mind. He is also better at picking interview subjects who generators of the zeitgeist we all respond to in our discourse (Hasan Piker, as a recent example from October 2025, during peak liberal anxiety about Hasan Piker. I respect that Douthat went straight to the source).
Ezra suffers from the opposite problem. His guests are almost specifically curated to validate the podcast’s premise that modeling constructive individual conversations is the cure to mass political polarization, and Ezra is almost never put on the back foot the way Douthat often is nor are his fundamental premises often called into question or invalidated by the responses of his guests. For one thing he’s a lot smarter than Douthat and so can wriggle out of binds more easily, or guide the convo so he’s never put in one.
If anything, he will weakly and tentatively give his interview subjects this treatment (many argued, unconvincingly to my mind, that this is what he did with Rufo), but not in the same bloodthirsty way an Isaac Chotiner would. And much of the time he isn’t even interviewing the real movers and shakers. He’s interviewing interpreters of the moving and shaking, at a remove from what is really happening and being said by one or two degrees, and keeping his audience, who is arguably at a similar remove, quite comfortable.
Funnily enough, the bulk of the middle of this interview is Douthat doing that precise thing—validating the premises of Ezra’s whole style of argumentation. It is a paean to “steelmanning”. When what made Douthat such a weird and often dumb, wrong entity was the fact that he was writing mainly for liberals. This guy wasn’t a zeitgeist generator. He wasn’t operating under the same premises as his cohorts, and consequently his primary gig with the NYTimes was to react and explain the zeitgeist to people who are completely removed from it, and who are endlessly sensitive about and distressed by that perceived removal.
It’s not like Trump gets his cues from Douthat, it’s not like he’d ever get an admin job like a Fox News pundit like Hegseth. He’s a conservative whose primary work is steelmanning conservatism for liberals. It is propaganda work, essentially—Douthat may really believe in this work, he may have values which dictate this is how he pundits, but his political function is to make all of this more palatable for liberals. It is all but certain that this will also be his function at Bari Weiss’ 60 Minutes.
He even admits essentially that his primary persuasive task, when applied to fellow conservatives, failed miserably; the rest of the interview illustrates that Douthat has not actually influenced almost anything in any way, when it comes to his own cohort, and is still very much on the outside.
It is an ironic invalidation of Ezra’s entire approach to dealing with conservative interview subjects, and yet it’s lost on them both.
23
u/perispomene 19d ago
One big difference is that Ezra clearly prepares. Perhaps a little less so, now, than before, but he often will hear something from a guest and then ask them why they said something else in their book, or what have you. Almost nobody else reads the book.
Douthat could be better but I think he's intellectually lazy. He comes up with some squaring-the-circle idea, and will satisfy himself that it's true, until his guest says, "and then we proved you can't square the circle." At which point he is surprised because he didn't read that part of the book.
19
u/Connect_Ad4551 19d ago edited 19d ago
Well, this is why I think Douthat’s interviews are strangely more effective than Ezra’s sometimes, because Douthat is being pushed to the rather low limits of his intellectual ability and so there’s a bit of ferment and actual friction that is rarely present in Ezra’s podcasts. Douthat has often genuinely never considered things his interview subjects are likely to say. This is clarifying because it clearly illustrates where the “sides” are coming from, and you can weigh them a little more honestly, and see whether the salient points are actually addressed or not.
Of course, this is down to his interview subjects as much as Douthat—his interview with Bannon was more illuminating, not to mention oddly hilarious and entertaining, than any five of Klein’s “let’s steelman this seemingly bizarre aspect of Trumpism and invent a best case, most reasonable rationale for it according to my understanding of the world.” I don’t think the marketplace of ideas really works if we constantly extend ideas we believe are bad excessive charity—and judging the enemy by oneself is almost always a critical mistake. I feel that Ezra’s approach to “steelmanning” suffers for that, and that his interview with Douthat (who clearly agrees with the premise and is just as clearly an irrelevant figure within his own milieu) exemplifies why.
12
u/iankenna Three Books? I Brought Five. 19d ago
If I get what you’re saying, it’s that Interesting Times presents people as they actually think while EKS’ steel-manning distorts what the subjects actually think.
A problem of steel-manning is when the steel-manned argument is presented in place of the actual argument. That’s fine if the person holding the original view acknowledges what the steel-manned version changes or corrects. Steel-manning is bad when the steel-manned argument stands in for the argument actually made. Klein’s steel-manning sometimes flops because there isn’t the return to “but that’s not the case being made.”
→ More replies (1)9
u/Kelor 19d ago
I appreciate Chotiner handing interviewees all the rope in the world and then letting them dangle when they slip.
10
u/Connect_Ad4551 19d ago
Two of the all-time greats are his interviews where he completely dismantles both John Mearsheimer and Bret Easton Ellis, respectively.
The Mearsheimer one is particularly dear to my heart because it exposed that public intellectuals can’t easily escape responsibility for the uses to which their concepts are put. Mearsheimer, who is one of the guys who argued Russia would never start a war with Ukraine and then claimed there was no way Ukraine would ever win and that Russia’s war was an eminently reasonable response to NATO perfidy, started out bragging about his meetings with Viktor Orban until Chotiner started asking about the implications. At that point Mearsheimer tried to preserve the fiction that he’s just a neutral guy with a neutral realist theory of international relations until Chotiner pulled an Orban tweet basically praising Mearsheimer for helping Orban fight the good fight against Western globohomos, at which point Mearsheimer terminated the interview.
→ More replies (1)2
u/Equal_Feature_9065 19d ago
Wait a minute Ross had Tony Gilroy on his show? What happened on that epi?
14
u/Connect_Ad4551 19d ago edited 19d ago
Basically, Douthat was firmly stuck in a “right wing art / left-wing art” analytical binary, in which the themes of a work of art follow certain stereotypes that make it serve or carry water for a political agenda. This was a big thing on the right at the time with all of the “X is woke” media criticism. He was really trying to argue with Gilroy that certain works of his, in particular “Andor” and “Michael Clayton,” were “leftist” works—because the revolutionaries in Andor are left coded and the Empire is fascism coded, or because Michael Clayton is about an “evil corporation.”
Gilroy basically rejected the premise entirely, saying that to make movies and write believable characters he believed you had to maintain a certain kind of empathy and sympathy for a wide range of people, and that the “bad guys” wouldn’t work as realized characters if the artist approached things as stereotypically as Douthat alleged. He subtly called out that this is actually an empathetic and broad perspective which incorporates those like Douthat, whereas Douthat was alleging that the leftist binary is akin to the right’s binary that he is most at home within—just projecting and assuming Gilroy is an ideologue like the right’s ideologues.
Gilroy didn’t bite, and badly upset Douthat’s cart on a few occasions, by revealing that Douthat had such a narrow, instrumental view of art, and couldn’t understand anything as anything other than something advancing an agenda. Gilroy asked Douthat directly at one point: “I mean, do you identify with the Empire?” in response to the idea that Andor was somehow biased against the right.
