The End of History and the Last Pundit
For those who are not, properly speaking, liberals in a philosophical sense per se. Plus: Twenty songs (minus fourteen)
For those of you who subscribed through or because of my post on clergy quit lit and solidarity, welcome and thank you! This essay is going to be pretty far afield from anything church or clergy related, so if you are interested in more content on those topics, I recommend Christ and Culture, The Parables of Jesus: Into the Parableverse, a post on four futures for a mainline denomination, and this one on a Just Some Guy Ecclesiology. But this one should be fun, too.
Every liberal’s favorite conservative
I am, I admit, a superfan of New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. I’ve been reading him since his early days at National Review and The Atlantic, I’ve reviewed two of his books (only one of the reviews, on The Decadent Society, made it into print), I rarely miss his columns, and I even catch every episode of the “Matter of Opinion” podcast. So I immediately clicked on Isaac Chotiner’s New Yorker profile (via WRB) and read it in the crannies of time between meetings, driving, and making dinner (the profile even got the rare between-dinner-task read). Nothing in it was revelatory or even surprising, at least to someone who’s read most of Douthat’s work for as long as I have. I don’t know Ross, though I recognized his name when he appeared on the scene and I think we’ve had some mutual acquaintances over the years.1 I like his work for all the reasons Isaac Chotiner and his sources explain in the piece, and for some specific points of sympathetic recognition I’ve experienced in his writing.2 He’s an astute observer of political culture, and culture generally, and he writes with a rare degree of openness to the claims of different kinds of views (even, or maybe especially, when those claims don’t have much more to recommend them than vibes).
But what long-time readers will have noticed, and what Chotiner doesn’t really bring up, is that Douthat stopped writing about public policy at some point. And by “stopped writing about public policy,” I don’t mean Douthat stopped being a wonk who gets deep in the weeds of program design, which he never did, and I don’t mean he stopped focusing on the big picture questions rather than more marginal policy areas. I mean he literally doesn’t write about what the government does. When he and Reihan Salam wrote Grand New Party, there were actual policy proposals that were coordinated to the social outcomes they wanted. I didn’t find them very convincing, but they existed, and they were plausibly treated as means to the goals their politics valued. That’s all long gone now. Sure, he’s imagined a Trumpism-without-Trump path for his party, without specifics, and he’s talked up the few pro-worker, anti-business messaging bills that have come from people like Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio. But Trumpism-without-Trump turned out to be a guy whose applause lines are about “slitting throats” and extrajudicial killing, and the proposals to, say, give workers a suggestion box if they waive their labor-law rights haven’t even been pushed or discussed by the senators who put their names on them. Mitt Romney, whose third act in American politics found him pushing an earnest and serious proposal to enhance support for children in low-income families that could have become law in some form, has announced his retirement. It’s just a dead enterprise.
Not all that long ago, conservative pundits talked about stuff the government does, should do, or should stop doing all the time. But in the course of Douthat’s career, they just stopped doing that. The energy mostly went into the Fox News/Newsmax infotainment space or into highbrow fantasies of a post-liberal rehabilitation of the public sphere. Neither of these tendencies has anything to say about what we might normally call policy questions. Someone like Patrick Deneen can plausibly imagine a new mixed regime being built within the shell of our current order, in which a conservative Christian aristocracy will constrain and guide the democratic forms of public life. Really, you can see the possibility of this Iranian-style regime it if you squint—a Federalist Society-staffed supreme judiciary functioning as a Council of Guardians, while radicalized local and federal law enforcement agencies and informal paramilitaries play the role of the Revolutionary Guard—but there’s no realistic account of how this sort of regime will use government to meet the putative goals of the post-liberals.3 It will have the power to throw drag queens in jail, seize university endowments, and purge Toni Morrison from curricula across the land but all of this will ultimately be in the service of the car dealers and extractive industries who would form the regime’s material basis. That’s how this stuff works.4
Between the hucksters and the people who think that “politics” is short for “my team never loses,” Douthat’s turn to theater criticism and analysis of the gestalt is the only project worth doing or reading. And it really is worth reading! Douthat is a very good critic of contemporary progressivism. He identifies and presses on points of internal conflict, he extracts meaningful dissenting views from the undigested mass of content liberals will not otherwise encounter, and he does these things from a stance of seemingly genuine respect, not just for his audience but for the claims that animate ideas he doesn’t personally share. This is why he’s the “conservative whisperer to liberals” at the New York Times, in the words of Samuel Moyn (with whom Douthat teaches a class at Yale).
