Ross Douthat

Jay Cost, responding this column from Reihan among other things, doesn't think any of the sturm und drang over Limbaugh makes a difference:When appealing to a political audience as broad as the voting public, you are confronting a large majority of voters who pay relatively little attention and are essentially non-ideological in their political orientation. That means the idea of converting somebody from "liberalism" to "conservatism" as a precursor to getting his… More »

I basically agree with Jonah Goldberg's point about the limits of the Limbaugh-Oprah comparison, which is one reason my original post circled around to a Rush-Jon Stewart analogy instead. But I think he's missing the point with this:Why, for instance, is Limbaugh less serious a spokesperson for a point of view than, say, Keith Olbermann or, for that matter, Bill Moyers? Olbermann, who started out as a sportscaster, says things his ideological opponents don't like… More »

From a provocative list of propositions (via John Schwenkler) about the great evolutionist and religion:From the beginning, it was moral panic more than scientific scruple that drove Christians to jump on the bandwagon of anti-Darwinism. But it wasn't just driven by the ignominy of the common biological ancestry of all hominids ... even more significant was the elimination of teleology from the study of nature and its implication for social ethics. But this is… More »

Hugh Hewitt writes that Limbaugh's speech at CPAC "will be talked about for years and even decades." I hope he's wrong about that, but he's definitely right about this: A week ago a reporter from a major American newspaper called me to talk about Rush. I agreed to do the interview provided it was recorded and that I could air it after the story the reporter was working on ran. The reporter asked me if Rush was a "leader," and I said no. He is, I continued, a… More »

Even Warren Buffet is allowed to have an awful year from time to time. But reading about Berkshire Hathaway's losses over the weekend, all I could think about was the fate of Victor Niederhoffer. More »

In my last post on Big Love, I described the show as "arguably - arguably! - one of the most sympathetic portraits of conservative religious belief on television." Writing on last week's episode, one of the show's finest, Todd VanDerWerff took up that theme:Television doesn't do terribly well in portraying people of faith. To a real degree, this is a function of television being a mass medium and mass media wanting to do their best to keep their audiences as mass… More »

My reaction to the thing is too predictable to be worth going over, but if you're interested in the state of American conservatism I'd certainly advise you to read it - or better, to watch it, assuming you have an hour you can block off for the task. Andrew Breitbart, in a fawning tribute, calls it "an address that could have altered the election had it been delivered early last fall by any Republican presidential candidate." And on that, at least, we can agree. More »

Now this a discussion I wish we could have seen on YouTube.Update: There seems to be an audio version here. More »

I liked Patrick Ruffini's attack on the Right's Joe the Plumber Wurzelbacher (enough with the nonsense, right?) fixation. But I also liked Daniel Larison's critique of Ruffini's post. And that's because it's useful to think of the problems facing the American Right in terms of layers of misapprehension. The first layer is pure denialism - the kind of denial that Rush Limbaugh is practicing when he reads anyone who didn't like Bobby Jindal's speech out of his… More »

... and the Republicans are still floundering, what happens? Yglesias says the GOP comes back anyway:[A] hard-right agenda ... certainly isn't where the country is right now but it's not so unreasonable to think that things might change. I think we'll be growing again in late 2012 and Obama will probably get re-elected no matter Republicans say or do. But it's possible that things will really go off the rails and we'll have a years-long L-shaped recession in which… More »

At this rate, pretty soon it'll just be Rush and his microphone. More »

To Reihan's objections (and those of some readers), I should say that I didn't mean to oversimplify the state-by-state picture on abortion, which is inevitably rather complex. (For instance, it's no doubt true that some of the extremely low abortion rate in Utah and Idaho is explained away by the extremely high abortion rate next door in Nevada, and obviously different dynamics are at work in states with low abortion rates and high out-of-wedlock birth rates, like… More »

Larison's take on Jindal's tone-deaf address seems spot-on to me. More »

From Michael Gerson's (pre-speech) column on Bobby Jindal: At a recent meeting of conservative activists, Jindal had little to say about his traditional social views or compelling personal story. Instead, he uncorked a fluent, substantive rush of policy proposals and achievements, covering workforce development, biodiesel refineries, quality assurance centers, digital media, Medicare parts C and D, and state waivers to the CMS (whatever that is). Some have compared… More »

Obama was fantastic - worlds better than his inaugural. He laid out the most ambitious and expensive domestic agenda of any Democratic President since LBJ, and did it so smoothly that you'd think he was just selling an incremental center-left pragmatism. I think that he has an acute sense - more acute than most people in Washington, probably - of just how much running room is open in front of him at the moment, and he intends to make the absolute most of it.… More »

Like I said, I'm trying to be patient with the Obama-era GOP: It's a leaderless party in an awfully tough spot. But that doesn't mean that Fairbanks, Yglesias, and Weigel aren't making good points about the weirdness of a battered political party deciding to re-run the none-too-successful tactics of its just-defeated Presidential candidate. More »

I admire the persistence with which Will Saletan argues for common ground in the abortion debate, and attempts to sell his fellow liberals on the notion that reducing the abortion rate belongs in the Democratic Party's agenda. But I remain unconvinced that his preferred method for such reductions - a dramatic new push, whether political or cultural, to expand the use of contraception in the United States - would produce anything like the results that he envisions.… More »

Matt Continetti's essay on the crisis of American authority called to mind this passage from a perceptive analysis of neoconservatism that Tod Lindberg published several years ago: ... The neoconservative critique of capitalism drew heavily on Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In the neoconservative view, capitalism -- salutary though it was with respect to the efficient allocation of goods and services and… More »

I wouldn't say that it was a good a night for Oscar, overall. (Penn over Rourke? Alas ...) But I was glad to see the mad Frenchman from Man on Wire pick up a statue, at least. And the "In Memoriam" montage gets me every time. More »

Hard to do better than a lengthy conversation about Mulholland Drive, I'd say. Or, alternatively, an appreciation of The Devil's Advocate. More »