The Times Slot

After noting a creepily misogynist passage from the book of the man taking over the Billy Kristol Chair in Applied Bullshit at the New York Times, Brad DeLong offers some alternative suggestions:

…there is an awful lot here not to like, and an awfully good reason to think that Tyler Cowen or Kerry Howley or Virginia Postrel or any of a large number of other candidates would be an infinitely better choice for the job.

I certainly agree with this. But if I were inclined to be contrarian, I could raise one counterargument. Cowen and Howley are certainly much more impressive writers, but they’re also libertarians, and one can argue that while economic conservatism is vastly overrepresented among prominent pundits social conservativsm really isn’t (even granting that the social liberalism of major pundits tends to be pretty nominal.) So, to the extent that the Times feels a need for a conservative diversity hire, a cultural reactionary in the Douthat mode might be a better choice.

Having put forward this defense, allow me to disown it. First of all, there’s nothing very interesting about Douthat’s social conservatism. Whether it’s abortion or stem cell research, Douthat doesn’t have an especially proficient grasp of the underlying issues and with remarkable consistency ends up with little more than feeble rationalizations of whatever ludicrously incoherent position the GOP has on such issues at a given time. I’m not sure what the added value is here. And yet, I must admit that beyond Ramesh Ponnuru I can’t name anybody better suited to the slot.

And second, given the diversity of opinion (as opposed to quality reportage) available online, I also don’t think there’s any particular reason for a newspaper to reserve a slot for someone to defend the denial of fundamental rights to gays and lesbians, reactionary gender roles, etc. So I say given Kristol’s spot to Lithwick or Pollit. If they must have some diversity, give Bobo’s slot to Howley. And then while we’re dreaming we can talk about replacing Dowd and Collins with people who actually write about politics and a non-buffoon to write about foreign policy…