NYT names anti-choice Ross Douthat to replace Bill Kristol

Atlantic Monthly blogger Ross Douthat, who thinks fertilized eggs are people, has been chosen to replace Bill Kristol on the New York Times' editorial page.

If preliminary online chatter is any indication, the emerging consensus among liberal dude commentators is that Douthat was a good choice because he's a smart guy who's generally reasonable, at least by conservative standards. (The soft bigotry of low expectations strikes again.)

Agreed that Douthat is well to the left of most self-styled conservatives when it comes to economic issues. For example, he supports more generous social programs to help traditional nuclear families. When it comes to reproductive rights, however, Douthat's right at home on the patriarchal fringe.

Douthat claims to abhor abortion. If you take him at his word, an abortion is murder. Yet he stops short of backing enhanced access to contraception and sex ed, which he admits would reduce the number of abortions. Why? Because he thinks abortion would first have to be illegal in order to convince people (read: "poor, dumb, slutty women") that unplanned pregnancies are shameful enough to be worth preventing.

Update: Amanda Marcotte has more on the Douthat hire, including a link to Amie Newman's discussion of Douthat's bizarro jihad against Planned Parenthood.

Comments

[Alon Levy]

He's not the only economically left-wing conservative at the NY Times. Ben Stein has railed against excessive CEO pay and called for higher taxation on the rich, in between making creationist movies.

[aeroman]

But he's friends with Matt Yglesias. Haven't you heard of the McArdle Principle?

You're really just scratching the surface regarding his abortion writing. He's not just wrong -- he's regularly either reckless or dishonest in his characterizations of both the pro-choice position and the post-Casey U.S. constitutional framework.

For example, here he cites John Schwenkler's reading of some public opinion polling on the legal status of abortion. The polling responses broke down like this:

"Which comes closest to your view on abortion: abortion should always be legal; should be legal most of the time; should be made illegal except in cases of rape, incest and to save the mother's life; or abortion should be made illegal without any exceptions?"

Always legal: 25%
Legal most of the time: 24%
Illegal with a few exceptions: 37%
Illegal without exceptions: 10%
Unsure: 4%

Now, any sane person who knows what she's talking about would read this and conclude that a plurality of 49% of people endorse either something similar to the existing pro-choice status quo endorsed by Democrats or something more pro-choice. After all, virtually all Democrats endorse outright bans on late-stage abortions, which would place them in the "most of the time setting," while many Democrats endorse some additional restrictions, which would also put them in the "most of the time" grouping.

So, since that's the only plausible reading, it's what a sensible conservative like Douthat (via Schwenkler) would endorse, one would think. But no! Apparently, "always legal" "just is the view of the Democratic Party, since so long as Roe v. Wade and the body of jurisprudence that follows in its wake remains in place it is necessarily the law of the land that there can be no meaningful abortion restrictions whatsoever." But that just is false. Roe permits outrights bans of many abortions, and subsequent cases, especially in recent years, have repeatedly upheld restrictions that, though perhaps modest, were certainly meaningful.

I actually like Douthat as a writer on many issues. It's just a shame that on the issue that's supposed to be his chief bread and butter, he's incoherent at best.

[Alon Levy]

What's the McArdle Principle?

[dr2chase]

abortion would first have to be illegal

He's just young and stupid. In a world of carrots of sticks, sticks are a last resort, not a first resort. Sticks are for moralizing jerks.

[aeroman]

It's the principle by which status as a respectable conservative can be obtained by being on good social terms with young liberal bloggers.

[Chris O.]

I'm not sure I really see the point of this post. "Conservative writer is anti-choice" is pretty darn redundant. If the NYT wants a conservative, then they did a hell of a lot better with Douthat than they did with Kristol. Doesn't mean we all won't criticize the hell out of him, however.

[Eric Jaffa]

I'd rather they added someone to the left of their op-ed regulars.

Someone like Barbara Ehrenreich or Atrios.

