https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii152/articles/ross-douthat-condition-of-america
Introduction

Claims that left and right, terms born during the French Revolution in the divisions of the National Assembly of 1789, are becoming, or are already, anachronisms have been a recurrent political trope since the last century. If there is no more reason to credit it now than there was in the past, evidence of confusion between the two has been visibly increasing, in an ideological flux dramatized in Brazil by Roberto Schwarz, historicized by Christopher Clark in Britain, and enacted daily in the cross-cutting populisms of Europe and America. Scenes like these speak to a slow erosion of the liberal order, with no clear-cut alternative to challenge its rule, whose upshot is the jumbled discourses cartwheeling through social media and broadcast politics, open feedstock for clinical scrutiny.

The world of ideas proper, where articulated systems of thought confront each other, is another matter. There, a serious left needs to respond, not with self-segregation or withdrawal to any Abgrenzung of its own, but with open-minded curiosity and principled critique, where these are in order. In that spirit, we lead this issue with an interview with Ross Douthat, the conservative columnist who is the most consistently original mind writing about American politics in the pages of the New York Times. In doing so, the journal continues a tradition of treating thinkers and writers of an outlook antithetical to its own with respect—and, if merited, admiration—that started with Michael Oakeshott in the sixties, and from the nineties onwards continued with Francis Fukuyama, Giovanni Sartori, J. G. A. Pocock, Karl-Heinz Bohrer and others. Author of some seven books on a wide range of subjects, covering class and culture, demography and religion, technical progress and economic stagnation, the organizing subject of Douthat’s writing is the condition of his own country, America, placed within the setting of the world. In the Victorian era there were equivalents in the press of Britain, France, Italy and elsewhere, writers about their time enjoying significant public authority. But today’s Europe lacks any real counterpart, and in the United States itself there is no journalist of comparable imaginative scope. A firebrand of the student right in his youth—incendiary entries in the Harvard Salient, an inaugural salvo of ‘Cheney for President’ in the nyt of 2009—by the time Trump ran in the primaries of 2016, Douthat was one of his sharpest critics. At no point part of what became the Never Trump brigade, Republicans—Cheney’s daughter in the lead, along with Kristol Jr and the like—scandalized by his lack of regard for Cold War pieties, Douthat would develop into one of the astutest analysts of the trajectory of the current President, whose zigzagging threats of an all-round trade war he judges condemned to failure. Here our contributor Nick Burns questions him about his intellectual formation, political evolution, international horizon and the gains and limits of his role as a tribune on America’s leading newspaper. The result is a portrait, perhaps unlike any other so far available, of a far from typical conservative intelligence.

Ross Douthat
Condition of America
Interviewed by Nick Burns
Your first book, Privilege, is at once a devastating take-down of Harvard, as a bastion of a self-satisfied elite careerism, and a rueful love letter to it. Since those days, you’ve always unmistakeably been an adversary of American liberalism, yet in some ways continue to be a beneficiary of it. Where would you locate yourself—politically, then intellectually—on the map of the contemporary American scene? What is it in liberalism, beyond obvious hypocrisies, that you dislike?

Ishare the fairly conventional conservative view that the strongest case for liberalism is as an effective technology for managing social peace in a complex society—but one that depends upon sources of meaning and purpose deeper than itself, which it struggles to generate on its own.
Liberalism as feeding off non-renewable moral resources?

Those resources can be self-regenerative. I don’t fully buy the argument that, with the advent of Locke, there is an automatic decline into hyper-individualism. American history provides plenty of evidence that a liberal superstructure doesn’t necessarily prevent great awakenings. To the extent that it does so, it is under particular technological conditions. The vindication of the older conservative critique of liberalism as atomization—which looks more potent today than it did when I was at Harvard in the early 2000s; and looked more potent then than it did in, say, 1955—is technologically mediated. There have been technologies that accelerate individualism, ranging from things we take for granted, like the interstate highway system and the birth-control pill, through to the internet, a particular accelerant. As a metaphor, you can think of individualism’s tending towards atomization and despair as a gene within the liberal order, which gets expressed under particular environmental conditions, but doesn’t necessarily emerge if those conditions are not present. In recent years, the internet in particular has helped that gene be expressed more fully than it was.

