Masters of Modern Thought

 Ross Douthat published his swan song at the New York Times yesterday—his final column for the paper before heading off into the sunset of Bari Weiss–controlled media. It was a fitting capstone to his career at the Times, in that it summed up a central motif of much of his writing there: namely: I'm not sure who's right, but I know I'm mad about it. 

For years, Douthat has been telling us that, as a conservative Catholic intellectual, he is against liberalism.

But he also knows that most of the illiberal alternatives on offer are not rationally or morally defensible. 

And so, he is often reduced to making a sort of stylistic critique of liberal elites: they are holier-that-thou; they are too sure of themselves; they may be right but they do it in such an annoying way. 

Douthat rejects the permissive culture and "expressive individualism." But he also knows there are good arguments for decriminalizing marijuana, for instance, that are based—not on some positive affirmation of drug culture—but on concerns about mass incarceration. 

So, does he actually disagree on a substantive level with the goal of legalizing pot? Or is he just mad at the way liberals talk about the issue?

One could go on down the list. He found the Obama-era foreign policy consensus obnoxious—with some reason—for its mix of " multilateralism and hawkishness," as he puts it. But one could hurl his own later-disavowed support for the Iraq war back at him; and he has never been conspicuous in advocating against specific examples of real-world U.S. imperial arrogance. 

In short, he is never quite willing to tell us, if liberalism is so bad, exactly which aspect of the classic post-Enlightenment liberal project he would be willing to jettison. Should we not have equality before the law? The principle of one person, one vote? The separation of public and private realms? 

Douthat is in fact close to some people who would bite the bullet on this. Some of them are actual theocrats or Catholic integralists. J.D. Vance—whom Douthat appears to have been closer to before he held office—seems to be developing a sort of Action Française–style blood and soil Catholic nationalism for the United States (an odd fit for a country of immigrants with no Catholic majority). 

When these people say they despise liberalism, one can tell exactly what they mean—and which parts of our modern democratic tradition they would be prepared to sacrifice. 

I am reminded here of Julien Benda's words: "[T]he historian [...] is amazed at the transformation of a species which only four centuries ago roasted prisoners of war in baker's ovens, and, only two centuries ago forbade the workers to establish a pension fund for their aged members. [... T]hese improvements [...] are the results of the teaching of the eighteenth century, against which the 'masters of modern thought' are in complete revolt." (Aldington trans.)

Douthat, though, is a better and wiser person than that. He knows that he can't actually get behind the "post-liberal" agenda on either the right or the left, which he acknowledges in his column yesterday. He doesn't actually want to shed the whole heritage of progress that has been won through the growth and spread of Enlightenment-era secular liberal democracy. 

But if he in fact cannot tell us what, specifically, is wrong with liberalism—then what was the point of all this? Why has he spent so much time railing against it? 

"Once I would have imagined a valedictory essay offering some stirring brief for religious conservatism," he writes in his final Times column; "some last foray into the territory where I was most likely to be in disagreement with my readers. But I don’t think that quite fits the moment."

Perhaps it doesn't "fit the moment" because more illiberalism is very obviously not in fact what America needs in the Trump era? Perhaps because "religious conservatism" is the "one thing a man has had too much of," to repurpose a phrase from D.H. Lawrence? 

Douthat at times in his final essay seems to be saying as much. He says he's not sure who the good guys and the bad guys are anymore. Could it be that what he means here is that he knows exactly who the bad guys are (and they are currently in the White House), but he also can't just make the liberal opposition the "good guys"—because what, then, was the point of his whole career?

He still thinks those smug, technocratic, meritocratic liberals are obnoxious. And, in many ways, they are—though Douthat has never laid out an egalitarian economic agenda that would substitute for meritocracy, that I'm aware of. 

But he also knows that the barbarians are at the gates. Left- and right-wing illiberal populisms seem, if anything, even less defensible than the elite consensus of the Obama years. 

The same goes for those genuinely frightening Curtis Yarvin–style anti-democrats and Catholic neo-reactionaries (today's heirs of Benda's "masters of modern thought") who are so close to our current vice president. (Douthat somewhat disavows them, but then he also borrows phrases about the "friend-enemy distinction" that show he is clearly in dialogue with their closed, neo-fascist Schmittian intellectual world.)

And so, he is reduced to throwing up his hands on his way out the door with a sort of confession of ultimate ignorance; who knows who's right or who's wrong?; "all the oracles are dumb or cheat / Because they have no secret to express; [...] none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain / Because there is no light beyond the curtain;" to quote James Thomson (a.k.a. Bysshe Vanolis). 

I have always been deeply fond of that humble passage from Gottfried Benn's "People Met," (Hofmann trans.), and it seems an admirable way to sum up Douthat's swan song as a Times columnist: 

I have often asked myself and never found an answer

whence kindness and gentleness come,

I don’t know it to this day, and now must go myself.