Ross Douthat is a Hack Journalist and a Shitty Human Being

Ross Douthat

Political scientists sometimes speak of the Overton Window. This idea holds that ideas exist along a spectrum. At either extreme, ideas seem ridiculous, unfeasible, even destructive; consider how America defines itself as neither Fascist nor Communist, but something in between. In other words, the extremes define the center. But this carries a scary implication for current affairs: making the extreme seem normal moves the center. Extremists can make the formerly unacceptable seem normal.

Ross Douthat, the New York Times’ in-house conservative, writes this week that we should take “incels”—self-described “involuntary celibates” who believe they’ve been unfairly treated by today’s shifting sexual values—seriously, because “extremists and radicals and weirdos see the world more clearly than the respectable and moderate and sane.” He then spins a windy discursion on sex robots, the politics of attraction, and y’know what, you should read this goulash of old-school establishmentarian twaddle for sheer horror factor.

Spoiler alert: he doesn’t mean it. One needn’t read very far into this jeremiad to realize Douthat has cherry-picked some orphan quotes, shared them out of context, and pushed them to their extremes to shove them outside the Overton Window. He means it all satirically, as an appeal to the slippery slope, claiming that somehow incels, whose manifestos identify them as conservative and “alt-right,” are the logical conclusion of liberal sexual values overwhelming Western society.

If you slept through recent weeks, or you’re reading this in a more peaceful future that’s forgotten 2018, “incels” came into common knowledge recently when one jackass, believing his sexual frustrations justified violence, killed ten people when he drove his van into a crowded Toronto sidewalk. Before this act of terrorism, he attempted to position himself as a martyr for the cause. Like Dylann Roof, he thought he’d start some long-simmering populist uprising.

Except ordinary people realize something Ross Douthat dances around: nobody is entitled to sex. Human mental health requires intimacy, but sex isn’t about any individual. Having sex requires two people to agree, which requires communication, compromise, and discourse. Natural human sex requires people to see each other, at least potentially, as equals. Anything else reduces one partner to, in Douthat’s words, “a sex robot,” a lifeless thing which exists to receive another person’s masturbation. Sexual entitlement is always dehumanizing.

Douthat claims sex can be redistributed much like “property and money.” He doesn’t believe this, certainly, but floats the idea in an attempt to (forgive me using a term from rhetorical criticism) kick shit. But he starts from a flawed assumption. Economist Hernando de Soto demonstrates that property requires documentation to have any weight, documentation only governments can maintain efficiently. And Catholic economist John C. Médaille, citing Henry Ford, notes money only exists because banks loan it into existence.

Humorist Tom Tomorrow on columnists
saying ridiculous things for specious reasons.
Click here for the full original comic.

Sexuality is, essentially, the ultimate libertarian transaction. While money and property require an extensive regulatory bureaucracy to even exist, sex is a private agreement between two(-ish) individuals, based upon mutuality, trust, and need. While who we desire is conditioned by cultural standards, as everything is, two people sharing similar conditioning simply make an agreement, and proceed from there. But saying this is impolitic, since it admits libertarian economics is all about getting screwed.

In the final paragraphs, Douthat reaches his real agenda: “There is an alternative, conservative response, of course—namely, that our widespread isolation and unhappiness and sterility might be dealt with by reviving or adapting older ideas about the virtues of monogamy and chastity and permanence and the special respect owed to the celibate.” In other words, everything before this has been my hack undergraduate attempt at Swiftean satire, and let’s go back to church.

The old Protestant in me innately sympathizes with the idea of resurrecting the ideals of self-discipline and restraint. But I still have multiple problems here: neither the libertarian, the alt-right, nor the progressive agendae really want restored puritan mores, for separate reasons. And besides, Douthat, a journalist, realizes he withholds his twist too late; whether in print or online, nobody reads op-ed columns long enough to reach his big reveal in paragraph sixteen.

Douthat has, in essence, retreated into ridicule. I’m reminded of author Loren Collins, a self-described conservative libertarian, who bemoans how often his fellow conservatives abandon evidence and reason. Instead, they “poke holes” in others’ logic, in ways that often look plausible to the ill-informed. Rather than staging his own argument, Douthat engages in contrarian histrionics. But to anybody who thinks about his point realizes he contradicts his own principles. Assuming he has any.