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☆ Opinion | Why Liberal Academia Needs Republican Friends
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-04 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Here are a few snapshots from higher education in America:Under a new provision in state budgeting, public universities in North Carolina will cease funding distinguished professorships in the humanities, reserving them for science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The furor around elite universities over their responses (or non-responses) to Hamas’s massacre in Israel has now inspired a group of white-shoe law firms to collectively demand a stronger response to antisemitism from leading law schools. Ron DeSantis of Florida, in his continuing higher education wars, is trying to shut down pro-Palestinian student groups whose national chapter supported Hamas’s attacks. A new survey from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found weak student support for free speech on campus, and the weakest support among the most liberal students; meanwhile the schools whose students were friendliest to the discussion of unpopular views included the right-leaning Hillsdale College and the self-consciously classically liberal University of Chicago.

Persons: Ron DeSantis Organizations: Gov, Foundation, Rights, Hillsdale College, University of Chicago Locations: America, North Carolina, Hamas’s, Israel, Florida

☆ Opinion | Two Ways of Looking at the West’s Population Dilemma
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-03 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +11 min

That means the dilemma of the 21st century isn’t how Earth will feed an ever-growing population, but how the world will deal with a potential mass rebalancing of population via migration, an altered wealth-and-people equilibrium, in a world where technology is making the movement of peoples easier than ever. Clearly, the richest countries will be able to replenish their populations with immigration across the 21st century — if they choose. (A 25 percent ratio means there are four workers for every retiree; a 50 percent ratio, just two.) I don’t think you need to be especially pessimistic to regard that kind of transformation as incompatible with stable democratic governance. It’s among the reasons you already have the rightward shift in European politics and why immigration restriction will be a winning issue for the foreseeable future in many European countries.

Persons: Declan Walsh, Africa’s “, Hannah Reyes Morales, Walsh, it’s, Paul Morland, Philip Pilkington, —, hasn’t, don’t, ’, Morland, Pilkington, Biden, Trump, “, Gilbert Meilaender, Blake Smith, Yuan Yi Zhu, Valerie Stivers, Tim Miller, John Gallagher, — Sarah Neville Organizations: Financial Times Locations: Israel, Gaza, Europe, Africa, East Asia, Latin America, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, Romania, Germany, Sweden, Nigeria, Morocco, Americas, America, United States, Palestine, Denmark, Britain, South Korea, Japan, Asia, Poland, ”, London, North America

Listen to and follow ‘Matter of Opinion’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicThe polls are clear: Neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump has the full confidence of American voters. But is Biden’s latest competition, Democratic Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, the answer to voters’ malaise? Or perhaps an independent candidate like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? On this week’s episode of “Matter of Opinion,” the hosts imagine their own alternative candidates for 2024 and debate what good — if any — could come from long-shot contenders. (A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)

Persons: Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Dean Phillips, Robert F, Kennedy Jr Organizations: Spotify, Democratic, Dean Phillips of, Times Locations: Dean Phillips of Minnesota

☆ Opinion | The Israel-Hamas War Will Reshape Western Politics
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-01 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +6 min

In that fairly distant past, the politics of Israel-Palestine broke down into alignments that were familiar and decades-old. On the pro-Israel side in the U.S. were three broad factions: Zionist Democrats, centrist and liberal; neoconservative hawks; and evangelical Christians. But 2023 may be remembered as the moment when Arab and Muslim discontent began to really matter inside Western countries as well. And the tacit alliance between this diaspora and a secular, feminist, gay-affirming Western progressivism — “Islamo-gauchisme” in the French phrase — raises big questions for both progressives and conservative Muslims about who is using whom, and how the Western left and Western Islam might ultimately co-evolve. This isn’t the George W. Bush-era version, with its world-bestriding confidence in American power and its hawkish grand strategy.

Persons: It’s, —, Pat Buchananite populists, Islamicization, Aris Roussinos, Emmanuel Macron’s, it’s, George W, Bush Organizations: Israel, Zionist Democrats, Democratic, Channel, Hamas, Likud Locations: Israel, Gaza, Palestine, U.S, Western Islam, Europe, British, Britain, progressivism

☆ Opinion | Where Hamas Is Winning
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-28 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +4 min

That universal enmity made it hard to imagine how this state of many names — the Islamic State, ISIS, Daesh — could long survive. The atrocities perpetrated by Hamas against innocent Israelis, the snuff films, mutilations and delight in simple cruelty, inspired immediate analogies to the Islamic State’s depredations. Yes, a movement deliberately going to extremes risks the Islamic State scenario, where you isolate yourself so completely that you end up first morally delegitimized and then cornered and destroyed. Suppose you turn southern Israel into an abattoir and you don’t end up like the Islamic State thereafter? Well, then, as Damir Marusic writes in a troubling essay this week, you have achieved a “revolutionary legitimacy” that you didn’t have before.

