By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, July 31, 2026
So, there’s a Ross Douthat-size hole at the New York
Times. After writing a column there for 17 years, Ross Douthat is going to
be a 60 Minutes correspondent. This is not a sentence I ever
contemplated writing. It’s a bit like writing, “John Podhoretz will join Simon
Cowell, Sofía Vergara, and Howie Mandel as a judge on America’s Got Talent.”
Don’t get me wrong: John would make a fantastic judge on that show. It just
seems unimaginable that he’d get the gig.
Similarly, I think the naysayers are prejudging Ross
unfairly. He’s an incredibly smart and talented guy, and he’s a very good
interviewer of newsmakers and controversial figures (better than me, which
isn’t saying a lot. So, I’ll say much, much better than me).
He’s also very shrewd about how he thinks about his
role(s). Indeed, I think he sometimes overthinks such things. If I had a
criticism of Ross’ column—and before that, blogging—it’s that sometimes he
makes me feel like a physicist trying to locate or measure dark matter. I can’t
see what he really thinks on the page, but I can infer it from how the words
orbit around what he actually thinks. He has a gift for making people more
Straussian. Regardless, the point is, he will think hard about how to pull this
off, and if I had to bet, he will.
I should also say that the move surprises me a bit in
that Ross has a tendency I share of standing—or sitting—a bit apart. I make a
lot of jokes about how I am a tad hermit-ish and misanthropic. There’s a lot of
truth to those jokes. I’ve always seen a similar tendency with Ross (we aren’t
super close, but I’ve known him and been reading him since he interned at National
Review a long time ago). Going out among the people and talking to them
takes effort that doesn’t come easily or naturally. I could be wrong, he’s a
charming guy in person—but I can be too, it just takes effort. Being a 60
Minutes correspondent, I imagine, requires marshaling a lot of that effort,
both internally and externally. Put another way, all things being equal, I’ve
always had the impression that between the two of us, I’d be the more
successful Amway salesman. But we’d both probably go hungry if we worked solely
on commission.
But that still leaves that Douthatian lacuna at the Times.
I still find it a little odd that many people think the Times has
to replace Douthat with another conservative. Some folks talk about his slot
the way people talk about the “Jewish seat” on the Supreme Court. It’s not a law or rule
that such a seat exists or should exist, but the expectation is real all the
same.
This is one of those moments where I really miss having
my dad around, because if you boarded a plane in New York bound for LA, sat
next to Sid Goldberg, and asked him during the pre-takeoff safety
demonstration, “How does the Times pick its columnists?” or “Has the Times
always had a conservative columnist?” you’d be retrieving your carry-on luggage
before he answered your question to his satisfaction. And even then, he’d be
telling you in the aisle that Arthur Krock (the Times’ official “conservative”
columnist—and arguably its first real columnist—from 1933 to 1966) was a
conservative Democrat.
William Safire is remembered as this lovable,
wordsmithing lion of the Times’ op-ed page. But when he was hired, the
outrage in liberal salons was akin to the indignation aroused by Napoleon using
monasteries to quarter his horses. A.M. Rosenthal recalled that “Almost everybody on the paper and all the
journalists outside were sneering.” It wasn’t just that Safire was a
conservative, it’s that he had been a partisan Republican. As a Nixon
speechwriter, he was the guy who called the press “nattering nabobs of
negativism.” Letters to the editor were more than 9-1 against his hiring. The op-ed editor sneered that he “degraded the Times” and insulted the readership. A
Times colleague told Esquire it was “a monstrous accident.”
The reaction to Safire illustrates how much partisan
politics drive a lot of arguments that are allegedly more high-minded than
partisan politics. Over the last decade, the Times had a number of
columnists that qualify as conservative by nearly any objective definition, and
measured against the subjective standard of the Times’ decidedly left of
center center of gravity—not to mention the commenters at the Times—they
were all fascists and neanderthals. David Brooks has moved left—and moved on
from the Times—but he came aboard as a conservative and despite his
“growth” he was always to the right of the Times’ center of gravity.