An alternative theory of liberalism is that it is an ambitious way of life in its own right. That would be the argument of my friend Samuel Moyn, with whom I’ve taught classes on this. He would essentially agree with the conservative critique, but argue that this means you need a liberalism that is not just managerial but ambitious, Promethean, committed to self-creation and exploration. And that form of liberalism, in my view, is subject to strong and dangerous temptations. Sometimes they’re necessary temptations—a culture may need a little Prometheanism—but they can quickly lead it badly astray. The liberalism I described in Privilege tended towards a spiritually arid form of hyper-ambition; not Whitman and Emerson communing with the glories of creation, but: how do I get a job at McKinsey? Under conditions of prosperity, liberalism as a world-view had been transmuted into a purely instrumental, self-interested meritocracy.

Liberals themselves subsequently decided this was true. A whole spate of books came out after Privilege, from Harry Lewis’s Excellence Without a Soul—he was dean of Harvard when I was there; he wrote it as soon as he retired—to William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep, Daniel Markovits’s Meritocracy Trap, Michael Sandel’s Tyranny of Merit. So in a sense, I was early to a critique of meritocratic liberalism that many liberals came to think was probably correct. Of course, I was already stealing things from Christopher Lasch.
When you talk about the traditional conservative critique of liberalism, is that a specifically American conservativism, or does it overlap with Anglo-conservatives like Oakeshott, or the harder European right?

There is a particular American conservative critique, which is related to the weakness of the left in the us. The original European critique of the liberal project—Oakeshott wouldn’t be the right example, he’s not hard enough—but if you read someone like de Maistre, the liberal idea is understood as a revolution against order, against God; it’s Satanic. That critique makes sense in a political landscape where there is an ancien régime and a social hierarchy that a traditionalist can ally with, and also a deeper form of radicalism than has usually obtained in the us. The reactionary case against liberalism in Europe finds its strongest purchase in the French Revolution and Soviet Communism—instances where there was a radical takeover, a lot of people were killed and a lot of priests were killed, too. America never had an ancien régime of that sort nor a really potent form of radical left-wing politics. So conservatism in the States has tended to focus more on the shallowness of liberalism than on its dangers.

Of course, there are moments when the liberal world is perceived to be more radical, and the conservative critique becomes more radical in turn; the late sixties were one such moment, and the period we’ve just lived through would be another. It’s no coincidence that post-liberals have emerged as important figures on the American right in the last five or ten years, with a more thoroughgoing, to-the-roots critique of liberalism, at the very moment when liberalism itself becomes more radicalized and aggressive in its desire for a cultural revolution. Whereas in the 1990s, with neoconservatives versus neoliberals, they were not that far apart. The George Will and Irving Kristol critique of liberalism differed from that of, say, Adrian Vermeule, who argues wokeness proves that liberalism was radical all along. But in periods when liberalism seems moderate, the conservative critique inevitably becomes more moderate. When I was writing Privilege, it wouldn’t have made sense to claim that Harvard in 1999 was run by Marxist radicals bent on destroying all of America’s traditional hierarchy, because clearly the liberalism of that era was fully adapted to American hierarchy and invested in the preservation of elite power. So, to the extent that I felt alienated from that, it was much more about what I saw as its moral and spiritual limitations, as opposed to its radical tendencies.
As a columnist for the New York Times, you occupy a fraught intersection in American public discourse, charged with interpreting conservative ideas and positions for liberal readers.

People like to say that, yes—I’ve heard that before.
What are the rules of this game? How does your own background, formed as much in the institutions of liberalism—Harvard, the Atlantic, the Times—as in those of American conservatism, like the National Review, play into this?

