Ross Douthat

“My view of Trump is that, while he has done some extremely noxious things, in general his worst feature, his most authoritarian feature, really is his public presentation.”

“The days of noblesse oblige are long behind us, so our elite's entire claim to legitimacy rests on theories of equal opportunity and upward mobility, and the promise that 'merit' correlates...”

“On the evidence we have, the meritocratic ideal ends up being just as undemocratic as the old emphasis on inheritance and tradition, and it forges an elite that has an aristocracy's vices (p...”

“I grew up in a household that spent most of my childhood on a religious pilgrimage through American Christianity.”

“I think that for social conservatism to make sense as a political world view, it has to have a more capacious understanding of what kind of society it wants than just saying, 'Leave us alone...”

“Genuine cosmopolitanism is a rare thing. It requires comfort with real difference, with forms of life that are truly exotic relative to one's own.”

“I get the sense people sort of imagine that in my personal religious life I must be an intense rigorist wearing a hair shirt under my clothes while scourging myself. And, really, I'm not a r...”

“Liberalism has never done as well as it thinks at resolving its own crises.”

“In Barack Obama's second term, with his legislative agenda dead in a Republican-controlled Congress, the president turned to executive unilateralism on an innovative scale.”

“Whatever role the structure of the Internet plays in radicalization, the root causes are still primarily sociological and political, and they will perdure and manifest themselves somewhere,...”

“In our age of digital connection and constantly online life, you might say that two political regimes are evolving, one Chinese and one Western, which offer two kinds of relationships betwee...”

“That the actual practice of meritocracy mostly involves a strenuous quest to avoid any kind of downward mobility, for oneself or for one's kids, is something every upper-class American under...”

“One of the frustrating tics of our society's progressive vanguard is the assumption that every evil it discovers was entirely invisible in the past, that this generation is the first to wres...”

“Our great national drama was a westward expansion that conquered a native population rather than coexisting with it.”