Ross Douthat

The divisions in our country are resilient, the reversion to a 50-50 split seemingly inevitable even amid plague and war and protest. Yet in those regions of America that officially have a professional commitment to debate — the realms of academic and journalistic argument — things are still mostly…

The heyday of the new atheism in Western life, when anti-God tracts by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens bestrode best-seller lists, did not arrive because brilliant new arguments for God’s nonexistence were suddenly discovered. Rather, it arrived because specific events and deeper forces…

In 2015, Barack Obama submitted to interviews with three YouTube stars, one of whom was notable for eating cereal out of a bathtub. It was a moment that opened a window into the media landscape of the future, after the mainstream media as we have known it — while also making that future seem…

The election of 2016, both Donald Trump’s shocking victory and Bernie Sanders’s socialist insurgency, created a sudden swell of ideological ambition. Conservative thinkers rushed to fill in the outlines of Trumpian populism, building various intellectual frameworks for an incipient “post-liberal”…

One of the Biden White House’s greatest achievements, from the perspective of its staffers, if not necessarily the country, has been to deny the press the kind of juicy leaks that were constant under Donald Trump and frequent under his predecessors. Save for a very narrow period of time, that is,…

Let me tell you a medical story; you decide what you make of it. A person has a routine medical experience, the kind that all their neighbors have had as well. But afterward they have weird symptoms, odd forms of pain, fatigue that just goes on and on and on. The medical system can’t help them, so…

For all the ways that our political coalitions have changed over the last few generations — Southern Democrats joining the G.O.P., Northeastern Republicans turning Democrat, “Reagan Democrats” moving right, suburban Republicans voting for Joe Biden — there are patterns that persist across the…

In February there was a flurry of discussion about whether President Biden’s advancing age and seeming weakness in a matchup with Donald Trump meant that he should step aside. I wrote a column on that theme, but the more notable (that is, nonconservative) voices arguing that Biden should consider…

Foreign policy can make a mockery of moral certitude. You’re trying to master a landscape of anarchy policed by violence, where ideological differences make American polarization look like genial neighborliness, where even a superpower’s ability to impose its will dissolves with distance, where any…

When I was a college undergraduate 25 years ago, the fancy school that I attended offered what it styled as a “core curriculum” that was really nothing of the sort. Instead of giving students a set of foundational courses and assignments, a shared base of important ideas and arguments, our core…