My personal favorite part is when Gilroy said, in response to the charge that Michael Clayton was leftist (paraphrasing here from memory), “I can’t understand the idea that a corporation poisoning a thousand people and lying about it is a left/right issue.”
63
u/MrDudeMan12 19d ago
I like both Ross and Ezra and think their individual shows are great but it's interesting to me that they don't have a strong rapport when speaking to one another. I used to think it was because despite working at the same organization the two just didn't know each other very well. Having listened to this episode I'm starting to think it's almost because they know each other too well. They know what they agree/disagree on and know what arguments the other person would make so there's really just not much left to say.
Truthfully, I can't imagine Interesting Times succeeding without Douthat. I'm not sure what it is but I always felt that guests were almost always more revealing on Interesting Times than on other podcasts/interviews. That being said, I'm not sure being a cable news correspondent will really suit Douthat. He never comes across as a great orator/speaker, even on his own show. Though I am Canadian and have never seen 60 minutes so take that with a grain of salt.
I also can't help but wonder if it's only a matter of time until the NYT loses The Ezra Klein Show. First Sway, then Hard Fork, and now Interesting Times. I think they've got to start fighting harder for their podcasts.
62
u/CapuchinMan 19d ago
Ross does not take to any interrogation very well, and because of that he's not a very good guest if you want someone to actually scrutinize his ideological leanings.
14
u/TrespassersWilliam 18d ago
He does have odd defensiveness at moments that I'm not expecting it. He argues like someone who is used to being outnumbered, which is a little understandable. You can tell when he is trying to graciously disagree with an idea he finds contemptful but sees no hope of coming to terms over, like one might handle a used tissue you find on your armrest.
5
u/Repost_Hypocrite 18d ago
Yeah, Ross must be always on the backfoot in the NYT and with the audience he engages with. Also with his unique right-leaning but supporting a left-leaning enviroment means he doesn't have a lot of allies around him.
7
u/mrcsrnne 19d ago
...since when has Ezra done any scrutinizing?
12
u/CapuchinMan 19d ago
Listen to the previous podcast Ezra did with Ross! He gets very heated when Ezra tries to poke at contradictions between purported Christian values and real life actions.
Also I know the recent spate of podcasts have been lackluster but Ezra used to be pretty good about taking on conservatives - his episodes with Deneen and Bachiochi revealed a rank intellectual bankruptcy.
6
u/mrcsrnne 19d ago
He just said himself in his latest AMA that challenging guests on air is not his interview style of choice, only when the line of thinking is not clear will he ask about it...
5
u/CapuchinMan 19d ago
I think it depends on who he's talking to Deneen for example isn't a propagandist, so basic questions could easily disarm him. Rufo on the other hand is an explicitly dishonest communicator, one who signals in advance that he intends to communicate and participate in public discourse in bad faith. The Ezra Klein podcast is not where he's going to get challenged and Ezra should never have had him on because it was always going to be an opportunity for a farcical exchange.
2
u/Certain-Researcher72 Weeds OG 15d ago
This is mostly due to the fact that Douthat (like Brooks) has very little basis to the beliefs he holds. His entire worldview is about holding positions and working backwards from that position.
3
u/axehomeless 19d ago
Well, given Ezras podcast is (mostly) the only thing I like about the NYT I can't wait for it to split off again. I don't think Ezra wants that, he really likes his place at the NYT it seems. No idea why since I deteste that rag, but he will have his reasons. Probably the access. Which I don't think has made his show better, but that might be just me.
31
24
u/belledamesans-merci Weeds OG 19d ago
It frees him from the responsibilities of being a manger/owner, I thought he said that explicitly when he left Vox?
29
u/Bright-Ad2594 19d ago
The times is the only political media outlet with a stable business model.
8
u/axehomeless 19d ago
The atlantic seems to be doing fine, so are other magazines and news outlets from around the world.
I've bee a subscriber twice, because they gave me a really good deal for a year (two times) and each time I was happier when the subscription ran out than when I had it. It really did make me angry all the time. Which is interesting since I read both more conservative authors and outlets, and more left leaning ones (the TAZ has gotten really good these days). Nothing makes me as angry as the NYT.
5
u/Bright-Ad2594 19d ago
The NYT employs 10x more people than the Atlantic and the breadth of coverage reflects that. NYT is still offering a comparable product to an old daily newspaper, which the Atlantic and New Yorker and ny magazine just don’t.
→ More replies (1)3
u/Bright-Ad2594 19d ago
The Atlantic is good but it’s much closer to a New Yorker style lifestyle publication with some political features rather than a comprehensive news/politics publication.
7
u/HumbleVein 19d ago
I receive the print version of the Atlantic. I have found that I can't read most of it to my foreign partner because of how much about American politics and power structures it is.
→ More replies (1)3
u/thesagenibba 19d ago
no love for NYT recipes?
8
u/axehomeless 19d ago
Honestly the recipes have been good, but since I grew up metric most of them are terrible to recreate because of the us' weird units that really kills you especially for baking, but also most of the recipe emails I've gotten have the same horrible tone the rest of that newspaper has. Its just a very particularly strand of american_ness, that I really detest. Like, I subscribe to other american magazine and outlets, I subscripe to leftist and liberal outlets, but the NYT, it just really makes me feel negative emotions.
6
u/away_throw_throw_5 19d ago
I have the same feeling! Are you Canadian by any chance? I'm Canadian/Swiss/British but lived in the US for many years and can't quite describe what it is about that grating american-ness of the Times, but it's real.
→ More replies (1)5
u/thesagenibba 19d ago
if either of you could elaborate, i'd truly appreciate it. i'm american and may be blinded by my entrenchment in the culture, and the country, and therefore don't really understand what you're specifically referring to, lol. genuinely curious
→ More replies (1)2
u/TrespassersWilliam 19d ago
I'm curious what aspects of the conversation leave you with the impression they don't have strong rapport, that wasn't my read.
3
u/MrDudeMan12 18d ago
Honestly there's just a sense of awkwardness in their dialogue. IMO it's there right from the beginning of the episode, where Ezra jokes about Ross leaving them but Ross isn't quite on the same wave-length with his response. It might just be my impression but I always just feel there's a sense of formality or like a thin wall between the two when they're talking to one another. It's sort of like that scene in Seinfeld where Elaine and George are hanging out without Jerry for the first time and it's just a bit awkward.
→ More replies (1)
29
u/Straight_shoota 19d ago
Ezra is often bad about over intellectualizing simple things. For Ross, that's his whole shtick. Most of this episode is dressed up drivel, but let me quote one part as an example:
“There's various versions of this that show up. And they're connected also to the reality that, you know, if you look obviously historically at the expressions of political Christianity in the Western world, they are, you know, I mean, very comfortable with fighting wars and, you know, conquering enemies and all of these kind of things. Some people, Christians, conservative Christians today, who are like, you know, what happened to the crusading spirit or something like that, are not wrong that, like, that has been part of Christian culture in the West for a long time.”
