"I’m worried about Weimar America. That’s the title of the next book I’m working on. The first thing people say when they hear that is..."

"... 'Oh, is this a "Trump is Hitler" book?' No, Trump barely figures in this book. When we hear Weimar, we think of the film 'Cabaret' and corruption, and we think it all ended up in Nazism. But that is a superficial understanding of it. We have created in America today, perhaps throughout the West, the psychosocial conditions of Weimar without having suffered the traumas that Germany did — losing the First World War, hyperinflation, and the Great Depression. This also goes back to Hannah Arendt and her famous 1951 book, 'The Origins of Totalitarianism.' She tried to explain how it was that right-wing totalitarianism in Germany and a left-wing version in Russia rose, and she said social atomization is by far the most important factor...."

Says Rod Dreher, quoted in "'I'm Worried About Weimar America'/'It may not be Hitler 2.0. It may not be Stalin 2.0. It might be something all American, but it’s not going to be what we’re used to,' the author Rod Dreher argues" (NYT). This is Ross Douthat's podcast "Interesting Times," and you can listen to the whole thing and read the transcript here (and elsewhere).

Bonus: "What is fascism?" 

"[T]he dominant mode in Democratic politics right now. It’s not the rebellion or radicalism manifest in, say..."

"Hasan Piker’s Twitch-streamer Marxism or Zohran Mamdani’s telegenic democratic socialism. Notable as those tendencies may be, the Democrats’ fundamental condition is a late-Trumpian stasis — in which the president’s stark unpopularity encourages his opponents to imagine that they can keep everything basically as it was in the Biden era, with the same broad priorities and deference to activists and interest groups, and float back to power automatically. The continuing appeal of Harris is a useful indicator of this stasis. Yes, she is unlikely to be the 2028 nominee, and part of her support is name recognition...."

Writes Ross Douthat, in "Slouching Toward Kamala Harris" (NYT).

Harris is ahead in the polls for the Democratic nomination in 2028. The Real Clear Politics average has her up by 9.3 percentage points. The most recent poll, from Harvard-Harris — has her up by 28 percentage points. Here's her closest competition:

This is about as bad as I’ve seen him. pic.twitter.com/xksNZfG0BE

— Kira (@Kiradavis) May 3, 2026

"Sure, even I get caught up in the romantic notion that a life exists beyond the grueling 9-to-5 of our capitalist society. A simple life, baking bread and caring for children..."

"... bestows a sense of comfort. But the promise of a tradwife is nothing more than fiction. And the idea of a womanhood that’s 'natural' has been completely determined by a white, male-centric society. Tradwife content allows young women to shrug off any sense of self-blame or responsibility for their role in society.... Tradwives get so caught up in their echo chambers that protecting the nuclear family seems like safeguarding existence itself, and they become completely insulated from what they deem 'unnatural': queerness, diversity, difference of thought. Without this exposure, they are unable to strengthen their sense of empathy.... They become so segregated from the rest of the world that they begin to believe that they will never achieve more—should not achieve more—than the conservative 'natural' role of womanhood.... Starting an article with the headline 'Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?' does nothing more than appeal to those who try to keep lower-income women oppressed and drive young people into a tradwife future that keeps them caged."

Said Kenneal Patterson, one of the participants in a Vanity Fair conversation called "Women of Vanity Fair Consider Ross Douthat’s Question: Did Women Ruin the Workplace? Today, The New York Times published a conversation between the conservative columnist and two writers about just how bad ladies have screwed up corporate culture with their presence. We felt we should engage."

"Today" was a few days ago. We talked about the Ross Douthat piece here, 3 days ago (and that post has a gift link to the provocatively titled Douthat conversation).

"You hear that language of personal choice, not only on the left with regard to abortion, but for conservatives in opposition to things like SNAP benefits for unmarried women..."

"Well, you chose to have this baby while you were poor, and everyone knows you could have chosen differently — when that could entail not having sex or killing the baby in the womb after sex has been had. So there is this sense that the base-line person does not have someone to depend on in this way. I think pregnancy is the starkest example, and it’s the gendered example, but the sense that the fundamental nature of the human person is someone who isn’t constrained by someone else’s need isn’t just a problem for women — it’s a problem for all of us. Each of us has people who depend on us, even if we go through our whole lives childless...."

