“In the absence of any compelling intellectual traditions on the American Right, Catholicism has offered a refuge for those weary of progressive ideologies mandated by institutions that are no longer hiring. The senior branch of Christendom has long enjoyed a default advantage in this competition for souls, for the wayward, post-secular scholar, writer or aesthete will never find what he’s looking for in the dying Protestant denominations that founded our first universities, nor in the raucous assemblies of the evangelical.”
by Thomas Brannigan
What in the daily flow of reported events will count as properly historical in the light of time? Decades after history was said to have ended, a few categories of today’s headline stories might be thought to qualify for this now questionable status: military and technological developments that herald a new international balance of power, infamous crimes that undermine the normative credibility of liberal-democracy, and elections that speak to the discontents of civilization.
But the election of a pope? It seems unlikely that the historians of 2050 will give the tenure of Leo XIV more than a passing mention, presuming the existence of their efforts. Unless, of course, a breakup of the Church takes place on his watch. The new bishop of Rome will have to confront this prospect as he retreats from his predecessor’s crackdown on traditionalist dissent, a campaign lauded from the outside but exacerbating the conflict within. While the ‘more Catholic than the pope’ stance of today’s Right is hardly new, this opposition can no longer be put down by Vatican fiat, having its mainstays in America and Africa where the vicar must tread carefully.
It might be objected that the demographic expansion of the world’s Catholic population makes for a less gloomy picture. But it is doubtful that progress by this purely materialist metric will save the Church from its current politico-spiritual drift or suture its deep divisions. The change in the quantity of souls certainly will bring about a change in quality, but of what nature? Charismatic mumbo jumbo, like the smells and bells of old, may win hearts but not the mind where the decisive battles will have to be fought. Better fewer, but better, as Lenin said.
The intervening years are likely to be rich in unexpected events giving occasion to hopes for a comeback. What at present has the air of history-making structural and ideological shifts may be creating a context in which the Catholic Church could recover from decades of decline and resurface with greater authority in intellectual and moral matters. While our ruling classes no longer put much stock in these intangibles, more practical considerations may come to weigh in the balance. The end of neo-liberalism, the impending failure of the last and greatest regime change campaigns of the West, enormities in the Holy Land, and angry backlashes against social engineering may incline the far-sighted to revisit the Church’s long experience of managing decline. Rebuilding this institutional pillar of late Roman origin could perhaps provide an epochal perspective on what lies ahead.
In the US, over the last several years, Catholicism has won over a new cohort of sympathizers and converts. The wider political context in which this happened unfolded roughly as follows. In 2016, the liberal wing of the establishment took the lead in mobilizing against a backward and feckless multitude that seemed to threaten a long unchallenged status quo. For a time, their Kulturkampf confronted only a half-hearted opposition from the conservative side, itself seeking to thwart the troublesome interloper. Within this temporarily unbalanced partisan configuration, a decades-old culture war dynamic got unhinged from previously operative elite constraints and was allowed to rip, taking wokeness and the backlash against it to ever higher levels.
In the absence of any compelling intellectual traditions on the American Right, Catholicism has offered a refuge for those weary of progressive ideologies mandated by institutions that are no longer hiring. The senior branch of Christendom has long enjoyed a default advantage in this competition for souls, for the wayward, post-secular scholar, writer or aesthete will never find what he’s looking for in the dying Protestant denominations that founded our first universities, nor in the raucous assemblies of the evangelical.
Amid all the din, some of these new Catholics have been able to get a hearing in the liberal intellectual mainstream as well as in alternative online venues, where they stand apart from a larger, intellectually negligible formation of pseudo-traditional influencers. Compact Magazine, for example, regularly publishes self-identified Catholic writers who oppose the libertarian and fundamentalist currents of American conservatism and look to Church encyclicals in pursuit of a more socially conscientious critique of progressivism. One noteworthy accomplishment of this intellectual tendency is to have carved out a neutral zone on the ideological frontlines, where controversial topics can be discussed more freely. Though their efforts to explain majoritarian grievances to a liberal public have been met with skepticism, the measured tone and impartiality of their writing have won them admirers in that quarter as well as on the Left, albeit often secret ones.