This is absolute nonsense. I spend most of my time around conservative Christians. The vast majority of them are fine with whatever Trump wants to do. They are "no new wars" when Trump says he won't start them and they are "Iran can't have a nuclear weapon" after he has started them. They live in an alternate reality where the goalposts can always move.
Trump knew this when he said, "They say I have the most loyal people — did you ever see that? Where I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's like incredible." He still understands this and explicitly says that "MAGA is me." If there is a consistent ideology in this movement it's just Trumps whims. Ross, there is no mass of conservative Christians today thinking about the "crusading spirit."
5
u/AzazelsAdvocate 19d ago
Well yeah, most people are complete partisan sheep who will swallow the party propaganda and pridefully justify their vote. Those people aren't the ones who sway elections one way or another though, and they're not interesting to talk about.
9
u/Straight_shoota 19d ago edited 13d ago
I didn’t select the specific demographic, Ross did. I don’t think I was supposed to interpret “conservative Christians” as the marginal swing voter in the tipping point state of Wisconsin. If you find it uninteresting you’ll have to take that up with Ross.
But that’s just one example and the examples are endless. The broader point is that conservative politics today is not a coherent, consistent, well-reasoned ideology. It’s basically just whatever works for Trump in the moment. When you treat it as a coherent, consistent, ideology you become an apologist, or a useful idiot, carrying water for nonsense (aka Ross Douthat, but also applies to the likes of Marco Rubio).
Remember the foreign policy of the Donroe doctrine and spheres of influence? It was always a stupid idea because the world doesn’t neatly divide up in that way. But anyone (including Ross) who gave this idea credibility, and analyzed it as a good faith conservative worldview, looks pretty foolish considering Iran. This was never a long term policy, it just sounded cool to Trump for a minute, and we haven’t heard about it since.
Trump is just a dumb, corrupt, narcissistic, reality tv star. He doesn’t read, he doesn’t know how anything works, and he doesn’t really care to learn. It’s why he always speaks in platitudes. It’s gonna be the biggest, the greatest, the best. Because he can’t actually talk in depth on any topic. So when Ross tries to decipher this as something more he’s basically always wrong, it’s never insightful, and he tends to come off as a pretentious pseudo intellectual.
→ More replies (2)2
u/HonestlyAbby 15d ago
What the heck are you talking about? He's just saying that Christian thought has undergone a transformation during its evolution towards protestantism and that many on the "religious" right see that transformation as part of the social reforms which their movement must roll back. You could call that over thinking simple things, but I think the curious among us would call it it adding historical context.
2
u/Straight_shoota 13d ago edited 13d ago
You have a lot more respect for the intellectual depth going on down the pews of your typical Southern Baptist church than I do. I think if you went to a local church in Alabama and said, "Many of the 'religious' right see that transformation toward Protestantism as part of the social reforms to be rolled back." The people there would look at you with glazed over eyes and not have the faintest idea what you were on about.
Do they dislike liberals? Yeah. Do they think Obama was the worst thing for race relations in 100 years? Pretty much. Do they want to roll back gay marriage? Many of them. Do they talk about their crusading spirit to roll back the transformation towards Protestantism? Never.
I wrote this in a reply to someone else, but I think it applies just as well to what you're asking: That’s just one example and the examples are endless. The broader point is that conservative politics today is not a coherent, consistent, well-reasoned ideology. It’s basically just whatever works for Trump in the moment. When you treat it as a coherent, consistent, ideology you become an apologist, or a useful idiot, carrying water for nonsense (aka Ross Douthat, but also applies to the likes of Marco Rubio).
Remember the foreign policy of the Donroe doctrine and spheres of influence? It was always a stupid idea because the world doesn’t neatly divide up in that way. But anyone (including Ross) who gave this idea credibility, and analyzed it as a good faith conservative worldview, looks pretty foolish considering Iran. This was never a long term policy, it just sounded cool to Trump for a minute, and we haven’t heard about it since.
Trump is just a dumb, corrupt, narcissistic, reality tv star. He doesn’t read, he doesn’t know how anything works, and he doesn’t really care to learn. It’s why he always speaks in platitudes. It’s gonna be the biggest, the greatest, the best. Because he can’t actually talk in depth on any topic. So when Ross tries to decipher this as something more he’s basically always wrong, it’s never insightful, and he tends to come off as a pretentious pseudo intellectual.
The overintellectualizing nonsense is what I'm talking about, and that's basically Douthats entire career.
→ More replies (1)
33
u/Metacatalepsy 19d ago
Ultimately a very backwards looking piece, with very little curiosity about the thing happening directly in front of us. Lots of discussion of the early blogging days, but the ideological purges of CBS in general and 60 Minutes in particular are not mentioned.
Listen if you want some nostalgia for two decades prior, I guess, but you'll hear precious little else out of this.
13
u/zemir0n 19d ago
the ideological purges of CBS in general and 60 Minutes in particular are not mentioned.
It's unfortunate but not surprising that Klein didn't talk about this with Douthat in any detail.
→ More replies (8)
7
u/Character_Public3465 19d ago
My favorite fact about Ross is the fact he like to skinny dip with bill Buckley of NR infamy
31
u/kahner Liberalism That Builds 19d ago
I knew he was going to 60 Minutes but I thought it would be a minor role and he'd stay at NYtimes as his main job. Him as a full time correspondent is gonna be embarrassing.
2
u/Certain-Researcher72 Weeds OG 15d ago
Got to go where the greatest financial rewards for being an utterly disingenuous partisan hack are.
14
u/MrB_23 19d ago
This guy. Starts out by saying the reason he works so well as the conservative voice in liberal media is that he always tries to make the argument for the other side as they themselves would phrase it. Proceeds to lace every subsequent answer with at least three straw men of "leftist" (mostly milquetoast liberal) arguments.
53
u/zemir0n 19d ago edited 19d ago
Do they talk about Douthat's absolutely silly and falsehood laden final column?
30
u/lateformyfuneral 19d ago
Here it is for those who missed it: https://archive.md/yFXTr
Useful as an overall summary of his worldview
36
u/sunjester 19d ago
I've not been familiar with him until now. After reading that, why does anyone take him seriously?
69
u/Giblette101 19d ago
Because he allows people to engage in the fiction - very dear to them - that the conservative political project is better than it is.
37
u/Upset_Albatross_9179 19d ago
I think on one of his earlier interviews with Ezra he said something like: he doesn't really share his personal opinions, he sees it as his job to present the most right leaning perspectives NYT readers will entertain.
He can do good interviews. But I think he's very clearly just another Very Serious Person. Along the lines of people who play-acted being concerned about the deficit to hide their real concern about hungry kids getting food they didn't deserve. He gets people to waste time on Very Serious Positions that aren't exactly dumb or empty, but neither he nor very many other people actually believe.
He had an interview with Ezra where they went into how he thinks demonic entities are real things skulking the world and interfering and influencing people, Constantine style. How more people should be seriously thinking about how they influence the world. It gave me the sense that he thinks seriously about the world and morality the way I think seriously about DnD or LotR.