Said Leah Libresco Sargeant, in an interview in the NYT with the provocative title "Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace? And if so, can conservative feminism fix it?" That's a free-access link to the transcript of the new episode of Ross Douthat's podcast. Also in the interview is Helen Andrews. As Douthat puts it, the guests are "both conservative writers, both critics of feminism, but they have very different views of what a right-wing politics of gender should look like."

"But my goal was to push the justice on... whether her preferred legal theory, originalism, can bend and flex in response to prudential and political concerns."

"[Amy Coney] Barrett believes strongly that it shouldn’t, that justices should rule without worrying about public opinion or who happens to be in the White House. But I tend to think real-world politics constantly tests and limits that ideal. So in our conversation, I’m trying to find those limits and the ways in which even justices devoted to the original meaning of the Constitution have to deal with the highly unusual pressures of right now."

Writes Ross Douthat in the introduction to his podcast, which is an interview with Amy Coney Barrett — "Amy Coney Barrett Is Looking Beyond the Trump Era."

I'll let you listen to that and decide if Douthat got what he said he was pushing for. It's a well-worn road, and I was distracted by the phrase "the highly unusual pressures of right now." It made me think of "the fierce urgency of now." It's always now. Is the pressure of the now that happens to be today's now really so highly unusual? There's too much melodrama!

I began to fritter away precious time thinking of mellower alternatives to "the highly unusual pressures of right now"/"the fierce urgency of now." I thought of: The gentle nudge of somewhat later.

"I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?"/"Uh............"/"You’re hesitating"/"Well, I don’t know. I would....... I would....."

"There’s so many questions implicit in this"/"Should the human race survive?"/"Yes.... but I also would like us to radically solve these problems. And so it’s always, I don’t know, yeah — transhumanism. The ideal was this radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed into an immortal body. And there’s a critique of, let’s say, the trans people in a sexual context, or, I don’t know, a transvestite is someone who changes their clothes and cross-dresses, and a transsexual is someone where you change your, I don’t know, penis into a vagina. And we can then debate how well those surgeries work. But we want more transformation than that. The critique is not that it’s weird and unnatural, it’s: Man, it’s so pathetically little. And OK, we want more than cross-dressing or changing your sex organs. We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body. And then Orthodox Christianity, by the way — the critique Orthodox Christianity has of this, is these things don’t go far enough. That transhumanism is just changing your body, but you also need to transform your soul and you need to transform your whole self. And so............................"

It's Peter Thiel, responding to what one might think were easy questions from Ross Douthat, on the new episode of Douthat's podcast, here, at Podscribe.

Go to 00:37:32 to experience Thiel's freakishly long hesitation when Douthat has just asked if he'd like humanity to survive. And I love how he takes the concept of "trans" and runs with it.

Even though Thiel's cogitations wander into Christianity, he doesn't mention The Transfiguration, in Matthew 17. There, Jesus is "transfigured":

"I really do think that social solidarity is destroyed when you have too much migration too quickly."

"And so that's not because I hate the migrants or I'm motivated by grievance, that's because I'm trying to preserve something in my own country where we are a unified nation. And I don't think that can happen if you have too much immigration too quickly."

Said JD Vance on the new episode of Ross Douthat's "Interesting Times" podcast — audio and transcript at Podscribe.

Douthat was challenging him to coordinate his political thinking with his Catholicism. To quote a bit more of what Vance said:

"It’ll seem like it’s all systems go, let’s keep going, let’s cut the red tape, et cetera. Let’s basically effectively put the A.I.s in charge..."

"... of more and more things. But really what’s happening is that the A.I.s are just biding their time and waiting until they have enough hard power that they don’t have to pretend anymore."/"And when they don’t have to pretend, their actual goal is revealed as something like expansion of research development and construction from earth into space and beyond. At a certain point, that means that human beings are superfluous to their intentions. And what happens?"/"And then they kill all the people, all the humans."/"The way you would exterminate a colony of bunnies that was making it a little harder than necessary to grow carrots in your backyard...."

It's Daniel Kokotajlo talking to Ross Douthat, in "The Forecast for 2027? Total A.I. Domination" (NYT).

AND: I thought May 13th was Bad Analogy Day.

"On this question of how you unrig the economy... Democratic economic policy during the Biden administration, I would argue, was very heavily reliant on subsidy."