This is the unexpected arc of Douthat’s career. He started out trying to persuade conservatives and Republicans to adopt different priorities and policies, but they declined to do so. Later, he put considerable effort into making a reformist or soft-populist conservative case against Trump, which conservatives also politely declined. He’s spent the more recent phase of his career trying to talk to liberals instead—really, I think, pleading with them to reform their own relationship with the society they want to lead in various ways. That his conservatism is genuine I don’t doubt, but it is fundamentally a foil for liberalism for the sake of liberalism’s own sustainability.
That is to say, Ross Douthat is also, in the broad sense, a liberal. He denies this in the profile:
Douthat looked a bit sheepish. “I think liberalism has strengths and weaknesses,” he said. “I think it benefits from critiques from both the left and the right. It needs them to work. I don’t see an alternative to liberalism available at the moment which is worth shattering society in order to obtain. But if you said, ‘Philosophically, are you a liberal?’ No, I’m not.”
I’ll translate this for anyone who isn’t familiar with the way people in this world talk:
Yes, I’m a liberal.
We can all play this game. No writer who tries to be bold and innovative wants to self-identify, “philosophically,” as a liberal. Philosophically I’m a Christian existentialist, which means I’m either an anarchist or a supporter of autocracy or a revanchist Danish monarchist. You put all those things together an they average out to a boring supporter of liberal democracy, someone who prefers adapting what is, “at the moment,” subject to ongoing critiques from all sides, because “shattering society” sounds like a pretty bad proposition. There is precisely one world where the particular public life the Douthat profile describes can happen—where you can have a big Catholic family, worship in a conservative church full of big Catholic families, send your kids to a progressive school, teach at an elite secular university, debate anyone you want on whichever terms seem good to you, and muse about whether Jeffrey Epstein was a “foreign intelligence asset”5—and that world is our world. The term for its uniquely incoherent internal arrangement is “liberalism.”
I don’t want to implicitly overpraise the policy seriousness in left-wing and liberal commentary here. Progressives seem to have gotten less willing to set priorities among competing goods, less interested in the details of policy design, more inclined to tolerate errors from people on the team, and less inclined to acknowledge good points from outside the team. But most of the material policy debates that once happened between right and left, albeit often splitting the coalitions in some way, are now intra-liberal arguments. Housing policy, immigration regulation, restraining and paying the costs of the health system, managing the transition to carbon-free energy, the once-Trumpian goal of industrial policy and infrastructure are comprehensively argued out within the liberal left. Even the debate about reading instruction, which as a policy matter was really kicked off by the George W. Bush administration, seems to have become an intra-liberal issue. In some cases this is because conservative and libertarian critiques from an earlier era have been absorbed (this is especially true of housing policy, where some liberals sound like libertarians used to sound). In some cases this is because the faltering of the neoliberal consensus opened the door to more left-wing ideas. But all of it happens without any current participation by the conservative policy world. Douthat’s party has a framework in place for consolidating itself as a post-liberal regime—subordinating universities to political control, restricting the franchise, punishing corporations that publicly oppose state action, banning inconvenient books from being discussed on public property, nullifying court elections and so forth—but no clear ideas of what to do with all that consolidated power. The left has a lot of ideas of what to do with state power but no idea how to either obtain that power within our constitutional structure or transcend that structure in a new kind of regime.6 That’s why someone like Jamelle Bouie, Douthat’s Times colleague and a more rigorous and scholarly writer, is even deeper in the political wilderness than Douthat himself.