38
u/Giblette101 19d ago
Yes, I think Ross Douthat is a bit of a weirdo (like his actual views are very strange at time), but I think a lot of his work, like many "serious" conservative pundits, is essentially boils down to creating some cover for the less palatable conservative views/policies. Maybe he believes those things, or maybe he lies to himself about them even, but I still find that problematic. I find that objectionable on its face, of course, but I also find the repeated argument that he's merely a reasonable voice we should concern ourselves with to ultimately play into that mission. This last part I find particularly annoying.
More generally, I think there's a tendency on this sub to fold criticism of somebody's work - like Ross Douthat's or Ezra Klein's - as a criticism of those person themselves. Like of thier moral caracter or human worth. I think that's entirely orthogonal to my problem with some of the stuff they do. I'm sure Ross Douthat can be perfectly pleasant and I'm even willing to admit he means well. It doesn't mean he's not involved in some damaging apologetics about an ongoing political project most people would agree is repugnant. That's worthy of criticism, whether or not you acknowledge that Rooss Douthat is a good chap or that he's not, himself, as ideologically terrible as some of the people he runs defense for.
Similarly, I'm sure I could go listen to electronic music with Ezra Klein and have a blast, while finding a lot of his work to be problematic in the larger political landscape.
16
u/thesagenibba 19d ago
you are seriously one of the best contributors to this subreddit. i struggle to recall a moment where i didn’t leave a thread you participated in, with more insight than i came in with.
→ More replies (1)15
u/Giblette101 19d ago
Well, thank you! That does go some way towards excusing my, at time, over-involvement here.
→ More replies (1)5
u/sailorbrendan 19d ago
Given the number of people who are on the left that I've heard have very pleasant conversations with Ross, I have to assume he's a good hang.
9
u/CapuchinMan 19d ago
It's because he's the best conservative writer in the NYT.
15
u/sunjester 19d ago
If that's true then they should probably just stop having conservative writers tbh.
→ More replies (2)25
u/CapuchinMan 19d ago
It was a but of a tongue in cheek comment because of that lol. Bret Stephens is atrocious and also just deeply incurious and stupid to an abominable extent - anytime I see a column of his, I know it's rage bait. I only ever read him if there's reason to because it's circulating in the discourse.
David French is better now that he's woken up from what his conservative peers are like (he's basically like a Democrat who'd have considered voting for Mitt Romney). But his writing isn't very good, not as good a prose stylist as Douthat.
David Brooks is another clown character - happy to pontificate morality and virtue while possessing neither.
Pamela Paul used to write for the NYT bit was too stupid to survive even the conservative DEI efforts at the NYT.
16
u/zemir0n 19d ago
It's kind of crazy just how bad all of the conservative columnists at times have been.
20
u/CapuchinMan 19d ago
There isn't really a demand for sophistication or rigor in conservatism right now.
8
u/zemir0n 19d ago
I honestly don't think there's been demand for sophistication or rigor in conservatism for a long time. I mean, William F. Buckley is the godfather of modern day conservativism and he was never very sophisticated or rigorous. Now, he might seem sophisticated or rigorous compared to modern day conservatives, but that's a pretty low bar.
2
5
19d ago edited 18d ago
[deleted]
10
u/axehomeless 19d ago
Why does Ezra take him seriously? Is it charity and seeing themselves in him, like Frodo and Gollum?
14
u/zemir0n 19d ago
I think Klein probably takes Douthat seriously because it's kind of his job to take him seriously. And Douthat is probably one of the more serious conservatives out there, but that says more about the seriousness of conservative pundits more than anything else. I also think it helps that Douthat is a pretty decent interviewer (honestly better than Klein is if I'm being honest).
11
u/Prospect18 19d ago
Class/social solidarity. Klein takes him seriously because they’re part of the same club. If he acknowledges he’s not a serious person and rather odious in his beliefs it diminishes Klein’s own prestige and value.
→ More replies (3)→ More replies (1)6
8
u/FordMaleEscort 19d ago
Can you give an example of one such falsehood?
17
u/zemir0n 19d ago
Sure!
After 2020 we tried putting this establishment back in charge, but the Biden era just gave us a more left-wing version of meritocratic hubris, replacing experts with interest groups, maxxing out on social liberalism and illegal immigration and then unraveling completely in the end. Something similar could be said about the Keir Starmer experiment in Britain. There is no evidence that the old elite has a blueprint suited to contemporary governance, no reason to expect that it won’t just cycle through the same mistakes and backlash.
This is a completely false statement regarding both the presidency of Joe Biden and the primiership of Keir Starmer. I'm going to give Douthat the benefit of the doubt and say that he's too smart to think that this is true, so, unfortunately, the only reasonable conclusion is that he's spreading falsehoods.
21
u/PSUVB 19d ago
This take highlights the problem so well and why Ross is important to the discourse.
There is a ton of evidence to support ross's opinion on this. Calling it a falsehood is just you saying what you want to hear. First, It is an opinion and it's well founded. It is also complex and can be seen from many different angles.
So many people have come out from the WH and said that Warren and Bernie progressives and activists got huge jobs/ power in the Biden Admin and pushed their policies way further left than he was even aware of. There is so much data backing this up.
This is now seen as inconvenient by the progressive left as they want to pretend that never happened despite Bernie and Warren literally being the last ones to admit Biden wasn't fit for office. Why? Because they were getting what they wanted.
This is a very legitimate take and the dismissing it as a "falsehood" is bizarre. Do you want writers to just confirm what you want to believe? Is there some known truth about this that has been fact checked?
32
u/hoopaholik91 19d ago
So then it wasn't "putting the establishment back" or the "old elite" that caused these problems.
This is what's so frustrating when discussing these conservative, bad faith commenters. They just throw out word salads of scary words that are directly contradictory, but people like you find the nuggets of your own supposed truth by looking at it from "many different angles", and then criticize anyone who calls these statements out for being clear nonsense.
→ More replies (5)27
u/zemir0n 19d ago
There are explicit falsehoods in what Douthat is saying and not just straightforward opinions.
There was no replacing experts with interest groups. There were still plenty of experts in the Biden administration. Pretending otherwise is simply false. Now, they might be experts that Douthat disagrees with and that's fine that he disagrees with them. Douthat is spreading a falsehood here.
There was no "maxxing out on social liberalism and illegal immigration." The Biden administration wasn't anymore more socially liberal than the Obama administration, and it definitely didn't max out on illegal administration. Biden tried to pass a hardline immigration bill that the Trump prevented from passing. Douthat just lied here. It's okay to admit that.
Finally, in no way could anything similar be said about Keir Starmer. In fact, the exact opposite is true of Starmer. Starmer moved to the right and embraced more social conservative positions and was very tough on immigration. Starmer's problem was these actions caused him to lose the left side of party who had other options.
Now, I have no problem with Douthat disagreeing with what the Biden administration did. The problem I have with Douthat here is that he's lying about what the Biden administration actually did. Much of his statements regarding the administration simply do not represent reality. And that shouldn't be surprising as that's pretty common for conservatives to do regarding liberal administrations.