"The child care tax credit, the increased Obamacare subsidies, the forgiveness of student loans, essentially a whole bunch of efforts to write families a check in order to paper over the unfairness of the economy: I don’t think that’s actually what voters want. Those are good economic policies, but they feel kind of dirty, kind of lousy to have to be compensated for the fact that work doesn’t pay, that my inputs don’t match my outputs. Which is why that has to be the structure of our efforts to unrig the economy: making work pay. That means a much higher minimum wage. That means much more empowered labor unions. That means the deconstruction of corporate power, so that if you do start up a small bookstore in your community, you don’t get squashed out of existence in the first week. A suite and a set of policies that say to families: If you play by the rules, you are going to have a much better shot of getting ahead than you did under the old rules...."

Says Chris Murphy, in "Can Democrats Win the Working Class and Save the Republic?/Senator Chris Murphy on the Democrats’ 'five alarm' crisis" (NYT podscast, but my link goes to Podscribe, with audio + transcript).

The figurative use of the word "lousy" — literally, full of lice — has been around nearly as long as the literal use. Both go back to the 14th century. The OED records one writer complaining about the word in 1849: "I wish I could never hear the word lousy again. I am willing to bet that Tommy Plunkett uses it fifty times a day, but he is no worse than the others. It is ‘lousy’ this and ‘lousy’ that. The rain is lousy, the trail is lousy, the bacon is lousy, and Gus Thorpe, losing in the card game, has just said that he has had a lousy deal."

Anyway, maybe you can sift through that Murphy stuff and find his "suite" and "set of policies" that Democrats could credibly offer the working class. Trump figured out a way to do it. Do it back. I'd like to see them try. Credibly.

"I can tell you... '16 was providential. That was the hand of God.... The pandemic and the stealing of the 2020 election was also the hand of God."

"At the time, it didn't seem that [way] but if we had gone right into a second term, it would have been like trench warfare. It would have been like the Western Front in World War I, just two sides dug in, and they kind of had Trump surrounded. God's hand worked that we would step back.… We had the time to regroup. Trump had the time to think.... You had those four years of preparation."

Said Steve Bannon.

That made me think about something Ross Douthat said in that podcast blogged 2 posts down: 

"The TV show 'Girls' is a right-wing show.... [That's] some labeling we’re grafting onto this thing after the fact."

"But what these pieces of work are doing is telling the truth about the world in a way that is not compromised by artistic or ideological preferences.... about [what]... society wishes were true about these people. So my thing is that if you are telling the truth about the world, then you are going to make right wing art..."

I'm listening to Jonathan Keeperman on Ross Douthat's podcast in an episode called "The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Offensive":

 

The quote above is Keeperman's. Douthat responds: "Then you’re saying all great art is somehow right wing." He thinks there can be some great art that is "left coded," but he agrees about "Girls," because "it’s a scabrous satire of a particular kind of upper middle class lifestyle in a liberal city."

Keeperman denies that he's saying "if I like it, therefore it’s right wing art, or if it tells the truth [it's right wing art]." Click on the embedded video if you want to hear Keeperman clarify or hear Douthat wedge in the concept of "vitalism" ("a celebration of individuality, strength, excellence, and an anxiety about equality and democracy as... enemies of human greatness").

That reminds me of the time — back in 2005 — I incurred the wrath of lefties by saying "To be a great artist is inherently right wing."

But back to "Girls." Why talk about "Girls" now? The reason for me is that Lena Dunham has a new essay in The New Yorker: "Why I Broke Up with New York/Most people accept the city’s chaos as a toll for an expansive life. It took me several decades to realize that I could go my own way."

"How horrifying it is on the regular."

I'm listening "Resistance, Where Art Thou?," the new episode of the NYT "Matter of Opinion" podcast. At 5:28 in the linked audio/transcript, Ross Douthat says:

From 2016 to 2020, there was a sense that there was a fundamental liberal, or at least center left majority in America that had been unfairly denied its rightful position of power and influence. And so it just made sense to say, we just need to mobilize.... [I]n the early days of 2017, and indeed throughout his presidency, [the White House] was filled with people who were not at all loyal to Donald Trump. Some of whom were just total opportunists, some of whom were sort of, you know, respectable Republican figures who felt like they were there to manage the weird, bizarre phenomenon of the Trump presidency. But those people played a very important role, a kind of feedback loop in driving the energy of the resistance by basically leaking constantly about how crazy things were inside the Trump White House.... [T]he teams that exist in the Trump White House this time have esprit de corps. They have internal loyalty and cohesion. And so whatever is going on... in the kind of Trumpian attempt to remake the executive branch, you know, people aren't interested in just telling Politico and The New York Times all about how horrifying it is on the regular.

