Ezra Klein's interview with Ross Douthat this week shows us the rather depressing spectacle of someone confronting the fact that they have compromised themselves—by joining forces with something morally hideous—and resorting to all manner of feeble ad hominem arguments and fallacies of irrelevance in order to avoid acknowledging that fact.
Reading through the transcript, it is clear that Douthat is open to criticizing Donald Trump personally. But what he cannot bring himself to do is to admit that his buddy J.D. Vance, specifically, has utterly and basely sold himself. Each time Klein specifically tries to bring up Vance and to get Douthat to comment publicly on the obvious and rank hypocrisy of Vance's positions—Douthat demurs.
Klein, for instance, asks how Douthat would square the Trump administration's professed commitment to "Christianity" with—say—the fact that they deported people without due process to a prison in El Salvador, then mocked them publicly for it on social media, and celebrated their own cruelty, and said these men would never come home, and would spend the rest of their lives there.
Where is the Christian charity in a policy like that? Where is the belief in human dignity or in God's preferential option for the poor and the meek?
Douthat responds, in effect: well, I don't agree with the Trump administration on everything. Maybe their policy of cutting foreign aid, for instance, in a way that is already causing the preventable deaths of innocent children in Africa, is bad. Maybe their deportations to El Salvador are bad. But the administration has "pagan" elements as well as "Christian" ones, as we must bear in mind.
Okay, so maybe Trump is a "pagan" or a "heathen," in Douthat's terminology. But what about Vance, with his performative Christianity? How does he reconcile his ostensible devotion to the Christian ethic with his complicity in a regime that is openly, brazenly, proudly cruel toward the weak and helpless—a regime that does things like make "Studio Ghibli" AI images of its weeping victims?
It's not like Vance has been a passive bit player in these El Salvador deportations, after all. He has spent his time on social media lying his ass off—saying we can't have a "trial" for every person we "deport"—as if he weren't the Vice President of a country that has in fact already established mandatory adjudicatory hearings by law to handle deportations...
And as if to "deport" someone in general was the same thing as deporting them deliberately to a hideous perpetual torture-dungeon and then paying another country to forcibly keep them there!
Douthat responds: Well, lots of people compromise themselves in various ways with the forces of evil. Such is the fallen condition of humanity. Such is politics. Lots of people on the Left, too—who may have been otherwise decent people—went along with the excesses of "wokeness," didn't they? ("I don't want to relitigate wokeness," adds Douthat, before relitigating wokeness.)
And sure—maybe some people went along with "cancel culture" at the moment, even though they had internal misgivings. But there isn't exactly a moral equivalence here. No matter how bad you think peak "wokeness" was—no one ever spent the rest of their lives in a foreign torture-dungeon because of "wokeness." No child was ever denied life-saving food aid because of "cancel culture."
Besides, Douthat's argument is a pretty pathetic example of a Tu quoque. It's like: yes, there are plenty of examples of people on the Left compromising themselves with evil. Look at the Stalinists. All the more reason, then, not to be a Stalinist. Good thing I'm not one. Great, that takes care of that: now, Douthat, why, then, are you an apologist for Vance?
No one made Vance run as Trump's Vice President. He did it for power. And having reached that position, no one forced him to defend his boss's most disgusting actions with completely disingenuous arguments on X. He did that for power too.
Well, says Douthat, there are plenty of other examples of hypocrisy in history. Look at how the Spanish conquistadors brutalized people during the conquest of the Americas. That was hard to reconcile with Christianity too. But, Christianity also gave them the grounds for an internal moral critique. Look at Barolomé de las Casas!
To which I say: great! Wonderful! Why don't you follow in the spirit of Bartolomé, then! Let's hear the internal critique! I would love nothing more than for you, Ross Douthat, to make an internal critique of J.D. Vance for patently and obviously violating the spirit of his own professed Christian views!
To which, Douthat replies: well, I'm not necessarily saying this, but one might say, potentially, that secular liberals have no right to hold Christians to any standard of moral consistency, since they deny the metaphysical presuppositions that support the foundations of the Christian ethic in the first place, so they are the real hypocrites, etc.
Another ad hominem. Another fallacy of irrelevance. Let's just say hypothetically that I am the sort of person who says: I believe in the normative force of morality. I take it as a given. How would Douthat then accuse me of hypocrisy?
