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Don’t Believe the Ross Douthat Hype

The New York Times columnist is being touted as the latest conservative even liberals can love. But his actual work doesn’t live up to the fanfare.

Conservative New York Times columnists have historically occupied a peculiar place in the discourse. They have to intellectualize conservative positions, but in a way that flatters the sensibilities of a center-left audience. This has created a strange genre of writing from the likes of Bret Stephens and David Brooks (who now works at The Atlantic) that will often employ personal anecdotes to highlight positions like “Trump Just Reminded Me of Why I’m Still a Neocon” or “I Detest Netanyahu, but on Some Things He’s Actually Right”. While this approach may come wrapped in more elegant packaging than a Fox News rant, it ultimately serves a similar function: to manufacture consent for a right-wing—and, in the case of Netanyahu, an openly genocidal—agenda while creating enough moral distance to placate the Times’ readership.

Ross Douthat, the paper’s current leading conservative writer, doesn’t quite fit this mold—if only because his brand of conservatism is a little different than the Stephens-Brooks version. For one, Douthat is markedly more socially conservative. His rise as a columnist hinged on his anti-abortion Catholic views, and he still distinguishes himself as a heterodox religious voice within the liberal institution.

But while his religious takes are quite confident, his political views present as more searching and less self-assured. For example, Douthat refused to take a position in the 2024 presidential election between President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, hedging his choice in a column days before the vote. These two modes complement each other. By playing his political cards closer to his chest, Douthat is able to create the appearance that he is carefully thinking through hard choices, which has helped to bolster his credibility with a wider audience. And by leaning on his faith, including in his most recent book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, he positions himself as politically skeptical of various groups—namely liberal institutions, Silicon Valley, and MAGA.

All of these strains of Douthat’s public persona have come together in his most prominent forum yet—his podcast Interesting Times, which, somewhat improbably, has turned Douthat into a liberal darling. A recent profile for Slate explained that the podcast creates “a communication line between us embattled liberals and the barbarians at the gates”; the piece’s headline called Douthat “the one conservative liberals will actually listen to.”

But appearances can be deceiving. In the inaugural episode, Douthat introduced the show as “a set of conversations that attempt to map out the new political order with people at the forefront.” And Interesting Times certainly does feature conversations; Douthat has conducted over 50 interviews since the show premiered this past April, with the likes of........

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