By the way, I had a long conversation with Grok about the idiom "on the regular." I won't link to it. Have your own conversation with your own robot. 

I also wanted to quote this from Michelle Cottle: "There was a big piece in Politico saying, oh, you know, the Democrats are, are taking the bait by defending USAID, Americans hate USAID. They think that, you know, we give way too much money to people abroad and things like that. And... I, personally... I am much more familiar with the left critiques of USAID and the work that it's done around the world."

The left critiques of USAID. Where's the NYT article about that? When are we going to hear that side of the story? When — if — Elon Musk releases it into the public domain? Who wants to see that and who is desperately afraid?

"[T]here would be clear advantages: to participate in the great drama rather than watching from across the border, to shape the imperium rather than negotiating a position in its shadow."

"If I were a young Canadian, especially one outside the Laurentian heartland, I think I would feel this vision’s pull. And yes, even if I were a young left-leaning anti-Trump Canadian — because what better way to serve those causes than to actually pull Washington leftward, to add your votes to the coalition that just failed to defeat Trump? That’s the reason that it would be somewhat strange for American conservatives to actually welcome Canadian accession at this time — because it would immediately destroy the Republican Party’s political advantage."

Writes Ross Douthat, in "O Canada, Come Join Us" (NYT).

"I’ve been writing lately about how American politics seem to have moved into a new dispensation — more unsettled and extreme..."

"... but also perhaps more energetic and dynamic. One benefit of unsettlement, famously adumbrated by Orson Welles’s villainous Harry Lime in 'The Third Man,' is supposed to be cultural ferment: 'In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.' There are certainly signs of ferment out there, in technology, religion and intellectual life. But I’m worried about pop culture — worried that the relationship between art and commerce isn’t working as it should, worried that even if the rest of American society starts moving, our storytelling is still going to be stuck...."

Writes Ross Douthat, in "Can We Make Pop Culture Great Again?" (NYT).

I got totally sidetracked by "dispensation." Here's my interaction with Grok that convinced me that Douthat didn't make a weird word choice. It's an excellent word choice, and I enjoyed reading about the religious meanings of "dispensation," including

"Musk is the dynamist, the believer in growth and innovation and exploration as the lodestars of American civilization..."

"[H]e has adopted a more libertarian pose, insisting on the profound wastefulness of government spending and the tyranny of the administrative state. Vance meanwhile is the populist, committed to protect and uplift those parts of America neglected or left behind in an age of globalization.... Despite this contrast, the Musk and Vance worldviews overlap in important ways. Musk has moved in a populist direction on immigration, while Vance has been a venture capitalist and clearly has a strong sympathy for parts of the dynamist worldview, especially its critique of the regulatory state.... And there is modest-but-real convergence between the Muskian 'tech' worldview and Vance’s more 'neo-trad' style of religious conservatism...."

Writes Ross Douthat, in "JD Vance, Elon Musk and the Future of America" (NYT). Douthat thinks dynamism needs populism and populism needs dynamism and, embodied in these 2 men, there's potential for a synthesis into something great, but also a risk of losing "downscale swing voters for the sake of an unrealistic libertarianism."

"I’m worried that if the Harris campaign wins on an abortion, abortion, abortion, presidential message, that the Democrats will take the lesson..."

"... that the way to win is to divide America along gender lines and convince young women that the essence of their political identity should be focused on making sure that they have the right to terminate their unborn children in the womb. That, I think, would be a very depressing future for American liberalism and would make me unhappy for my daughter’s future."

Said Ross Douthat, on November 1, in "This Election Is the Tiebreaker Over Trumpism/The hosts dig into what they got right, and what they got so wrong, about this campaign season," an episode of the NYT "Matter of Opinion" podcast.

The Democrats, most emphatically, did not win the election, and I wonder: Did they learn that it's not a winning strategy to divide us along gender lines?

Scanning the headlines of columns this morning, I get the impression that the response is to double down on gender division. I'll just link to Maureen Dowd's "It’s This Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World":

"I also think it’s important to acknowledge that, as much as I detest Trump the man, there are sides of the MAGA movement that deserve respect."

"I don’t think of it as a collection of unadulterated bigots. Most Trump voters I know are decent people who don’t like being condescended to by a morally smug and self-serving elite that fails to see the many ways in which the federal government fails ordinary people. I also think Trump’s voters see things that too easily escape the notice of Trump’s haters, whether it was the farce of many of the Covid rules and restrictions or the double standards by which Trump’s opponents claim to be defending democracy while using every trick in the book to put him in prison."