Persons: opprobrium, Yair Rosenberg, Damir Marusic Organizations: ISIS, Bolsheviks, Islamic State, Islamic Locations: Jordan, Israel, Islamic State, Russia, American, statelessness, Palestine, Saudi, Gaza

☆ Opinion | What Happened to the American Dream?
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-27 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

number — third-quarter growth at a 4.9 percent rate — coexists with data showing disposable personal income actually dipping just a bit, suggesting that the post-Covid stagnation in real earnings hasn’t fully broken yet.) Whereas the Trump era was less complicated: For a few short years, the American economy performed in ways Americans once took for granted, closer to the long post-World War II boom than to the decades of recession-punctuated deceleration we’ve experienced since the 1970s. Lately, I’ve been reading a portrait of that long age of disappointment — “Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream,” a new book by my Times colleague and former podcast sparring partner David Leonhardt. The book’s argument belongs to a genre, reconsiderations of neoliberalism, that’s somewhat familiar by now but is usually more narrowly polemical, where my colleague offers sweep and detail and depth of historical narrative. And the genre’s entries usually come from predictable “outsider” ideological perspectives, from the far left or lately the populist right, assailing the neoliberal age in the voice of its traditional enemies.

Persons: Donald Trump, Trump, Covid, Trump’s, they’ve, I’ve, —, David Leonhardt, It’s, Leonhardt, Wright Mills, Robert Bork, Barbara Jordan, that’s Organizations: White House, Biden, Times

Listen to and follow ‘Matter of Opinion’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicWill technology — and the people who make it — lead us into a better future? Or a worse one? This week on “Matter of Opinion,” the hosts discuss Elon Musk, techno-optimism and the manifesto taking Silicon Valley by storm. Plus, we learn that Ross wears dad drag. (A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)

Persons: —, Ross Organizations: Spotify, Elon, Times

☆ Opinion | Why We Should Fear China More Than Middle Eastern War
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-21 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +5 min

And since we don’t actually want to be at war with China, it makes a certain sense to avoid lumping Beijing in with Moscow and Tehran. It makes sense to talk about China, Iran and Russia as a loose alliance trying to undermine American power, but it is not a trio of equals. But the threat China poses to Taiwan, in particular, has different implications for American power from the threat Russia poses to Ukraine or Hamas poses to Israel. Whatever misery Iran and its proxies may inflict upon the Middle East, they are not going to conquer Israel or drive American power out of the Levant. But we have no experience being defeated in straightforward combat, not guerrilla war, by a great-power rival and ideological competitor.

Persons: Joe Biden, don’t, ”, “, Biden, Putin, pseudodemocracy, Xi, Vladimir Putin Organizations: NATO Locations: Israel, Ukraine, America, United States, China, Russia, Iran, Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, Taiwan, East Asia, Crimea, —, Vietnam, Afghanistan

☆ Opinion | Why Big Money Can’t Easily Change Campus Politics
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-20 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +11 min

First, Jewish donors probably can’t win the identity politics game. But this strategy also has inherent limits, insofar as the free speech protected by campus administrators is only as diverse as the people who are speaking. Which brings us to the second point for would-be reshapers of the university: If you can’t influence faculty hiring and tenure, you may be wasting your money. Will the University of Pennsylvania miss the collection of major donors who’ve denounced the school in the past week? But not with the goal of using such student groups as a means of conflict with the administration or the faculty.

