[Marxism] Douthat

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

From the sound of it, you'd think that Ross Gregory Douthat's new book 
"Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" would have been 
published by Monthly Review. Actually, the title is just a demagogic use of 
radical language. Douthat is in fact a National Review writer who had the 
same relation to Harvard that people like Dinesh D'Souza had to Dartmouth. 
For Douthat, the "ruling class" means people like Ted Kennedy or Ted 
Turner, not rightwing slugs like the Coors or Olin. I don't know if Thomas 
Frank takes up Douthat in his book on what's wrong with Kansas, but he is a 
clear example of how the rightists have appropriated the "underdog" stance 
on the left while protecting the interests of the super-rich.

There's a rather toothless article on Douthat in today's Slate magazine:

>>Douthat is an old soul trapped in a young campus conservative's body, 
and true to type, the principal victim of the culture of privilege is 
Douthat himself. If Douthat wishes he had encountered one more poor student 
while at Harvard, he never lets on; and Privilege doesn't waste a precious 
syllable on how to make Harvard a more vigorously fair institution. We do, 
however, hear­and at great length­about how Douthat failed to get into the 
"final club" of his choice (apparently he wasn't among those who "lived in 
the right suburb, vacationed in the right windswept part of Long Island or 
Maine or Nantucket or the Vineyard") and how a certain campus starlet (who 
"would have been pretty had it not been for the ghostly, heavily made-up 
pallor of her skin and the coldness of her eyes") refused to acknowledge 
his existence.<<

full: http://slate.msn.com/id/2114657/

Here's a much better article on Douthat from the NY Observer, a newspaper 
that really has an obvious talent for mocking twits like Douthat on the 
right and Alterman on the left.

NY Observer, March 13, 2005
A Pisher?s Privilege
by Sheelah Kolhatkar

On the brink of the publication of his first book, a 
memoir-cum-sociology-tract called Privilege: Harvard and the Education of 
the Ruling Class, Ross Gregory Douthat was looking earnest and somber in 
tan cords and a navy V-necked sweater, lunching on a B.L.T. at a restaurant 
called Dishes near the Washington, D.C., offices of The Atlantic Monthly, 
where he works as a reporter-researcher. "People always ask you when you 
have a book coming out, ?Which would be better, to have it be well reviewed 
or to have it sell a lot of copies??" said Mr. Douthat, who is 25, 
baby-faced and bearded. "And I?d say, ?Both, of course!? And that?s the 
classic ambitious person?s response. Harvard teaches you to want both 
things." He ordered a piece of apple pie.

Mr. Douthat is the latest example of a relatively new and somewhat alarming 
breed: the Ivy-educated instapundit. Gone are the days when new graduates 
would toil in journalism for a few years?as a copy boy or intern, 
perhaps?before getting their first meaningful byline, never mind their 
first book deal. Now we have bustling young upstarts like Mr. Douthat, who 
received a $120,000 advance from Hyperion for Privilege, which was 
excerpted in The Atlantic. He has a blog, of course (rather grandly called 
theamericanscene.com), and a network of powerful mentors, mostly 
conservatives (political theorist Harvey Mansfield blurbed his book; 
right-wing critic Andrew Sullivan hired him to sub-blog on andrewsullivan.com).

Mr. Douthat cites New York Times resident neocon David Brooks? book Bobos 
in Paradise as an inspiration for his own work, along with William F. 
Buckley Jr.?s classic critique of upper education, God and Man at Yale; the 
work of Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe; and Donna Tartt?s novel The Secret 
History. But is he a baby Brooks in the making or just another Jedediah 
Purdy? (Remember Mr. Purdy? The sapling author of the anti-irony tract For 
Common Things that was the big Knopf sensation of 1999? We didn?t think so.)

Shoulder Nibbling

While at Harvard, Mr. Douthat played the role of conservative gadfly, 
penning self-deprecating biweekly columns in The Harvard Crimson and 
editing the campus? conservative paper, The Salient, where he wrote op-eds 
about U.S. policy in the Middle East and did a sort of proto-blog about 
goings-on around campus. "He was quite prominent on the scene, I would say, 
during his undergraduate career," said Professor Mansfield, who taught Mr. 
Douthat in modern political philosophy. "People did read what he said. He 
had a way of putting it in a sort of attractive and provocative way without 
trying to shock people."

