The Gasbag Takes Off

Yesterday I started reading a sentence aloud to Rachel from a story in The New York Times. I challenged her to guess who wrote it.

I began: “It was a perspective that was morally permissive and self-consciously cosmopolitan, uniting multilateralism and…”

I printed it large because she yelled it.

Yes, it was indeed Ross Douthat, the famous whiny conservative blowhard, in his final column for The Times before leaving to become a full-time correspondent for “60 Minutes.” Just a few days ago I wrote about how dreadful a hire this was.

I was disappointed Rachel didn’t give me the opportunity to finish, because that half-sentence had only just begun to plumb the echoing depths of its ism-rich pseudo-intellectual stank-cellar. This was the rest: “ … uniting multilateralism and hawkishness in foreign policy, and optimistic that a meritocratic elite could guide a globalizing world toward prosperity and harmony.”

Typically, a columnist’s farewell piece is self-effacing and a little treacly— though mine did include a fart joke. Not Douthat’s. Never that. Douthat’s farewell was yet another grievance-filled plaint about progressives who’ve made his coddled and privileged life a living hell, beset by enforced liberal orthodoxy. The point I want to make is that this column perfectly typifies why Bari Weiss — the Lucille Bluth of journalism — wants this guy around. He is an apologist for her scabrous, grasping worldview . . . concealed behind a thin intellectual facade.

Douthat is forever defining “populism” as a noble political stance instead of what it is and has always been: the politics of trawling for eyes and ears and hearts and minds by milking resentment over invented hobgoblins that come and go with the times — Chinese laborers, foreigners, feminists, brown people, the intelligentsia, the rich, the poor, whatever is currently unpopular with the masses.

Here’s Douthat’s whole column, but I’ll save you the ordeal. I have distilled it down into two bullets.

• Douthat says he hates Trump, but always manages to somehow express his distaste with a tepid qualifier. He complains that Trump is bad, but was made that way by idiot liberal policies to which he was reacting. In this piece, Douthat actually says this: “But as Trumpism has flailed and failed, it hasn’t consolidated the kind of authoritarian power anticipated by its most alarmed opponents.” (It hasn’t? Really? Let’s just let this particular opinion air out a little in the backyard until it is bearable to approach.)

But here’s the big one: Douthat wrote the following: “I lived with the blue-state governance that doctrinaire progressivism encouraged, and it yielded civic and educational collapse.” Aaaand: “I lived through the years of peak woke, and it was a McCarthyite experience.”

So. Just to be clear, Douthat is talking about the tyranny he perceives from lefties who are trying to instill a groupspeak ethos into society at large, using shame to foist their progressive views about American history and proper moral and ethical conduct on good people like himself. A thinly defensible position, perhaps — until he went full McCarthy.

To be precise, Joseph McCarthy’s shameful five-year reign in which he was coddled by mainstream Republicans — including the president of the United States — out of fear of angering his populist “base,” destroyed tens of thousands of lives. It drove people into bankruptcy. It drove people to suicide. It ruined actors, writers, artists, university professors, teachers, and scientists. Its second tier, the Lavender Scare, hounded at least 5,000 gay and lesbian federal workers out of their jobs, rooted out by the government for being “perverts.” Many people took their own lives, including a Democratic U.S. senator who was blackmailed by Republicans under the threat of exposing his son as gay. The senator shot himself in the head in his own office. The stench against gays continued long after McCarthy was dead: In the federal workforce, it was a fireable offense to be homosexual until … 1975.

Meanwhile, Ross got his fee-fees hurt. He still hears the jackboots.

I want to end by giving Douthat some credit where credit is Douthat. He is well-educated. Maybe he isn’t just a guy who randomly applies big words to everything, until everyone around him except Bari Weiss starts yelling Shut The Fuck Up. Maybe he is a brilliant wordsmith, light years ahead of the rest of us.

So let’s look at this sentence of his again, with charity in our hearts, but the granular mindset of a copyeditor:

“I lived through the years of peak woke, and it was a McCarthyite experience.”

Maybe Ross wasn’t misusing “McCarthyite” where he meant “McCarthyesque.” Maybe he actually WAS comparing his experience not to a victim of McCarthyism, but to “McCarthyites,” who were McCarthy’s thuggish enablers, ardent supporters of the man and his mission. Maybe he was speaking on behalf of the poor McCarthy dupes and loyalists who found themselves demonized after their hero had been exposed for what he was.

I’m happy to give Douthat that benefit of the doubt.

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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

How funny is today’s story that Donald Trump was smuggled from one plane to another in an airline catering cart, because of credible death threats from Iran? (Meanwhile, the plane he was supposed to be on, the one deemed too dangerous for him to take, was apparently allowed to carry members of the media and members of Trump’s staff, who had not been told of the problem.)

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And semi-finally, here is the best tweet I have found on the subject:

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Good.

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