s/b “Does America need the New York Slimes, or Ross Douthat?”
Douthat has been positioned for 15 years by the NYT as a conservative Catholic (opposition) voice. I don’t read much that he writes, probably because it rarely has surprising or memorable elements, at least to my way of thinking. He may well be authentically both conservative and Catholic; he is also the product of a country day school in Connecticut and Harvard (Phi Beta Kappa, to his credit), and a descendant of a governor of Connecticut (not that there’s anything wrong with that). No doubt it’s hard to break away from the (Uniparty) establishment.