I have an anthropological interest in Ross Douthat. I don’t find him to be a particularly good or insightful columnist, and I’m usually irked by his default prose style, which I’d describe as archly smug. (When I read his work, I visualize a man sitting in front of his computer with an unchanging smirk and a single, permanently elevated eyebrow.)

Douthat’s value is not in his writing per se, but in his weird, possibly unique position as a conservative intellectual who clearly enjoys “liberal culture.” The man is, at his heart, a prestige TV fanatic, and if he’d been born a decade or two later, he might’ve been perfectly happy as a YouTube video essayist. Instead, we ended up with a tenured New York Times columnist who attempts every other week to intellectualize his anxiety over his own cultural position as a professed conservative who likes indulging in the output of a liberal Hollywood.

One of his most recent columns for the Times offers a fascinating example of goofy professional rationalizations for participating in things that he clearly just wants to do anyway! Like browsing bookstores with the stated goal of measuring the current mindset of the moderately well-off liberals he often complains about:

Seven months into the second Trump administration, the future of American liberalism is still opaque. I can identify movements contending for influence — the Trump-focused neo-resistance politics of the No Kings protests, the neo-neoliberalism emphasizing political moderation and economic growth, the socialist enthusiasm around Zohran Mamdani’s New York mayoral campaign. But none of them seem like definite expressions of an emerging zeitgeist, or forces with the strong winds of history at their backs.

There are other places besides the political scrum to look for liberalism’s future, however, and this summer I’ve made a habit of canvassing one such zone: the small independent bookstore, whose curated tables reflect and shape the aspirations of highly educated professionals, often the vanguard of progressivism’s march. As a journalist, vacationer and sherpa for a spousal book project, I have crisscrossed California, Minnesota and Maine, and in each state I have made an impressionistic study of what the blue-state intelligentsia seem to be reading.

It’s okay to just visit small independent bookstores, Ross! Admitting that you enjoy doing so doesn’t threaten your conservative credentials.

Slightly more awkward is his discussion of romantasy — a genre which he is fully unprepared to actually analyze — and Harry Potter fanfiction, both of which are reflections, for Douthat, of a new political order in which liberal values must come to terms with their own defeat:

On the romantasy shelves, too, you can see a cultural retreat from liberal optimism. If the Potterverse was a natural touchstone of the anti-Trump resistance (J.K. Rowling’s own political shift notwithstanding), offering a vision of a magical meritocracy successfully defending itself against a fascist irruption, romantasy assumes a more gothic landscape, with ambiguous or malign powers in ascendance. The authors profiled by The Times’s Alexandra Alter last week, who have spun novels out of Potter fan fiction “set in an alternate universe where Harry Potter is dead and the evil wizard Voldemort has triumphed,” make the political progression especially concrete.

But notably, these novels find an erotic frisson in the new dispensation. With titles like “The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy,” they place characters modeled on Hermione Granger, the bookish feminist of Hogwarts, in “illicit, morally ambiguous” relationships with characters modeled on Draco Malfoy, the sinister Potterverse aristocrat.

What that says about the possible futures of liberalism, I leave for the reader to consider.

This is silly nonsense. But it’s at least understandable when you consider Douthat’s own fraught position as a conservative commentator who is ideologically obligated to dislike the cultural products that he personally enjoys. Indeed, Douthat’s career might be understood as an extended piece of fanfiction about a right-wing intellectual trapped in an enemies-to-lovers arc with an entertainment industry that he finds simultaneously repulsive and attractive — an “illicit, morally ambiguous” relationship indeed.

What my own penchant for continuing to read and hate on Douthat says about my own psychological hangups, I leave for the reader to consider.