To Ross Douthat: What you should have asked Matthew Continetti

 

Dear Ross,

I found your conversation with Matthew Continetti somewhat disappointing. If as you say Continetti is  a leading intellectual of the conservative right, it would have been more illuminating to hear him argue why, as a matter of public policy rather than politics, conservatives have it right, especially on two key issues you talked about: woke versus slept, and immigration. So here are some public policy ideas I wish you and Continetti had taken up.

On Woke versus Slept

We progressive liberals on the woke left believe that social and economic justice demands affirmative action. That’s based on our reading of 19^th century American history, in which millions of black and native American lives were shattered by the institution of slavery and ejection of native Americans from their land. We believe that if you break it you own it, and so as a society, we own the legacy of social and economic inequality that results when deeply unequal amounts of  human and financial capital are transferred from one generation to the next for many generations.

 We reject the myth of meritocracy, which says that after 100 years, any remaining inequality can only be explained by differences in talent and hard work. The way we see it, America has become an inherited meritocracy, in which parents’ ability to invest in their children’s human capital – the “merit” metric that drives unnatural selection in our competitive society – is entirely a function of how much parents can afford to spend.

The central message of Critical Race Theory, which we endorse, is that the socio-economic status of anyone living in America today is heavily dependent on the legacy of human capital investment from which she has benefitted, or of which she has been deprived, not just in her own lifetime, but over the generations of her ancestors. Human capital investment, or lack thereof, is above all an inter-generational phenomenon. Which is why today we live in an inherited meritocracy.

The slept right rejects this way of thinking. It believes that it is unfair for an institution – for example a school or a fire department – to reject an applicant with a higher “merit” score and select someone with a lower score. The woke left sees things differently. We don’t frame the question through the eyes of the rejected individual alone. In that frame, his rejection doesn’t seem fair, but in our frame, he is a citizen of a country and a member of a society that has historically treated some classes of people unjustly. The legacy of that injustice lives on. and justice is served through affirmative action to discriminate in favor of those who are victims of that legacy.

On Immigration

As for immigration, your conversation did not elicit any ideas about immigration as a public policy issue – only a political issue. Of course it works politically to oppose immigration – legal and illegal, past and present. But the question for a leading intellectual on the right should have been whether what Stephen Miller is doing is good for our country.

Ron Chernow’s biography of Mark Twain offers a pertinent commentary contrasting vividly the woke and slept perspectives on immigration.

 In1854, the 19 year-old Sam Clemens left Hannibal Mo to spend a few months working as a compositor in a print shop in New York City. Here’s Chernow’s account:

“However entranced he was by New York City, Sam Clements was still blinkered by small town bias, and revolted by the racial and ethnic mix in lower Manhattan. Shaped by Hannibal, he spewed forth prejudice. His daily stroll to work led him through the tough immigrant neighbourhood of Five Points and he gazed with sheer loathing at the diverse inhabitants:

‘Niggers, mulattoes, quadroons, Chinese and some the Lord no doubt originally intended to be white but the dirt on whose faces leaves one uncertain as to that fact. To block up the little narrow streets and wade through through this mass of human vermin would raise the ire of the most patient person that ever lived.’”

Chernow writes, “A massive tide of German and Irish immigration had spawned the nativist Know Nothing party in the 1850s and Sam echoed their xenophobia, squawking to his brother Orion that:

 ‘There are so many abominable foreigners here [in Philadelphia] who hate everything American.  I always thought the eastern people were paragons of uprightness, but I never saw so many whiskey-swilling, God despising heathens as I find in this part of the country.’”

Chernow then tells us that Clemens saw the matter very differently twenty years later, when “[Clemens] left a withering portrait of his youthful self as ‘a callow fool,  a self-sufficient ass, a human tumble-bug, stern in air, heaving at his bit of dung, imagining that he is remodelling the world, and is entirely capable of doing it right.  Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful chuckle-headedness, and an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all. That is what I was at 19 or 20.’”

Clemens’ blinkered 19-year old self is where slept nativist Americans are today. Clemens’ awakened 39-year old self is where the woke left is today.

So here are the policy questions I wish you had asked Continenti: notwithstanding the recurring bouts of American nativists’ antipathy towards immigrants,hasn’t immigration always been good for the American economy and American society? Does it make sense to decry the rise of the non-native born share of the population from 4.7% in 1970 to 14.9% in 2023 (US Census Bureau data), when demographers report that the 2023 total fertility rate  of native-born American women was 1.7 (below the replacement rate of 2.1) versus 2.2 for immigrant women? The overall average rate of 1.8 is well below the replacement rate, and it will be even lower if Stephen Miller gets his way. Does the right endorse the idea that it’s better to have a shrinking country, with all the economic problems that would entail, if that’s what it takes to keep the country white?

