Ross Douthat Knows the Fascists are On His Side

Consensus white supremacy relies on fascism to crush its foes.

Image credit: Mercatus Center, CC

NYT columnist Ross Douthat—heading out the door to the new MAGA version of 60 Minutes under billionaire boot-licker extraordinaire Bari Weiss—wrote his last column in the spirit of all his others. In a piece titled, “Who Are the Good Guys and the Bad Guys? I’m No Longer Sure,” he boasted about his own lack of moral insight, emitting a vacuous cloud as he contemplated the ecstatic contemplation of his own farts, methodically avoiding anything like evidence or specifics or insight. Beneath the grating whine and the faint sound of the splashing of his liquefying spine, you could just make out the spiteful murmur of status anxiety and the steady march of the jackboots.

There’s not much point in trying to make sense of a Douthat column just as there’s not much point in collecting swamp gas and injecting it into your eye socket. But it is worth briefly talking about one of his favorite tropes—aka, The Poor Fascists Have No Agency. Douthat references this tired shibboleth in a couple typically lazy burbs. “[P]opulism” he says, “has risen to power because of the elite consensus’s failures.”

Again, this is a very common trope among Very Serious Thinkers on the right. Fascism, for them, is not an outgrowth of decades of conservative efforts to rob women of bodily autonomy, force queer people out of public life, prevent Black people from voting, and throw Black people and immigrants in prison. No, the problem is the failure of the “elite consensus”—an elite consensus in which, somehow, Ross Douthat, prestigious NYT columnist, and wealthy real-estate asshole Donald Trump, do not participate.

Why does elite asshole Ross Douthat think he is not an elite? Why does he assume that fascists (or in his smarmy, cowardly euphemism “populist”) just bampf into being when liberals whisper “abortion rights”?

The answer is that conservatives like Douthat rely on fascism even as they disavow it. Russ does not know “who are the bad guys” because to let himself know would be to admit that he is one.

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White supremacy is the default

In American public discourse, as epitomized by discourse-setters like Ross Douthat, white supremacy—to the extent that such a tasteless phrase can even be mentioned—is a marginal ideology, embraced, perhaps, by some of those populists, but hardly by the elites. There’s fascism (or populism), the nasty fetish of the unwashed herd, and then there’s the bloodless technocratic classism of the powerful. Never the twain shall meet, no, not even in the person of the richest person on earth making Nazi salutes and killing 14 million Black people.

The truth, however, is that white supremacy is not a marginal discourse in US history or in US present. As political scientist Julia Azari explains in her book Backlash Presidents, white supremacy has not been an aberration in American politics. It has been the default.

The US was founded as a slave state. Presidents and political leaders worked hard for a century to work out a white supremacist compromise between north and south that would defuse tension over slavery. When that failed in the Civil War, the nation experimented (very) briefly with multi-racial democracy before forging another century long white supremacist compromise on Jim Crow and brutal discrimination in the north and west. The Civil Rights legislation of the 50s and 60s undid most de jure racism, but that was quickly replaced by a consensus on color-blind racism which subjugated Black people through ongoing disenfranchisement and intense criminalization and incarceration. When Obama’s election opened the possibility that a multi-racial coalition might over time undo that color-blind consensus, we got Trump.

What this means is that white supremacy is and has always been the elite consensus. That is in no small part because white people are the nation’s most stable and most powerful elite. Douthat frames Obama and multi-racial democracy as elitist because he is a white supremacist who sees white power as legitimate and multi-racial democracy as illegitimate. Thus, any time someone like Obama gains power, that power is unearned and a blight on the face of the true volk. People are “elite” not because they have power but because they are overturning the righteous hierarchy. The term that some of those less polished populists might use is “uppity.”

Consensus white supremacy and backlash white supremacy

Conservatism is an ideology that advocates for and fights to preserve traditional hierarchies. In the US, those traditional hierarchies are defined by race. Douthat as a Catholic reactionary who wants to subjugate women and LGBT people also, in the US context, believes that Black people should stay in their place.

But Douthat is again a conservative—which in this context means he’s a consensus white supremacist. He wants to return to a time when political elites were united in their support of the subjugation of Black people and women and LGBT people. He wants that hierarchy to be stable, congenial, accepted. The whole point of a consensus, bipartisan white supremacy is that you don’t have to fight for it.

From Douthat’s perspective (and from the perspective of many like him) the problem with traditional hierarchies is not that they are unjust and are organized to torture and immiserate Black people and other marginalized people. The problem is that Black people and women and LGBT people sometimes resist. It is that, supposedly, which causes all the unrest and unhappiness.

Douthat insists that the Biden presidency, “gave us a more left-wing version of meritocratic hubris, replacing experts with interest groups, maxxing out on social liberalism and illegal immigration and then unraveling completely in the end.”

You couldn’t put it much clearer than that. Trump may be a corrupt brutal thug, but Biden allowed Black people and women and LGBT people (those evil “interest groups”) a role in government! (Douthat’s claim that the Biden administration was friendly to immigrants is simply a lie, albeit a telling one. Biden tried to pass draconian anti-immigration legislation and put in place a brutal regime of deportations. Luckily for Douthat the NYT doesn’t factcheck white men.)

Douthat and consensus white supremacists don’t want to have to escalate enforcement of white supremacy. They don’t want to shoot people outside the normal white supremacist racist systems of murder. They are nice guys who just want to collect their elite NYT checks while being hailed as the true authentic voice of the nation. It’s not so much to ask.

But every so often, the pesky rabble gets worked up. Once the pesky rabble was even elected president! What to do? Douthat didn’t know. He daren’t know. But, oh, the fascists knew. And they did bad things. But they crushed the bad rabble! Which is worse? Which is worse? The bad rabble or the bad people who do the necessary but ugly work of crushing the rabble? Weimar or Hitler? It’s so hard to choose!

If you’d stop resisting, I’ll stop abusing you

Backlash white supremacy—or fascism—is a dialectical reaction to successful left and liberal liberation movements. Racial progress is met with escalating violence, whether that’s the Klan, the Red Summer, massive white resistance during the Civil Rights era, or Trumpism.

Consensus white supremacists always insist that they are not responsible for this escalation. It is outside agitators stirring up the Black people who are at fault; it is the trans activists pushing for too many rights; it’s the activist left judges on the Supreme Court forcing the right to deny women healthcare.

And so on. Consensus white supremacists want the status quo to remain the status; they don’t want to do anything but sit around and order lemonade from the people they’ve enslaved and get paychecks from the New York Times. It’s not their fault that the “groups” forced the fascists to get mean—even if people like Douthat voted for the fascists, spent almost two decades fluffing the fascists, and spent his last column lying with his usual dogged, steady, flatulent prose on behalf of the fascists.

The consensus white supremacists are just the fascists with sparkling white hoods. But consensus white supremacists insist they never would have donned those hoods if Black people, and immigrants, and Muslims, and Jews, hadn’t demanded rights, or run for office, or refused to die. This is why conservatives like Ross Douthat never have agency. It is why the “elites” are always responsible and yet are somehow never the wealthiest people in society, or the corrupt fascist oligarchs in power.

Consensus white supremacists are always already innocent because white power is pure and just and natural. The eternal upward career ascension of Ross Douthat is righteous and foreordained. If you demure, he will not hurt you. But he is so smug because he knows that someone will on his behalf.