History is Still About As Over As It’s Ever Been
So it seems to me that Douthat’s career is a witness to a form of modern liberalism whose crisis (maybe it is only ever in crisis) can generate internal challenges but no real alternatives. People talk about Orban’s Hungary, which offers a picture of how the state can punish enemies and more effectively direct government contracts to your cousins, but offers no “social model” for increasing fertility or church participation or even economic growth apart from foreign direct investment. Russia’s power is contingent entirely on energy exports (Russians also don’t go to church, for what it’s worth). China seemed to be the most sustainable alternative but for fairly obvious reasons it doesn’t have many partisans in the democratic world. None of these regimes are going anywhere any time soon, but with the partial exception of China, their departures from “liberalism” serve only to protect bad governance rather than to enable bold experiments. That’s the threat to liberal democratic governance today: not a daring leap to a dangerous and generative new paradigm, but a campaign for economic rents and cultural stasis, behind a trenchwork of unaccountable political bodies and nullified civil liberties.
Most people who commentate for a living are understandably unhappy with this limited horizon. It’s probably why many of us have exaggerated the coherence and scale of threats from outside. If you re-describe the grueling, dull work of counter-terrorism as a “clash of civilizations” or drop in some untranslated Russian terms to amp up the mystery of Putin’s grubby and vicious power grabs, it sounds cooler and more dramatic. But the call has always come from inside the house—from our own willingness to strip the weird edifice we’ve built together from real citizenship and mutual responsibility for parts. Douthat gets criticism for tracing every excess of paranoia, conspiracy thinking, or outright violence on the right back to the failure of mainstream institutions to secure their public legitimacy. But from another perspective, Douthat is just saying that no help for liberal democracy is coming from conservative institutions and intelligentsia—not from the ideological media, the think tanks, the evangelical churches, the Catholic bishops, or elected leaders. If liberal democracy is going to be preserved, progressives will have to do it by themselves, with their own misshapen coalition of civil-society do-gooders, professional public servants, campus chatterers, live-and-let-live suburbanites, unionized workers, and politically activated identity groups. I doubt Douthat really believes that, and he certainly doesn’t say it. But he writes as if it’s true, and that’s what matters. If it weren’t true, he would be writing for someone else and not for you. Even when he’s wrong about the specifics, he’s right that the administrators of a liberal order need to pick their way very carefully through a landscape of threats that can be managed, minimized, compromised with and even absorbed, but never eliminated.
Twenty Songs
I picked up the meme from Barbara and wrote out my whole list of “personal canon” songs, but like most double albums, it would be better with only the strongest numbers. So here goes: My twenty top songs, minus the ones I didn’t think I did a very good job writing about.
There are better Rolling Stones songs. There are arguably better songs on the same album. But this is the song I’ve listened to more than any other, and one I will happily listen to over and over again forever. On the surface, there’s not a lot going on here. I don’t think I fell in love with it on first listen. The opening riff sounds kind of pro-forma, the lyric is muddy and desultory, the refrain is just the same line twice with “sleeping” replacing “dreaming.” But then it comes together, the lines of the verse all starting on the subdominant chord, going up to the dominant, then landing on the tonic, the chorus reversing the order, and the horns vertiginously sliding up from the A to the E to put an exclamation point on it before staggering back down. It’s about disappearing into drugs and having, apparently, unsatisfactory sex—a lyric stuck in neutral over an up-tempo arrangement. Inertia, but make it fun. I’ve never been an oversexed, bottomed-out rock star, but the emotional range of the song hit me early and comes back over and over again. Sometimes life is being stuck doing something that isn’t good for you and you don’t really enjoy, and yet not wanting to stop. You just wait for the horns to carry you back up to the top of the slide before slipping down again.
Why lie? This is just a great song, a little short story about youth, escape, and the perilous, thrilling transition to adulthood. It’s not quite a love song—one imagines the “words I ain’t spoken” are a confession of love—but it’s about linking hands to run away. “The ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away / They haunt this dusty beach road in the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets.” The choice is clear: me, my guitar, and the uncertain destiny of the highway, or the land of the ghosts. It’s got the best populist artistry of this phase of Springsteen’s career, with the tinkling, almost old-fashioned piano line building to the sax-and-glockenspiel outro that’s as big and open as the highway out of a nameless town.