And how about crime? According to the most recent data, the violent crime rate for native-born Americans was 213 per 100,000, while the rate for illegal (i.e. undocumented) immigrants was 96.2. For drug crime, the numbers are 332 for native-born Americans and 135 for illegal immigrants. By deporting illegal immigrants, Stephen Miller is increasing the overall rates of violent and drug crime in the US population. Does Continetti think this Is good public policy?

As always,

Daniel Badger

 

To Ross Douthat: What Chris Murphy should say at a town meeting in Hannibal MO

Dear Ross,

As a fellow citizen of the Nutmeg State, I found your conversation with our Senator Chris Murphy both enlightening and provocative. Great journalism!

At the heart of the case you were prosecuting against the Senator is the fact that he is agnostic. He can’t stand before voters anywhere and proclaim that he believes in an awesome God, because he has doubts. And if he can’t say that in a red state, he can’t expect church-going voters in those states to identify with him. And if they can’t identify with him, how can he persuade them to vote for him?

However, as is often the case with prosecutors, I don’t believe your avenue of attack was altogether fair. When the Senator said this:

“Church was the place where I learned selflessness. I learned to care about my neighbors, that moment in church every Sunday morning when you turn to the strangers next to you and introduce yourself was an important reminder to me that even if I didn't know somebody I still should care about them and they were part of my community.”

and this:

“I struggle with my own personal thoughts about God and the afterlife but I find that even if your beliefs lean towards secularism or deism or agnosticism you can still find a lot of value in church.”

you said this:

“The language you just gave me is very Connecticut. I hear that language all the time. I would like to go to church because I get a lot from it socially.”

That’s a fair characterization of most members of the congregation at Christ Church, Greenwich where I was baptized , but it’s an unfair characterization of what the Senator said to you about what church-going means to him.

The Senator’s views on the existence of God and the value of church in society place him somewhere between the worshippers at Christ Church, Greenwich on the one side and the worshippers of an awesome God in Missouri, etc. on the other. But if the Senator can’t honestly say in a church or at a town meeting in Hannibal, MO that he believes in an awesome God, here is what he can say:

“What separates you from me is not my views about humanity, but my views about divinity. I can’t ask you to identify with my views about divinity. Jesus preached that the greatest commandment is to love God with all your heart and soul and mind. But my soul and mind have doubts about the nature of God, the afterlife, the miracles and resurrection of Jesus, and many other things the Bible tells me are true.

“However, I can and do ask you to identify with my views about humanity. Jesus preached that the second great commandment, like unto the first, was to love thy neighbor as thyself. Some may say that you can’t be a Christian if you can’t bring yourself to obey the first great commandments. But I would say that neither can you be a Christian if you can’t bring yourself to obey the second.

“The idea that we should love ourselves and our family more than we love our neighbors, that we should love our neighbors more than we love people in the next town, and that we should love them more than people in the next country – the so-called “order of love”--  dates back to the Christian theologians St. Augustine in the 4^th century AD and Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century.

“These days, the “order of love” is being promoted from the White House as “common sense.” But I say it’s nonsense. It preaches disobedience to Jesus’s second great commandment. This idea may somehow be compatible with the Christianity of Augustine, Aquinas and the White House, but it is not the Christianity of Jesus Christ, who simply said Love Thy Neighbor As Thyself. Period. [Matthew 22:37-39, Mark 12:30-31 and Luke 10:27].

“And by the way, if you try to get your head around the tortured logic by which Augustine and Aquinas attempt to reconcile the plain meaning of Jesus’s second commandment with ordo amoris, you will be very much reminded of Antonin Scalia’s contorted attempts to reconcile the plain meaning of the Second Amendment to the Constitution with his idea that the Framers intended to grant all citizens the right to bear arms, whether or not they are members of a well-regulated militia.”

[Of course, it might be impolitic for Senator Murphy to make this point in Hannibal MO. But it’s true.]

Finally, Ross, I wish Senator Murphy had concluded your conversation with him by saying this to you:

“It’s true, as you say, that many red state voters have trouble identifying with someone who can’t tell them he believes in an awesome God. But it’s also true that a large majority of those voters happily gave Donald Trump a pass on the awesome God question, even though the man plainly believed not in an awesome God, but in his own awesome self.

“How can both of these things be true? The answer, I believe, is that these Trump voters care less about a candidate’s views on divinity than about his views on humanity. In Trump, they see a man who proudly wears on his sleeve a brand of humanity towards people who don’t support him marinated in grievance, resentment, intimidation, humiliation and retribution. That’s a brand of humanity these voters identify with. But is it Christian?”  

Daniel Badger

West Hartford CT

May 12, 2025 

To Ross Douthat: the question I wish you had asked Jonathan Keeperman

 Dear Ross,

First, thank you very much for your Interesting Times podcasts exploring why intelligent people on the right think the way they do. This is an invaluable service to liberals like me.
 
