Trump or Harris? Ross Douthat Just Can’t Decide
So ludicrous are his rationales for fence-sitting as to cast doubt on whether he is really on the fence at all.
Should America be a democracy or not?
Should people have rights or not?
Should we herd our neighbors into concentration camps and deport them without due process, or not?
Should the White House become a cesspool of treason and graft, or not?
Should professional civil servants be purged from the federal bureaucracy and replaced with ideological lickspittles who serve at the pleasure of a fascist buffoon, or not?
You might think the answers to these questions are straightforward. Not so fast, cautions Ross Douthat, a columnist for The New York Times. You see, Douthat has been racking his brain over the merits and drawbacks of the two candidates and cannot make up his mind.
As for how such radical tendencies manifested themselves, Douthat has little to offer aside from stock footage from the moral-panic archives. For instance, he cites the rise in homicides during the latter half of 2020, which was obviously the result of wokeness. How, exactly? I don’t know, and neither does Douthat.
Perhaps we should hear him out, you say; after all, one does not land a plush job at the Times by being a moron. Might he not make some reasonable points?
Reader, I can assure you he does not.
Ross Douthat Plays Make-Believe
To see why, it is best to start at the beginning. In 2016, Douthat writes, “the Hillary Clinton campaign offered the country an implicit bargain.”
…[T]he promise was that even if you disagreed with liberalism’s elites on policy, you could trust them in three crucial ways: They would avoid insanity, they would maintain stability, and they would display far greater intelligence and competence [than] Trump and his hangers-on.
It takes some nerve to suggest that Trump’s record compares favorably with anyone’s, much less when it comes to sanity, stability, intelligence, and competence. Forget Kamala Harris; on the qualities Douthat lists, a chipmunk would give the former president a run for his money.
Consider, first, his claim that the Democrats broke their “promise of sanity.” How does Douthat defend this argument, particularly in light of Trump’s rather evident limitations in that regard?
Well, there was all the wokeness, you see. “Under Trumpian and especially Covidian conditions,” Douthat tells us, “the culture of elite liberalism lurched toward fanaticism, embracing radical and fanciful ideas to a degree that I had not imagined possible.”
As for how such radical tendencies manifested themselves, Douthat has little to offer aside from stock footage from the moral-panic archives. For instance, he cites the rise in homicides during the latter half of 2020, which was obviously the result of wokeness. How, exactly? I don’t know, and neither does Douthat.
Nor, for that matter, does Matthew Yglesias, Douthat’s source for the claim. Writing in 2023, Yglesias, a performative centrist with a penchant for statements that, for most reasonable and educated people, prompt a reaction of “I’m sorry, what?” took a gander at the data. He concluded that the uptick in murders in 2020 was caused by the Black Lives Matter protests—this despite acknowledging that said uptick started before the protests got underway.
Leave aside, for the moment, the fallacy of presuming that everything that happens in the world is the product of what U.S. presidents do or don’t do. Did international politics under Trump remotely meet anyone’s conception of “stability?”
So much for woke homicides. Douthat’s other example of wokeness-gone-wild is the existence of trans people. Liberals, he writes, “mainstreamed experimental and unproven chemical and surgical treatments on thousands of gender-dysphoric young people.”
Of course, gender-affirming care (GAC) is not “experimental and unproven.” Believe it or not, scientists began studying the practice long before it burst on the scene in Douthat’s limbic system. These studies overwhelmingly find that GAC reduces depression, anxiety, and suicidality while improving quality of life.
Not that very many people, especially children, receive such treatment in the first place. Listening to Douthat and his fellow-travelers, one would think that penises are getting lopped off on an industrial scale. The actual number is trivial. The share of minors who identify as transgender is about one percent. The number of those kids who go on to receive GAC (e.g. hormone therapy, surgery, and the like) is minuscule—certainly no greater than one percent annually.1 The share of that one percent who end up regretting the decision is itself about one percent.
In other words, the issue of GAC for minors has no place whatsoever in our public discourse. The national furor around it is a moral panic, one that Ross Douthat and his colleagues at The New York Times have played no small role in fomenting. Having already helped to whip it up, Douthat then invokes it as a possible justification for reelecting a treasonous criminal and dangerous psychopath to the presidency.
A Very Normal and Stable World. Remember?
