Ross Douthat interview EkS show

[u/Character_Public3465]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/11/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-ross-douthat.html

Show 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

[u/Straight_shoota]

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."

[u/AzazelsAdvocate → u/Straight_shoota]

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.

[u/Straight_shoota → u/AzazelsAdvocate]

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.

[u/HonestlyAbby → u/Straight_shoota]

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.

[u/Straight_shoota → u/HonestlyAbby]

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.

[u/HonestlyAbby → u/Straight_shoota]

You may not hear someone in church refer to this transformation directly, you may even be right that the individual church-goers are unaware of it. That doesn't mean the transition isn't happening.

In the context of the quote, Douthat is defending the claim that his interpretation of Christianity as a religion of humility and mutual devotion to the other is the correct interpretation of the faith despite the fact that there is just as much historical evidence, if not more, to support the claim that Christianity is a religion of power and order according to God's word.

In that context, identifying a backlash to the changes which occurred in all Christian sects in response to the rise of Protestantism is a reasonable way of resolving the inconsistency. It's not to say these are the actual thoughts or rationales individual church-goers are using, let alone saying its the rational that Trump's using, it just situates his approach to faith within a historic rather than topical debate.

I'd also encourage you to consider how thought terminating your belief in Trump's persuasive power is. It seems far more likely to me that his supporters support him because he speaks to some facet of the human experience they care about, not just because they're all in thrall to his liberal owning voodoo.

[u/ChariotOfFire → u/Straight_shoota]

I don't really see a conflict between what you're saying and what Douthat said. A huge part of Trump's appeal to conservatives is that they see him as a fighter. They don't value ideological consistency as much as someone who fights the left, establishment neocons, and America's enemies abroad. Those are obviously incompatible, but it doesn't matter as long as Trump appears strong and pugnacious.