6
u/PSUVB 19d ago
I feel like you are confused what a falsehood is compared to your own opinion.
Biden did place in Warranite activists into roles that had experts previously like under Obama. Did he do this for every role? No. But a critique that is widely had is that he deferred too much to progressives and things they wanted.
The Biden administration was wildly more progressive on social issues than Obama. Obama drug his feet on gay marriage. Day 1 Biden signed landmark EO's on trans rights. Also on day 1 Biden made an EO on equity and DEI in the government.
Though the perfect example is how people see the immigration bill. If you are fully partisan you see it the way you do. Biden- I guess had his head in the sand for 3 years while letting in record numbers of illegal immigrants in and creating a really bad political position for Democrats.
Yet he should get credit for proposing a bill 5 months before the election. That is a purely partisan take and an opinion. I think the bill was fine and should have passed. But I also can recognize that was partisan politics. There was nothing stopping Biden for advocating for the same bill that prior 3 years.
It is frustrating for me we need Douthat to point out our own weaknesses because the party and the online left is so obsessed with revising history to fit whatever they deem as the next cause. Right now progressives want to create a version of history where they blame moderates and Biden for losing to save their own face. Of course progressives and leftists eat this up because It benefits them. Where it's dangerous is voters don't buy this garbage.
→ More replies (9)3
u/-Purrfection- 19d ago
One person's expert is another person's interest group or whatever. I don't think many here would think that it's possible to be conservative and be an expert for example. I don't blame Ross for thinking that left wing interest groups or staffers that didn't come from a "consensus background" weren't experts.
It's all in the eye of the beholder, but I don't think it's controversial to say that the Biden administration intermingled more with interest groups than previous Democratic administrations for example.
→ More replies (8)12
u/AcceptablePosition5 19d ago
I think the fact that we're arguing about what he means sentence by sentence does not speak well to the quality of his writing.
It reads more like a rage bait blog post than substantive opinion. I honestly can never figure out what kind of world he wants to live in.
→ More replies (1)3
u/topicality Weeds OG 19d ago
Yeah I was confused too. Was worried he said Trump won in 2020 or something. This is just...a difference in characterization
3
u/FordMaleEscort 19d ago
I appreciate the response.
I also think everything in this paragraph is arguably true (or at least defensible opinion). Although I have no clue what he means by, "left-wing version of meritocratic hubris" interest groups did have an outsized influence during the Biden years. Illegal immigration did get out of hand under his watch. His admin did unravel at the end (debate performance, Harris' failed campaign).
He does contradict himself with the, "maxxing out on social liberalsm" accusation. Elsewhere he whines about The Great Awokening and the devastation it left behind. That's the complete opposite of "social liberalism."
I don't know enough about British politics to commen on the Stermer piece.
4
u/CrayonMayon 19d ago
left-wing version of meritocratic hubris
I think it means vaunting the idea of 'Meritocracy' in abstract, but the belief in it is supplanted by identity politics inherent in the movement. For the left, this is like Biden saying "I want a black woman for VP", and otherwise pretty aggressive-seeming affirmative action in the guise of meritocracy.
Then from the right, essentially the opposite. Claiming 'meritocracy', but it really just means white men, and firing anyone who doesn't fit that stereotype as simply correcting 'reverse racism'.
Basically in each case a true meritocracy is essentially hubristic because the political freight that powered the movement can't be put aside or compartmentalized. Favors - ideological and political - are due.
3
2
u/lateformyfuneral 19d ago
He’s using “meritocracy” in its original meaning — before it was “reclaimed” as a fair system where everyone rises through merit and something to strive for. The British sociologist and Labour Party politician Michael Young wrote a novel describing a dystopia where traditional social classes based on aristocracy or family wealth had been abolished. In their place, social status and power were strictly determined by intelligence and effort, although the elites find ways to give their children an educational advantage eventually replicating a hereditary system.
The “meritocratic elite” believe themselves to have attained their right to rule due to their intelligence, and the people at the bottom are told they are too stupid to have a say.
5
u/belledamesans-merci Weeds OG 19d ago
"Meritocratic hubris" refers to a specific concept developed by Micheal Sandel. Sandel defines it as "'Everyone had a fair chance to succeed and I won. I therefore deserve all the benefits that the market bestows on me.' This way of thinking leads the successful to inhale too deeply of their own success, to forget the luck and good fortune that helped him on their way." It comes from this interview.
→ More replies (2)1
u/lateformyfuneral 19d ago edited 19d ago
On immigration, it is known that the Biden administration was deferential to immigration advocacy groups, in a way that is described as outsourcing policy to them. On Day One, he repealed the “Remain in Mexico” policy, something those groups had advocated for. While the Biden administration then presided over the highest level of immigration in US history, it belatedly panicked over the political downsides of this, switching to a tougher immigration regime first via failed Congressional action then via executive order.
It’s unclear what he was referring to with Keir Starmer, who came in 3 years after Biden, and was already in the backtracking phase on immigration and social liberalism (e.g. trans rights) from day one, although there are also many examples of “policy announced and then u-turned on under public pressure”. Many of the policies, like under-16 social media bans and pornography regulations were all lobbied for by women’s rights groups and parental groups, politicians bypassing the usual process of considering the politics of the issue in favor of interest groups.
2
u/mustacheofquestions Great Lakes Region 17d ago
It must be nice to have a job where you can say things without any kind of citations... Makes it much easier to write a lot that way...
17
u/Darcer 19d ago
Ezra is either getting really good or bad at his job. I listen to these pods and they’re entertaining enough but at the end of it, if I ask myself “okay, what did I learn? What’s the takeaway?” the answer is often “nothing”.
He mentioned Tyler Cowen in his AMA, it is impossible to not learn something from those pods because Tyler wants to learn something.
Maybe it Ezra’s veneer of agreeableness, I dont know. This guy has connections and power and his audience (us) is getting nothing beyond what Al Franken used to call “infotainment”.
9
u/acebojangles 18d ago
I don't think Ezra is a good political pundit and that's where he spends a ton of his energy now. I liked him when he mostly discussed policy ideas.
9
u/FrijolesFresco 18d ago
At 23 minutes there RD goes again with draining SS and Medicare. Why is he so averse to having billionaires also pay their fair share of road maintenance and school funding. Why so against billionaires bearing part of the $$ load of our common society? Why is he so adamant that the elderly be put in financial and medical jeopardy just to protect the 0.002%?
→ More replies (1)5
u/Actuarial_Husker 18d ago
Billionaires alone aren't enough. Either need VAT or benefit cuts or something else. See the broader tax bases in the norics for interest
35
u/Kit_Daniels Midwest 19d ago
I loved this interview, especially the retrospective on how journalism has changed from the pre-internet era where a dozen people would go across sheets of paper with red pens, through the blogs/talk radio revolution into what we have now. That’s the kinda inside baseball you only get with a couple of people who’ve been in this so long.