But wokeness-run-amok is hardly the only reason to contemplate such a move, according to Douthat. Another, he says, is “the failure of liberalism to deliver stability abroad.” After all, there continue to rage a number of foreign wars that began under Biden, particularly in Ukraine and Palestine. Still, being that there are two people on the ballot, one of whom has served as president before, it is worth considering what "stability" looked like during his administration.
Leave aside, for the moment, the fallacy of presuming that everything that happens in the world is the product of what U.S. presidents do or don’t do. Did international politics under Trump remotely meet anyone’s conception of “stability?” His sudden and hasty withdrawal from the Trans Pacific Partnership, the Paris climate accord, the Iran nuclear pact, and the Open Skies Treaty? His threat to withdraw from NAFTA and the World Health Organization? His idiotic Muslim travel ban? His equally idiotic trade war with China? His air strikes on Syria and his assassination of Iranian Revolutionary Guard leader Qasem Soleimani? His implicit threat to abandon America’s commitment to defend its NATO allies? His shameful and treasonous obsequiousness toward Russian president Vladimir Putin? Oh, and the time he almost started a war with North Korea?
Sure, Ross, very normal and stable indeed.
As for the wars that began under Biden, it is silly to think that Trump would have prevented them. Was there something special about Trump which would have deterred Hamas from carrying out the October 7th terrorist attack or mitigated Israel's response? Get real.
What about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? Was the fact that it only began under his successor due to Trump’s own masterful gambitry, and was Biden’s lack thereof what brought it about? Putin’s decision to invade had almost nothing to do with anything happening in America at the time—other than his belief that the U.S. would roll over and refrain from significant retaliation, which, let’s face it, would have been a much more credible scenario under Trump.
Reporting from the Financial Times and Verstka reveals the true reason Russia invaded. According to people close to the Russian president, Putin spent his days during the pandemic holed up in his mansions reading about the exploits of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. Eventually, he resolved that he, too, should be called “the Great,” and that the way to do it was to conquer Ukraine. In his mind, it’s a fake country anyway, comprised mostly of temporarily-deluded Russians.
Now, there is a lot of cultural baggage that lies behind this genocidal worldview, which is why it would be inaccurate to call the invasion “Putin’s war.” It is very much Russia’s war, not just Putin’s. The point, for our purposes, is that the choice to invade had little to do with Joe Biden.
Much Intelligent, Very Competence
Last but not least is Douthat's contention that the Democrats have failed the test of competence and intelligence when viewed against Trump. This, as you might imagine, is the dumbest part of an already-dumb column. At the risk of inducing brain damage in my readers and myself, I will briefly indulge this preposterous claim.
At this point, you may be wondering how, or even if, Douthat weighs the prospect of electing an insurrectionist who tried to destroy the republic and now promises to finish the job. To his credit, he does consider this obvious counter. But most revealing is how he dispenses with it.
Harris, says Douthat, "is still the Dan Quayle-like figure that almost everybody saw just a little while ago, still vague on policy and painful in extended interviews." A statement like that prompts the question of whether Douthat has been living in the same reality as the rest of us this past decade. Whether you like her or not, there is nothing about Harris’s background or conduct that would call her competence into question. The comparison to Dan Quayle is so strained and fantastical as to suggest there may be something else about Harris which informs his opinion of her. As for what that something could be, I will leave it to you, the reader, to surmise.
Let us not forget, moreover, with whom we are asked to compare Harris on this score. Of all the words Trump brings to mind, “intelligent” and “competent” are not high on the list. This is a guy whose “policies,” such as they are, can be roughly divided into two categories:
Fascist pledges for roundups, deportations, and murder; and
Jumbles of sentence fragments combining such disparate topics as election fraud, golfer penises, and fictional movie villains he somehow believes are real people.
Which one of these enticing predilections, specifically, has Douthat thinking, "boy, what a tough decision we face?"
At this point, you may be wondering how, or even if, Douthat weighs the prospect of electing an insurrectionist who tried to destroy the republic and now promises to finish the job. To his credit, he does consider this obvious counter. But most revealing is how he dispenses with it.
Behold the following passage, complete with a “but” for the ages:
As for how Douthat will be voting today, he professes not to know. Untangling all the pros and cons is simply too daunting a job to ask of him now. That’s his story, at least, and he’s sticking to it.
