Ross Douthat: the College Years
A look at the newest New York Times columnist’s undergrad writing.
Ross Douthat, who was just selected to be The New York Times‘ youngest columnist, speaks at a Pew Forum event in 2008.The New York Times reported yesterday that it had hired conservative Atlantic blogger Ross Douthat as an op-ed columnist. Douthat, who will be one of the youngest—if not the youngest—columnists in the history of the Times’ op-ed page, is being hailed in some quarters as a more intelligent, intellectually honest counterpoint to the columnist he is replacing, William Kristol. Others, however, are criticizing the Times for picking Douthat, citing his hard-line views on abortion on and sexuality.
During his college years at Harvard, Douthat was a prolific writer. He was a columnist for The Harvard Crimson, the university’s daily newspaper, and climbed to the rank of president of the conservative Harvard Salient in 2001.
One of the appeals of Douthat’s new perch, at least for progressives, is that he will not hew as closely to conservative orthodoxy as did his predecessor, Kristol. But Douthat’s college writing shows that, when it came to conservatism’s “meat-and-potatoes” issues, he was far from a maverick. In fact, when opining on the “culture war” and, after September 11, terrorism, he held predictably boilerplate conservative views. While Douthat has certainly produced more recent work that allows his ideology to speak for itself, it’s nonetheless useful to see where he stood at a pivotal point in American politics.
Douthat on culture:
“There is a tendency among ’90s conservatives to adopt a bunker mentality, to insist that the forces of moral degeneration are winning the culture war and that the apocalypse is imminent. But there is a wider world out beyond the Charles and Sunset Boulevard, a place where as many people go to church as did in the halcyon 1950s, a place where everyone owns a gun and ‘conservative’ is not a dirty word. It is a place with its problems, including a debased popular culture and a distressing tendency to elect men like Bill Clinton. But it is not the conservative-hating Gomorrah that some right-wingers like to imagine.”
“Today, everything is available, to everyone, at any time. Every deviant desire, dark fantasy and sordid dream can be realized, at a reasonable price. Forget ‘normalizing homosexuality’—something the Right has been worrying over since the advent of gay liberation. Today, the Internet and DirecTV are normalizing everything, from group sex to bestiality to darker things that decency forbids mentioning. And as for pedophilia—why, any erotic website worth its salt promises links to images of the ‘barely legal,’ ‘young teen sluts,’ and all the rest. Today, Nabokov’s Humbert would need not be a tragic figure; instead, he could have spent his years ensconced in front of a glowing computer screen, with a thousand Lolitas for his delectation.”
-The Crimson, October 30, 2000
“If I really wanted to offend Harvard Asians, I might sit down and write an article in which I was, well, a tad critical of the Asian community. For instance, I might suggest that there was, let’s say, a slight trend toward ethnic self-segregation, or a slight proclivity for the sciences over the humanities among Asian-Americans. And I might, if I were so inclined (not that anyone would be), get downright nasty and suggest that a large chunk of these self-segregated, math-and-science types are self-absorbed, clannish and downright weird.”
Douthat on cloning and abortion:
"In other words, for the first time in our history we will have enshrined in law a class of human beings—cloned embryos—who it is illegal not to kill. Even the moral idiocy of our country’s abortion law, which permits the slaughter of fetuses (or the ‘elimination of the unwanted tissue,’ for those who find refuge in euphemism) at any time and for any reason, cannot quite compare to this. Under the rules set down by Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, American women and their doctors are allowed to kill unborn human beings. Under the rules proposed by those who hope to ban reproductive cloning while allowing the ‘therapeutic’ variety, American researchers will be required to kill unborn human beings—by the hundred and hundreds of thousands, eventually."
-The Crimson, December 3, 2001
Douthat on voting:
“[A]bsent a remarkable change in human nature, it seems unlikely the American multitudes, more concerned with ‘Survivor’ and stock options than with the details of Al Gore’s prescription drug plan, will suddenly bestir themselves, flip on CNN, and catch up on all the politics they have missed during our comfortable, decade-long Gilded Age. More likely, a sudden and artificially induced increase in voter turnout would only mean an increase in the number of ill-informed, poorly thought out and just plain stupid votes. To be blunt, most of the people who don’t vote, shouldn’t vote.”
-The Crimson, September 25, 2000
Douthat on the war on terror:
“At least for now, before the casualties mount and the failures begin and the inevitable partisanship rears its head, we seem to be showing the necessary steel for the task ahead. And at the risk of sounding predictable, let me say how glad I am, and how fortunate we are, to have such a collection of hard men and women (Condaleeza [sic] forever!) at the helm of state today. Rumsfield and Powell, Cheney and Wolfowitz, all make me feel far more secure than the collection of ineffective hand-wringers (Anthony Lake, Warren Christopher) who dominated the Clinton years. (Think, for a moment, what a tissue of squandered opportunities Clinton’s foreign policy now seems.) And yes, in that list of leaders I include George W. Bush, whom even I have always considered a good but slightly callow man, but who seems so far to be rising to the occasion[—]as America’s leaders always have, so far. Call it Prince Hal becoming Henry V, if you will, but Dubya is growing up, and his speech last week before the Congress was one of the one of the finest political addresses that I have ever heard[—]and certainly the best American speech since the close of the Cold War. A friend tells me that she watched the speech with a collection of Harvard Housemates, who spent the entire thirty minutes heaping scorn on the President. This should not surprise, but it does sadden.”
-The Salient, September 27, 2001
“[G]oing back to the beginning of Islam, one finds Muhammed himself—the model Muslim, against whose standard all the faithful must be judged. And where Christianity has a Christ who turns the other cheek and gives himself over to be crucified, Islam has a Prophet who makes war—in self-defense, arguably, but with a glad heart, a warlike spirit and a knowledge that Allah is on his side. It is that example, that spirit of war, that flung the early Islamic empires outward to the corners of the earth, that spirit that inspired militant Muslims down through the centuries—a spirit that divides the world into the House of Islam and the House of Unbelief, and declares irrevocable enmity between them.
That spirit endures to this day. Just ask Osama bin Laden.”
-The Crimson, October 22, 2001
“It goes without saying that [Saddam Hussein], too, is busy trying to acquire a nuclear bomb, to supplement his extensive collection of biological and chemical weaponry.”
-The Salient, February 14, 2002
Dylan Matthews is a freshman at Harvard University and a regular contributor to Campus Progress. Jesse Singal is an associate editor at Campus Progress.
ALEC At It Again, Now Pushing Climate Change Denial in Schools
Facebook IPO Draws Attention To Privacy Controversies
Unemployment Problems for College Grads; Fla. Senate Allows Student-Led Prayer in Public Schools