A Fart in a Stiff Wind
By 
Ross Douthat has penned his final column for the New York Times. You’re welcome to read, although I wouldn’t recommend it:
That means that this is my last column for The Times, in this season at least. Once I would have imagined a valedictory essay offering some stirring brief for religious conservatism, some last foray into the territory where I was most likely to be in disagreement with my readers. But I don’t think that quite fits the moment.
The rest of the column is a paean to Douthat’s sense of ideological homelessness, as he cannot bring himself into alignment with Trumpists or Establishment Elites or the Woke Mob and must therefore wander the shores of this world, singing laments of despair and regret. That, or get a prominent, cushy gig from his buddy Bari Weiss at 60 Minutes.
Douthat’s time at the NYT was characterized by utter blandness. He almost immediately found himself out of step with modern trends in conservative thought, but understood his role well enough to know that he couldn’t simply become another anti-Trumper; the Times felt that it was in need of someone who could play the Brooks/Safire role and Douthat was willing to comply. His bland inoffensiveness served him well and kept him out of trouble during the Age of High Woke, when a failure to do or say anything of interest at all was the best defense for a token conservative at an elite liberal institution. I don’t recall who (possibly Yglesias?) pointed out that Douthat effectively represented the view from nowhere in American politics for most of his tenure, representing the vanishingly small percentage of American conservatives who navigated between embrace and outright resistance to Trump.
Practices of media consumption are different than they were 25 years ago and in any case I don’t want to wax nostalgic for the days in which I read the entire NYT opinion page, but William Safire and David Brooks were both talented writers who could say something thoughtful that was actually worth disagreeing with. Douthat never achieved that, and never seemed that he was really trying very hard to say anything memorable at all.
Photo Credit: By Mercatus Center – YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7cDKkrp-nM&ab_channel=MercatusCenter – View/save archived versions on archive.org, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=164504102