Over this period, the columns of Ross Douthat in the New York Times offered tonic relief from the agendas that otherwise seemed to dictate every word its editors deemed fit to print. Standing apart from the Straussians and assorted, manly enthusiasts for Western civ, Boss Ross has emerged as one of the country’s preeminent conservative intellectuals. As a talented political writer with impeccable establishment bona fides, he invites comparison to Christopher Caldwell, a fellow Harvard alum and English lit grad, though the Tocquevillian gravity of the latter can seem miles away from Douthat’s brand of affable pop-culture criticism. The first line of his that caught my attention some years back was a self-effacing shaft that atoned for all his faults. “There are times in any columnist’s life when you worry about being too much oneself, too on brand, too likely to summon from one’s readers the equivalent of the weary line delivered by a colleague listening to J.R.R. Tolkien read aloud from his Middle-earth sagas: ‘Not another effiing elf!’”
Memorable, but a reader not yet acquainted with his prose should be forewarned. In a signature Douthat column, serious political opinion does come sprinkled with references to The Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, Sopranos, and far-out reflections on alien civilizations. Catholicism of the snobbish Evelyn Waugh variety is occasionally thrown in to raise the tone, while notes of moral concern for the beleaguered little man, his family and community, recalls the hearty Chesterton. Another Harvard man and later-life convert to the faith, the law professor Adriane Vermeule, whose Common Good Constitutionalism I reviewed in the first issue of this journal, also belongs to this small but influential constellation of conservative Catholic thinkers, though in his case, membership links him to a solid formation of co-religionists in the judiciary, and is expressed in a semi-Schmittian defense of the legality of the administrative state at a further remove from the preoccupations of a newspaper columnist.
My fellow editors found the idea that Douthat was worthy of an in-depth review far-fetched though like myself they were on the whole sympathetic. Not following him too closely, I was surprised to learn he had written a book, and thumbing through it at the Strand I was expecting, it’s true, elves galore. But it turns out that Decadence rises above the usual fare from the writers of opinion pieces–even the better ones. Take for example, Christopher Hitchens, who wrote many splendid, albeit scurrilous columns, but never a good book. Polemic after ten pages invariably becomes tiresome. A measured reflection, Decadence often goes deep and has what Benedetto Croce called ‘actuality’ all the more surprising since it turns out it was written in 2020, a long time ago if still in the same galaxy.
By its author’s own account, it was inspired by earlier reflections on this hoary topic, in particular crediting two works: Fukuyama’s End of History and Jacques Barzun’s Dawn to Decadence (2000). I didn’t read the latter but in a recent interview with Douthat in the New Left Review, we are told that it “traced the arc of Western culture from the creativity of the Renaissance to the catastrophe of the First World War, which left the public mind maimed and disoriented, producing the exhausted stasis of a consumerist ‘demotic society’.” Its influence, however, turns out to be more in the nature of a gesture than a debt. In fact, Decadence negates the premise of Barzun’s periodization according to which the downward phase of Occident set in after 1920. For that would encompass the entire America Century, flattening what Douthat sees as the highpoints of our civilization, with the ’69 moon landing epitomizing for him the can-do Promethianism of this happiest and most prosperous time in the history of mankind. The best years of the West from an American perspective came after WWII.
Douthat identifies as a conservative but he does not subscribe to the tale of moral decline beginning in the 60s ordinarily associated with the type. Despite his sympathies for the Latin Mass, he is far too much a product of the cultural changes of his time to rehearse such sermons and he knows it. In one of his columns, the 90s are held up as a golden age of pop culture, a happy interval between the backlashes of the Reagan years and the era of full-blown identity politics, i.e. more or less the Clinton years.
It’s not evident then when the descent supposedly began: was it after Apollo, Vatican II, the fall of Communism, the financial crisis, or perhaps the last episode of Seinfeld? The haziness of his periodization stems from his reluctance to provide a definition of the phenomenon itself. For most, ‘decadence’ evokes a luxuriant and immoral aestheticism but what our author seems to have in mind would probably be better conveyed by ‘exhaustion’ or ‘closure’.
These two words summon up the other theorization he cites as formative, Fukuyama’s The End of History. To encapsulate the relationship between the two, it could be said that Douthat foregrounds what the latter had relegated to pessimistic afterthoughts.
“I read it in the late 1990s, well after it came out, and just thought: this is right—this describes the world. In a way, my Decadent Society (2020) is a sequel to The End of History, asking what the end of history looks like twenty years on.”
How this morose reflection on the exhaustion of our civilization relates to the liberal triumphalism of America’s answer to Hegel may not be obvious but anyone who’s actually read Fukuyama’s book will probably recall the downbeat tone of its conclusion.
“The end of history will be a very sad time…The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post historical period, there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.”