Persons: Jason Willick, specter, Willick, you’re, Donald Trump, there’s, Bernie, Sanders, they’re, who’ve, Leland Stanford ”, Rather, Michael Brendan Dougherty, Chris Caldwell, Anthony Grafton, Anthony Lane, Arthur Brooks, George Orwell, Zvi Mowshowitz, Keith Phipps, Martin Scorsese’s “, Foucault, — Maxi, ” Organizations: The Washington Post, Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, Big, Hillel, Penn, — Locations: The Washington, State, Israel, tokenism, Harvard, Poland, Foucault’s

Listen to and follow ‘Matter of Opinion’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicThis week, the Opinion columnist and former New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Thomas L. Friedman joins the “Matter of Opinion” hosts to discuss the rapidly evolving situation in the Middle East and the mistakes that led to this moment. (He’s looking at you, Benjamin Netanyahu.) (A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)

Persons: Thomas L, Friedman, Benjamin Netanyahu Organizations: Spotify, New York Times, Times Locations: New York Times Jerusalem

☆ Opinion | Are There Lessons for Israel From America’s Response to 9/11?
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-18 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Other lessons do apply, but not in any simple way. But not every aggressive path America took after 9/11 looks mistaken in hindsight. The long-term debacle of our Afghanistan occupation doesn’t make our initial decision to topple the Taliban unwise. Setting out to destroy the Islamic State’s caliphate rather than seeking stable coexistence was a correct and successful call. Reportedly that kind of cruise-missile minimalism is what Bin Laden expected from America after Sept. 11 as well.

Persons: doesn’t, Al, Clinton, Al Qaeda’s, — Locations: Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, America

☆ Opinion | ‘The Entire Debate Was a Gong Show’: Winners and Losers From the Second Republican Showdown
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-28 | by ( New York Times Opinion | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +21 min

Matthew Continetti Governor Haley is an excellent communicator, but her message was often lost amid all the cross talk. Daniel McCarthy In this debate, Governor Haley decided to play the role that Vivek Ramaswamy played last time, frequently interrupting and attacking others. Matthew Continetti Governor DeSantis is not an exciting debater, but he remains the most plausible alternative to Donald Trump. Jane Coaston He really, really, really wanted to fight Donald Trump, who was not present. His worst moment was a canned line in which he compared Donald Trump to Donald Duck (Disney defamation suit to follow).

Persons: Ronald Reagan, Jane Coaston, Tim Scott, Vivek Ramaswamy, Ramaswamy, Gail Collins, Matthew Continetti, Haley, Ron DeSantis, I’m, Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat, Amy Klobuchar, Vivek Ramaswamy’s Pete Buttigieg —, Michelle Goldberg, Katherine Mangu, Ward, Daniel McCarthy, Katherine Miller Haley, Scott, ” Peter Wehner, she’d, DeSantis, Donald Trump, zinged Trump, Trump, he’s, Nobody, Michelle Goldberg DeSantis, DeSantis —, Daniel McCarthy He’s, don’t, Katherine Miller, Peter Wehner, Christie, Donald Duck, Matthew Continetti Governor Christie, He’s, —, Ross Douthat “ Donald DUCK, “ Donald Duck, ” Katherine Mangu, Biden, ” Daniel McCarthy Governor Christie, Katherine Miller Christie, stemwinders, Donald Trump’s, Haley —, ’, “, ” Matthew Continetti, MAGA populists, MAGA, Haley didn’t, Reagan, Ward Ramaswamy, Katherine Miller Ramaswamy, Burgum, Ross, Yep, Katherine Miller Burgum, Gail Collins Boy, Pence, ”, Mike Pence, Asa Hutchinson, Peter Wehner Trump Organizations: Republican, Ronald Reagan Presidential, American Special Operations, Washington, Trump, Fox, Washington , D.C, South, Blacks, ’, Reagan Locations: California, Iowa, New Hampshire, Mexico, Florida, Ukraine, Washington ,, New Jersey, Simi Valley, China, America, North Dakota

☆ Opinion | The Permanent Migration Crisis
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-23 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

On Wednesday the Biden administration announced that it will offer work permits and deportation protections to over 400,000 Venezuelans who have arrived in the United States since 2021. On paper this is a humanitarian gesture, a recognition of the miseries of life under the Maduro dictatorship. In political practice it’s a flailing attempt to respond to a sudden rise in anti-immigration sentiment in blue cities, particularly New York, as the surge of migrants overwhelms social services and shelters. In Eagle Pass, Texas, The Wall Street Journal reports that in a week, an estimated 10,000 migrants have entered the city, whose entire population is less than 30,000. And policies that make it easier to work in those cities, like the Biden move, are likely to encourage more migration until the border is more stable and secure.