Mr. Douthat was critical of Harvard?s rampant grade inflation, found the 
overwhelmingly wealthy students to be interested only in their summer 
internships, and thought most humanities courses were oppressively P.C. and 
not rigorous enough. In Privilege, he refers to Harvard as a place where 
"canons are scorned, books exist only as texts to be deconstructed by eager 
theorists, willfully obscurantist writing is championed over accessible 
prose, and every mention of ?truth? is to be placed in sneering quotation 
marks." He harbored nostalgia for a (possibly nonexistent) time when 
college students were interested in learning and not just résumé-padding, 
and when government service, the military or the priesthood were acceptable 
career choices for rich kids.

Mr. Douthat stuck out in part because of his passionate religiosity: He is 
strongly anti-abortion and said that "premarital chastity is something that 
as a Catholic and a Christian I aspire to." (Although he has one serious 
former girlfriend?"Alice" in the book, who in real life is Baltimore Sun 
feature writer Abigail Tucker.)

When asked whether he?d "aspired" successfully, he blushingly answered: "I 
think I should probably take the Fifth."

In Privilege, he describes semi-stalking one Rachel Polley, who seemed to 
tease him mercilessly for months on end, distracting him by hanging around 
his dorm room in skimpy tank tops and letting him nibble at her shoulders.

Though he wasn?t exactly a campus Romeo, Mr. Douthat seems to look upon his 
tenure at Harvard as a sort of golden time when he was a luminary in his 
own insulated world, before the pressures of the cutthroat media rat race 
set in. "One of the things about Harvard was that I was the only 
conservative columnist on The Crimson, so automatically, even if most 
people disagreed with me, I was a voice of something, and what I was saying 
was unique," Mr. Douthat said somewhat wistfully. "What you realize when 
you come to Washington and see the welter of op-eds, and now with the 
blogs, is that the trouble with being a columnist is that there are 50,000 
other columnists saying the same thing every day."

Skinny-Dipping with Buckley

Mr. Douthat was raised in New Haven, Conn., alongside one younger sister. 
Their father was a lawyer and their mother primarily a homemaker. The 
family scene was a combination of crunchy hippiedom?"health-food camps," 
etc.?Democratic politics and hard-core Catholicism, to which the entire 
family converted when Mr. Douthat was a teen. (His mother is also at work 
on a book, about this conversion.)

Young Ross moved rightward in his teenage years, partly as a form of 
youthful rebellion. He attended private school at Hamden Hall, in the 
shadow of the more prestigious prep academy Choate. There, he and his chum 
Mike Barbaro "managed to create a little media monopoly" (as Mr. Douthat 
put it) within the school, editing and writing the literary magazine, the 
official school newspaper and the underground paper.

"In high school, he authored a substantial portion of?if not a whole part 
of?a sci-fi novel, which I always mock him about," said Mr. Barbaro, a 
reporter at The Washington Post who seems a bit in awe of his friend. "I 
always make fun of the name?Darkness Discovered, or some silly title. I 
think he sent that around to publishers and was really, really crestfallen 
when that didn?t get any response."

Ms. Tucker (a.k.a. "Alice"), who dated Mr. Douthat for about a year right 
after their college graduation and remains a close pal, met him for the 
first time during a high-school debate tournament in Connecticut. "I 
remembered him as this guy who utterly trounced me and my partner in debate 
one day," Ms. Tucker said. "I remembered he said something to his partner, 
something like, ?We?ll squash them like insects.?"

Arriving at Harvard, Mr. Douthat had some vague political aspirations and 
briefly contemplated law school, but basically knew he wanted to be a 
writer, although he said that Harvard?s money-grubbing culture made him a 
bit anxious. "You know that your peers who go off and do consulting or Web 
design?or back then it was Silicon Valley?are going to be making, for the 
foreseeable future, twice as much money as you are, and living lifestyles 
twice as affluent as you are," Mr. Douthat said. "But there are professions 
that are very respectable if you?re a kid at Harvard, and writing is 
clearly one of them?because even though it doesn?t have the financial 
rewards of some of the others, it does have the recognition and fame aspect."

