A Distinct ‘Privilege’

“I regard myself as a conservative in the aesthetic sense,” Ross G. Douthat ’02 once explained to The Harvard Crimson in his final year in Cambridge. Already a long-running Crimson columnist and editor of the Harvard Salient at the time, he had earned a reputation as a prolific writer and the foremost conservative on campus. With his recent selection to replace Bill Kristol ’73 as editorial columnist for the New York Times, he will become—at the tender age of 29—one of the nation’s most preeminent political commentators and visible conservative intellectuals.

The Harvard community, and especially those involved in the campus media where Mr. Douthat began his journalistic career, welcomes this news in particular. Mr. Douthat’s speedy rise through the ranks of opinion journalism does our newspaper—as well as the Salient—proud. Harvard for a long time has been privileged as a fertile ground for launching careers of all sorts, especially in journalism. Mr. Douthat, author of Privilege, the celebrated autobiographical account of his undergraduate years, offers further encouragement to the campus’s aspiring writers and thinkers.

Although Harvard has particular reason to celebrate, the rest of the public should similarly laud the Times’s smart choice of Mr. Douthat. The columnist whom he will replace, Mr. Kristol, has ancestral ties to the luminaries in the American conservative tradition. His father, Irving Kristol, chartered the school of thought known as “neoconservatism,” and he studied for his doctorate under Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., ’53, conservativism’s elder statesman and principal brain trust. Despite these credentials, Mr. Kristol’s short run on the Times’s editorial page had yielded little more than uninspired boilerplate. With Mr. Douthat taking his stead, the Times will now feature a conservative whose intellectual vintage is much younger but who has already earned a reputation as an independent thinker and reformer.

The succession of Mr. Douthat to Mr. Kristol’s post perhaps represents a larger movement within conservatism. As the American right, hammered by two consecutive electoral defeats and without a clear political or intellectual leader, struggles to find its identity, Mr. Douthat will be able to articulate a fresh vision and sound principles in which his moribund movement may rediscover its raison d’être.

Liberals here at Harvard and throughout the country indeed may find Mr. Douthat’s positions and philosophy no less objectionable than his predecessor’s. Yet Mr. Douthat, a captivating author who appreciates nuance and spurns unsophisticated ideology, will contribute not only his perspective, but also, perhaps more importantly, a respectable approach and attitude that conservative pundits too often have lacked. Mr. Douthat is no Rush Limbaugh—for better or worse, conservatives in this country and on this campus will have a smart and rational exponent around whom they can rally.

As a self-described aesthetic conservative, we can only hope that Mr. Douthat will inaugurate change not only in substance but also in style among his fellows on the right. In the spirit of the great Evelyn Waugh—from whose novel he had borrowed the title of his Crimson column—Mr. Douthat promises to bring a conservative voice to the Times that is more intelligent, more elegant, and more enjoyable to read.