Tethered Swimming

We’re now three columns in to Ross Douthat’s residence in the opinion section of The New York Times (I say “section” because his columns haven’t yet made it to the printed page, though one assumes that’s coming).  His first effort used a hypothetical “Cheney ’08” campaign to lament Republican unwillingness to confront the ugly reasons they’ve lost power.  The second was a dismissal of Arlen Specter and a call for more “centrists” in the Republican Party.  The third, yesterday’s, was an attempt to paint an optimistic face on the anti-abortion movement.  This is an admittedly small body of opinion work from which to draw any conclusions, but it appears that Douthat is acclimating himself well to the role of conservative minstrel.

Provided you’re willing to be ostracized by your own kind it’s a pretty sweet gig.  You can’t ask for a higher profile, the pay is quite nice and all kinds of people will take your phone calls and invite you to parties.  Look at David Brooks, he’s been doing this for years and as much scorn as he has had heaped on him (and as incoherent as many of his columns are), he’s recently been singled out for attention by the President of the United States.  Constructing grammatically correct sentences that pick at liberal arguments in a Reasonable Conservative way has its perks.

There is, of course, a downside to this (after all, any real conservative will tell you that there’s no such thing as a free lunch).  The Reasonable Conservative can’t just go gallivanting around the airwaves, best seller lists and op-ed pages making outrageous statements in a fact free environment like the Limbaughs, Coulters and Krauthammers of the world.  That’s more fun and more crowd pleasing, but it will never get Serious people to think of you Seriously.  Rather, the Reasonable Conservative has to recognize the existence of facts and reality (and their well known liberal bias), and then still say conservative things.  That is not an easy thing to do, and it leads to intellectual train wrecks like yesterday’s column.

Titled “Faking Left” Douthat starts by arguing that conservatives are inherently fucked in the debate over gay marriage because they’re arguing against freedom, in this case the freedom to marry whomever you please:

Thus gay marriage opponents’ persistent disadvantage. They can argue from tradition, custom and Christianity — as Obama himself does, albeit with dubious sincerity, to explain why he backs civil unions but not full-fledged marriage. They can note the perils of formally severing the link between marriage and childbearing in a society where far too many children are born outside of wedlock as it is. But supporters of gay marriage are the only ones making an argument from personal liberty — the freedom to marry, the right to marry — and that has made all the difference.

This is Reasonable Conservative argumentation at its finest.  He’s agreeing with the liberal position (that’s nice!) but he’s doing so within a serious intellectual framework, so it’s okay for him (the conservative) to do so.  He deploys words like “freedom” and “right” which everyone can endorse and while there is a whiff of lament about the increasing liberalness of the world, he seems okay with it on account of that rigorous intellectual framework.  Unfortunately it’s at this very moment, when the Reasonable Conservative line of argumentation has built up a good head of steam, that it begins to jump the rails.  What’s really fascinating about this is that you can actually watch it happen, sentence by sentence.  Here’s the very next paragraph:

On abortion, though, the picture is very different. The pro-life movement is arguably more comfortable with the language of rights and liberties than its opponents. Abortion foes are defending a right to life grounded in the Declaration of Independence, after all, whereas pro-choicers are defending more nebulous rights (privacy, autonomy, etc.) supposedly grounded in “penumbras” and “emanations” from the Constitution.

There’s a lot going on there, so let’s fisk it line by line:

On abortion, though, the picture is very different.

Did you agree with what I said in the paragraph about gay marriage?  Remember how Reasonable I was?  Well hold tight because I’m about to blow your liberal mind.

The pro-life movement is arguably more comfortable with the language of rights and liberties than its opponents.

Mind.  Blown.  You like “rights” and “liberties”, don’t you?  And when it comes to abortion you’re not used to thinking of pro-lifers as people with a high regard for “rights” and “liberties” because to you a woman’s “rights” and “liberties” should take precedence over the pre-born person you don’t even care about.  Oh yeah, and nevermind that the hypothetical woman in question is a breathing autonomous person, I deftly skipped that part and you didn’t even notice.

Abortion foes are defending a right to life grounded in the Declaration of Independence, after all,

See what I did there?  “Right to life”, “grounded”, “Declaration of Independence”, I’m arguing from first principals which are unassailable because they hearken back to our most hallowed traditions.

whereas pro-choicers are defending more nebulous rights (privacy, autonomy, etc.) supposedly grounded in “penumbras” and “emanations” from the Constitution.

Ah, there’s privacy and autonomy, thought I was going to ignore them, didn’t you?  Instead I’ve minimized them by using quote marks and weak-kneed words like “nebulous” and “supposedly”.  Your position now looks mushy and weak whereas mine is straight edged and solid.

That is a tightly crafted paragraph (transition in the first sentence, statement in the second, and support in the third) written by someone who probably got a lot of “A”s in English classes over the years.  It has all the marks of the clean, unassailable logic that is supposed to be the Reasonable Conservative’s calling card.  Unfortunately it’s an intellectual house of cards because the whole thing is constructed on a premise, all but unstated, that is neither clean nor logical.  It rests on the hoary idea, easily dismantled by anyone with a passing knowledge of biology, that Life Begins at Conception.  Douthat ignores that entirely because engaging it would spoil the mood; instead he blows right past that gaping logical hole and keeps on moving so that the finished product looks nice and sounds Reasonable; and that’s good enough for minstrel work.

No opinions are likely to be changed, and anyone who feels the urge can take it apart without too much effort, but Douthat accomplished his purpose: he amused the liberal majority with easily defeated arguments and gave the Times’ opinion space the veneer of ideological balance.  If he keeps it up for a decade or more he too can dine with a liberal president as a show of tokenism.