I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Ross Douthat
Ross Douthat, (pronounced DOW-thut), a 29-year-old writer and editor at The Atlantic, has been hired to replace Bill Kristol, who left the New York Times one year after his opinion pieces began appearing in the paper.
“[Douthat's] writing steers away from partisanship — he frequently criticizes Republicans — or doctrine, showing a concern for income inequality that is usually the terrain of more liberal writers. On abortion, he said in an interview, ‘I’m sort of a squishy pro-lifer,’ interested in finding areas of compromise. He initially favored the war in Iraq, but later opposed it,” reads a story posted Wednesday on the Times’ site.
Douthat was one of a several young conservative thinkers profiled in a July, 2008 “Week in Review” piece in the Times. Here’s an excerpt:
Another new-generation conservative, Ross Douthat, argues that “Reagan was right for his time, but now it’s a different time.” Mr. Douthat, 28, and Reihan Salam are the authors of a new book, “The Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.” Mr. Douthat says that social conservatives have gotten stuck and need to move beyond their focus on gay marriage and abortion — a focus, he said, that does nothing to help a single African-American mother trying to raise a family. Instead, conservatives need to “figure out a way to talk about the problem of family breakdown and the extent to which that’s linked to social mobility, economic troubles.”
In his eyes, while the network of research groups and journals helped build conservatism, it has also contributed to its stagnation. “Conservatives have always criticized the liberal establishment” — universities, magazines, organizations — for a “tendency toward cocooning,” Mr. Douthat said. Now, it is conservatives who are cocooning, talking only to each other and not looking around for new ideas.
“There was this tremendous generation of intellectuals who came of age in the ’70s and ’80s, but I think there’s been some difficulty in establishing a new generation,” Mr. Douthat said. “On the right, a lot of them did their best work 20 years ago.”
Kristol, founder and editor of the conservative magazine Weekly Standard, and a FOX News commentator, had previously published columns in The Washington Post.
“Even some journalists sympathetic to Kristol say his Times writing was often predictable and not his best work, and noted that he had to correct three factual errors,” observed The Washington Post in a story that also announced the paper would begin publishing monthly columns by Kristol.
“The New York Times’ decision not to renew Bill Kristol’s opinion column was because of the conservative writer’s sloppiness and uneven quality, according to a reliable source with first-hand knowledge of the decision,” wrote Scott Horton at The Daily Beast.