The 90s were a moment when the big picture seemed to have come into view. Victorious, globalizing America looked like a rough approximation of the homogenous end state that Kojève had foretold, though undoubtedly a more relaxed place. It’s often said that in the absence of a common enemy, and indeed of any threat at all to the system, American domestic politics started to get loopier, as the vacuum of ideological strife came to be filled with a lower-stakes value conflict that was now allowed to rage. What form would intelligent conservative dissent take in this liberal-democratic universe after the defeat of not only the major adversary but even some of the minor ones, like the unions, welfare queens and progressive taxation? Even violent crime has come down. Unlike in Western Europe where intellectuals had once been attracted to radical left-wing creeds and now confronted a wholly new situation, in the US no comparable opposition ever broke through into the political system, and so the end of the Cold War resulted in only a modification of the inherited themes of political contention between conservatives and liberals.
“America never had an ancien régime of that sort nor a really potent form of radical left-wing politics. So conservatism in the States has tended to focus more on the shallowness of liberalism than on its dangers.”
People who follow politics don’t often realize how confusing it has been for the average American to hear about ‘neo-conservatives’ and ‘neo-liberals’. Even the ones who do follow the discourse might be hard pressed to explain the relationship between the two terms. Most people in this country will tell you that a liberal is the opposite of conservative and yet the addition of the prefix puts them into some conceptually opaque relationship to one another. Douthat has pondered this duality as it touches on his own politico-intellectual trajectory from the later 90s when he says he read Fukuyama as a teen convert to Catholicism through his stint as a Cheney enthusiast at Harvard and across the Obama-Trump era (2008-2025) when he came up as a writer on politics and popular culture. Neither extreme having a political home of their own, whatever political opposition there has been in America has been subsumed into this liberal-conservative dyad, giving rise to variations in the degree of their antagonism.
“…there are moments when the liberal world is perceived to be more radical, and the conservative critique becomes more radical in turn; the late sixties were one such moment, and the period we’ve just lived through would be another…. Whereas in the 1990s, with neoconservatives versus neoliberals, they were not that far apart.”
After the mellow 90s, came the crusade against terror and from there an ever-expanding spiral of regime change wars that proverbially never end, widely understood as inspired by neo-conservative ideology. The latter might be thought of as a programmatic supplement to the neo-liberal agenda of world market/civil society pacification in so far as it posits such wars as a means of achieving this end, but also of perpetually forestalling this end so as to always have occasion to call forth “daring, courage, imagination, and idealism”. The sad fate of Nietzsche’s last men could thereby be postponed or mitigated at least. When I was at the University of Chicago back in the years right after 9/11 that’s how they talked.
Fast forward. Decadence was written during the US election of 2020 and takes on the panic gripping liberal America. It offers a less catastrophic account of these years of political derangement, treating them as a symptom of a far graver malady whose correct diagnosis belied partisan narratives. The gist of the argument is that economic stagnation and a long-term decline of birth rates have spawned an intellectually sterile culture unable to create, renew and mediate. The result is an aging dystopia in a perpetual state of frenzy but confronted by no serious threats and so free to make a spectacle of itself indefinitely.
“That combination—restlessness and even frenzied activity that ultimately just recycles and repeats—was also predicted by Jean Baudrillard, famous for his pre-Internet emphasis on simulated reality as the default experience of late modernity. The French theorist answered Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ argument by suggesting that a society facing the closing of its historical frontier would not, in fact, suffer the sleep of a museum docent, the ‘centuries of boredom’ that Fukuyama feared, because of the great ‘postmodern invention of recycling’.”
Although social media had been around for a little while, these were the years in which the liberal wing of the establishment came to see the new online world ocean as a state of nature in need of constant patrolling, sanctions and interdictions. Without discussing the new platforms explicitly, its narrative seems to recognize their metastasizing role in that anno horribilis of ’16. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the relation of cause and effect is left unclear–maybe it was the culture that caused the stagnation, maybe it was the other way around.
In any event, liberal readers were reminded that the political dysfunction that fueled this populist revolt went back to the presidency of Hope and Change, more precisely, to the disillusionment that set in when it became obvious to everyone that the system was unreformable. The only thing left to do was troll and humiliate its most conspicuous representatives. Douthat even hinted that the bailing out of Wall Street on the tax-payer’s dime might have stoked the fire that broke out in ‘16, but the idea that weariness and disgust with catastrophically futile wars could have contributed to stirring up the plebs apparently does not warrant consideration.
Here is what the author had to say about Obama’s improbable successor as well as the nature of the opposition he triggered in 2020.