It’s true that I’ve always worked inside elite liberal institutions. I was an intern for National Review and I’ve written for conservative publications. But I went to Harvard, I wrote for the Atlantic and, since 2009, I’ve worked for the New York Times. There’s never been a point in my career where I was doing anything other than primarily writing for a liberal-leaning audience from a conservative perspective. In that sense, there are ways in which ‘here I stand, I can do no other’. There was no other vocation that my career path prepared me for, and to some degree it’s felt natural to do what I do, even though it is a curious position. It seems to me a valuable thing to do—not to overestimate my own importance; I don’t look at America and think I’ve had a positive impact on easing the culture wars or anything like that. But it’s good for people who care about ideas to engage with the arguments on both sides. What is writing for, if not to speak to people who disagree with you at some level? Even though this means that there are certain kinds of writing that I don’t get to do, types of polemic that I avoid. The reality is that the job’s a tightrope, where there’s a danger of falling off on one side, going too far into the conservative world to be able to reach back and speak to liberals, or falling in the other direction and becoming a tame figure, the conservative that liberals can read to confirm their sense that Trump and the Republican Party are bad, challenging them only mildly. I’ve always been conscious of that.
How are you viewed by the intellectual right in America? As an important advocate in such a mainstream outlet as the Times, or as an insufficiently committed waverer, corrupted by having spent too much time among liberals?

There are certain conservatives who think ill of me and regard me as having been captured, a tamed figure. But most people to my right whom I respect understand what I’m doing and what the role is, and don’t regard me as someone who has sold out to the enemy. In a way the Trump era, by creating a large category of conservative intellectuals who didn’t like a Republican president, made it easier to occupy this role. From the liberal perspective, as long as you were on side about being anti-Trump, you could say conservative things and retain credibility. The never-Trump phenomenon hasn’t ceased to matter as a force in American politics, but I’m not sure what the future holds in that regard.
Does that create obstacles on the other side, where people on your right say: you don’t like Trump, therefore you don’t get it, you’re not one of us?

Yes, lots of people say that. But those who take that view and discount everything I have to say are not usually people I respect. On the other hand, I’ve written a number of pieces saying that the new Trump administration will probably mess up and blow this opportunity, and the response I’ve had from some people on the right whom I do respect has been, basically: ‘You don’t get it, you’re trying to finesse it but this is about power politics, we have to crush our enemies.’ But people like that can have the argument with me without assuming that I’ve sold out; they just think I’m too interested in everyone getting along. Which is a fair point; one aspect of my life and work is that I like people on both sides—I always have. It’s true, as you say, that my first book was a scathing critique of Harvard, but most of my friends there were nice liberal Harvardians. My life was formed there; it’s where I met my wife. I’m friends with people who voted for Trump and with people who think Trump is a fascist threat to American democracy. Maybe at some point that will become untenable, but I hope it doesn’t.
At moments in your earlier writing, you adopted a polemical or programmatic tone—for example, in Grand New Party, your 2008 book with Reihan Salam. But in your Times columns, you tend to take a more dispassionately analytical approach, offering discomfiting critiques rather than conservative prescriptions. Sometimes you defend more moderate positions than the ones you seem to hold. Is that a personal preference, or an accommodation to an audience that doesn’t share your perspective?

I think it’s both. There’s value in not burning your bridges every time you write an 800-word article. The role I play at the Times could not be played if I was constantly burning bridges; I would just be undermining my own vocation and my professional obligations as a writer. But experience has taught me a lot about the limitations of the influence a political columnist can actually have on American life. When Reihan and I wrote Grand New Party, we were part of a project that aimed to change the gop, to make it more working class-friendly—‘reform conservatism’, as it was labelled—with quite a few people involved. Then in 2016, Trump came along and vaporized that—while at the same time, realizing some aspects of the outreach to the working class. Things that we predicted came to pass, but not in the way that we predicted and certainly not through our own efforts. My period of maximal anti-Trumpism came after that, during the 2016 campaign and into 2017, when I wrote a lot of very anti-Trump columns.

The people in political journalism who hate me the most right now are probably those who agreed with me about Trump in 2016, but who then took it as an obligation to make anti-Trumpism their organizing theory. To someone like Jonathan Last at the Bulwark, for example, I’m a symbol of the failures of conservative punditry to grasp just how bad Trump is. Maybe in the weighing out of Trumpian history, he’ll be proven right—I don’t know. But the endless anti-Trump columns just seemed to be screaming into oblivion; I saw how little effect they had upon the world. In the end, I found a cooler and more analytic style, which in my view has been more helpful to the people who wanted to oppose Trump. The Democratic Party of the last eight years would have had more to gain from listening to me than to those never-Trump writers who became intense adherents of everything Biden decided to do!

