Ross Douthat has been occupying some of the world’s priciest editorial real estate for a while now, churning out variously incoherent or inane commentary for the New York Times every Monday. He got the job earlier this year when I was lost in a fog so I haven’t paid much attention to him. I think he replaced the clownish and immaculately cynical Bill Kristol, whose support of Sarah Palin was in no small part responsible for President McCain’s come-from-behind win last November.

At any rate, there he is. This week’s cutting edge commentary reveals that when Democratic administrations respond effectively to economic crises, voters in their formative political years tend thereafter to trust the federal government and vote the Democratic ticket. When the opposite is true, the opposite is true.

Recessions, it seems, only benefit liberals when an activist government is perceived to have answers to the crisis. When liberal interventions seem to be effective, a downturn can help midwife an enduring Democratic majority. But if they don’t seem to be working — or worse, if they seem to be working for insiders and favored constituencies, rather than for the common man — then suspicion of state power can trump disillusionment with free markets.

He goes on to say that support for Obama and Democrats in general among voters in that formative period—ages 18-25—is still high but that “the more that Democrats flail in the present, the more likely it becomes that the Great Recession will be remembered as the time when liberalism let the future slip away.”

Even excepting the dim and ritual characterization of Obama and company as liberal, are any of Douthat’s conclusions acute enough to warrant exposure on the Times editorial page? Obviously the answer is yes, but I spent my formative political years thinking the Times was the exemplar of intelligent argument and lo these several decades later I still struggle with the illusion and the pain of losing it. I sympathize with what Obama’s remaining supporters have in store.

Douthat isn’t especially clever but he is sly. He never actually acknowledges that the welfare state policies initiated by Roosevelt worked; he only says that they “were perceived to have” done so. Nor does he mention that those and other activist (Democratic) government policies—Medicaid, food stamps, public cash assistance, housing subsidies, unemployment insurance payment extensions—are at present all that provide even marginal security for tens of millions of Americans and counting.

Among the “insiders and favored constituencies” he cites are “Wall Street bankers, auto unions, public-sector employees.” The interests of union members and government employees are, in Douthat’s construction, removed from those of “the common man,” and linked, at least by proximity, to those of the pirates who precipitated the crisis. There’s just an em’s worth of space between the banker with the million-dollar bonus and the auto worker fighting to keep his house while facing demands for reductions in pay, hours and benefits, the coddled bastard.

What Douthat has done is launch a no-brainer concept, that people have a higher regard for government when it saves their lives than when it makes their lives worse, and tow a bunch of blandly revisionist and amnesiac tropes along behind it. That’s the only respect in which his writing shines: he makes the dishonesty seem effortless.

Of course liberalism isn’t really in a position to let the future slip away, being as it’s less an engine of history than an occasionally coherent ideology adhered to by a very few office holders of limited influence, but that’s not to say that Democrats aren’t often mistaken for liberals and don’t seem determined to forever salt the earth against whatever it is that they profess, or that other people think they profess.

But Republicans won’t let them: if there’s one thing the past forty years have taught us, it’s that no matter what manner of perfidy Democratic administrations visit upon their supporters and the country at large, Republicans in turn will leave no depth unplumbed in their efforts to drive voters back into the pathetic refuge of Democratic arms.

So even that little glimmer of sense, the suggestion that if Obama doesn’t deliver us from evil—excuse me, appear to deliver us from evil—then liberalism, by which is meant Democrats, will forever suffer from it, is dimmed by Douthat’s refusal to acknowledge that the escalating Republican imperative toward implosion will continue to short-circuit any potentially epochal trend.

That’s what it takes to earn the slot: a rough proficiency with the language and the ability to make the obvious sound vaguely revelatory while simultaneously refusing to grasp it. Lacking the latter skill, it’s a wonder that Bob Herbert and Paul Krugman still cling to their positions.

Bookmark and Share

Close Bookmark and Share This Page

Save to Browser Favorites / Bookmarks

Ask backflip blinklist BlogBookmark Bloglines BlogMarks Blogsvine BuddyMarks BUMPzee! CiteULike co.mments Connotea del.icio.us

Digg diigo DotNetKicks DropJack dzone Facebook Fark Faves Feed Me Links Friendsite folkd.com Furl Google

Hugg Jamespot Jeqq Kaboodle kirtsy linkaGoGo LinkedIn LinksMarker Ma.gnolia Mister Wong Mixx MySpace MyWeb

Netvouz Newsvine oneview OnlyWire PlugIM Propeller Reddit Rojo Segnalo Shoutwire Simpy Slashdot Sphere

Sphinn Spurl Squidoo StumbleUpon Technorati ThisNext Twitter Webride Windows Live Worlds Movies Yahoo!

Email This to a Friend

Copy HTML: 

 If you like this then please subscribe to the RSS Feed.

Powered by Bookmarkify™

More »

Powered by Bookmarkify™