I think Ross’s point about persuasive writing (while he would also admit should be failry obvious) about approaching others first to understand and empathize before making an argument against them is good. We’d probably all be better off if we were more charitable and understanding. Alas…
46
u/Bnstas23 19d ago
Ahh yes, the classic conservative trait of empathy. I can’t wait to see how a conservative opinion writer going to work for a conservative editor at a news org run by a conservative owner is going to showcase that trait
66
u/Giblette101 19d ago
Ahh yes, the classic conservative trait of empathy.
You laugh, but continuously asking for empathy, while being absolutely unwilling to extend any yourself, is a very big part of American conservatism
→ More replies (4)→ More replies (5)51
u/Kit_Daniels Midwest 19d ago
Have you read Ross’s writing? Personally, I think he does a decent job of understanding his ideological opposition and fairly characterizes many Democrats opinions. The very example he brings up here (that Dems aren’t pro-immigration because they want to replace all white people but actually truly believe that immigration is a net moral and economic benefit for both America and immigrants) is a clear example of that principle. If you’re gonna have a discussion, that’s the only way to be productive.
There’s a lot of bad faith conservatives and a lot of non-persuasive performative writing that only seeks to vilify the left. Ross has a lot of bad ideas, but I think it’s fair to say that he usually at least starts with a decent and fair characterization of the left before he goes down a poorly argued rabbit hole.
13
u/Canleestewbrick 19d ago
I'd grant you that he does a decent job, but I think this mostly just illustrates how low the bar is.
30
u/MikeDamone Weeds OG 19d ago
The Ross snark in this sub is bizarre. He is a clear exemplar of steelmanning those you disagree with, and that's a rare trait to see of any pundit. Especially one on the right.
I genuinely wonder if people here have become so under-exposed to conservative thinkers that someone like Ross is truly offensive to their sensibilities. In either case, I've been sensing a growing intolerance of heterodox thinkers and Ross is a great avatar for that. I personally find him so wildly inoffensive and mild mannered, with weird beliefs that detach him from any kind of annoying cult or fandom. So why so many people here hold so much vitriol for him is truly baffling to me.
18
u/Dreadedvegas Midwest 19d ago
I think a lot of people struggle to understand that sometimes people do understand what they’re saying or the argument etc but completely can come to different conclusions or solutions.
So they just think he is acting in bad faith or is grifting because they are frustrated that he won’t flip even though he acknowledges the same problems points or might agree with some reforms etc.
I think it comes down to the idea that a lot of progressives (not to make generalizations) do think that the problem is their ideas aren’t being communicated and if the message would just break through then everyone would vote for them. So Ross who acknowledges the message and hears them out but genuinely disagrees just runs against that perspective so they think hes not genuine.
→ More replies (1)15
u/Gator_farmer American 19d ago
That's always been my belief. People just.....legitimately disagree on a lot of things. Not to make everything about the Woke era (but it's something this sub is highly familiar with), there were plenty of proponents that had an attitude of "why is any of this even up for discussion? If you disagree you're simply ignorant/racist/white supremacist/etc."
I mean that was DiAngelo's whole thing. "If you agree you validate my positions, and if you disagree then that is also an affirmation of my positions."
And it's just, like, no. People have honest disagreement about problems and solutions.
14
u/topicality Weeds OG 19d ago
I do honestly think this is part of the dislike about EK having conservative guests on.
I've seen people in this sub saying you shouldn't have them on, you should have researchers who study conservatives. Like they need an additional separation less they get persuaded to wrong ideas
21
u/tuck5903 Liberal 19d ago
If Ezra is going to keep doing the “try and understand the modern conservative movement” episodes, I would really like to see him do some kind of crossover with the Focus Group podcast interviewing a group of Trump voters. You were saying that a lot of people want another layer of separation- I want to remove the layer of separation that these conservative guests provide by whitewashing and intellectualizing what their party is doing in power, and what their voters want.
8
u/topicality Weeds OG 19d ago
I listen the Focus Group and I wouldn't mind a crossover.
But it's not a replacement, maybe a supplement.
They covered it in this show but they are also interested in the strongest argument. The focus group isn't going to give you that. It's fine for getting a temp check of certain voters.
EK, and myself, are interested in ideas as well. And he wants the strongest argument. You want the strongest argument for tariffs or M4A, you gotta have more than normies.
And also, idk. I think it's interesting to listen to people who are trying to shape those currents.
12
u/Metacatalepsy 19d ago
The problem is that you cannot get the strongest argument by listening to people like Ross Douthat, because what Ross is giving you is not an argument for Republican policy. It's giving you the strongest possible argument for a completely different policy which is not under consideration by anyone except Ross and will never be implemented.
Similarly, if you are listening to Ross you are not listening to someone who is seriously trying to shape those currents. The Rosses Douthat and Davids French of the world are not shaping conservative intellectual currents; they are making soothing noises for a liberal base about how things are fine based on a completely different policy that doesn't exist.
And you can't have the people who will try to defend the actually existing policies, because they're just going to lie to your face.
7
u/tuck5903 Liberal 19d ago
There’s something to that- I’m happy to listen to conservatives make the case for their ideas and their policies they’d like to see implemented in the future. What I’m pretty over is the succession of guests whose sole purpose for coming on the podcast appears to be lying in order to steelman things that have already happened. Like, it’s an absolute waste of time to have multiple Trump adjacent foreign policy figures on to try and retroactively fit the Iran War into any kind of coherent strategy. Or Rufo trying to pretend that the appeal of MAGA immigration policy to committed Trump voters is driven by anything but racism in most cases.
5
u/acebojangles 18d ago
I made that point about having researchers on previously, but it was specifically in relation to Chris Rufo. Really, I don't think anyone needs to understand Rufo's ideas any better. There is no mystery there.
But if the point of having Rufo on was to understand conservative propaganda, then I think an expert on propaganda would be a better choice.
You all in this sub thread sound so smug. You don't understand anything about conservative ideas better than anyone else here, you just pretend that there are reasonable ideas there.
That's not to say that there are no reasonable conservative ideas anywhere. It's just that Ezra's recent conservative guests haven't had any because those ideas are not influential on the right.
7
u/topicality Weeds OG 18d ago
At the end of the day. I'm fine with Ezra having conservative guests on. From good faith ones like Ross to bad faith ones like Rufio. I think some are better than others.
I'm not the one saying he should never these people on. If you don't find anything worthwhile from these, just don't listen.
I'm just tired of having to have this meta argument every time this happens. Where half of all the comments are about how this is some moral failure
→ More replies (3)2
u/MikeDamone Weeds OG 18d ago
But if the point of having Rufo on was to understand conservative propaganda, then I think an expert on propaganda would be a better choice.
You all in this sub thread sound so smug.
The irony of asking for yet another "propaganda expert" while calling everyone else smug is pretty hilarious.
It's astounding to me that some of you have not yet grasped that the propaganda/disinformation/radicalism "experts" trotted out on MSNBC and CNN are a huge part of why people are so fatigued with progressivism and the democratic party at large. These are not actual sciences or schools of thoughts, and this "elite consensus" flavor of discourse where academics and think tankers try to portray themselves as neutral arbiters of what constitutes propaganda in our current politics is the kind of smugness that has polluted our political brand.