During his first two summers, while classmates were off interning at places 
like The Washington Post, Mr. Douthat made money writing SparkNotes?study 
aides for high-school students, like CliffsNotes?and failed to write a 
novel. His final summer before senior year, he interned at The National 
Review, at the feet of William F. Buckley Jr., which yielded one of the 
more memorable scenes in Mr. Douthat?s book?one more reminiscent of an 
Abercrombie and Fitch catalog than of a right-wing political journal: Mr. 
Buckley took him, a classmate and the summer "boat boy"?a college kid from 
Yale?sailing. They all got drunk, stripped naked and jumped off the side of 
the boat.

One day not long before graduation, The Atlantic Monthly?s chairman, David 
Bradley, "sort of swept into The Crimson and said, ?I?d like to interview 
10 or 15 of your best people,?" according to Mr. Douthat. The Atlantic?s 
editors selected three of them, Mr. Douthat included, to serve as 
"Ninjas"?the magazine?s term for the young researchers staffing a new 
Washington, D.C., office who would be at the beck and call of the Boston 
writers and editors. Mr. Douthat started working there in the fall of 2003, 
after a mountain-climbing trip in Maine with Ms. Tucker. "We intended to 
climb the tallest, but we got up there and they told us the trails were 
full," he said. "So we went for the second-tallest."

?They?re Ambitious, and I?m Ambitious?

The first few weeks in D.C. were somewhat slow. Mr. Douthat realized that 
he "had things that I wanted to say about Harvard and elite education and 
the whole culture of meritocracy and achievement and competition." He 
didn?t want to do a polemic, though.

"It seemed like there hadn?t been anything written in a long time about the 
undergraduate experience from an undergraduate perspective," he said. "You 
know, what you see is, people sort of parachute in ?. David Brooks did a 
great piece for The Atlantic a couple of years ago called ?The 
Organizational Kid,? where he went to Princeton and he interviewed a bunch 
of Princeton kids and he sort of tried to get the sense of the place. And 
then you have Tom Wolfe with I Am Charlotte Simmons?a similar thing, you 
know: Older reporter goes and tries to be a fly on the wall at college, and 
so forth. Those were very good, but I felt like college from the point of 
view of the college student was fertile literary terrain."

One of Mr. Douthat?s Harvard-bred co-workers had interviewed with a 
literary agent, Rafe Sagalyn, who had mentioned that she should send any 
"hot young Harvard writing talent" his way. When Mr. Douthat got wind of 
this, he eagerly sent his first few chapters along, which included ones 
about his freshman year and his failed attempt to join a snooty eating 
club. He added a few more sections and a book proposal, and Mr. Sagalyn 
started shopping it around. A handful of houses were interested.

"I think there was a tiny bit of bidding, but it wasn?t a bidding war," Mr. 
Douthat said. He liked the acquiring editor at Hyperion, Ben Loehnen, 
another Harvard boy who had been a couple of years ahead of him and who 
even knew some of Mr. Douthat?s high-school acquaintances. "It?s sort of 
interesting," Mr. Douthat said, "because so much of what I talk about in 
this book, in terms of the way that an elite education is mostly about who 
you know and the connections you make and so on?it completely played itself 
out in the way that my book ended up being published."

Of his advance, Mr. Douthat remarked that it was "less than Peter 
Beinart?s" (the young New Republic editor who reportedly received $600,000 
for a two-book deal from Doubleday).

Mr. Douthat spent less than a year writing the book, working on it in the 
evenings and during downtime at work, taking some unpaid time off from The 
Atlantic.

Now, on the eve of Privilege?s publication, anticipating an Ivy-covered 
tour that will bring him to read at the Harvard Co-op on March 10, Yale on 
the 30th and Columbia on the 31st, Mr. Douthat is all too aware of the 
bitter feelings that can surface as he attempts to stake a claim to a place 
in the public eye.

When asked whether he anticipated that any of his peers would be jealous, 
he responded: "I mean, I would be!" Then he caught himself: "I think that, 
yes, I spend a lot of my time being jealous of my peers? achievements. So 
if someone else had written a book about Harvard, you know, I would find it 
annoying.

"I?m much more ambitious since I went to Harvard," Mr. Douthat continued. 
"I?m still part of the culture. I mean, I work at The Atlantic Monthly in 
Washington, D.C., I?m friends with all my friends from Harvard, and they?re 
ambitious and I?m ambitious, and ?. What could be more Harvard than writing 
a book about Harvard?"


Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org 


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