In sum, Douthat expresses far more concern about these mostly imaginary liberal excesses than their far graver manifestations on the right. This very fact suggests he does not have much of a problem with them—so long, that is, as they are used to advance his own vision of how America should be.
Still, I suspect he has already made up his mind. The very act of penning such an asinine column gives the game away. Douthat, by his own admission, takes pains to conceal his extremism from the public: “[B]ecause my livelihood depends on being a thoughtful conservative who writes for a liberal readership…,” he once explained to Ezra Klein, his Times colleague, “I’m not going to tell you all of my most radical thoughts.”
Nevertheless, his body of work hints at what these thoughts may be. For one thing, he shares with the neofascist right an odd obsession with the national birth rate. For another, he blames “woke progressivism” for the “slough of despond” into which “Western civilization has fallen,” the cure for which, he maintains, is a revival of “traditional religious belief.”
To bring about this change, he pins his hopes on J.D. Vance, an openly authoritarian figure who has cravenly endorsed Trump’s neofascism (“I may have a personal bias in JD Vance’s favor,” he admits in his latest piece).
What’s more, he regards left-liberalism as an existential threat to the republic—this despite the fact that every example he cites of ostensible progressive overreach is glaringly evident on the right.
For example, he sympathizes with conservatives for whom the Kavanaugh hearing was “an inflection point,” presumably due to what they saw as a lack of due process afforded to the nominee. But on Trump’s highly publicized plan to deport millions of American residents—who will inevitably be denied the very due process he believes was withheld from Kavanaugh—Douthat has nothing to say.
In addition, he decries the “shifts in…internal left wing discourse and politics” which “cost people their jobs in certain liberal institutions.” Fine. But is he similarly vexed over Republican plans to purge liberals from the federal bureaucracy and other institutions? Of course not.
The projection gets more absurd from there. Consider, among other claims, the “bureaucratic supervision of intimate life” he fears in #MeToo feminism; the anti-racism movement’s supposed proclivity for “re-education,” “strict white deference,” and “society being re-engineered;” and, most laughably, his premonition of a “color revolution” by Democrats bent on reversing a Trump victory in 2024.
In sum, Douthat expresses far more concern about these mostly imaginary liberal excesses than their far graver manifestations on the right. This very fact suggests he does not have much of a problem with them—so long, that is, as they are used to advance his own vision of how America should be.
You see, Douthat needs some way of justifying his vote for Trump. But he cannot do it without concocting some fictional nightmare about a liberal menace which threatens all we hold dear. As such, he will tell himself—and the rest of us—whatever he needs to hear.
The most comprehensive estimate I have found comes from Jason D. Wright, Ling Chen, Yukio Suzuki, et al., “National Estimates of Gender-Affirming Surgery in the US,” Obstetrics and Gynecology 6, no. 8 (August 23, 2023), https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2808707#google_vignette. They look at a sample of 48,019 patients who received Gender-Affirming Surgery (GAS), using two data sources. The first is the Nationwide Ambulatory Surgery Sample (NASS), which “captures major ambulatory surgical procedures at nearly 2800 hospital-owned facilities from up to 35 states, approximating a 63% to 67% stratified sample of hospital-owned facilities.” The second is the National Inpatient Sample (NIS), which captures about 20 percent of all inpatient hospital encounters across 48 states. Together, they represent a sizeable chunk of all recipients of GAS during the five-year study period, from 2016-2020. In all, the authors identified 3678 patients between the ages of 12 and 18 years who received GAS, which comes out to an average of 736 such patients per year. A separate study based on CDC data estimates that around 300,000 people ages 13-17 identify as transgender. See Jody L. Herman, Andrew R. Flores, and Kathryn K. O’Neill, “How Many Adults and Youth Identify as Transgender in the United States?” Research That Matters, Williams Institute (University of California, Los Angeles. School of Law), June 2022, https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Trans-Pop-Update-Jun-2022.pdf. One percent of that would be 3000. If the Obstetrics and Gynecology study finds that an average of 736 transgender minors receive GAS in any given year, and this sample represents quite a large part, if not a majority, of all such patients, it strains the imagination to conclude that the total number of minors receiving GAS exceeds 3000 per year, or one percent of all minors who identify as transgender. Hence, my contention that the percentage of transgender-identifying minors who end up getting GAS almost certainly does not exceed one percent annually.
The talking point that "there were no wars under Trump" is a typical case of correlation does not mean causation.