Persons: Biden, Eric Adams, Kathy Hochul Organizations: Biden, Street Journal, D.C, Fox News Locations: United States, New York, , Texas, Chicago, Washington, Eagle

☆ Opinion | How Covid Built a Bridge Between the Worst of Past and Future
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-22 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

I would put inflation in this category as well. By contrast, the aspects of the Covid era that I discussed or tried to predict in my fast-forward column were accelerations, not disjunctions. The growth of working-from-home and virtual commuting, similarly, was a leap upward that followed a “continuous rise” in the pre-Covid decades. And the baby bust of 2020 was, of course, an acceleration of a fertility decline that began with the Great Recession more than a decade before. Some trends didn’t shake out exactly as I anticipated three years ago: The decline of newspapers, for instance, continued on trend but didn’t actually accelerate.

Persons: Wells, Bill Clinton’s, George Floyd, Barack Obama’s, wokeness Locations: America

Listen to and follow ‘Matter of Opinion’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicAmericans are sick of business as usual. So what’s going on with work in America? This week on “Matter of Opinion,” the hosts break down how a changing economy and technological innovations are complicating the worker-employer relationship. Ross asks how little work The Times should pay him to do. And ultimately, the hosts debate the question: In today’s world, what role should work play in our lives?

Persons: Lydia, Ross Organizations: Spotify, Amazon Music, United Auto Workers Locations: America

☆ Opinion | Pro-Choice? Pro-Union? Donald Trump Has a Deal for You.
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-20 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

(And on the evidence of national polls, in which he now does slightly better than DeSantis against Biden, it’s working.) Does Trump actually have a labor-friendly solution to the U.A.W. workers should be fired the way Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers. Likewise, can Trump actually mediate a national compromise on abortion by stiff-arming the pro-life movement? But his sudden pro-choice outreach is a cynical response to a real political problem for Republicans.

Persons: —, DeSantis, he’s, Biden, it’s, Tim Scott, Ronald Reagan, Trump Organizations: Trump, Republicans

☆ Opinion | Is ‘Peak Woke’ Behind Us or Ahead?
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-16 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The attempts to use “woke capital” to effect progressive change have met strong resistance, and corporations are losing enthusiasm for a vanguard role. Meanwhile, there is more intellectual and political energy in anti-wokeness now, evident not just in backlash in red states but in this autumn’s roster of new books, which includes critiques of social justice ideology from the socialist left, the center left and the right. The Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action has created new legal roadblocks for Kendi-style progressivism. The mood in elite journalism is less ideologically committed and more skeptical and critical. These exemplify a different aftermath for “peak woke” — not the ideology’s retreat, but its consolidation and entrenchment.

Persons: Trump, Jack Dorsey, —, ”, “, Michael Powell’s, ” — Organizations: Antiracist Research, Boston University

☆ Opinion | What Does a Good Economy Look Like?
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-15 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

But the sourness of public opinion on the economy seems to match up pretty well with Furman’s estimates. At the very least, no matter where we stand relative to the late Obama or early Trump economy, some further improvement seems necessary to convince the public that the Biden economy is actually in good shape. So then the question for the Biden administration becomes: What counts as a good wage trend? Remember that the economic trends before 2020 were the best of the last few decades, so just returning to that dotted line in Furman’s chart would be great news. But does Biden need that scale of success to get credit for a good economy, or does he just need wage growth at any pace?

Persons: Dube, Obama, Biden, Barack Obama, George W Organizations: UMass Amherst, Inc Locations: Trump

Listen to and follow ‘Matter of Opinion’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicHundreds of thousands of migrants, many seeking asylum, have arrived in the United States over the last year, overwhelming already-strained resources in cities and states across the country. Last week, in arguably one of the most immigration-friendly cities in the country, Mayor Eric Adams said that migrants would “destroy New York City.”This week on “Matter of Opinion,” the hosts discuss how the “border crisis” has come to frustrate Democratic politicians further north, and why the conversation about immigration is always actually about who we are as Americans. (A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)

Persons: Eric Adams Organizations: Spotify, Democratic, Times Locations: United States, New York City, ”

☆ Biden, Trump and the 2024 Field of Nightmares - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-13 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

A half-dozen at-bats later, a Mookie Wilson ground ball went through Buckner’s wobbly legs, sending the World Series to Game 7 and a certain 6-year-old Red Sox fan to bed in desperate tears. Those tears were my first acquaintance with the harsh truth of a baseball aphorism: The ball will always find you. Obviously, this is a column about President Biden’s age. But not only about Biden, because America has been running a lot of Buckner experiments of late. And she almost did — but in the end, her legacy was reshaped and even unmade by a decision to stay too long on the political field.

