The Left's Douthat Pushback

I noted previously that Ross Douthat's appointment to the New York Times would hardly mean we'd have "a Buckley-esque voice at the op-eds."

Well, it turns out folks on the left aren't seeing things that way:

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.”

-The Salient, March 3, 1999

“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

You can see why the secular collectivists might get upset. Indeed, check out this nugget on Douthat from Amanda Marcotte:

The New York Times hired Ross Douthat as their new columnist. Which means it’s officially easier for a virgin to get such a plum job than a feminist, at least a female feminist. (Bob Herbert, we still love you!)

But that’s unfair, Amanda!, you might say. Why so harsh on virgins? And this is true---I shouldn’t implicate all virgins or suggest that being a virgin doesn’t mean you can’t be an insightful writer. I would caution against the problem of people who don’t play the game making the rules, and my beef with Douthat over the years is that he’s a wild misogynist, an anti-choice nut who flirts with hostility to contraception, and a panty-sniffer who is willing to engage in misinformation campaigns against those who disagree that sexually active people are evil. I have no doubt he’ll use his perch at the NY Times to do the same.

Douthat's married, of course, but a little detail like that's not going to deter Marcotte from her campaign of excoration.