Ross Douthat, the New York Times op-ed
columnist, probably didn’t imagine that he would spend much of
the past six months writing about Donald Trump. For a brief
moment in 2012 and early 2013, it seemed possible that
Republicans, chastened by Barack Obama’s re-election, would
regroup and recalibrate, and perhaps pursue what Douthat and
Reihan Salam (a Slate contributor and fellow “reform
conservative”) had called for in their 2008 book, Grand New
Party: an economic agenda focused on the middle class and
policies friendly to an increasingly diverse America. Alas, the
one 2016 candidate who has really bucked Republican orthodoxy,
at least rhetorically, has been Trump, who Douthat views as a
dangerous demagogue.
Nevertheless, Douthat has been one of the most thoughtful
commentators—conservative or otherwise—on the Trump phenomenon
and what it means for (and says about) the Republican Party.
When we spoke by phone late last week, we discussed the rot that
has infected some of the rightwing media, the future of the
religious right in a changing America, and who a conservative
should vote for in a hypothetical Clinton versus Trump matchup.
The conversation has been edited and condensed.
Isaac Chotiner: How has the Republican campaign affected your
views about the future of the GOP, as you laid it out in Grand
New Party?
Ross Douthat: It’s an odd mix of vindication and depression. The
Trump phenomenon has proved one part of our thesis in a
remarkably vivid and totally unexpected way, while also possibly
suggesting the inefficiency of wonkish policy ideas to address
underlying problems. I don’t think there is any question that
Trump has revealed or exposed a deep alienation of a very
large—larger even than I expected—swath of Republican-leaning
voters from the basic orthodoxies of the party. That is the
problem Reihan and I were trying to point out and have been
talking about ever since. I didn’t expect it to be exposed in
quite this manner, but it has, and it is woven together with
awful celebrity politics and xenophobia and violence—I would say
the dark side of Trump, but it’s mostly all dark side at this
point. As someone who is trying to imagine a future
conservatism, it leaves you wondering whether you are too
late—the alienation is too strong to be addressed in meliorist
ways—and whether it’s a little silly to imagine that a bunch of
pundits and journalists could come up with five great policy
ideas that would fix this problem.
There’s this sense, especially in the media, that with Sanders
and Trump everyone is angry now. It’s an interesting narrative
given that the president’s approval ratings are at or above 50
percent.
Yeah, although that is, I think, almost certainly driven by the
Trump phenomenon in part. I don’t see any other causal mechanism
that could be pushing Obama up that quickly in the last few
months, but anyway, go on.
It’s just interesting that this is the moment when people have
become so angry that they are turning to Trump.
I think you are right. I don’t think that people writ large are
incredibly angry. I think Trump and Sanders are tapping into two
discrete sources of anger that are confined to particular groups
and demographics. I think Sanders is tapping into the
disappointment of a particular slice of the left with the
compromises of the Obama years and some of the disappointments
of liberalism. And Trump is tapping into a larger group than the
white working class, but particularly the white working class,
which is not a majority of the country anymore. So it’s possible
to have this politics of anger that is rooted in about 35
percent of the Democratic electorate and 35 percent of the
Republican electorate but isn’t necessarily shared by the entire
country.
Do you have an explanation for Trump, or is there one that
appeals to you more, whether its trade or revulsion at having a
black president?
I think it’s all of them. I thought that your colleague Jamelle
Bouie’s piece about the racialization of white working class
anxiety—I didn’t agree with all of it—but I thought it was a
reasonable frame for understanding part of what is going on. You
have this era where America is becoming a majority-minority
country in some sense, and you have the first black president
and you have all this talk in the media about this new coalition
of ascendant voters leaving the Republican Party as just this
rump party and so on. I don’t think it is surprising at all that
this would lead to a kind of white identity politics. I think
you have seen that on the right before Trump. You have seen the
anxieties of the Obama era in the Glenn Beck moment and a lot of
what Rush Limbaugh and figures like that have played into.
What I think liberals are disinclined to acknowledge is that all
this isn’t just some sort of purely irrational, racially biased,
or racist perspective. Seen from the outside, or seen from
people who used to be a core Democratic constituency and now
aren’t, there is a sense in which modern liberalism looks a
little like an ethnic patronage machine in which you have
everything from the politics of affirmative action to the
politics of immigration reform, which all seem to be designed in
certain ways to pursue, woo, and reward minority constituencies,
and I don’t think it is necessarily unreasonable for a lot of
hard-pressed white working class voters to see that as a trend
in which they really are losing out.
You may have a situation where a lot of white working class
people feel this way, but you also have a situation where a lot
of minorities, particularly black Americans, feel like the
Democratic Party establishment doesn’t care about law
enforcement injustices against them or isn’t taking large enough
steps to provide economic security or reform drug laws and the
criminal justice system.
I think the fact that the white working class has reasonable
grievances about the drift of liberalism doesn’t mean that black
Americans can’t have reasonable grievances about the status quo.