Persons: John McNamara, Bill Buckner —, Dave Stapleton, Biden’s, Buckner, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s, Donald Trump, Dave Stapleton —, Mike Pence — Organizations: Boston Red Sox, New York Mets, Red Sox, Biden, Trump Locations: America

☆ Opinion | Why Is Joe Biden So Unpopular?
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-09 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

The woke wars and Covid battles that disadvantaged Democrats are no longer central, and the post-Roe culture wars seem like friendlier terrain. Biden’s foreign policy team has defended Ukraine without (so far) a dangerous escalation with the Russians, and Biden has even delivered legislative bipartisanship, co-opting Trumpian promises about industrial policy along the way. The hope has to be that inflation continues to drift down, real wages rise consistently and in November 2024, Biden gets the economic credit he isn’t getting now. Across multiple polls, Biden seems to be losing support from minority voters, continuing a Trump-era trend. — much as culturally conservative white Democrats drifted slowly into the Republican coalition between the 1960s and the 2000s.

Persons: Biden, Trumpian, isn’t, wokeness Organizations: Democratic, American, Democrats, African, Republican Locations: Ukraine

☆ Opinion | The Subtlety of J.R.R. Tolkien
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-08 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +7 min

The devil appears to some people as Lucifer the light-bringer, yes — but his darker visage finds worshipers as well. Ours is no longer the world in which Tolkien grew up, nor even the one in which he spent his last years. Tolkien himself was very careful to note that the Shire is not self-sustaining, dependent as it is on outsiders for security. I obviously endorse this point, but I think the last line undersells how much Tolkien subjected his own pastoral nostalgia to critique. Because Tolkien is a reactionary, the solution to that sickness is the return of a king of ancient lineage.

Persons: Tolkien, Soviet Union didn’t, Adolf Hitler’s, Joseph Stalin, Hitler, Lucifer, unrealism —, Tolkien’s, Philip Larkin, “, King Charles III’s, Niall Gooch, Hobbitism, Bilbo, It’s, Gondor, Anárion, that’s Organizations: Gorgoroth, Jackson Locations: Nazi Germany, Soviet Union, England, Tolkien’s, Isengard, Shire, Britain

Listen to and follow ‘Matter of Opinion’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicClassrooms have been a key battleground in the so-called woke wars for years now. But could the debate over how schools teach history, race, gender and sexuality be coming to an end? This week on “Matter of Opinion,” the hosts look at signs that these wedge issues are no longer dividing us, ask whether we have reached “peak woke” and disagree on whether it’s even worth fighting about wokeness at all. (A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)

Persons: ” Organizations: Spotify, Times

☆ Opinion | A Progressive James Bond Is Proof of American Cultural Imperialism
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-06 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

(The cruelty and neglect at these schools was real but the specific claims about graves at the B.C. school have outrun the so-far scanty evidence.) The first is a general tendency of provincial leaders to go overboard in establishing their solidarity and identification with the elites of the imperial core. The second point is the role of secularization and de-Christianization, which are further advanced in the British Isles and Canada than in the United States. Then the third point is that smaller countries with smaller elites can find it easier to enforce ideological conformity than countries that are more sprawling and diverse.

Persons: Ed West, it’s, tastemakers, Aris Roussinos, ” Organizations: Canadian, “, British Isles, Christianity’s, Republican, Laurentian Locations: Canada, British Columbia, British, Ottawa, London, Rome, Europe, United States, Britain, America, Westminster

☆ Opinion | Should Right-Wing Populists Despair?
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-02 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Over the last few weeks Sohrab Ahmari, well known as a leading intellectual exponent of a combative Trumpian conservatism, has been making the rounds explaining why he’s giving up on right-wing populism. That’s a slight overstatement; his new book, “Tyranny, Inc.,” on the cruelties of corporate power in America, bears blurbs from leading populist Republicans like Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio. But part of the reason that the “Tyranny, Inc.” author and his circle earned so much attention in the Trump era is that the age of populism really did unsettle economic orthodoxies on the right. The Trump administration often defaulted, as Ahmari laments, to warmed-over Reaganite policymaking. But Trump’s victorious campaign really did kill off, for a time at least, the Tea Party-era emphasis on entitlement reform and hard money.

Persons: Sohrab Ahmari, ”, Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, it’s, Trump, Ahmari, Trump’s, Biden Organizations: Inc, Tea Party Locations: America

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