My anti-Trump credentials stretch back to 1987, when Ross Douthat was eight years old.

Photo credit.

First the "conservative affirmative action" columnist Ross Douthat got in trouble joking about Donald Trump's assassination, which got Allen West all shook up. Then Douthat pinned the blame for Trump on Barack Obama ...

“What it hasn’t inspired is much in the way of self-examination, or a recognition of the way that Obama-era trends in liberal politics have helped feed the Trump phenomenon.”

... which Sean McElwee refutes vigorously in Salon:

Ross Douthat’s pathetic Trump evasion: The NYT columnist attempts to pin the blame on Obama — and fails spectacularly

 ... Trump is the ugly creation of the Republican party’s race-baiting political coup. As a man Douthat admires quite a bit once said, “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.” Obama’s only responsibility for creating Trump was being a Black man who had the audacity to become President of the United States.

Now Douthat has moved past all that, and advocates convention chicanery by the grandees.

The Party Still Decides, by Ross Douthat (New York Times)

What Trump has demonstrated is that in our present cultural environment, and in the Republican Party’s present state of bankruptcy, the first lines of defense against a demagogue no longer hold. Because he’s loud and rich and famous, because he’s run his campaign like a reality TV show, because he’s horribly compelling and, yes, sometimes even right, Trump has come this far without many endorsements or institutional support, without much in the way of a normal organization, clearing hurdle after hurdle where people expected him to fall.

But the party’s convention rules, in all their anachronistic, undemocratic and highly-negotiable intricacy, are also a line of defense, also a hurdle, also a place where a man unfit for office can be turned aside.

Donald Trump's book The Art of the Deal was published in 1987. That's amazing. It means I've been disgusted by Trump for nearly 30 years. What took the rest of you so long?

Even you, Ross?

Charles Pierce rips Ross Douthat a new one over "decadent" non-procreative sex.

Douthat closed his Sunday column ("More Babies, Please") with this:

The retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion — a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. It’s a spirit that privileges the present over the future, chooses stagnation over innovation, prefers what already exists over what might be. It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.

Such decadence need not be permanent, but neither can it be undone by political willpower alone. It can only be reversed by the slow accumulation of individual choices, which is how all social and cultural recoveries are ultimately made.

I have someone in mind you needs to read Charlie Pierce's reply, though I doubt he will.

Ross Douthat Explains Himself

By Charles P. Pierce

at 3:48pm

Ross Cardinal Douthat, Patriarch Of Dweebopolis and Archbishop Of Dorkylvania, is back with a defense and clarification of his column earlier this week in which His Eminence was critical of white American ladies who are out there having child-free sexytime without his permission, and thereby shirking their moral duty to pump out white babies to keep the blahs and the brown at bay. This, to Ross, is not merely unpatriotic, but "decadent," a loaded word that indicates that His Eminence has lived the sheltered life of an entombed cleric. People reacted rather strongly to this contention, so he has come back today to revise and to extend — and I do mean "extend," if you understand what I'm saying, and I think you do — his remarks.

"Father Douthat Explains It All," and Charles Pierce begs to differ.

I, too, read Douthat's piece in the Sunday NYT. Unlike me, Charlie Pierce is willing to deconstruct Douthat's bilge clause by clause. That's why Pierce gets paid the big money to blog, I guess.

Father Douthat Explains It All

By Charles P. Pierce

at 11:15am

I would dearly love it if people who weren't alive in The Sixties would drop some brown acid, listen to the first Quicksilver album, or at least read more than two books before they start telling the rest of us how everything they would have loved about America, had they been alive then, went to hell in a handbasket the first time Ken Kesey sat down at a typewriter. Case in point is young Ross Douthat, a conservative affirmative-action hire at The New York Times who yesterday favored us with yet another rendition about how unauthorized sexytime is draining our precious national body fluids away from the Republic the way that the blood ran in rivulets down the slopes of Golgotha. Or something.

(The usual Douthat Disclaimer — Douthat is a convert to Holy Mother Church. Take it from a cradle Catholic, converts can be the absolute worst. They are dogmatic drones who believe that the Church was founded expressly to take the knots out of their own personal ropes. This all started with St. Paul, the original sanctified convert pain in the balls, and has only gotten worse through the millennia.)

People who fk without Ross Douthat's permission have been expressing happiness over the results of the recent political election, and Ross Douthat is simply not going to stand for that sort of thing much longer.

"Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved?"

Considering the identity of the author, I was prepared to be annoyed with this piece. In the end, I am annoyed, but at least he took a stab at balance in the end.

Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved?, by Ross Douthat (New York Times)

... Yet instead of attracting a younger, more open-minded demographic with these changes, the Episcopal Church’s dying has proceeded apace. Last week, while the church’s House of Bishops was approving a rite to bless same-sex unions, Episcopalian church attendance figures for 2000-10 circulated in the religion blogosphere. They showed something between a decline and a collapse: In the last decade, average Sunday attendance dropped 23 percent, and not a single Episcopal diocese in the country saw churchgoing increase.