Ross DouthatVerified account

@DouthatNYT

New York Times columnist, National Review film critic, author of Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (Free Press, 2012).

Washington DC
Joined April 2012

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  1. Pinned Tweet
    18 Oct 2016
    Replying to

    Read the excerpt: Read the op-ed: Buy the book: You won't regret it.

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  4. My pre-release opinion of "Black Panther" is that I would much rather watch a sci-fi movie about the internal politics of an imaginary African kingdom than a new Marvel movie, so I'll be pretending that it's just the former.

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  6. Also this is kind from but he leaves out the part where I plied him and with Macallan and they revealed the identity of the next pope.

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  7. I'm told that the event is sold out but you can still watch me get anathematized in real time online:

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  9. Jan 28
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  10. Jan 28

    I suspect he'd write it differently today, and the shape of black opinion probably looks somewhat different today thanks to Trump. But I think it's still a good example of a more realistic, and ultimately compromise-oriented, approach to these things. /finis

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  11. Jan 28

    Here, for instance, is a moderately sympathetic piece from four years ago about anti-immigration sentiment that treats it as a normal part of politics. It's about African-American immigration skepticism. wrote it:

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  12. Jan 28

    That's because, as I said in the column, I think there are reasonable socioeconomic reasons to be skeptical about mass immigration, and because people are complicated you shouldn't distill an argument to the worst impulse animating it.

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  13. Jan 28

    Finally is right about this: I am arguing that the presence of bigotry and racism among immigration restrictionists does not automatically disqualify their views from a place in negotiations:

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  14. Jan 28

    The stresses created by demographic change are not confined to the white working class. Nor is the case for a politics that acknowledges them as problems, and proceeds relatively cautiously when shaping/accelerating that change.

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  15. Jan 28

    It's not as extreme as the Trumpian form, but from the "Berniebro contra mundum" battles to the "multiculturalism versus Zionism" debates on campus it's very easy to see such dynamics at work.

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  16. Jan 28

    He suggests that saying "diversity sows distrust" is just an excuse for a racist distrust that only manifests among white conservatives. But I don't think that's true at all. The Democratic coalition is increasingly shot through with diversity-driven distrust as well.

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  17. Jan 28

    A couple of more thoughts, specific to 's critique, starting with this point:

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  18. Jan 28

    And when your enemy has just made an offer that has infuriated (for real) a number of his own allies, that's a good time to think creatively about counter-offers, doomed as they may be. The belief that moral purity precludes them is part of the doom spiral of polarization.

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  19. Jan 28

    I grasp why that's seen as a more outrageous idea, since it distills a vague general idea to a specific deal with a figure seen as the devil. But such deals (Nixon to China, etc.) *are* in fact a common feature of successful political compromise.

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  20. Jan 28

    The difference is that this time I'm specifically arguing that this compromise might (though probably not) be reachable via negotiations with Stephen Miller and the Trump White House, based on the offer they've made.

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  21. Jan 28

    The argument is basically the same one I made in this column six months ago -- that a stable bargain on immigration would involve keeping rates roughly steady while changing the skills mix. That column did not provoke much controversy that I can recall.

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