In his final New York Times column (8/8/2026), Ross Douthat — departing for CBS's 60 Minutes — offers a striking reversal from his usual posture as a confident conservative critic. For 17 years his target was clear: the Obama-era elite consensus, a fusion of social liberalism, technocratic optimism, and cosmopolitan meritocracy that he opposed on religious, political, and structural grounds, arguing it needed critics precisely because unchecked it would overreach.
That consensus did collapse, largely for the reasons he predicted. But Douthat's real subject here is what came after — and his admission that he can no longer identify a faction worth backing. Trump-era populism, meant to be the corrective, has proven corrupt, chaotic, and just as prone to foreign-policy blundering as its predecessor. The remaining center-left establishment (Biden, Starmer) simply recycled meritocratic hubris in a more left-coded form before unraveling. And the rising alternative — a more socialist, more doctrinaire progressive left — revives for him the McCarthyite climate and institutional collapse he lived through during "peak woke."
Layered on top of this three-way political muddle is AI, which Douthat treats as a genuinely novel axis of power that scrambles the usual friend/enemy sorting entirely: Anthropic vs. OpenAI, the Pentagon vs. frontier labs, accelerationists vs. doomers, "AI as normal technology" vs. "AI as machine god." He argues the correct alignment on these questions depends on empirical unknowns — how fast capability actually advances, how existing political tribes will metabolize it — that nobody currently has good answers to.
His closing move is notable: rather than a valedictory defense of religious conservatism, he frames the moment as one demanding more questions and fewer confident verdicts — a fitting note as he shifts from opinion columnist to broadcast interviewer.
[The above text is Anthropic Claude's reduction of Douthat's article].
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