I am holding myself to a ration of one (1) Jesus song on this list and this is it. It’s about salvation in a very direct Biblical idiom. She will meet Jesus, wear a diadem, walk the streets of gold. But all of this is phrased with the vocabulary not just of gratitude but astonishment: “My soul looks back and wonders how I got over.” The shadow of American racial oppression hangs over this song, of course, so there is a doubleness to these images of endurance and vindication. The powerhouse version by Aretha Franklin in Amazing Grace is a revelation, the sort of thing you can pull up from memory in considerable detail after only a few listens. The pre-chorus is beautiful, too, all on its own, that diminished chord setting up the yearning that faith fulfills.
“Amelia,” Joni Mitchell
What Joni Mitchell does with tunings and chords is poetry of its own, and here they fit the lyrics perfectly. It’s about wanderlust, with the terrestrial peregrinations of the singer mirroring the courses of airplanes and of the song’s doomed namesake. The lack of fulfillment in the lyrics is echoed by the suspended chords, which build and revolve but don’t come to a stable resolution. “Maybe I’ve never really loved / Maybe that is the truth / Spending my whole life in clouds at icy altitudes.” Yearning without an object and wandering without a destination.
This is a song about grief, not just for an individual (my pet theory is that it is a belated, rueful acknowledgment of Reed’s onetime trans lover Rachel, whom he apparently treated even worse than the rest of the people in his life) but for a whole world that was carpet-bombed by AIDS. The ghosts are vividly captured in single lines, while the living remain nameless. The chords modulate up by a fourth after every other verse; there’s no disjuncture or dissonance, but only the shifting disorientation that comes with grief. The pattern can keep going on and on. “See you next year, at the Halloween parade.”
“Democracy,” Leonard Cohen
It is not easy to write a truly good “political” song. Protest songs, labor and civil rights anthems, muckraking narrative pieces can all serve and even transcend their purposes. But to sing in an interesting way about political life as such, or about a moment in history, is a pretty rare achievement. Cohen wrote and released this song in the late Regan-Bush years, in the immediate post-Cold War period that gave us Neil Young’s stirring but sloppy “Rocking in the Free World” and the Rolling Stones’ just mediocre “Rock and a Hard Place” (along with Francis Fukuyama’s perennial banger The End of History and the Last Man). Cohen anchored the song with a martial snare-drum intro that recurs throughout, and the lyric’s perspective pivots from contemporary to historical and from intimate to global. Democracy here is not a destination but a process that emerges from personal and collective struggle, spiritual aspiration, and tragedy (it took me years to hear the line “ashes of the gay,” and it still makes me shudder). There’s plenty of irony here, but I will shout along with the chorus like a true believer: “Sail on, sail on, O mighty ship of state / To the shores of need, past the reefs of greed, through the squalls of hate.” Reefs and squalls there have always been, threatening the vessel and narrowing the course to a route no one may wish to take, and still there’s nothing to do but sail on. History’s horizon moves, but only as we do.
My post “Conservative Pundits as I Knew Them” is unlocked for subscribers at the Melanchthon tier.
If anyone knows where his column? newsletter? whatever he wrote about The Flight of Peter Fromm is posted, would you please send me a link?
Not to belabor a point about the people who are chomping at the bit to replace democracy, but if you think a post-liberal regime can do policy things to get people to marry or whatever, you could just make the case for the government doing those things now and see if you can get people to agree with you.
I would like to do an in-depth interview with any of the people who proposed or green-lighted a name (Regime Change) for Deneen’s new book that recalls the greatest single policy disaster in recent American history.
A possibility I don’t find at all implausible.
I wonder if this is why Douthat’s left-wing Yale colleague Samuel Moyn, a very smart and informative writer, nurses his loser’s crush on right-authoritarianism: at least it has a plan for breaking the hegemony of liberal institutions.
Douthat mentions Fromm in his book Bad Religion...?
(Martin Gardner’s 1971 novel-of-ideas, The Flight of Peter Fromm, features a young seminarian driven mad by Reinhold Niebuhr’s evasiveness on supernatural questions: “He tapped his finger on the book’s brown cloth cover and said angrily: ‘Can you imagine this? There are six hundred pages here. It’s a full statement of the theology of America’s most famous Protestant thinker. How many references do you suppose there are to the Resurrection of Christ? … Not one! Not a single one!’”)
I suppose this is a nit, but Jamelle Bouie is the human embodiment of "politics as 'my side never loses.'"