[Alon Levy]

Eric: if Maureen Dowd, Bob Herbert, and Paul Krugman are not good enough for you, then you're reading the wrong paper. I'd recommend a rag like Z.

Aeroman: a lot of Americans view "always legal" as the current status quo. That doesn't mean it's correct, but it does mean that a lot of people who think the current status quo is fine answer "always legal" instead of "legal most of the time." On another note, I don't know Yglesias, but I've met others in the same circles, and I tend to think less of most people who like them personally. McArdle I don't care much for - what I've read by her on Tech Central Station is unimaginative repetitions of Republican talking points.

[Matthew Yglesias]

I don't know that Ross is really "friends with Matt Yglesias." I know him. He's a nice guy (but you can say that about a lot of people -- even Jonah Goldberg seemed like an okay person when I met him). We used to have lunch when we worked in the same office. I'd say "hi" and chat if I ran into him on the street. But we never really hung out before or after I left the Atlantic. DC's a pretty small town; most people of about the same age working in the same field know each other, that doesn't mean we all like each other.

Ross's views on choice? They're nuts. Are they more nuts than Bill Kristol's? I don't think so. And at least Ross has the guts to really spell out how far out there on this he is. I think a lot of anti-choice people hide behind weasel words.

As for Megan, I'm not really sure where the idea that she's "respectable" came from.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

It was a given that the NYT was going to pick a conservative. If that's the slot the NYT was looking to fill, I'm happy to see it go to someone young who's closely linked to online media.

My point is that Ross is being praised all over the liberal blogosphere as a sage, reasonable conservative whom we can all respect. My point in writing the post was to note that, while he's okay on family and medical leave, he's an out-and-out crackpot on choice and bioethics generally. As Matt says, he's not reasonable on reproductive freedom, he's insane.

[Cass]

Eric: if Maureen Dowd, Bob Herbert, and Paul Krugman are not good enough for you, then you're reading the wrong paper.

Maureen Dowd?

[Eric Jaffa]

Given that the majority of Americans were against the $700 billion bank bailout bill, including most liberal bloggers, and Paul Krugman was in favor, he's not very far to the left.

[Chris O.]

Lindsay, if that was what you were pushing back against then fair enough. I hadn't seen that, just some over-the-top praise from Marc Ambinder that I chalked up to half being nice to a colleague and half "evenhandedness" that someone is his position is supposed to convey.

Eric's wanting to see someone to the left is actually something I have to disagree with. Theocons deserve their spot on opinion pages too, if they earn it, which I think Douthat has. He certainly has some extreme views that I would fight tooth and nail against, but I wouldn't deny him a venue to express those views. And let's be honest, it is true that newspapers can be pretty clueless in their treatment of theocons and social conservatives generally. It would be better for the country as a whole if they took steps to address that, and maybe this could be one.

[aeroman]

I stand corrected!

[Amanda Marcotte]

The problem is that extreme anti-woman views are routinely treated not as the hate and insanity that they are, but as just a matter of disagreement, akin to the way gentlemen can disagree with each other with whether or not the estate tax exemption should be $2 million or $3 million. It's hard to see it if you're a guy, but for a lot of women, Ross's loathing of us feels very personal and very disturbing, especially since we are good people. It's unfuckingbelieveably frustrating to hear men talk about women's basic rights as if they were so easily disposable. And layering on a phony baloney "respect" for women on top of it makes it worse, because that sort of thing hoodwinks people into not looking at the fire-breathing woman-haters you consort with when you are an anti-choie nut, as Ross is.

Look, they accuse us of being murderers or conspiring with murderers because we don't sperm worship. That's hateful. That's not hateful in the name-calling sense, but real, deep, ugly hate. It's the sort of hate that assumes the targets aren't even worthy of being treated like people. Anti-choicers don't really think it's murder, and hesitate to suggest it should be prosecuted like murder, where women who get abortions would go to jail. They don't see a problem with calling us murderers because they don't grant us the respect to believe that's a serious charge.