“The story of the Trump administration to date is one of corrupt weakness, of would-be authoritarianism undone by incompetence…. Trump’s liberal opposition is one of transformation, half accomplished so far, into an ideological formation, woke progressivism, that mirrors the decadent phase of the conservative movement in its ideological demands and litmus tests, its airless certainties and willful disdain for moderation.”
These appraisals of the contending sides support a suggestive theorization of a new mode of governance: “kludgeocracy, meaning a system in which every solution is basically an inelegant patch put in place to solve an unexpected problem and designed to be backward-compatible with the rest of the system. As with computer programming, the pileup of kludges creates a very complicated program that has no clear organizing principles, is exceedingly difficult to understand, and is subject to crashes.”
This system, whose Weimar prototype was called ‘polyocracy’, is not confined to America. The program has virally replicated and is now entrenched in the political hardware of much of the so-called collective West. Europe offers in many respects a purer specimen of the type. “In effect, the centralizers of the modern EU created a regime in Brussels that imitated the worst flaws of Washington, DC, but with less democratic accountability and zero historical legitimacy.” While populist upheaval shocked the status quo in the US and UK in ’16, the European ruling classes’ greater insulation from comparable pressures resulted in a far more brittle regime of the extreme Center, one whose fate now hangs in the balance.
Such is the political surface of the underlying dégringolade of modern civilization but its scope is more comprehensive: “when you look at the data rather than just the impression, there is a strong case that while the speed with which we experience events has quickened, the speed of actual change has not. Or at least not when it comes to the sort of change that really counts: growth and innovation, reform and revolution, aesthetic reinvention or religious ferment.”
Among Douthat’s assorted indices of decline–intellectual, political, economic and demographic—his survey accords primacy to the latter two factors and principally in their impact on a fifth, the psychological. A tacit materialism has growth and procreation determine–or perhaps express–the prevailing degree of optimism towards the future. For a society defined by perpetual expansion, decadence is what happens when the frontier closes.
The most alarming aspect of the multi-faceted involution of the West is demographic. In the interview mentioned above Douthat maintains that on this front, things look even more dire than they did back in ’20. Whereas the thesis of the book was that decadence, like green capitalism, was sustainable, when it comes to population, we’ve now gone beyond that towards the brink of accelerating, irreversible depopulation.
“When I was writing The Decadent Society, fertility rates had settled somewhere between 1.2 and 1.8 births. From my perspective, that’s a zone of sustainable stagnation—a society that gradually slows down, gets older, gets more sclerotic, but keeps going. But in the last five to ten years, there’s been a step change, for reasons that may be partly to do with Covid, but also to do with smartphones. The range is now 0.7 to 1.4 births. South Korea is the prime example, but you see it in Latin America, in Argentina and Chile. That’s a range that is heading towards collapse—nations become unsustainable in that environment. So there again, the decadence thesis no longer applies.”
I would console the Douthat of ’25, and in the spirit of the mellower pessimism of Douthat ’20 propose the obvious remedy to this first world problem which is, of course, mass immigration. If in Europe this has been and threatens to be ever more culturally disruptive, in the U.S. it would increase the percentage of socially conservative Catholics in the population and remarkably this could be done with liberal support. Plus, we don’t have much of the kind of welfare state that pits natives against newcomers. Two, maybe three birds with one stone? The political calculations that keep Douthat from accepting this obvious solution have little to do with population trends. I would encourage him to adopt this longer perspective on what it would actually take to rejuvenate our jaded societies. Unlike the Church, nations like ours really are subject to the law of the transformation of quantity into quality.
Let us descend to that other material determination, the abode of production. One of the problems with a standard decline story when it comes to the U.S. has always been that, even after the 70s when American growth stalled, for a long time no other country seemed to be rising to a height that would bring the alleged decline home with compelling force. Morning in America, victory over Communism, the globalization that followed, and, more recently, a mounting technological advantage over Washington’s main clients—there have been plenty of occasions when tales of decline come to seem less plausible. In 2020, when the book came out, the idea that the capitalist system was running up against the limits of development had gained some traction across the political spectrum and Douthat was open to the idea. He held that our sense of living in an era of unprecedented technological change was “an illusion created by the Internet—the one area of clear technological progress in our era, but also a distorting filter on the world beyond your screen.”
He drove home the point with the following film reference.