There was a parallel between my most anti-Trump columns and my most vehement critiques of Pope Francis. Two things that I was deeply attached to—American conservatism and the Catholic Church—were being taken out of my hands by figures with whom I did not identify at all: Trump was a populist reactionary, the Supreme Pontiff was a liberal. This was a period when I was physically very ill, living in the woods in Connecticut, and very angry. That anger was expressed in those columns. In both cases, at a certain point I realized I needed to accept that I’m not in charge of the Republican Party, I’m not in charge of the Roman Catholic Church. I’m a newspaper columnist, and my fundamental role is to try to help my readers understand the world in which they live. I continued to be a critic of the Pope, but I tried to shift tone when writing about the Francis era—to write less about it, honestly, and not get in fights with liberal Catholic theologians where I call them heretics. It’s not that what I said was wrong. But a columnist is mostly trying to understand and describe history, rather than to change it. There are moments when a columnist can be a political actor, but I haven’t experienced many of those in my stint at the Times. The descriptive role is much more important right now, because we are entering into a very different dispensation to the post-1990 era. Maybe I have useful things to say about that, by virtue of having a weirder perspective on it than a lot of people. But being useful in the world requires being dispassionate, to some degree—or at least, not being seen as a spokesman for a faction. Which I haven’t been, since reform conservatism died ten years ago. My sense of myself as belonging to a faction just evaporated.
Your ‘reform conservatism’ project with Reihan Salam in Grand New Party argued that the Republicans should become something like a us version of Christian Democracy, reaching out to the working class through social programmes and pro-family policies. To some extent, the gop has modified its position on things like Medicare. But the Party’s principal working-class gains have come through the ascendancy of Trump, a figure you have, as you say, consistently opposed. Trump’s win in 2024 was clinched by working-class voters, including working-class Democrats who stayed at home. What’s your explanation for his spectacular success in changing the gop and the political landscape in America?

The simplest explanation is that the more stringent libertarianism of Republican elites has never been that popular here, even if America is, and will always be, a more libertarian society, to some degree, than western Europe.
Is that why reform conservatism didn’t work?

No, I think we were reasonably aware of that. But to take a different case study, that’s why someone like Sohrab Ahmari, who was originally much more libertarian than I on economics, has now travelled well to my left. He wants actual Christian Democracy, or some version of it. But that particular fusion is in certain ways too Catholic—it’s a poor fit, ultimately, with America’s Protestant politics. But so is full-tilt libertarianism, zeroing out the government, cutting old-age pensions and so on, which is why the Tea Party hit a wall. We’ll see where things go, but part of what Elon Musk is doing may hit that wall, too. The quest for an effective right in America is always for the zone in between. You’re not trying to be Clement Attlee meets Konrad Adenauer. You’re going to be a little more right-wing than that. The other reality is that, because the Republican Party is libertarian, it’s just always going to have trouble being the party that creates an effective system.
Reform conservatism was against Obamacare, more or less?

Right. In hindsight, it was always unrealistic to imagine that you would get a successful Republican-led healthcare reform. What we ended up with, which was Obamacare reformed by Trump, was probably the more plausible path, but not one that a policy wonk in 2007 would sit down and design. Our view was: the libertarians are right that Medicare and Social Security need to be reformed, but we want to combine that with opportunity-enhancing Clinton-style programmes. Let Paul Ryan cut a deal on entitlements and then use the savings to do things on education, on family policy, and so on. But what Trump intuited was that voters actually want the big existing programmes. It’s more attractive to a lot of right-of-centre voters, who are not hard libertarians, to say we are not going to touch Medicare and Social Security, we’re going to protect them. If you map it, Trump found a different way to navigate between Christian Democracy and hard libertarianism than the one we were trying to push.