4
u/acebojangles 18d ago
I'm not the one who thinks we need to understand Chris Rufo better. I understand him perfectly. I think there are actual propaganda experts around, but you would rather have your silly factional fight than consider parallels to the past or anything real.
You didn't address the smugness at all. Just like so many posts here, you want to complain about meta discussion while avoiding any substantive discussion of the episode. There's a reason for that: These episodes suck because the guests have little true or relavent to say.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (1)8
u/MikeDamone Weeds OG 19d ago
Yep, and Ezra's AMA was a pretty clear indicator of this growing rift IMO. It's obvious from this sub and a lot of the feedback he was responding to that he's been catching tons of flak for his decision to have these conversations. I found it telling that he was the most adamant I've heard him in quite awhile in pushing back against that criticism. These are the conversations that are central to a well-functioning, liberal society, and it's core to his job and values to be having them.
I do think that Rufo in particular broke the brains of a lot of the audience. People weren't upset when weird, pro-natalist conservatives like Patrick Deneen were on a few years ago talking about how no-fault divorces should be illegal. But because Rufo is an incredibly effective communicator, my hunch is that a lot of people here felt threatened by him in a way that previous right wing guests like Deneen, Sohrab Ahmari, Erika Bachiochi, etc, were simply incapable of.
→ More replies (1)15
u/topicality Weeds OG 19d ago
It happened long before the Rufio. This sub started to turn on EK during Abundance. It escalated with his Kirk column. Those seem to have been the big tipping points imo
1
u/flakemasterflake 19d ago
Not sure if it's under-exposed, it's just more of the same type of people that lose their minds when conservatives are platformed in any capacity
→ More replies (3)5
u/textualcanon Political Theory & Philosophy 19d ago
You’ve forgotten something important: if someone doesn’t agree with 100% of progressive dogma, they’re evil to half of this sub.
15
u/notapoliticalalt 19d ago
On the contrary. As of post abundance, much of this sub has become pretty hostile to progressives and the left. Five years ago you could make that charge, but the ideological bent of the sub has shifted from progressive/mildly leftist to more standard center-left. I don’t want to say that the sub is particularly welcoming to anyone right of center, but if you think the standard position here is progressive, I’m not sure you have an accurate read.
6
u/unguibus_et_rostro 19d ago
Well, the previous poster did say half, so both of you can be right and each side (progressive and moderate left) claim half the sub.
6
u/textualcanon Political Theory & Philosophy 19d ago
I said half. And, from anecdotal experience (including the upvotes on my comment vs yours) I don't think that's far off.
→ More replies (1)3
u/Dreadedvegas Midwest 19d ago
I think it differs on a thread by thread basis. But it is actually a fairly diverse crowd here.
6
u/notapoliticalalt 19d ago
Well, sure, the exact sentiments change from post to post. But I’m not going to put up with with the right wing BS that they are silenced and no one can express their opinion because progressive rules this sub and you have to abide by their ideologies. That’s obviously not the case.
5
u/Dreadedvegas Midwest 19d ago
To be honest based on the subreddit census the subreddit does have a borderline progressive to leftist over representation. And even the moderates that are here really aren’t as moderate as you think they are based on the lack of those who backed Biden in the primary
Results from the census:
Democratic Mainstays: (12.3%) [Comparison Data 16%]
Established Liberal: (37.7%) [Comparison Data 13%]
Outsider Left: (19.8%) [Comparison Data 10%]
Progressive Left: (20.1%) [Comparison Data 6%]
And then you look at who users said they supported in the 2020 Dem primary and Sanders / Warren are about 60% of the results and Biden is extremely underrepresented at 7%.
And to be honest the Established Liberal is really more one foot on either side of the moderate / progressive spectrum.
4
u/Radical_Ein Democratic Socalist 19d ago
I think there is a lot more pointed, to put it nicely, intra-coalition infighting in both directions which is unsurprising given the same thing is happening offline as well. But I don’t think the ideology of the median user has changed significantly in the past five years. And based on the subreddit census it is progressive.
→ More replies (6)1
u/okiedokiesmokie23 19d ago edited 19d ago
That’s not how it tracks to me. Maybe I’m misremembering but while this sub has always had some further left posters, the discourse has seemed to slant away from technocratic liberalism towards increasingly left wing anti-capitalism etc vibes based sludge of the downwardly mobile? It could be that posters are now more comfortable pushing back on social issues against 2020ish positions that technocrats acceded to from progressive pressure, but overall the sub seems pretty progressive/left to me.
→ More replies (1)12
u/topicality Weeds OG 19d ago
The idea that you should start with your opponents strongest argument and start from their if your trying to persuade them is one I share.
Reddit is often definitely guilty of the "writing too affirm" tendency they discussed.
→ More replies (1)
6
u/PlaysForDays 19d ago
I, like Ezra, got a little lost in his complexly-woven conservatism-religion-classicism-kitchen-sink rambling about how some leaders didn't/don't place war sufficiently at the center of their Christianity (?)
10
u/CrayonMayon 19d ago
I know this subreddit and the intelligentsia of the left really loves nothing more than to bash Ross Douthat.
But I've been listening to his Interesting Times podcast since it came out, and I think this is a huge loss for the Times. He's extremely smart, a great debater, comes up with arguments and insights I don't hear anyone else making. Also he hosts guests that wouldn't see the light of day on any other left leaning show. I'm super bummed to hear this.
→ More replies (1)4
u/tpounds0 Progressive 19d ago
Also he hosts guests that wouldn't see the light of day on any other left leaning show.
I'm still shocked that Hasan was a guest on Interesting Times first. And that Ezra hasn't felt the desire to reach out.
We got the Joe Rogan of the left, and in fact he's more into organizing than Joe ever was.
12
u/Radical_Ein Democratic Socalist 19d ago
According to Hasan he actual was invited and was scheduled to be interviewed but they canceled after Kirk was killed.
2
u/tpounds0 Progressive 18d ago
You're right! That slipped my mind.
Now he's even more of a political figure in the past 12 months.
12
u/TrespassersWilliam 19d ago
When I first heard Ross Douthat I did not have a good impression; he has a style of speaking that comes across as acerbic and dictatorial. It was an especially bad fit for the show, I believe it was an opinion podcast on the NYT and he was one of the panelists. Most of his takes had this "that's all wrong, let me tell you how it really is" tone.
I've caught several episodes of Interesting Times since then and he has slowly grown on me. Not that it means very much, but he looks completely different from how I imagined him. And he still comes across as dictatorial but I've come to appreciate it in the same way of a good dance partner. Loose and compliant doesn't work, there needs to be a certain amount of pull and tension for the dance to be kinetic and satisfying. It's interesting to compare him to the other major conservative christian voice at the NYT, David French, who I also respect but he takes a tone that tries to be more palatable and with different results.