“…if you had remade Back to the Future in 2015 and sent a Martina McFly back to ’85, you would have a lot of quips about the shock of life without the iPhone, some amazing shoulder pads, and probably some sort of critique of Reagan-era unenlightenment on same-sex marriage and sexual harassment. But there wouldn’t be the sense of visiting a past that’s actually another country, because compared to the gulf separating the Eisenhower-era and Reagan-era versions of the fictional Hill Valley, California, the 1980s and the 2010s just don’t feel that far apart.”
The onset of a stationary state is the material basis of a decadent cultural superstructure.
“Since the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession exposed almost a decade’s worth of Western growth as an illusion, a diverse cast of economists and political scientists and other figures on both the left and the right have begun to talk about stagnation and repetition and complacency and sclerosis as defining features of this Western age.”
After the pandemic, big government Keynesianism was embraced as a panacea for helping out the little people while also generously bolstering the optimates of tech and finance. Talk of stagnation subsided. America First optimism in the miraculous powers of industrial policy was made possible by the rationales for Bidenomics, just as the latter followed on Trump’s unsettling departures from the economic orthodoxy of globalization. Present-day schemes to reverse decades of deindustrialization swim against the evolutionary current of capitalism itself with grave consequences for military capacity. Along with population fitness, industrial power was the decisive variable in an older establishment discourse on decadence and may come to be seen that way again with the return of a great power competition. But none of this comes into focus in either the book nor, I think, in any of Douthat’s subsequent columns.
It’s clear from the recent NLR interview that he now thinks that we are on the cusp of another technological revolution. In part this is due to the ideological eclipse of stagnationism after the Covid event. But perhaps Ross’s warm relations with the overlords of Silicon Valley and their vice-presidential factotum have played a role in shaping his current view that the American economy is no longer so decadent.
Speaking of overlords, recent developments have put into question the term ‘liberal-democracy’ as an adequate designation of the form of government to which we are subject, and as the editorial of issue 2 pointed out, it is revealing that one rarely encounters the term anymore outside of political science departments. The conservative intellectuals of yesteryear typically expressed qualified support for the institutions of liberal-democracy–‘the worst form of government except for all the others,’ etc.–while remaining skeptical of its core values, which when unchecked tend towards progressive social engineering.
“The strongest case for liberalism is as an effective technology for managing social peace in a complex society–but one that depends upon sources of meaning and purpose deeper than itself, which it struggles to generate on its own.”
As Carl Schmitt once pointed out, such functional rationales for what we call liberal-democracy permit a consideration of other, possibly even more effective technologies of managing social peace in a complex society, especially when whatever you want to call our status quo is clearly failing to generate collective meaning and thus has started to interfere with the management of that society. What are the characteristics of this new regime of capital that has emerged from the womb of a decadent liberal-democracy?
“The civil liberties to be protected and encouraged in this new order are the liberties of pleasure and consumption, and the freedom to be ‘safe’–broadly defined–from threats to bodily integrity, personal expression, and psychological well-being. The liberties to be limited are the liberties that enable resistance, both personal and political.”
The new order apparently has a name although it may be too polemical to enter into the traditional catalogue of regime types going back to the Greeks.
“In effect, Poulos argues, the pink police state partially erases the idea of a public/private divide, replacing it with alternative binaries of health/disease and safety/danger instead. Social problems in this landscape are increasingly medicalized, with the language of treatment rather than moral exhortation a default response to any kind of disruption or unhappiness. Private conduct is freer in the variety of acts that are allowed, but more closely regulated in any case where there is a possibility of not just physical but also psychological harm.”
The safe-space society exists in a permanent state of pseudo-emergencies. How long can this go on for? Is revolt against these asphyxiating conditions even conceivable?
“Something similar happens domestically as well. The most feared ‘barbarians’ in the Western world today aren’t invaders from the distant steppes; they’re the Rust Belt deplorables voting for Trump, the gilets-jaunes burning shops on the Champs-Élysées, the little Englanders forcing their country into an unexpected Brexit.”
The Western pleb, admittedly not as pretty as the proletariat of old, poses no danger to the ruling element. As of 2020, it seemed to Douthat that this sad and puerile decadent society could go on indefinitely, without fear of confronting any serious outside adversary. But what about the more activist element in our society, the growing appeal of socialism to the youth of America and all the clashing of ideologies online?
“Step inside the matrix of online political debate, and it feels like all of history is coming back. Socialists and Marxists, again! Catholic monarchists and neo-pagans, again! Fascists and National Socialists, once again! Step outside, into the unhappy tranquility of everyday middle-class life, where drugs and suicide are far more serious temptations than political radicalism and revolutionary violence, and it feels like you’ve been inside a Violent Passion Surrogate–all the tonic effects of living in the 1930s, but with a much lower body count.”