On trade and tariffs, though, we’ll see what happens. Our assumption was that those features of the global economic system were just fixed, that trade policy was not going to go back to the nineteenth century. It didn’t make sense to see those as the levers you would pull to make conservatism more working class-friendly. Clearly there are people around Trump right now who do think that. Trumpism 1.0 was: we’re making the Republican Party more working class-friendly by promising to protect entitlements, running the economy hot and cutting immigration. Trumpism 2.0 is: ok, we can’t run the economy hot any more because of inflation, and maybe we’ll have to cut Social Security and Medicare—who knows?—but we’re going to be populist by renegotiating all America’s trade agreements. Which, whatever else, is interesting.
What explains this baseline libertarianism of the us and of the Republican Party? Certainly, it’s a set of ideas that has had currency in different forms over the course of American history. What are the material forces giving it purchase?

American geography? The psychology of the kind of people who came to America? You don’t have to get into genetic determinism to say there is some psychological distinction between the sort of people who will set out on a long voyage, and then keep moving westwards across a continent, and those who don’t. If you spend time in Europe today, compared to America, then whatever explanation you choose for it, Americans have more appetite for risk. The old line about every American being a temporarily embarrassed millionaire—that’s real, and it’s a trait you see less of these days in western Europe. There is some dynamic interaction between settlement and the frontier, even now that the frontier is closed; the us is a vaster system, with easier migration inside it.

Plus, Protestantism. American Catholicism is important to our history, but America is a Protestant country that has a theological suspicion of hierarchy and authority, which extends to bureaucratic liberalism. People ask, why are Southern evangelicals so hostile to the government doing good things for the poor? Why don’t Southern Baptists support foreign aid? The reality is that some of them do—it’s not the case that Christian conservatives are all hard-edged libertarians—but if you’re asking, why are people who are deeply Christian so unusually hostile, by global standards, to the government redistributing wealth, I think it comes back to a low-church Protestant suspicion of all hierarchies, and of hierarchical power-wielding moral authority. That goes really deep.

Covid was instructive in this regard. According to the standard theory of moral sentiments, as in Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, liberals are the cosmopolitans, while conservatives focus on purity and fear of contamination from without. That would lead you to predict what happened in the first month of the pandemic, when conservatives were concerned about ‘a flu from China’, and liberals were like: ‘Don’t be racist! Only Silicon Valley bros are freaked out about that!’ But then it flipped. There were some contingent reasons for that; Trump was president, of course. But the way it flipped also revealed something profound about red America and its ingrained hostility to bureaucratic managerialism. You might think it would be more afraid of disease, but no: it’s more afraid of bureaucratic power; the don’t-tread-on-me stuff is real, it’s culturally ingrained. I didn’t foresee how quickly anti-masking would become a thing, but I had friends who said, Americans are not going to go along with wearing masks the way people do in Japan and South Korea. They were right. Americans are not libertarians in the Cato Institute sense of the word, but they are folk libertarians in this sense of impulsive behaviour, which is a feature of American life that anyone who wants to govern the United States, Democratic or Republican, has to be aware of.
Would you grant that there could be an economic component to this? In a country where the welfare state is threadbare, never attaining the dimensions of western Europe, for a portion of the population, heavily represented in the Republican Party, is it not in their rational self-interest to slash all regulations, supercharge the frontier and go for a competitive-Darwinian outcome, because they might actually have a better chance of getting by under those conditions than by tinkering on the margins?

It’s in the interests of some people in the Republican coalition. It’s not hard to have an account of why business-class Republicans, country-club Republicans, are interested in slashing regulation. I don’t think the material self-interest argument applies as well to middle- or lower-middle-class voters, because most people in that position are not going to be John Galts, building huge businesses in a light-regulation society.
But they could be a car-dealership owner?

The car-dealership owner, yes. But the reason Republicans win elections is because they win the salesmen at car dealerships.
But they might benefit from lower taxes, selling more cars?

