What can a thoughtful right-wing intellectual reasonably hope for today?

A response to Ross Douthat

Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump delivers remarks during a campaign event on November 11, 2023 in Claremont, New Hampshire. (Photo by Scott Eisen/Getty Images)

I consider Ross Douthat an important interlocutor. That’s because, following Lionel Trilling and John Stuart Mill before him, I’m a liberal who believes the best way to ensure that his own liberalism avoids dogmatism and complacency is to place it in critical conversation with intelligent conservatives.

There are several reasons why Douthat is ideal for such a dialogue: He’s very thoughtful about a wide range of topics, he treats liberals with respect (which is necessary, given his overwhelmingly liberal readership as a New York Times columnist), and he really is a conservative—a man of the right. The latter point explains why, despite opposing Donald Trump from the start and (as far as I know) never wavering in that opposition, he has also shown no inclination toward embracing the Democrats as the GOP has become a party of Trumpist populism. (I suspect this unwillingness to break with the Republican Party explains some of the animosity directed toward Douthat by my friends and colleagues at The Bulwark, many of whom voted for and regularly defend Joe Biden, despite having spent most of their professional lives as Republicans—showing that deep down they may well have been liberals all along.)

All of those positive qualities were on display in the newsletter item Douthat published with the Times last Friday—an item that mentions and glancingly criticizes my own recent Times op-ed about the catastrophism of the contemporary right. As usual, Douthat’s claims are interesting and worth engaging with for their own sake. I will do some of that in this post. But in the hope that he sees value in wrestling with respectful liberal criticism, I will also raise questions about the limits of Douthat’s own approach to understanding what’s happening on the contemporary right—and the place of ideas within it.  

Possibility, Excitement, and Energy in Ideas

Douthat’s subject is the place of ideas within the present-day American left and right.

Focusing first on the rise of social-justice progressivism (or “wokeness”) on the left, Douthat suggests it’s mainly an elite-driven, top-down trend in which ideas and the people who devise and promulgate them have taken a leading role. As he writes,

Progressive belief isn’t purely an elite phenomenon, but the Great Awokening has largely wielded influence through what Nate Silver calls the “indigo blob,” a center-left network of schools and foundations and media enterprises and human resources departments. It has not really sought power through elections — in part, I would argue, because its project is fundamentally therapeutic and educational, placing soulcraft before statecraft. But also because when it’s been tested at the ballot box, it’s been a loser. That’s why President Biden, not Elizabeth Warren, is the leader of the Democratic Party right now, even if some of Warren’s ideas have prevailed behind the scenes, through the staffing of the White House.

As a liberal who both criticizes “woke” trends and tries to avoid exaggerating their importance, this sounds broadly correct to me.

The same goes for the contrast Douthat draws between this elite-driven, top-down process on the left and the emergence of right-wing populism in the United States and around the world: “On the right-wing populist side, you have a rather different phenomenon, a political revolution—the earthquake of Trumpism, the similar shocks in Europe—that far outruns any theory of what it’s about or what it’s doing and leaves the intelligentsia rushing to catch up.”

That, too, sounds right to me—both in itself, and as an illuminating distinction between the left and right at our moment. I also highly recommend the paragraphs of Douthat’s essay laying out how this difference emerges from and interacts with America’s ongoing and intensifying educational polarization.

But I’m more interested in the paragraphs that come later on in the essay, where Douthat begins to talk about the role of intellectuals in the populist right—not in devising the right-populist revolution itself, but in following along behind to fill in the details of the “populist alchemy” Trump effectuated largely by instinct. As Douthat puts it, “Someone is still needed to actually run any political order that the alchemy creates, to fill in all the details of the Great Man’s sketch, to make the inchoate somehow cohere.” That’s the work intellectuals can and must perform, and though it can be a “thankless and hopeless job,” it can also be, Douthat assures us, “an exciting one, with more space given to the individual thinker than in the somewhat more herdlike atmosphere of the liberal intelligentsia.”

But there’s more: Precisely because the right-populist revolution was originally so surprising, and even shocking, to so many, it also “creates a wider sense of political possibility in general,” encouraging “right-wing intellectuals not just to fill in the blanks of Trumpism but also to imagine further revolutions. If Donald Trump can seemingly impose his worldview on a major political party, what other worldviews might be more viable than we think?”

Here we reach the core of Douthat’s concerns—both on this topic and more generally. Douthat dislikes and fears above all what he calls “decadence,” which can be defined as cultural, economic, sociological, and political exhaustion and stagnation. It follows from an underlying constriction of ambition and imagination that Douthat sees at work on multiple levels within our country and even across Western civilization in recent decades. Anything he sees working against that trend, inspiring greater ambition and imagination, excites him. That very much includes the work of right-wing intellectuals, which, he claims, became “much more interesting and experimental during the wild four years of Trump’s presidency.”

Douthat acknowledges that this “sense of excitement and energy” can be dangerous, and he illustrates the concession by pointing to the figure of John Eastman, who did his best to convince Trump he could overturn the results of the 2020 election, thereby contributing in a significant way to how events unfolded on January 6, 2021. Eastman was one of the figures I examined in my own Times essay, and this is where Douthat turns to me, conceding as well that the apocalyptic impulse I highlight on the right clearly exists, even if he disagrees with me on a number of other matters he notes only in the most cursory way.

But the real, or deeper, disagreement with my essay has to do with my decision to emphasize “the sense of doom” shared by the various thinkers I examined. In doing so, Douthat thinks I neglected the more positive appeal of their ideas: the feeling of “possibility—the excitement of living through a revolution and playing a dramatic part.”

Hope and Hopelessness on the American Right

I have two broad points to make in response.