What happens when this virtual world spills out onto the streets as it occasionally does? Why can’t this passage between on and offline become a new dialectic of opposition?
“…the rebellions would be swiftly reabsorbed into the entertainment portion of the Panopticon, their leaders would be swiftly drawn into negotiations over their audience share and their right to monetize their antiestablishment message–and meanwhile, the underlying problems would continue to be managed, and managed, and managed, by screens and drugs and drones for some indefinite period of time.”
One consequence of demographic stagnation and decline is that the age cohort responsible for renewals of all sorts is a diminishing portion of the whole. As Leo Strauss once wrote, modernity was a Youth Movement to which one might add that today’s youngsters testify to the impasse of this form of society. While it’s certainly too soon to tell, this kind of picture is undoubtedly compelling. Spoiling the effect is the obvious fact that Douthat has an ideological axe to grind for he clearly wants things to remain this way. He and his milieu are sitting pretty and understandably wouldn’t welcome successful rebellions against an establishment to which they belong. Decadence has been pretty good for those who can find the work. “From this perspective, the rich world’s present stagnation, for all its discontents, is actually the best way to balance humanity’s material needs against its tendency toward self-destruction.” This might explain why when he does confront rebellions that aren’t monetized and, on the contrary, bring down the fury of the establishment on the heads of brave young people, even at his own effing alma mater, he just smirks it off. For this troubled, thoughtful man of the faith has nothing to say about an evil of monstrous proportions unfolding before all our eyes. This is a stance that exemplifies the moral and intellectual decadence of our punditry but Douthat has little to say about journalists in his catalogue of decline.
Nonetheless he ends up offering some undeniably astute remarks on the possibility of a consequential politics of opposition to decadence, either of the Right or the Left.
“…my own account of the decadent society suggests that decadence is perpetually seductive even to its critics. In which case, any alternative would need to begin with institutions that have more power and more scale; it would need to be a nationalist renewal, not just a local one, because only the nation-state has the scale and potency to experiment with different political forms without being dissolved or crushed.”
Yet it would not be advisable for a nation whose worst problems are not inequality, injustice and war but rather boredom and meaninglessness to reach for such drastic alternatives. Even in times of higher impact political conflict, the noble ideals of anti-decadence, Douthat suggests, will have a way of making a bad situation worse “with disquieting regularity.” Here his own personal experience of a lost cause can be seen as formative of his entire outlook.
“The experience of being a very young writer during the post-9/11 moment, when many conservatives and some liberals romanticized the return of history and then regretted the war that followed, probably shapes my caution here.”
Although its legacy troubled him, the details of this or any of our subsequent wars apparently have never been of much interest to Douthat. Here he stands out a bit from other contemporary rightwing intellectuals, in conformity with his role as a NYT columnist. One distinctive feature of the writings of Caldwell, Lind, Art, or Layne has been its franc-parler when it comes to foreign policy, at least by comparison with liberals (and much of the left…). This is not remotely the case with Ross whose statements concerning America’s role therein are unfailingly banal. There’s something almost endearing about the naïveté of these edgy ‘wingers when it comes to Europe. Henry James meets National Lampoon’s Family Vacation. One gets the sense that they have zero comprehension of the ancient evils of the Old World. This might be part of why even their Catholicism has something comical about it.
Disillusionment with the campaigns of civilization against barbarism had ballooned into this wider reflection on decline. But none of Washington’s post-Gulf War assertions of primacy have ever occasioned a peep of dissent from our columnist. Why do those who recognize the immense folly of this cause keep on rallying to the colors? The mentality at work is not entirely unlike the infamous heroic pessimism of the inter-war radical Right, although those who fight for the Occident today do not have to worry much about perishing in a storm of steel. Douthat does not shirk from this telling resemblance in explaining the origins of his outlook in a cause that seized his imagination as a young man and from which he later pulled away in sorrow and regret.
“Evelyn Waugh, Unconditional Surrender: “Even good men thought their private honour would be satisfied by war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardships in recompense for having been selfish and lazy. Danger justified privilege. I knew Italians—not very many, perhaps—who felt this. Were there none in England?” “God forgive me,” said Guy. “I was one of them.””
A touch of inflated self-regard in this sly confession but a real insight nonetheless. Sadly, a wholly vacuous recent column defending US aggression against Iran suggests that not even his own insights mean much to him. Frankly, hearing such people invoke conscience may incite the wrath of those who have just had it. Fear that God will not forgive you for you remain one of them.