Bret Stephens is a conservative, even if he isn’t counted as one by the MAGA
crowd. My good friend and former colleague twice-over David French is hated
even more by that crowd, but most of the claims that he isn’t a conservative
rest more on his animosity to Trump than his ideological commitments.
And then there’s Ross. He is obviously a conservative,
with a decidedly Catoggian eeyoreness. But what makes him both vexing and
compelling to fans and foes alike is his gift for describing and inhabiting
positions you can’t always be sure he holds. I am not making any charges of
disingenuousness. He comes by this talent honestly and it’s often very useful
and insightful. Ross’ commitments are more “paleo” than the typical elite
columnist working behind enemy lines, and he developed a skill at Harvard of making
sure to shave the sharp edges so that they never get caught on anything that
might get him stuck. He has an effortless—and again valuable—ability to
critique the critiques leveled by other intellectuals. He can describe the
anti-anti-Trump position without explicitly embracing it and articulate the
shortcomings of the pro-Trump position without forthrightly rejecting it. This
tendency annoys MAGA types who suspect his sympathies (often wrongly) for their
side are stronger than he lets on and who believe that sharp edges are a
feature, not a bug. And it infuriates anti-MAGA types who crave unalloyed
outrage at all times, particularly from one so erudite and sophisticated.
Some think that the Times must hire a columnist
who voted for Trump or who is less esoteric and even-handed in their support
for one of the new “isms” swirling around the right. I don’t think this is
necessarily risible or outlandish. I can think of some writers I profoundly
disagree with who would make great permanent additions to the Times’
roster. Christopher Caldwell, already a contributor, would be a great addition.
Still, there is an irony in folks who do not hesitate to
call the Times “fake news” simultaneously demanding that one of their
own be granted the prestige and recognition of writing for the paper. It’s a
bit like demanding the Catholic Church appoint a Baptist bishop.
I just think it’s a misguided way to think about the
question. It was reasonable to consider Safire a mistake when he was hired. He
wasn’t a reporter and he was a bit of a political hack at the time. He also
turned out to be a fantastic and fearless columnist who often skewered
Republicans (even though his insatiable hunger for wordplay could sometimes
pull his column into a ditch). The times changed and Safire seized the
opportunity to change with them.
The sand is running out of the Trumpian hourglass. MAGA
media is already curdling like a dumpster full of expired milk. Picking a
columnist bound to this fading moment simply strikes me as folly, and not just
because I think there’s precious little about this current moment worth
defending. Safire didn’t carry water for Nixonism after the Nixon era. And at
least Nixonism was a thing in a way that Trumpism is not. To carry the
torch for Trumpism post-Trump would mean arguing for either some mere faction
of the Trump “intellectual” or political coalition or simply arguing for a kind
of neo-Caesarism forever. No one is going to argue that the next president
should simply “rule” as a free agent heedless of norms, rules, and
Constitutional restraints. At least no one worth hiring—or reading.
I didn’t plan on going this long on a subject that
matters so little to most Americans. What I really wanted to do was suggest a
replacement that captures the zeitgeist more unapologetically, taking Ross’
worries about decay and decadence, stripping it of his contrarian patriotism
and religious conviction, and giving us the unvarnished negativity the times
demand and the Times needs.
I am referring, of course, to Werner Herzog, the dark
sage who doesn’t simply elicit metaphors of searching for dark matter,
but inhabits and embraces the darkness fully. Born in Munich under the Third
Reich, he sees the folly of hope and the comedy in optimism. He reads Nietzsche
for the jokes and laughs at the nihilist’s occasional optimism. One might argue
that 83 he’s too old for the job, but he certainly has enough gas in the tank
to get us through this moment, and he is the man to meet this moment.
Imagine Herzog writing about the first GOP presidential
primary debate:
This primary
begins, as all contests for power begin, with rivalrous men standing before
enormous flags, pretending not to smell fear.