[Chris O.]

Eric: I really don't think that bailout bill split nicely along liberal/conservative lines. Especially seeing as it got defeated in the House the first time because Republicans revolted en masse. I suppose that makes them more liberal than Krugman?

[Eric Jaffa]

Chris O. -

There are conservative reasons and liberal reasons to oppose the bailout.

Conservatives may oppose the bailout because they don't want the Free Market interfered with.

Liberals may oppose the bailout because they believe in corporate accountability, want corporations to absorb their own losses, don't want people who caused our economic problems to be rewarded, and don't want multi-million dollar salaries to be federally subsidized.

Paul Krugman is apparently lacking in both conservative values and liberal values, since he is in favor of the bailout.

[Cass]

I agree with everything Amanda says, though there are political and psychological reasons as well for them not to openly call those women "murderers".

Roy Edroso has an introduction to Douhat for the uninitiated.

[Amanda Marcotte]

My favorite quote from Cass's link:

You could spin this out further and point out that it also makes adaptive sense for women to have a certain amount of difficulty having orgasms, because then they're more likely to seek out a long-term monogamous partner who knows their body well, which in turn dovetails nicely with the general female interest in having only one partner, the better to keep that partner around when the children come along.

[parse]

That's not hateful in the name-calling sense, but real, deep, ugly hate. It's the sort of hate that assumes the targets aren't even worthy of being treated like people. Anti-choicers don't really think it's murder, and hesitate to suggest it should be prosecuted like murder, where women who get abortions would go to jail.

Why would people who are anti-choice because of a deep,ugly hate for women be reluctant to see women who have abortions go to jail?

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Even if you hate someone, you probably don't want to see them thrown in jail for a murder they didn't commit.

Anti-choicers say they want to control women's bodies because they believe that a fertilized ovum is a person. When push comes to shove, they obviously don't believe fertilized eggs are full-fledged people. So, the question becomes, if it's not about the little embryo babies, why exactly are they so keen to control women's bodies? Maybe because they think women can't be trusted to control themselves.

[Alon Levy]

Given that the majority of Americans were against the $700 billion bank bailout bill, including most liberal bloggers, and Paul Krugman was in favor, he's not very far to the left.

First, in Congress, the more liberal members were more likely to vote for the bailout than the more conservative members. On the vote for releasing the second round of TARP, the Progressive Caucus was by far the largest supporter.

Second, who cares what liberal bloggers think about the bailout? Many if not most conservative bloggers are creationists, as are a fair number of conservative pundits. That doesn't mean the NYT has to have creationists on its op-ed board.

Even if you hate someone, you probably don't want to see them thrown in jail for a murder they didn't commit.

Why not? The people who hated blacks in the segregated South had no trouble engaging in lynches and sentencing black people to death on flimsy evidence.

[parse]

Even if you hate someone, you probably don't want to see them thrown in jail for a murder they didn't commit.

Even if you hate them with a deep ugly hate that assumes they aren't worthy of being treated like people? I think if I hated somebody that much, being thrown in jail would be too good for them.

[Eric Jaffa]

RE: "who cares what liberal bloggers think about the bailout? Many if not most conservative bloggers are creationists"

I care what liberal bloggers think.

Liberal bloggers who opposed the bailout are right.

Conservative bloggers who believe that there is a thinking creature who created the earth are wrong.

[Amanda Marcotte]

Why would people who are anti-choice because of a deep,ugly hate for women be reluctant to see women who have abortions go to jail?

Because they think so little of us that considering us morally accountable human beings doesn't occur to them. Women are presumed to have the moral sense of dogs, and therefore they insist that doctors are the ones that should be accountable. That's why the (usually male) doctors have become the main targets for violence. You blame the human being who set the dog on the victim, not the dog itself.

Maybe hate is a confusing word. Bigotry? We understand that someone who believes black people to have lower intelligence "hates" black people. So why is it confusing when it comes to women?