As I’m reading books for my American Decline series, it’s a trip seeing how the authors are speaking with each other.
This FTP is on The Dying Citizen by Victor Davis Hanson. My previous read was The Decadent Society by Ross Douthat.
Douthat I like, I respect but he began annoying me. So I skipped sections and looked for the meat of his argument in the last third or so. What annoyed me, was his constant work to pacify his New York Times readers. He came across as the house conservative for NYT readers. He just fed their belief that their worldview is correct, and that most Conservatives are racist dregs. It was unfortunate, he made great arguments and observations, then he quickly bent the knee to the worldview of urban elite liberals.
From Douthat:
In other words, Trump-era populism draws a certain kind of energy from moving back and forth across the safety/danger line, but when pressed, it prefers to appeal to the system as a client demanding services, or as a subject demanding its righ…