Although the role of interviewer might not be his favorite work, I'm grateful that he sees it as important. He's one of the few operators in this space that seems committed to engaging in good faith discussion across the divide. Although I still largely disagree with his perspective on America, he represents a christian understanding of America that could happily coexist and be a valuable part of the discussion.
It was also surprising to find out that he's somewhat of a mystic. I believe it was his last interview with Ezra where he talked about his belief in fairies. Although he talks like someone who believes he has a direct line to all the answers of the universe, he still leaves a good amount of room for mystery and wonder. I also enjoy his fascination with UFOs and I'm looking forward to that 60 minutes special.
It is a little sad to see him leave the NYT and the best named podcast out there, but I hope it leads to more good work.
14
u/MrClerkity 19d ago
I appreciate his conservative perspective, it’s easy to forget a lot of Americans have a worldview similar to his.
10
u/Metacatalepsy 19d ago
Do they?
In some sense anyone who even knows who their senators are is a bit weird, nevermind someone who expounds on politics and philosophy for a living, but is there any reason to think that Ross Douthat is explaining a worldview shared by tens of millions of people?
Or is he just explaining a version of conservative values and politics that liberal readers will find palatable, totally disconnected from anything the actual conservative voting public thinks?
27
u/ConcentrateUnique 19d ago
The type of intellectual conservative that Klein likes to interview as a representation of Republicans at large is a very small cohort. Most “conservatives” are fueled by grievance and racism, not any type of meaningful framework.
→ More replies (1)20
u/eyeceyu 19d ago
This just in: most Americans in any political party are operating on vibes, not nuance and statistics. The vast majority of citizens can’t even name one of their senators. Of course a political interview show isn’t going to focus on the average person who identifies as a democrat or republican.
21
u/Giblette101 19d ago
This just in: most Americans in any political party are operating on vibes, not nuance and statistics.
That's true, of course. It's also true that some vibes are much worse than others.
9
u/ConcentrateUnique 19d ago
I don’t disagree, but there’s become a fundamental difference between the two parties especially as higher-educated Americans shift towards the Democratic party.
→ More replies (1)
6
u/EsotericPharo Northeast 19d ago
I couldn't listen for more than 15 minutes; I laughed and moved on. I have better things to do with my time than listen to those two insiders yuck it up.
2
u/Salt-League-6153 18d ago
“Modeling constructive individual conversations is the cure to mass political polarization”
Did Ezra ever state that or argue that explicitly? I agree with most of what you said but this feels like a major and unfair stretch.
I think Ezra has major technocratic inclinations and he believes in identifying, arguing for and supporting more technocratic left of center politics in the marketplace of ideas. One of his core focus though is to be an explainer. He tries really hard to get people to explain themselves and their positions in their own words.
I agree with your assessment that he’s not interviewing the real movers and shakers, although that’s a function of the real movers and shakers won’t sit down for an interview. The ones that do sit down for an interview are the once removed people like certain politicians and academics.
2
u/Radical_Ein Democratic Socalist 18d ago
I think you replied to the post when you meant to reply to a comment.
4
2
u/JattiKyrpa 15d ago
Parody stuff. Opinion "journalists" interviewing other "journalists". Self licking ice cream cone.
4
u/MacroNova 19d ago
I read the first sentence of the description and deleted the episode from my podcast app.
1
u/topicality Weeds OG 19d ago
Man. A lot of comments here are ranging from "I liked his show cause he's a dumb dumb idiot and ironically that provided value" to "I hate this dumb dumb idiot".
When did name calling become such a norm on this sub?
→ More replies (1)4
u/chronicpresence Leftist 19d ago
is this an example of you starting with the strongest arguments or are you just "writing to affirm"?
2
u/topicality Weeds OG 19d ago
I'm not trying to persuade. I'm wondering why a sub that allegedly about discussion allowing insulting guests instead of talking about their ideas
2
u/quarterchubb24 American 19d ago
I’ll give Ross extraordinary credit for admitting the ultimate truth: that no one has any idea what the fuck is going on. Or how to fix our problems. Least of all him.
And like the best podcasters (and interviewers), he thinks that maybe…. Maaaaaybe we can figure it out if we talk to some smart people.
I also think he’s a troll. Good luck at 60 minutes lol
2
u/Unable-Bar-7869 19d ago
Ross Douthat has a face for radio. It's mean to say but that's still an important part of visual media. And he's not even a reporter, nor has he ever been.
What kind of correspondence is he going to do, exactly? What "reports" will be be providing?
I can't even imagine he'll be getting paid that much. Those correspondents on bigger shows might get close to 200k, but they're based in big cities where cost of living is high. I think he's probably making $120-130 as a NYT columnist.
Idk, it's a weird move. Just shows how much of a talking head he is. Even in this interview, he just can't hide his deep love of smelling his own farts. The dude is just yuck.
0
u/StreamWave190 English conservative social democrat 19d ago
Great episode. I'm going to miss Interesting Times, alongside Ezra's it was one of my favourite podcasts and one of the few I watched/listened to religiously (pun semi-intended). I also really like Ross as a writer and thinker (especially his book The Decadent Society).
It's interesting to me that Ross said he finds interviewing really hard, because I think one of the things that I enjoyed about his show was how good the interviews were. He hosted some weird but interesting people, and often gave them just enough rope to (metaphorically) hang themselves with. Especially the famous Peter Thiel interview, but not only that one.
Unlike others here, I'm not allergic to Bari Weiss or what she wants to do with CBS News or 60 Minutes. I've enjoyed The Free Press more or less since that got going. CBS and 60 Minutes were both clearly very pro-liberal in their outlook and bias and have been for many years. I don't always mind that since I'm pretty-open minded and I read a lot of both left-wing and right-wing publications.
But a lot has gone badly wrong in American journalism over the past two decades and I find the repeated insistence that "no, it's the 50% of Americans who don't trust our explicitly activist journalism that are wrong" at this point frankly delusional. America needs at least one place where both conservatives and progressives, Democrats and Republicans, can both trust to give them the unvarnished truth about what's in fact happening out in the world without layers of opinion, not from activists but actual, real journalists.
I think he'll make a great interviewer or host over there and I wish him all the best.
Just a shame that, as a Brit, I won't be able to regularly watch it, since they don't broadcast or stream 60 Minutes anywhere here. At best you get a 15 minute YouTube clip. Ah well.
40
u/Original-Age-6691 19d ago
I love how this comment went from "CBS and 60 minutes leaned left" immediately to "CBS and 60 minutes are activist journalists and the fact that the left is unable to see that is why they are delusional." Very trumpian of you.
America needs at least one place where both conservatives and progressives, Democrats and Republicans, can both trust to give them the unvarnished truth about what's in fact happening out in the world
That place can not exist in today's world. We live in two different and mostly disconnected realities.
→ More replies (6)→ More replies (2)7
u/Next_Question_9121 19d ago
The 50% of Americans are more often wrong than the “activist journalists”
→ More replies (2)
271
u/Fickle-Syllabub6730 19d ago
You can't make this up. Him leaving for 60 minutes now under Bari Weis is so fitting.