He would say: "but you deny the existence of God, who is Himself the only basis of all moral normativity!"
To which I reply: you have done nothing other than to simply posit the existence of moral normativity. Which is the same thing I did. The only thing you've changed is to unparsimoniously add a bunch of other gewgaws to it—like the notion that it must also be a person, that it must be split into a trinity, that it must have tortured part of itself on a Cross, etc...
None of which you have any basis in reason for; and none of which add any propositional content that is necessary to establish such a thing as a basis for normativity. So, sorry, not convinced.
It really does seem that his relationship with J.D. Vance is the thing that broke Douthat's brain.
As the interview makes clear, he does not struggle to distance himself from Trump, when confronted with specific examples of the latter's brutality. But, no matter how pointedly Klein tries to ask him about Vance, Douthat simply will not directly answer. He pivots each time. In the entire interview transcript, Douthat himself never once uses Vance's name.
I have used Shelley's image before of "the Rat and the Apostate" to characterize the relationship between these two men. Shelley had in mind Southey and Wordsworth—Southey being the "rat," for trying to turn informer and hand his former allies over to the King for prosecution; and Wordsworth being the "Apostate," for betraying his youthful political idealism.
But the image also perfectly suits Vance and Douthat. Vance too, after all, has turned "informer." He tried to sic the prosecutorial force of the government on a journalist, merely for daring to besmirch the honor of Trump by calling him a would-be dictator. And Douthat likewise has turned "Apostate"—mortgaging his integrity in order to defend the indefensible—namely, Vance and the administration he serves.
But why is Douthat so unwilling to criticize Vance for compromising himself so deplorably? Because Douthat realizes he has been compromised too. And so they will cling together in their moral ruination like Paolo and Francesca.
After all, in defending Vance for being willing to mortgage his integrity to join forces with Trump, Douthat is also tacitly confessing that he has made the same choice:
The bargain with Trump has always been, he says, for religious conservatives, some mix of protection and support — a transactional bargain. And then more recently, a hope that some kind of renewal of American dynamism can bring religion itself back with it.
Which, I will say, is a hope that I have indulged in myself. It’s like: OK, you have different varieties of post-Christianity out there, and you don’t want to ally with the Andrew Tates, but you do want to ally with the people who have big hopes for the future, rather than a woke progressivism that just seems inflected with cultural despair.
To which I can only say, as Hopkins once put it: "Creep, wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind." If this is all the justification Douthat can proffer for sacrificing his integrity and siding with abject evil, he is in a wretched position indeed.
For one thing, after all, Douthat's attempt to make "woke progressives" on social media sound as bad as Trump just once again entirely fails to convince. Leftists on social media may be annoying. I certainly find them annoying at times. Maybe they have some bad ideas. But—again—they never put people in a torture-prison for the rest of their lives in El Salvador, without any due process.
They never locked someone up for writing an op-ed and detained them far from their families on the opposite side of the country.
Whatever one can say against them, they are just nowhere near as abjectly and overtly cruel and evil as Trump has proved himself to be.
And then there's the fact that Douthat's compromise—like all such Tu quoque arguments—presents us with a false binary. No one has to be either the worst kind of self-righteous progressive, or the worst kind of Trumpian neo-fascist, in the first place. No one has to choose between these two restricted options. One could be neither.
The example of someone who was neither is not in fact hard to find; and should come readily to mind for Douthat himself: it's the man who is being laid to rest this week in Rome: the leader of Douthat's Church; Pope Francis himself, may he rest in peace.
The Rat and the Apostate, then, are caught in an entirely false trap of their own devising. No one actually forced them into such moral disgrace. They chose it for themselves—utterly needlessly and arbitrarily. Let them stay there, if that is what they prefer. We don't need them. We can march on without them.
But that is not to say I do not still hope for a re-conversion at some point—at least on the part of Douthat (it's probably too late for Vance, a.k.a. The Rat, at this point; he is too far gone down the path of absolute depravity). For Douthat, I still hold out Browning's wish that Wordsworth—a.k.a., the Apostate; a.k.a. "The Lost Leader"—might see his way back to the light at last:
Then let him receive the new knowledge and wait us,
Pardoned in heaven, the first by the throne!
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