I didn’t really start writing about the church in earnest until the mid-2000s, so I wasn’t present for or a participant in a lot of the John Paul II-era debates about papal authority. Ross Douthat Read Quote
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 and let us pass laws against abortion.’ Ross Douthat Read Quote
It’s an oversimplication to say that more monks and nuns are the answer to the Joel Osteen-ification of Christianity… but it wouldn’t hurt. Ross Douthat Read Quote
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 rigorist by temperament. Ross Douthat Read Quote
A diverse elite may be good in its own right, as a matter of justice and representation. But nothing about being a woman or a minority makes you immune to meritocracy’s ruthless solipsism. Ross Douthat Read Quote
Time and again a close election leads to hand-wringing about the need for Electoral College reform; time and again, politicians and parties respond to the college’s incentives, and more capacious and unifying majorities are born. Ross Douthat Read Quote
Donald Trump could win the presidency without a popular-vote majority only because both parties have been locked into base-turnout strategies that are partially responsible for our government’s ineffectiveness and gridlock. Ross Douthat Read Quote
Trump could also only win the presidency without a popular-vote majority because a large region of the country, the greater Rust Belt and Appalachia, had been neglected by both parties’ policies over the preceding decades, leading to a slow-building social crisis that the national press only really noticed because of Trump’s political success. Ross Douthat Read Quote
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, somehow, no matter what YouTube suggests for your next video when you watch a Milton Friedman lecture. Ross Douthat Read Quote
