Apparently the NYf'inT has decided that the demographic it needs to attract to the op-ed pages is White supremacists and head-up-their-ass mushy-middlers who fear Pedro will be elected class president. "There, there," soothes Douthat and the NYT, "the White daddies will soon be home, though maybe wearing some other guise. But it will still be White privilege like you've always known it."
Yeah, that is 100% correct. These guys really believe that there's also a great untapped market of NeverTrumpers they can lure into their maw. Imagine a zombie army of Davey Brookses wandering the suburbs for real news...
Ross is the trad, non-hipster Rod. That's why A) Ross has a gig at Marxist-Leninist NYT B) Rod is way, way more entertaining.
I guarantee that if Rod responds to this op-ed, it's gonna be FIYAH, especially if we get a "reader letter" about how a black trans HR director at his work made him convert to Wicca.
Douthat repeatedly predicted, right up until the last minute, that there was NO WAY the GOP would nominate Trump for President. In fact, he wrote how Trump was actually a "gift" to the campaign of Jeb Bush, for all the WASPY reasons he puts forth here. In other words, not only is it fatuous for him to now say that "we" Americans miss WASPS, he can't even credibly claim that fucking REPUBLICANS miss WASPS. As Roy writes: "But the really ridiculous thing about it is how pointless it is..." This sentence can be applied to every Douthat column. (e.g., Didja see his recent one on how Trump is making the "elite" drain its own swamp? Or the one where...)
A slight qualification: the GOP is, in fact, chock full of WASPs (white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants). In fact WASPs comp[rise the core of the white supremacist/neo-Confederate movement. Douthat is referring to an imaginary world of the old aristocratic sense of noblesse oblige. As we all know, the GOP has long been comprised of the most pig-ignorant bunch of racists and, above all, uninterested in helping anyone except themselves.
Good point, but integrity drives me to admit that I didn't think the GOP would nominate Trump either (though I gave him a good chance when he got in). I wasn't expecting a WASP candidate, however; I thought Scott Walker would lead the March of the Brain-Damaged Dummies. I should have realized that while modern Republican Party leadership shares with its membership a taste for cruelty, a taste to which Walker appealed, the membership needs even its cruelty dumbed down.
I had the polarities transposed: Like many others I thought by spring that he’d snag the nomination, lose the general. Still, I was uneasy enough as early as February to write this to a friend:
As will perhaps be evident, I’m not quite prepared to cast off the conventional wisdom that even the GOP is not crazy enough to permit Donald J. Trump to be its standard bearer this November. But of course, it’s looking increasingly as though while the party poobahs aren’t crazy enough to go with Trump, they are also not strong or smart enough to stop him, that having summoned forth the violent evils that he now embodies, and having carelessly left open a corner of the pentagram, they are shortly to be devoured by the demon king. In my darker moments Trump denialism puts me in mind of those doomed bit players in a summer blockbuster, say, Jurassic Park XVI: “Sure, the monster made it past the concrete barrier, the coils of razorwire, the piranha-stocked moat, the machine gun emplacements, the minefields, the particle beam weapons and the electrified fence, but no way is it gonna clear this spiked palisade here. Sucker’s what, fourteen, sixteen feet high? And it says ‘No Trespassing’ right there. We’re good.”
I never doubted that the New GOP party mutation gestated by decades of rabid talk radio, Fox, Tea Party morons, etc., was capable of nominating Trump. But a small part of me thought they couldn't possibly be that cruel to the rest of the country, until even that particle of hope was vaporized. But Douthat thought that Trump's brutal candidacy was -good- for Bush because Trump "sets up exactly the kind of stylistic contrast that Jeb needed: He and the Donald are now the two most famous names in the race, they’re occupying opposing poles (populist/establishment, raffish/respectable) in a way that makes Jeb look like the safest harbor for anyone freaked out by Trump’s success..." You'd think he would have learned his lesson when Republicans so soundly rejected this theory back then, instead of ascribing it to the rest of us now.
The saying goes that "Democrats fall in love; Republicans fall in line." But the rise of Trump has changed that as the Republican base has fallen in love with Trump (indeed, it was love at first slight) while the leadership first fell in line and now is also in love with him.
Douthat's specialty is appearing like a decent human being. Here and there he'll say things that are moderate and almost reasonable, and you find yourself saying "hey, he's got a point or two." But eventually the mask drops, and he tells you vicious world conquest is OK as long as you don't call women Horseface in public.
I volunteer to write Ross's next fortune cookie. Crack open that (admittedly large) bad boy, unfurl the foot-long strip of paper, and read, "Schmuck, did it ever occur to you that the translation of 'noblesse oblige' is 'give the descendants, who lack the smarts and ruthlessness of the original patriarchs, a job that keeps them away from the office but still permits them to advance the interests of the family?'" I know--what kind of "fortune" asks a rhetorical question? I'll work on it.