Said Bret Stephens, in "A Second Trump Term? Three Conservative Columnists Unpack What Could Happen" (NYT). The other 2 columnists are Ross Douthat and David French.

Douthat invites French to say something nice about MAGA. French says:

"Do you think it’s at all reasonable for the mother of a teenage boy to worry about a false accusation of sexual assault? Or is that just like, a normal maternal anxiety?"

Asks Ross Douthat of Tressie McMillan Cottom, who answers: "I think it is about as normal as worrying that you’re going to be sex trafficked at the shopping center if you are a Middle America mom. That is to say, is it possible? Sure. Is it likely? No. And is there a much bigger threat out there that might be a better use of your maternal anxiety?... The feminist philosopher Kate Mann calls it 'himpathy; — this default sympathy for men and for the male condition and that it is so deeply embedded in our culture."

That's part of a conversation at "Diddy and Our Culture’s 'Himpathy' for Powerful Men/How the allegations against/Sean Combs change the way we talk about #MeToo, rumors and powerful men" (NYT)(and that's my last gift link of the month, which should tell you there's a lot more to read there).

Mainstream media helps Kamala Harris maintain the nothingness.

This isn't the first time I'm noting that the Kamala Harris campaign seems to have chosen a no-substance strategy — a campaign about nothing. See here and here, for example.

This post is just to collect 2 new examples of elite media helping the Harris campaign disserve the electorate by withholding substantive content:

1. "Kamala Harris Doesn’t Need Policy to Win/In fact, a detailed platform will hurt her campaign more than it will help" by Peter Rothpletz in The New Republic: "Harris’s vibes-based, personality-based approach to the first six weeks of this mad dash of a campaign is clearly working.... Harris should hang out in the coconut tree and not release any economic plans that can’t fit within a Venn diagram. To win, Harris doesn’t need policy. She just needs vibes."

2. "How Harris Wins (and Trump and the Republicans Blow It)" by Ross Douthat in The New York Times": "[Y]ou have to think about Marie Kondo, the Japanese style guru famous for her ruthless minimalism, whose prescription for a cluttered home is to remove any object that doesn’t immediately 'spark joy.' The progressivism that infuses the contemporary Democratic Party can be a cluttered, claustrophobic worldview.... Her convention speech was especially Kondo-ist: Short, sparse, and nonspecific about virtually everything....  [W]inning on the most limited agenda and by the narrowest of margins is still winning...."

I didn't go looking for more things to put on this list. These are just 2 things I casually ran across this morning. I'm guessing there's more of the same out there, whether it's this explicitly stated or not.

This reminds me: The debate date is coming up soon. I'm guessing it won't happen. Kamala Harris will drop out and blame Trump. Here's what I said on this topic a month ago. Excerpt: "She's already avoiding speaking on substance. She's following something like Biden's old Covid-era 'basement strategy.' To avoid any debate would be consistent with her overall campaign strategy."

"On one side, there’s the enlightened maleness embodied by Harris’s vice-presidential pick and her husband, Doug Emhoff."

"These are the good progressive dads... the 'nice men of the left' who do guy things like coach football but also manifest liberal and feminist virtues.... Then there is the other model, the dark side of the Y chromosome: the toxic masculinity of Donald Trump, the anti-cat-lady conservatism of JD Vance.... But has liberalism perfected a model of modern masculinity while conservative culture slouches somewhere far behind? I’m skeptical.... First, I would have thought that by now liberals would be hesitant about proclaiming the special personal virtues of the male feminist, the enlightened pro-choice dude. After Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer and Harvey Weinstein, after MeToo case studies too numerous to count, surely we can say that sleaze percolates on the left and right alike....  Second... a strong, religiously motivated commitment to marriage and family — [is] not necessarily... anti-feminist.... [N]eo-traditional households actually show relatively egalitarian patterns of burden-sharing between spouses and strong paternal involvement in child rearing...."

Writes Ross Douthat, in "Masculinity Is on the Ballot" (NYT).

Douthat expresses skepticism about the generalizations and caricatures on both sides. I'll just add that feminism is dysfunctional if it doesn't stand apart from partisan politics. 

ADDED: I interact with Grok again:

 

I laughed a lot, and I'm not exactly sure why, but Meade didn't think it was funny at all, so I tried again:

That's only funny for being a terrible failure at understanding the prompt. Where's the dadness? Where's the feminist virtue? Why is he in a stadium? The first picture was funnier.