This is why I love Substack. I’ve got a place to write when something earthshattering happens, like Ross Douthat putting a period on his 17 years as New York Times op-ed columnist before he makes his way uptown to the studios of CBS, where he will bring his talents to the sure-to-be dwindling audience of its former flagship news show, “60 Minutes.”
Dear readers, Douthat actually wrote this in the second sentence of his column: “The columnist’s job contains multitudes.” Man, when the New York Times adds up the ledger on Douthat, they are bound to find his employment deeply in the black. I mean, that’s why you read the op-ed page of the Times, isn’t it? For that level of sagacity? You wait for the pay-off of such an introductory clause, and sure enough, Douthat is there for you. He tells us that as a columnist, “it is useful to have a primary antagonist,” which for him has been “the elite consensus of the early Obama era.”
And why is that, exactly, Ross? Well, writing at the end of a week that saw a blizzard of stories on how many millions of children will be left wanting by the Trump administration’s destruction of such programs such as Head Start, food stamps, and school lunch programs, Douthat tells us that the “elite consensus” and its “expert-driven policies…took social liberalism so far that it left vulnerable people adrift or abandoned to their vices.”
That would be all those five-year-olds who used to line up for elite consensus lunches at school and learn to read at Head Start programs who won’t have to feel “adrift” anymore, because the Trump administration, with the blessing of Ross Douthat, has given them the opportunity of providing for themselves the way conservatives have wanted them to do since the beginning of the New Deal.
Douthat goes on to blame the rise of “populism” on the “elite consensus’s failures.” There’s a sentence that’s carrying one hell of a shitload of weight. How the hell is it the fault of the libs that the rednecks fell victim to populism? Well, Ross whines that while “populism” was the “vessel for the hopes” of him and his conservative brethren, it has been dashed on the rocky shores of Trump’s second term, which engaged in cronyism and foreign wars and corruption. But Ross assures us that even as liberals clutch their pearls about the dangers of populism, thank God that “Trumpism…hasn’t consolidated the kind of authoritarian power anticipated by its most alarmed opponents.”
Whew. At least we dodged that bullet.
Douthat tells us that having survived the disappointment of the failures of populism, even worse was the “years of peak woke” he had to endure by being forced to “live with the blue-state governance that doctrinaire progressivism encouraged, and it yielded civic and educational collapse.” During those terrible years, Douthat was employed by the Times and earned somewhere in the neighborhood of $300,000 a year, not including the lucrative speaking engagements that come with the stature of being a columnist for the New York Times.
He describes his travails as a Times columnist as “a McCarthyite experience.” Douthat endured all his torture under the yoke of “peak woke” in New Haven, Connecticut, folks, where he was born and raised and now lives with his wife and five children. Somehow, Douthat dodged the terrible effects of educational collapse by attending a private school called Hamden Hall and Harvard University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
Towards the end of his valedictory column, Douthat takes a couple of pokes in the direction of artificial intelligence, which he has exactly zero understanding of, not to mention opinions about. Douthat laments that the “unpopular populists,” from which he neatly exempts himself, and “the flailing establishment [and] the rising left are displaying their vices in the shadow of the artificial intelligence revolution, which is creating new zones of power in which the friend-enemy distinction is almost impossible for me to parse.”
Well thank goodness for “60 Minutes!” Douthat won’t have to worry about figuring out who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy at “60 Minutes.” The world’s premier anti-woke unpopular populist Bari Weiss hired him away from the New York Times because Douthat arrives having written this sentence: “The liberal establishment is putting the West in the hands of Wokeness 2.0, Hasan Piker Thought and Democratic Socialists of America energy — social progressivism with socialist characteristics.”
There you go, folks. You now know what to expect from “60 Minutes,” at least until its numbers fall so far that its costs will outstrip its profits and the Ellison-Weiss cultural juggernaut shuts it down, which has doubtlessly been the plan all along.
Don’t worry about Douthat, however. Ross assures us “this is my last column for The Times, in this season at least.” Ever failing upward, he’ll be back.
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