Quite aside from the fact that doughty Douthat is just a poor writer and muddled thinker, his insistence on the long dead world of the noble aristocrat, which, as you ably pointed out, is a bizarre distortion of history. Douthat's is really a kind of useless grade school history text construct (just ask the African slaves, the slaughtered native Americans and the legions of exploited and grossly abused industrial immigrant workers (like my grandparents). GHWB's domestic "accomplishments" were almost entirely due to a unified Democratic Congress and the last remnants of the country club GOP. His most enduring legacy was his cynical elevation of the Ignorant Clarence Thomas to the SCOTUS to take the place of the distinguished Thurgood Marshall.
1. Is it weird for a guy that chose to become a Catholic is calling for a return to WASP ideals?
2. As a sort of WASP -- I'm white, predominately Anglo-Saxon, and was raised Protestant, I get knobless obligay. I think Rod may need to ride a bus (which I doubt he has ever done) to learn some obligay
Douthat doesn't even grasp his own pro-WASP point. He's trying to tell us that we lost the nation back in '92 because the low-church Clinton became president. But what he's accidentally saying is that the nation was dealt its fatal blow in '72, when the GOP officially switched its mode from Northeastern Snob to Southern Ignoramus.
"because for every Brahmin bigot there was an Arabist or China hand or Hispanophile who understood the non-American world better than some of today’s shallow multiculturalists"
See, my memory is that anyone who once *had* that knowledge was driven from public life by the Douthats of the day, sometimes by force; it led directly to catastrophes in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Central and South America. (Can't have it both ways, Rossy old boy.)
"Ooooh I see, he means Dean Acheson and that lot."
Dean Acheson of Joe McCarthy's "Cowardly College of Communist Containment"? THAT Dean Acheson?
The last real "noblesse oblige" to occupy the White House was FDR. And they fucking hated him. So much so that 75 years later they're still trying to undo his Presidency.
"The WASP virtues also included a cosmopolitanism that was often more authentic than our own performative variety . . . "
Coincidentally, the Jewish Virtues I was brought up on included a firm conviction, as expressed by many of our great men from Moe Howard on down, that what many WASPs needed was a good kick in the crotch.
Apparently the NYf'inT has decided that the demographic it needs to attract to the op-ed pages is White supremacists and head-up-their-ass mushy-middlers who fear Pedro will be elected class president. "There, there," soothes Douthat and the NYT, "the White daddies will soon be home, though maybe wearing some other guise. But it will still be White privilege like you've always known it."
Yeah, that is 100% correct. These guys really believe that there's also a great untapped market of NeverTrumpers they can lure into their maw. Imagine a zombie army of Davey Brookses wandering the suburbs for real news...
Agggh, no!
Ross is the trad, non-hipster Rod. That's why A) Ross has a gig at Marxist-Leninist NYT B) Rod is way, way more entertaining.
I guarantee that if Rod responds to this op-ed, it's gonna be FIYAH, especially if we get a "reader letter" about how a black trans HR director at his work made him convert to Wicca.
Douthat repeatedly predicted, right up until the last minute, that there was NO WAY the GOP would nominate Trump for President. In fact, he wrote how Trump was actually a "gift" to the campaign of Jeb Bush, for all the WASPY reasons he puts forth here. In other words, not only is it fatuous for him to now say that "we" Americans miss WASPS, he can't even credibly claim that fucking REPUBLICANS miss WASPS. As Roy writes: "But the really ridiculous thing about it is how pointless it is..." This sentence can be applied to every Douthat column. (e.g., Didja see his recent one on how Trump is making the "elite" drain its own swamp? Or the one where...)
A slight qualification: the GOP is, in fact, chock full of WASPs (white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants). In fact WASPs comp[rise the core of the white supremacist/neo-Confederate movement. Douthat is referring to an imaginary world of the old aristocratic sense of noblesse oblige. As we all know, the GOP has long been comprised of the most pig-ignorant bunch of racists and, above all, uninterested in helping anyone except themselves.
Good point, but integrity drives me to admit that I didn't think the GOP would nominate Trump either (though I gave him a good chance when he got in). I wasn't expecting a WASP candidate, however; I thought Scott Walker would lead the March of the Brain-Damaged Dummies. I should have realized that while modern Republican Party leadership shares with its membership a taste for cruelty, a taste to which Walker appealed, the membership needs even its cruelty dumbed down.
I had the polarities transposed: Like many others I thought by spring that he’d snag the nomination, lose the general. Still, I was uneasy enough as early as February to write this to a friend:
As will perhaps be evident, I’m not quite prepared to cast off the conventional wisdom that even the GOP is not crazy enough to permit Donald J. Trump to be its standard bearer this November. But of course, it’s looking increasingly as though while the party poobahs aren’t crazy enough to go with Trump, they are also not strong or smart enough to stop him, that having summoned forth the violent evils that he now embodies, and having carelessly left open a corner of the pentagram, they are shortly to be devoured by the demon king. In my darker moments Trump denialism puts me in mind of those doomed bit players in a summer blockbuster, say, Jurassic Park XVI: “Sure, the monster made it past the concrete barrier, the coils of razorwire, the piranha-stocked moat, the machine gun emplacements, the minefields, the particle beam weapons and the electrified fence, but no way is it gonna clear this spiked palisade here. Sucker’s what, fourteen, sixteen feet high? And it says ‘No Trespassing’ right there. We’re good.”