 One part of your conversation with Jonathan Keeperman was particularly striking to me, and prompted this note to you. Here’s a partial transcript of what Keeperman said, followed by the response I wish you have given.

"What does that look like in a future where it’s not a predominantly white country? These are legitimate things to think about. A lot of people didn't want us having these conversations previously, but then what happens in 2013-14 and then scales up over the course of the 2010’s is this insistence coming from the left that we have our moment of racial reckoning. So a bunch of people then are being asked to have a difficult conversation about race, and the prevailing view which is taken on by the New York Times by academia by and large is that any differences in outcomes among people can be ascribed to this infinitely amorphic, non-falsifiable, infinitely pervasive thing called systemic racism.  And this is if not intentionally, then de facto the fault of the white population in the country. So the question then is: is that true?  Are we allowed to look at the actual causes of why these discrepancies exist?  And it just is the case that when you look at these differences they are not attributable to white racism. You can actually identify causes”

Your response to Keeperman’s assertions was not entirely satisfying to me. You began by saying that you buy his version of the argument, then talked about Robert D'Angelo and psychological self-scrutinies to root out hidden structural racism, and then went on to Tin-Tin. 

Here’s how I wish you had responded to Keeperman:

“I want to challenge your critique of the view that the differences in outcomes between blacks and other races can be ascribed to systemic racism. You say there are other causes, having nothing to do with racism, and you imply that you’ve studied them. But you didn't say what these causes are, or mention any studies of them. So I would ask you please to enumerate these other causes for me. But before you do, and since I'm on the New York Times payroll, it's first incumbent on me to tell you what the left thinks causes these differences.

I believe you are referring to differences between blacks ond other groups on crime and incarceration rates, single-parenting, educational and professional achievement, and of course on income and wealth.

Liberals ascribe these differences to systemic racism because, in their view, they are legacies of forms of racial discrimination that were historically grounded in core institutions of American society. As the word legacy implies, what happened in the past leaves an imprint on the present. So differences in outcomes persist today to some extent, even though the historical structures of discrimination that caused the differences have been largely dismantled. 

This began of course with the institution of slavery, which not only deprived blacks of education and the means of accumulating wealth, but also, and more insidiously, undermined the cohesion and sanctity of the slave family unit. 

Wealth, education and family cohesion are transmitted from one generation to the next, as are poverty, ignorance and family dysfunction. Sociologists who study what the subject called the inter-generational transmission of socio-economic status find reasonably strong statistical correlations between, on the one hand, such explanatory variables as parent incomes, parent educational attainment, number of parents in the household, property values and crime rates in the neighborhood where a child grows up and, on the other hand, such outcomes as the child’s income as an adult, educational attainment, property values and crime rates where the child lives as an adult, the probability the child will commit a crime as an adult, and the probability the child will marry and remain married for life.
 
 Correlation implies causation where there is corroborating evidence. Here the corroborating evidence is the fact that children learn to behave well or badly from their parents, their parents’ friends, and their peers in school and on the streets they grow up in. Other corroborating evidence is the fact that the amount of human capital invested in a child while growing up depends largely on the amount of human and financial capital the child’s parents have to invest.
  
 The inter-generational correlation coefficients for socio-economic status are nowhere near perfect. Most studies show correlation coefficients in the range of 0.25 to 0.5 for most of the variables. This means that there is and historically always has been a fair degree of socio-economic mobility in America. Nevertheless, the studies show that today, a child whose parents’ lifetime income is in the bottom 20% of incomes for all parents has a 4% chance of having a lifetime income in the top 20% of incomes for her birth cohort. On the other hand, a child whose parents’ lifetime income is in the top 20% of incomes for all parents has a 39% chance of having a lifetime income in the top 20% of incomes for her birth cohort.

For black children, this odds-of-success gap is even wider, because black children’s parents are much more likely to have incomes in the bottom 20% compared to other groups. Again, for historical reasons.

Following emancipation, the socio-economic status of blacks was far, far below every other ethnic class in Ameria. Over time, and in the absence of any further institutional discrimination against blacks, the gap would have narrowed at a certain rate. But institutional racism persisted in different forms following emancipation:  in legislation enacted at all levels of government, in education, in civil and criminal justice enforcement, in public services, in property markets, and in private sector hiring. 
 
 As a result of these post-emancipation forms of institutional racial discrimination, the status gap caused by slavery narrowed more slowly than it would have done in the absence of ongoing institutional racial discrimination.

So I have this question for you, Jonathan: first, can you identify any cause of the differences we see today between blacks and other groups that is not itself the result either of intergenerational transmission of the poverty, miseducation and destruction of family life that were the legacies of slavery, or the result of continuing institutional racial discrimination after emancipation?”