That’s true of America in the Reagan era, when there was inflation-linked bracket creep and higher marginal tax rates. But the us has lowered marginal tax rates to a point where a lot of Republican voters don’t benefit that much from the kind of tax cuts that the first Trump Administration passed. This was part of our argument within the party—that to win those voters, you can’t just do tax cuts, because they have a material stake in the welfare state. The left-wing argument about racial polarization—that middle-class and working-class white people don’t support welfare-state redistribution because it’s seen as going to African-Americans, or to immigrants, and away from white people—makes more sense than the frontier spirit per se as a reason why there is no socialism or social democracy in America. Immigration to the us also undermines welfare-state politics, to the extent that each new generation of immigrants is seen as suspicious or not worthy of material support; not seen as neighbours, in the way that Scandinavians traditionally see welfare beneficiaries. That argument would also help to explain why the peak of social democracy in America—from the New Deal through to the beginning of the Great Society—corresponded with an era of low immigration, when American society was seen as primarily white, with a small African-American minority.

But I would view this mostly as a supplement to the cultural argument I was making. If you look at places where there aren’t a lot of minorities, and drill down to the granular, you still find this suspicion of the welfare state. The classic example is white Appalachia. Alec MacGillis, a Times colleague, wrote about this during the Tea Party debates, showing how working-class whites in Appalachia can be very suspicious of poor whites for being on the draw, for being ‘addicted to welfare’. And these are people of the same race, the same religion, neighbours and so on. You see that elsewhere, too. Even at the peak of New Deal America, Social Security was sold as pay-as-you-go—paying in and getting something back. Even at moments in history when Americans were willing to back the welfare state, there was still the idea that you’re not getting something for nothing.
But why are Protestants in the us so sceptical of the state, when Protestants in northern Europe are not?

Because, to generalize wildly, Protestants in northern Europe belong to the established religion. Scandinavian Lutheranism was the religion of the state. In America, state-integrated Protestants, like the Episcopalians, were the elites, so they weren’t sceptical of state power. The scepticism comes from Methodists and Baptists, the dissenting, nonconformist Protestants. Now, you could say that in England, nonconformists often supported the welfare state; I don’t think it’s a necessary connection, but if you’re looking for the difference between Scandinavian Lutheran attitudes to the welfare state and Southern Baptists’ attitudes, it is partially that sense of nonconformism yielding suspicion of state power.
There’s an American tradition of writers combining, in different proportions, political analysis and cultural criticism, who come to exercise significant public influence—from Mencken and Lippmann to more recent gadfly figures like Tom Wolfe or William Buckley, or solemnizers like George Will, whom you’ve mentioned. Are there any forebears or role models for you in this company?

Fifteen years ago, I would probably have said, ‘Yes, hopefully’; much less so today. I’ve talked already about the limits of a newspaper columnist’s influence in this era. It’s especially hard for a conservative columnist for the New York Times to exercise anything like the kind of influence that, say, Lippmann or Buckley enjoyed, because each of them was writing directly for an audience who could put their ideas into effect. Unless I actually succeed in converting the readership of the Times to my idiosyncratic conservative, dynamist and Catholic views, I will always be writing for people who will never fully agree with me, while also being somewhat of an outsider to conservative politics as a whole. Generally, America is more resistant than European countries to people moving back and forth between journalism and politics. A figure like Boris Johnson is an imaginable prime minister in a way that William Buckley was not an imaginable president. It’s true that jd Vance was a journalist, but the brevity of his period as a pundit—and the sharpness of his pivot to a more Obama-like role, as a figure who narrates his own life and then turns it into a political story—seems like the exception that proves the rule. Someone who has a tv platform, like Pat Buchanan, can play a role in American politics; if Joe Rogan decided to run for president, it would get some attention. But in terms of shaping power politics directly, there are real limits to what journalists can do. So yes, I see myself in that tradition to some degree, but with a strong sense that it’s almost impossible for someone writing about politics to exert that sort of influence in this phase of our history.
What have been the major intellectual influences on you? One was clearly the Franco-American thinker Jacques Barzun, whom we’ll come to in a moment. Aside from him, who has made the biggest impression on you in the different stages of your career?