I never doubted that the New GOP party mutation gestated by decades of rabid talk radio, Fox, Tea Party morons, etc., was capable of nominating Trump. But a small part of me thought they couldn't possibly be that cruel to the rest of the country, until even that particle of hope was vaporized. But Douthat thought that Trump's brutal candidacy was -good- for Bush because Trump "sets up exactly the kind of stylistic contrast that Jeb needed: He and the Donald are now the two most famous names in the race, they’re occupying opposing poles (populist/establishment, raffish/respectable) in a way that makes Jeb look like the safest harbor for anyone freaked out by Trump’s success..." You'd think he would have learned his lesson when Republicans so soundly rejected this theory back then, instead of ascribing it to the rest of us now.
The saying goes that "Democrats fall in love; Republicans fall in line." But the rise of Trump has changed that as the Republican base has fallen in love with Trump (indeed, it was love at first slight) while the leadership first fell in line and now is also in love with him.
Douthat's specialty is appearing like a decent human being. Here and there he'll say things that are moderate and almost reasonable, and you find yourself saying "hey, he's got a point or two." But eventually the mask drops, and he tells you vicious world conquest is OK as long as you don't call women Horseface in public.
It’s OK to call ’em “chunky Reese Witherspoon,” I believe.
I volunteer to write Ross's next fortune cookie. Crack open that (admittedly large) bad boy, unfurl the foot-long strip of paper, and read, "Schmuck, did it ever occur to you that the translation of 'noblesse oblige' is 'give the descendants, who lack the smarts and ruthlessness of the original patriarchs, a job that keeps them away from the office but still permits them to advance the interests of the family?'" I know--what kind of "fortune" asks a rhetorical question? I'll work on it.
Quite aside from the fact that doughty Douthat is just a poor writer and muddled thinker, his insistence on the long dead world of the noble aristocrat, which, as you ably pointed out, is a bizarre distortion of history. Douthat's is really a kind of useless grade school history text construct (just ask the African slaves, the slaughtered native Americans and the legions of exploited and grossly abused industrial immigrant workers (like my grandparents). GHWB's domestic "accomplishments" were almost entirely due to a unified Democratic Congress and the last remnants of the country club GOP. His most enduring legacy was his cynical elevation of the Ignorant Clarence Thomas to the SCOTUS to take the place of the distinguished Thurgood Marshall.
“we of the Chesterton Throne & Altar Society executive committee.”
Is it associated with the Darre Kinder, Kuche, Kirche Club (Controlled by Club President for life Rod Dreher)?
Yes, but membership fees are much higher.
A little land, a little blood? Not <i>that</i> much!
Roy, got a sure-fire way to increase subscribers: Guest posts by Megyn Kelly!!!
Don't thank me.
1. Is it weird for a guy that chose to become a Catholic is calling for a return to WASP ideals?
2. As a sort of WASP -- I'm white, predominately Anglo-Saxon, and was raised Protestant, I get knobless obligay. I think Rod may need to ride a bus (which I doubt he has ever done) to learn some obligay
Douthat doesn't even grasp his own pro-WASP point. He's trying to tell us that we lost the nation back in '92 because the low-church Clinton became president. But what he's accidentally saying is that the nation was dealt its fatal blow in '72, when the GOP officially switched its mode from Northeastern Snob to Southern Ignoramus.
"because for every Brahmin bigot there was an Arabist or China hand or Hispanophile who understood the non-American world better than some of today’s shallow multiculturalists"
See, my memory is that anyone who once *had* that knowledge was driven from public life by the Douthats of the day, sometimes by force; it led directly to catastrophes in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Central and South America. (Can't have it both ways, Rossy old boy.)
"Ooooh I see, he means Dean Acheson and that lot."
Dean Acheson of Joe McCarthy's "Cowardly College of Communist Containment"? THAT Dean Acheson?
The last real "noblesse oblige" to occupy the White House was FDR. And they fucking hated him. So much so that 75 years later they're still trying to undo his Presidency.
"The WASP virtues also included a cosmopolitanism that was often more authentic than our own performative variety . . . "
Coincidentally, the Jewish Virtues I was brought up on included a firm conviction, as expressed by many of our great men from Moe Howard on down, that what many WASPs needed was a good kick in the crotch.
True. But the WASP cosmopolitanism is rooted, while the Jewish version is, as we all know, rootless.
And parenthesized