Ross Douthat

A while back, during the whole "gay sheep" controversy, I remarked that if homosexuality can be detected in utero, we're likely to start aborting gay fetuses long before we start trying to "cure" them, because "there will almost certainly be a period of years or decades when it becomes possible to estimate your child's probability of homosexuality in utero, but not to 'inoculate' said child against same-sex attraction." But the more I read about the state of the… More »

While Hizzoner keeps pretending he won't run, I recommend reading Marc, Matt and David Frum on the potential impact of his candidacy. My own takes are here and here. More »

Rod writes, of the Taibbi discussion: To be clear, I don't believe that we're going to see a left-right fusion of any sort. The value I see in Taibbi's essay is his sense that the left doesn't have a lot to offer now -- that it's populated by a bunch of cranks and juveniles who are great at whining and complaining, but who don't offer much practical help. Ross has said that it's ridiculous for a leftie like Taibbi to complain about the worthlessness of the left… More »

So a Yalie named Aurora Nichols - a financial-aid student, and the daughter of community college grads - did a senior project that was supposed to be a commentary on class and money in the Ivy League: She took pictures of her everyday purchases - deodorant, takeout, etc. - and interspersed them with her classmates' abstract paintings. This earned her a profile in the Hartford Courant, which in turn earned her, well, commentary like this on a Yale message… More »

But I thank Will Wilkinson for calling that to my attention. More seriously, I think Will is slightly misreading my original post, in which I was setting forth what I think are many liberals' unspoken premises about policies that allow for large-scale immigration - namely, that they're a form of de facto humanitarianism, and thus to be supported. I do not believe myself that "voluntary trade between American employers and Mexicans workers [is] equivalent to… More »

James Poulos and Rod Dreher think I'm misreading Matt Taibbi's cri de coeur about the lameness of liberalism, and maybe I am. I think they're misreading the contemporary American left, though, if they think there's any kind of significant fusionism waiting to happen between disillusioned lefties and the anti-Bush Right. Sure, on the margins you can find some left-wingers "experiencing the [same] sort of nauseous reappraisal of Democratic orthodoxy as certain young… More »

Matt thinks it's peculiar that Fred Thompson is angling for Lady Thatcher's blessing, and suggests that "it all points to a weird quandry for the follow-the-leader party. Bush is too unpopular to be the ring everybody wants to kiss, Reagan is dead, and H.W. Bush is the incumbent's father ... So you've got Thatcher serving as a kind of ersatz symbolic leader of American conservatism." What's more interesting to me, though, is that Thompson seems to be treating Dick… More »

"We have no excuse if Hillary Clinton becomes president," Andrew writes. "We know what and who she is." Well, who and what is she? He quotes Elizabeth Kolbert reviewing the two new Hillary bios: At a retreat for Democratic senators in the spring of 1993, Clinton was asked whether it was realistic to pursue such an ambitious health-care program, given her husband's many other legislative initiatives. She responded that the Administration was prepared to "demonize"… More »

Somewhere along the line, it was decided that an effective trailer needs to give away at least seventy-five percent of the movie it's advertising - up to and including any plot twists that take place before the sixty-minute mark. I don't mind spoilers all that much, so I've made my peace with this tendency; given how voraciously I consume trailers, I don't really have much choice. But it's still nice to see a teaser trailer like this one for I Am Legend that… More »

Last week, Matt explained why liberals who worry about inequality don't worry about reducing illegal immigration: What most liberals think is that we should resist efforts to frame the economic problems of working class Americans as solely a matter of zero-sum competition with Mexican peasants, as opposed to something that could be more productively dealt with through measures that might compromise the interests of the global elite. Of course, one might argue that… More »

I've read a lot of "why liberalism is so screwed up" pieces, like this one by Matt Taibbi, over the last decade or so, and they've usually made me feel warm and fuzzy with schadenfreude. But enough is enough. At least until December 2008, I declare a moratorium on left-of-center whinging about how screwed up the left-of-center is. It's one thing to complain when you're down and out, getting smacked upside the head by Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman; it's quite another to… More »

Alex Massie continues the Knocked Up-and-abortion discussion. Russell Arben Fox rounds up the Rorty conversation, and pitches in with his two (okay, more like fifty) cents. And Emily Nussbaum has a great essay on the narrative arc of The Sopranos, and how David Chase related to his audience. Here's an excerpt: ... the moment that really wrenched the show off its axis was a brief, almost throwaway scene in the third season, in an episode titled “Second… More »

It's nice to have everything I've ever assumed about Zach "voice of my generation" Braff - no, not that he's a no-talent poseur; you can tell that just by watching his movies - more or less confirmed. And by "confirmed," I mean "confirmed by an anonymous source in an online gossip item." Obviously. But the circumstantial evidence keeps piling up. More »

Ruminating on whether the new mass secularism is really all that new, Jonah writes: ... both Waldman and Ross seem to be ignoring a fairly large elephant in the corner: Communists — or Marxists, doctrinaire socialists, dialectical materialists, whatever you want to call them. Here was a very tribal bunch. They were dedicated to the overthrow of religion and religious opiates. They protected themselves in tribal fashion in academia, government and politics. They… More »

Paul Waldman, in the Prospect: In 1984, 7.3 percent of respondents answered "none" when the General Social Survey asked what their religious preference was. Twenty years later, nearly twice as many, 14.3 percent, gave the same answer. Of course, the number of non-religious people will varies depending on how you ask the question. (For instance, the National Election Studies asks respondents whether religion plays an important part of their lives; in 2004, 23… More »

Of my last post, Isaac Chotiner writes: I think the reason to pick Warner would in fact be that he would likely win Virginia. Sure, Lieberman or Cheney or Gore may have helped around the edges, but it's hard to believe any of them actually flipped electoral votes. Media narratives are important, but I just cannot believe any veep pick really matters at all, unless they can bring around a state (obviously if Kerry had landed McCain or some other wild scenario were… More »

Sure, it's too early, but Marc Ambinder floats Mark Warner on the Democratic side and Mike Huckabee for the GOP. Both are from the South, which makes a certain sense, given that this is likely to be the first Presidential election since 1988 when neither candidate hailed from Dixie - or since 1984, if you count George H.W. Bush as a Texan. I'm pretty skeptical, though, of the notion that "regional balance" is a particularly important value for a campaign to seek… More »

In the midst of a piece on religious-right leaders and what they would do if Giuliani were the GOP nominee, we have this: Several social conservative leaders are leaving a narrow window open to supporting Giuliani in the general election if the New Yorker wins the GOP nomination. "Where Mayor Giuliani is today, I absolutely could not support him. However, I would not completely rule it out," said Pat Mahoney, executive director of the Christian Defense Coalition.… More »

Andrew, on my post about Linker, Rorty, the religious right and liberalism: Ross responds by arguing that Richard John Neuhaus and his theocon friends are only interested in persuasion and changing the culture, not using the levers of politics and the law to insist on their religious convictions. Please. Please yourself. I said no such thing. I said that Linker sometimes seems to oppose both political action based on religious conviction and non-political attempts… More »

Reading Michael Gerson's attack on conservatives fleeing Bushism, I found myself wondering what would have happened if Bush had followed through on his 2000 promises to be "a different kind of conservative" on the issues he championed in the campaign - education, prescription drugs, and faith-based initiatives - but had then toed a much firmer small-government line on (to pick a few examples) the transportation bill, the energy bill, and McCain-Feingold, wielding a… More »