To the extent that my evolution into conservatism was distinctive, it was due to the fact that I came of age in a family who were basically liberal Democrats but became very religious and, by virtue of that, got interested in religious arguments, and so subscribed to First Things while still voting for Bill Clinton, which was not the usual way. So, I was a religious conservative before becoming any other kind. Unquestionably the most influential politically connected figure in my teenage intellectual development was Richard John Neuhaus, the editor of First Things, though I haven’t returned to his work in a long time. Predictable names like C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton loomed large, but they weren’t writing about American politics and they were fifty years back. I didn’t read Jacques Maritain then, but I read writers who saw their neoconservatism as in continuity with his thinking. He was not a neoconservative, but they adapted certain Maritainian views—on church-state relations, American democracy, how Catholicism should relate to liberalism—to a neoconservative politics.
Is that broadly the First Things project?

Yes. That was a primary influence on me—but supplemented, because I had not experienced the seventies and eighties, when a certain conservative synthesis had settled in; I was always a little to the left of that. I retained more of the critique of capitalism, or globalization, than Neuhaus did. He started out as a radical, but became a real neoconservative. Still a defender of some kind of welfare state, but not anti-capitalist. In my early twenties, the chief influence was Neuhaus, plus a dose of Christopher Lasch; that’s probably how I would put it. Lasch’s later writings gave me a way of synthesizing my neoconservative scepticism of liberal elites with a suspicion of neoliberal capitalist politics, which he maintained to the end, even as he moved right—though never as far right as Neuhaus. So, Neuhaus, Lasch, even Chesterton—also a critic of capitalism, in his own way—were more important influences on me than anyone inside the movement-conservative world, whether Frank Meyer or Willmoore Kendall. I read those people later, but they were not formative influences.

The other distinctive point was that I wanted to be a novelist, not a political journalist. I majored in history and literature. I took political philosophy classes later, which was important for me. I studied with Harvey Mansfield and read his translation of Tocqueville in a seminar with him. I read Strauss and found it helpful. Without being a Straussian, I think that framework is a useful analysis of the ancients and the moderns. But even as I began a career as a journalist, the writers who were most important to me were people like Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell; in American terms, Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe; not conventional liberals, but people who were writing critical cultural commentary for a liberal audience. Tyler Cowen once said that after reading my stuff, he thought I was interested in using narrative, in storytelling.
I don’t know if that’s true.

I don’t think it’s true of me exactly, but he was picking up on something. I don’t tell stories, I write arguments; but I may be shaped more than some political commentators by the idea of what a writer does as a story-teller. In the twentieth century, the most important Christian writers in English were novelists: Tolkien, C. S. Lewis—The Chronicles of Narnia, and then, for the deep cuts, The Space Trilogy, particularly That Hideous Strength, which is so like what we’re doing now—even Dorothy Sayers; they definitely had an influence.

Then later, Fukuyama’s End of History. I read it in the late 1990s, well after it came out, and just thought: this is right—this describes the world. In a way, my Decadent Society (2020) is a sequel to The End of History, asking what the end of history looks like twenty years on. Even if we’re maybe exiting the Fukuyamian dispensation, I’d still maintain his book was a profound account of what the world looked like after the Cold War. Peter Thiel’s essay, ‘The End of the Future’, was very influential for my thinking about decadence. I had been enough of a religious conservative to take for granted that, whatever else was happening, growth and technological change were accelerating. Without endorsing the entire Thielian world-view—God knows, it’s hard to parse what exactly that is; I’m not a Girardian, or anything like that—but some of his writing about the limits of Silicon Valley in the early 2010s was important for me in raising questions about that growth narrative.
The Decadent Society, your panoramic critique of the condition of America, draws its master concept from Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence (2000), which traced the arc of Western culture from the creativity of the Renaissance to the catastrophe of the First World War, which left the public mind maimed and disoriented, producing the exhausted stasis of a consumerist ‘demotic society’. You take Barzun’s idea that decadence need not mean a downward fall—it can instead involve a levelling off into futile repetition—but give it a far more materialist twist, freeing it from his Kulturkritiker aversion to mass industrial society. In your account, this yields a compelling picture of economic stagnation—the long downturn, as anatomized by Robert Gordon or Tyler Cowen—combining with demographic decline, institutional sclerosis and cultural-intellectual mediocrity to produce a society that is ‘comfortably numb’. Two questions about Barzun’s influence. First, when did you encounter his work—as a student at Harvard? Second, on your differences with Barzun: he was ninety-three when he published his vast tome on decadence, you were forty-one when The Decadent Society appeared, and you took a much less hostile view of popular culture. Did that contrast matter to you, or not much?

