Ross Douthat, Undertaker of an Era

The last conservative to leave the New York Times turns the lights out

I do not make a regular habit of reading the New York Times. But when I recently had the opportunity to subscribe at a steep discount for a few months, I broke down and took it. The paper had finally figured out how to cheat paywall-breaking hacks like “archive.ph” (which I pass on in case anyone finds it…useful, though since you asked, no it does not work for Substack). Ordinarily, this being the Times, I wouldn’t care, except there was a Ross Douthat article I really wanted to read.

Here I’ll throw in a quick disclaimer that I’ve actually found myself enjoying other Times content along the way, like this delightful character study of a young Jewish bibliomaniac, or this exposé of abuses in the organ donation industry. A nice plus is that as long as I’m subscribed, I have unlimited gift links to give away, which I’ll be doing liberally in this post. However, I plan to let the subscription lapse as soon as the price goes back up, in no small part because as of this month, there will be no more new Ross Douthat columns to read. Capitalizing on the runaway breakout success of his interview podcast Interesting Times, Bari Weiss has hired him to join her reimagined 60 Minutes team at CBS News, where he’ll make a full transition from columnist to television journalist. This is good news for Douthat and sad news for readers like me, who sense that the end of his columnist career marks the end of an era in American journalism.

Douthat joined the Times roster as a rising young Catholic journalist at the dawn of the Obama era, which was less than 20 years ago but feels like 50. He went on to become one of the vanishingly few true conservatives doing opinion journalism on an elite scale. Well aware that he represented an embattled minority of religious Americans, he established a brand of calm, cool, collected commentary—never brash, but with enough subtle bite to be interesting. His indispensability as a columnist was partly a function of his range. He could shift tonal gears from cerebral analysis to intensely personal work like the medical memoir The Deep Places, on his harrowing battle with Lyme disease. And he could reflect insightfully on topics as diverse as electoral politics, baseball as dying religion, and the stagnation of New Testament scholarship. (The latter led him to encounter my mother’s work in the field, which he highlighted in his book Believe. He was also kind enough to point readers to my writing on the topic, and has in general been more generous to me than a small-time freelancer normally expects from an established writer of his caliber.)

There’s been a lot of speculation about who will “replace” Douthat, but the most likely answer is “no one.” There’s no reason to assume that in the year of our Lord 2026, the New York Times would make it a priority to fill a conservative Catholic’s spot on their roster, let alone a conservative Christian of some other stripe. They only kept Douthat because he’d been around for so long, and because he was so darn good. Apparently there are plans to continue Interesting Times with new hosts, but I can’t imagine what it would even look like without Douthat’s presence anchoring it. Who else is going to deliver memorable moments like this exchange with Peter Thiel about whether the human race should survive, or this spontaneous recitation of a poem about conceiving a child, or this entire interview with Ben Sasse?

At Mere Orthodoxy, Jake Meador wrote some good reflections on what Douthat’s shift says about the future of digital media, digital personalities, and the slow replacement of literate culture with oral culture. Since then, Douthat has given the beginning of his own explanation for the pivot. In conversation with Ezra Klein, he says that as the landscape of politics and culture has become progressively weirder and murkier, he has felt himself more and more at sea as an opinion journalist. At this point in time, he finds a certain relief in a job that allows him simply to ask lots of curious questions and describe what he sees, without the exhaustion of trying to persuade readers to see it his way. If persuasion was his main task as a columnist, then he confesses, poignantly, that he feels like he failed.

That sense of unburdening, of going out not with a bang but with a resigned sigh, is the theme of his farewell column. It asks simply, “Who is my enemy?” Where are the bad guys at? This question is increasingly open-ended, and the number of ways to answer it is increasingly varied. Is it the radical left, growing still more radical by the day? Is it a Trumpist right cankered with corruption? Is it the mad transhumanist techno-futurists of Silicon Valley? Douthat lays a curse on all houses, then leaves the final answer as an exercise for the reader.

I haven’t always agreed with him, but I feel a measure of journalistic kinship with him. On my own small scale, his sadness is my sadness.