They can and do. I don’t agree wholeheartedly with what I take
to be the Black Lives Matter vision but they are addressing real
abuses and injustices that people on the right as well as the
left have been acknowledging over the past 10 or 15 years.
What did you make of Kevin Williamson’s piece in the National
Review, which essentially lashed out at white working class
communities that are supporting Trump, and expressed contempt
for them? Is this going to be a more and more common line from
conservative writers in the age of Trump?
I don’t think so. Kevin is a very distinctive writer with a very
distinctive take on these issues. Conservative politics at least
tried to move in the opposite direction in the past few years.
There had been at least some learning from the 47 percent
debacle and what I think is the dead end of talking about makers
versus takers, and talking about how people in the working class
aren’t taxed enough, which was this bizarre theme of
conservative commentary for a few years in the first Obama term.
The drift on the right has been one I have favored, and says we
need to have real respect for the struggles of the working class
and talk about them, and not just cast everyone who gets
government assistance as a moocher, and so on. And you see this
in everything from the campaign Marco Rubio imagined he was
going to run [laughs], to Paul Ryan saying he was wrong to use
the makers and takers language.
You mentioned Rubio, who was often talked about as the
reform-conservative candidate. What did you make of his
presidential run?
Um, I guess I’d say this.
I am interpreting your pause as something less than enthusiasm.
[Laughs.] Well obviously his presidential run ended in failure,
and it ended in failure despite having certain obvious strengths
that made me and a lot of other people think that he was likely
to be the nominee.
Me too.
I am still not sure what I think about his reform conservative
forays and how to integrate them into the story of his defeat. I
think he was certainly the Republican politician who made the
most moves in that direction, especially before he started
running for president. A certain section of his policy agenda
was as close to reform conservatism as any Republican candidate
had come. At the same time, he was clearly trying to inject
those ideas into the existing orthodoxy rather than shaping the
orthodoxy. That’s how you ended up with his tax plan’s absurd
fiscal math, where it was, “alright, the reform conservatives
get their family friendly plan, and the Wall Street Journal gets
its huge capital gains tax cuts.” And then he goes on to talk
about how we have a debt crisis and so on.
None of that ever fully made sense, but I don’t think either the
reform conservative stuff or the Wall Street Journal–friendly
stuff really mattered all that much to how his campaign ended up
playing out. I don’t think that with more talk about a
family-friendly tax cut he would have beaten Donald Trump. I
think part of the lesson of Trump is the power of narrative and
personality to “trump” gamed-out policy agendas. The policy
issue that hurt him was clearly immigration, and that’s an area
where the broad reform conservative tendency tends to be a
little bit divided. I am in the camp that tends to be skeptical
of comprehensive immigration reform. It’s in my interest to say
that if only he had been against it, he would be the nominee. I
do think that’s true, but I don’t want to put too much weight on
the argument.
I still sometimes think that if he hadn’t screwed up so badly in
the debate with Christie he might be the nominee.
Well that too! All of this stuff is so contingent, and after the
fact we sit back and say, “Here are the five forces that went
into his defeat.” That can be true. There are things he could
have done where he would have been in better shape. But if you
take that moment away, he finishes ahead of Kasich in New
Hampshire, he comes closer to beating Trump in South Carolina,
and when he finally turns on Trump, it is not this flailing,
desperate, insult-heavy thing. And he probably is in the
position Cruz is in now.
We should be prepared for being mocked for being two pundits who
still don’t understand that Trump is inevitable.
But Trump isn’t inevitable. [Laughs.] I still think it’s more
likely than not that Trump isn’t the nominee. Once he is the
nominee people can go back and mock this interview.
I was wondering where you see social conservatism now, in 2016.
The conventional wisdom is that the left has, to some extent,
won the culture war.
I think the conventional wisdom is mostly right with, of course,
abortion being the sort of singular exception. Obviously, we’re
talking a day after Donald Trump had an abortion-related public
relations disaster. It’s a place where the playing field is
still pretty level, sort of tilting back and forth, with
incremental gains for the pro-life movement that I don’t think
are going to be reversed in the near term, even with a more
liberal Supreme Court.
On other issues, I would say that the past 10 years have been a
sort of surprisingly rapid rout for socially conservative ideas.
I think if you go back to the 1990s and the early 2000s, and you
see sort of where the country was and where the elite level
debate was, I think there was more support for a kind of
moralistic impulse in public policy around sex, marriage, and
family issues and that has diminished in various ways, and it’s
diminished in tandem with the decline of religious commitment
among young people. It’s diminished in tandem with the same-sex
marriage debate. It diminished with the crack-up of the Bush
administration, which tried to operationalize some of its ideas
with the Marriage Promotion Initiative and the faith-based
initiatives and so on.
Have your own views changed?
They’ve fluctuated, but haven’t changed dramatically. On
same-sex marriage, for instance, I sort of assumed that it was
inevitable starting at a relatively early point in that debate.