I probably encountered Barzun’s argument when it came out and returned to it, as I returned to Fukuyama, in gathering my own thoughts on the subject in the early 2010s. In terms of contrasts, I’m just doing a very different kind of work. He was a prodigious scholar of Western culture and I’m a newspaper columnist, which meant I wouldn’t be doing his kind of sweeping cultural analysis. I tried to broaden some of the concepts that he applied primarily to culture, to encompass politics, technology, sociology and other developments—so a broadening of his basic idea, but on a shallower scale than he attempted. On popular culture, I’m not actually sure what I think of my own views on it. There is a kind of small-c conservative lament for the decline of high culture that underestimates some of the values of popular culture and I do somewhat self-consciously try to avoid being the kind of stuffy reactionary who insists that everything has been downhill since The Rite of Spring. Not that that’s what Barzun thought—
Well, he does talk about cultural stasis.

Yes, he has a more characteristically European view of the American contribution to Western culture.
Which would be negative?

It would be negative, yes. I’d concede the general point that there is a certain kind of decline going on, from the masterworks of Victorian fiction or Italian opera, to the great American novel and the high tide of Hollywood in the 1970s; some falling-off in artistic sophistication. But I do think the best of American popular culture strikes a certain balance appropriate to a democratic age, between making art that is serious and making art that is for the masses. Because of that, I would place the date of full exhaustion somewhat later than Barzun does. It might also be a symptom of a decadent age that even critics of decadence still want to insist that some forms of art in their own time are better than they actually are. Do I overrate The Sopranos because I myself am decadent? Maybe.
Surprisingly, in your first Times column after the 2024 election, you suggested that history could now be moving into a new, post-decadent era—Trump’s second win signalling that thirty years of convergent neoconservative-neoliberal government was truly over, along with social-liberal hegemony and us expansion abroad. The argument that a new era is beginning is plausible enough. But if tariffs are not a serious answer to economic slowdown, if Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is rendering institutions more sclerotic, and if Trump himself is cultural nullity writ large, then, according to the benchmarks of The Decadent Society, doesn’t Trump’s return represent a deepening of decadence, rather than an escape from it?

There are different ways that decadence can end. One is acceleration, renaissance, dynamism. The other is that decline becomes collapse. The point of the decadence thesis is to describe a society that is neither in catastrophic crisis, nor accelerating towards a radically different future. When I wrote the book in the late 2010s, I was confident that the thesis applied to a lot of different aspects of American life, including the first Trump presidency—it was a rebellion against decadence that participated in decadence itself. Since then, some things have changed. First, there is a more radical technological breakthrough on the horizon than there has been since the internet, and arguably since the mid-twentieth century, depending on what happens with ai. If you look at technology alone, America is less decadent in 2025 than it appeared to be in 2018. We’re closer to self-driving cars, to big medical advances. In the book, I made only a passing reference to ai. Like everyone else, I don’t have a strong sense of where it’s going. But even the ai we have right now is enough to be a turning point in a lot of different ways. So, technologically, it feels like we’re exiting decadence.

Sociologically, in large parts of the world, decadence is deepening into collapse. This is the demographic question that I’m obsessed with, but I think correct to be so. When I was writing The Decadent Society, fertility rates had settled somewhere between 1.2 and 1.8 births. From my perspective, that’s a zone of sustainable stagnation—a society that gradually slows down, gets older, gets more sclerotic, but keeps going. But in the last five to ten years, there’s been a step change, for reasons that may be partly to do with Covid, but also to do with smartphones. The range is now 0.7 to 1.4 births. South Korea is the prime example, but you see it in Latin America, in Argentina and Chile. That’s a range that is heading towards collapse—nations become unsustainable in that environment. So there again, the decadence thesis no longer applies.
You’ve written a lot about falling birthrates, favouring a cultural explanation. But isn’t the political economy of the developed world a more immediate cause, pushing couples to work full-time while failing to offer them affordable childcare? Ctd....