J.D. Vance, who
burst into our consciousness promising an elegy, now offers us a welcome dirge
of an America lacking the fecundity to survive. Spectral childless cat ladies
line the shores of our once shining city upon a hill like sirens beckoning us
to a well-deserved doom. He promises salvation in the name of the “common
good,” a phrase that fuels the laughter of men dying of thirst on a raft upon
an undrinkable ocean. Confident that the “heritage Americans” he speaks to will
carry him on their backs to victory, as if the interred corpses of their
ancestors shall rise to cast their votes for him, too.
Marco Rubio, who
revels in promising a future that will always be beyond our grasp, smiles like
a man who cannot accept that the oasis ahead is a mirage masking yet more
parched sand from which no flower will grow. He speaks righteously of the
horrors of communism while defending his patron’s dragon hoard of an economy he
insists must be free. He wishes to engage a world that now looks upon our once
shining city upon a hill like ravenous predators lurking in the darkness just
beyond a campsite, their iridescent yellow eyes spying an opportunity to pounce
upon unsuspecting prey.
Kristi Noem speaks
straight to the camera like a glistening seductress hawking unguents designed
to hide the ravages of time to women dodging Chronos’ scythe. Her arrogance is
only exceeded by the prosthetic mammaries of her cuckolded husband. She boasts
of herding invaders into pens in far-off nations.
Tom Cotton stands
upright like the soldier who has seen death and found it wanting for courage.
His eyes stare, cold like a shark that cannot hear the screams of its prey.
Rand Paul holds
high above his Apollonian curls the figurative head of Anthony Fauci, lamenting
that the red meat of his appeal is only rhetorical.
They speak here in
a place called “Iowa,” a land taken from its original inhabitants to grow more
corn than humans have the stomach to eat, turning the excess into a government
moonshine called ethanol that no one dare drink lest they enjoy the drunkenness
that is only ended by the sweet rest of death.
The combatants
compete with each other, with promises that their elixir will be fed to
automobiles that will hasten their mechanical demise and accelerate our
conquest of the planet.
Other, lesser
supplicants round out the stage like a chorus of extras no one sees, lest
someone points out an unusual deformity or an unearned smile. A senator whom
not even Peter at the Heavenly Gates would recall the name of, a billionaire
rich from peddling ones-and-zeros like a dirty old man giving out candy at a
playground, a television personality famous to everyone in his employ and the
answer to a trivia question to everyone else but his long-ignored children.
They all shine like pools of ambition on a tundra of desperation.
They speak of a
man called Trump, who resides in his Olympus walking a ballroom atop a command
center designed to launch lightning bolts from an empty larder, depleted by
previous campaigns to purchase a place in friendly history books that will not
be written. These ravenous minions seeking elevation to greatness beseech his
divine mandate like so many chicks in a nest of camera lenses, hungry for a
mother vulture’s nurturing vomit. They vow to forestall the demise of a
civilization they profess to love, like an aging husband who insists he still
loves a wife who has lost her luster and no longer stirs his loins.
Vance accuses
Rubio of weakness. Rubio accuses Vance of extremism. Noem pretends to split the
difference while making sure the stage lights capture her Medusa’s coif of hair
extensions like they are the reflected gleam off Perseus’ shield. The
billionaire says something to the sound of eyes rolling.
The voters say
they want authenticity and the appetites in human form dance on their invisible
puppet strings, pretending it comes naturally to them. They talk of worshipping
the buttery likeness of Baal at the State Fair. They shout how well they listen.
They compete over who hates the Democrats the most and which is the most eager
to make Trump’s omnipresent name in the nation’s capital indelible. They all
vow to do things on day one of their presidency, things that cannot be done.
This Hieronymus
Bosch parody will come to an end, eventually, amidst music by the Village
People and the sight of falling plastic balloons descending upon living
mannequins with plastic smiles, the perfect symbol of a pointless ritual:
children’s playthings that are supposed to soar, pulled downward by the forces
of entropy that will consume us all, like ethanol in a catalytic converter.
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