Then I’ve sort of gone back and forth on how concerned social
conservatives ought to be about that inevitability. I think once
it actually happened, I ended up more concerned because of the
ripple effects and implications for religious liberty debates or
other debates related to sexuality and so on.
My sense is that conservative objections to same-sex marriage
have gone from being more about the institution of marriage to
now being about religious liberty.
Yeah, I think that social conservatives recognize that they
didn’t just lose the debate about same-sex marriage. They lost
the debate about the institution of marriage, and those two
things were sort of connected to each other. The way people
thought about marriage changed.
It also quickly became apparent that the new front would be: to
what extent are religious groups objections to same-sex marriage
going to be accommodated, to what extent is there going to be
soft or hard social and legal pressure on religious institutions
to change their views of sexuality. And that’s sort of where
social conservatives are right now: They see themselves as
fighting a defensive and possibly losing battle to prevent their
institutions from becoming Bob Jones University. [The school was
denied tax-exempt status due to policies like the one that
prohibited interracial dating.]
Are you surprised by Trump’s high level of support from
self-identified evangelicals? You wrote a book called Bad
Religion.
I did write a book, sort of about what I call American heresies
and how American religion and American Christianity is shot
through these tendencies that I was pretty critical of. I think
Trump’s appeal is connected in part to some of those tendencies.
I think you can see a clear link between certain kinds of
prosperity gospel preaching in support for a figure like Trump.
I think you can see a clear link between certain kinds of
Christian nationalism and support for Trump. Then, I also think
that Trump is benefiting from the weakening of religious
participation. He’s winning evangelicals who aren’t in church.
What do you make of the way some of the conservative media,
including people like Limbaugh and Hannity, has dealt with
Trump?
I belong to a group of conservative writers who have spent the
past five or 10 years occasionally being attacked by figures
like Rush Limbaugh and others with them saying that “these guys
want us to get beyond the Reagan coalition, but there’s nothing
wrong with the Reagan coalition, Reagan is great, and these guys
are just closet liberals, or whatever.” Something along those
lines. Yet, when push has come to shove, and a candidate has
come along who doesn’t just want to sort of reform Reaganism,
but literally intends to just dynamite it and replace it with a
ridiculous cult of personality, those guardians of conservative
orthodoxy either played along for a long time before they turned
on him, like Mark Levin did, or have simply, like Hannity, ended
up as sort of a ridiculous apologist.
Again, I didn’t have an incredibly high opinion of every sector
of the conservative entertainment complex before this election,
but I definitely think it’s been revealing about some people’s
actual motivations and some people’s actual tendencies. I think
it’s exposed a split that conservatives always sort of have
known was there, but haven’t had a good enough reason to
acknowledge, maybe to ourselves. Fox News is really two news
networks. It’s a center right news network that has good, solid,
interesting coverage if you’re watching Chris Wallace or the
panel on Special Report or anything like that. Then, it has what
Hannity and others like him do, which is just a sort of tribal
identity politics for older white people.
Do you think there’s anything to the argument that a party which
basically denies global warming is going to be especially
vulnerable to a huckster?
Yes and no. I think there is something to that argument. I think
the radio host in Wisconsin who interviewed Trump, and actually
held his feet to the fire, said something like, “Look, we have
to recognize that having spent so much time emphasizing how
biased the mainstream media is, we’ve torn down the ability of
media institutions to be gatekeepers.” He didn’t phrase it like
that, but that was sort of the gist of it. I do think liberal
media bias exists, and is very powerful, but, when your
narrative is “you can’t trust what the media is saying,” what
sort of allegedly straight down the middle shows are saying, and
then someone comes along who just sort of lies constantly and
ridiculously, like he lies the way he breathes air, then it’s
harder, and when you have a certain set of conservative media
personalities carrying water for him, it becomes very hard to
just sort of identify and brand him as a liar.
The other thing I’d say, though, is that again, Trump’s audience
is not just a Fox News audience, and that is part of his
remarkable success. He is getting both people who trust Sean
Hannity and people who are totally alienated from the movement
of conservatism and don’t think there’s much in it for them, and
are voting for him to sort of put the thumb in the eye of the
Republican Party as it’s existed.
I know Times columnists are not supposed to endorse, and I know
you have written that if Hillary and Trump are the nominees, the
argument that not voting is the same as voting for Trump is
silly. But do you think that Trump has reached a point of
dangerousness where one really must vote against him?
It’s a secret ballot, Isaac, and I can’t possibly reveal to you
who I would ever contemplate voting for.
I’m not sure of my own answer. In general, I think that not
voting is a perfectly honorable and civic-minded course in an
election with two options that you consider unacceptable. I
think casting a protest vote is a totally acceptable course. I
have done both in my life. If it came to it, where it was
Hillary at 49.2 and Trump 49.1 in the polls, and Connecticut,
where I am right now, was a crucial swing state, that would be
an argument I’d want to consider at length, let’s put it that
way. |