Conservatives Love Him. Liberals Actually Listen to Him. How Does Ross Douthat … Do That?

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The title of Ross Douthat’s podcast is characteristically absent of a value judgment. It’s called Interesting Times, rather than Foreboding Times, Quixotic Times, or Bleak Times—which is an indication of where he stands. At the tumultuous end of the American Century, Douthat is prepared to hear everyone out.

Interesting Times is an interview show. On it, Douthat hosts a slew of rabble-rousers and firebrands from across the political spectrum—think Steve Bannon and Hasan Piker—and peppers them with questions about how they’ve developed their ideology. Douthat finds plenty of disagreements with just about everyone who passes through the studio. He examines those fault lines and probes moments of tension, approaching the brink of an altercation without ever fully tipping over. But Douthat, of course, is a conservative. So that means that the spirit of debate on the podcast—he and J.D. Vance batting around how Catholic teachings interact with immigration policy, rather than examining the fascistic lurches of the Trump administration—is refracted through a much different light.

In that sense, the show is a natural extension of Douthat’s career as a writer and thinker. Since starting at the New York Times in 2009, he has made no secret of his reactionary leanings, which run counter to established Democratic doctrine. (Douthat is against abortion, gay marriage, and the theology of Pope Francis.) But nevertheless, he’s managed to cultivate a bastion of Times readers that find his commentary compelling, or at least odd enough to be worth considering. This has ingratiated him with elite liberal circles—one of his oldest friends is Michael Barbaro, the host of The Daily—but Interesting Times is largely a showcase of the reverence Douthat commands within this newly empowered MAGA coalition. In other words, there are simply not many other Times columnists with the bona fides necessary to induce a shockingly candid Peter Thiel into admitting that he might be less committed to the survival of the human race^[2] than the rest of us are.

Years ago, Douthat might have been accused of sanitizing the figures who appear on his podcast or of providing intellectual cover to the legitimately unhinged. He is likely still doing that, but in 2025, amid a MAGAdom that appears worryingly endemic, Interesting Times is one of the few podcasts establishing a communication line between us embattled liberals and the barbarians at the gates. I asked Douthat about how he found himself in a position to bridge that gap, how he gets politicians to say what they really mean, and why liberal readers have never seemed to despise him in the way they do his fellow conservatives at the New York Times. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Slate: How did you wind up hosting Interesting Times?

Ross Douthat: It was sort of a mutual conversation that [the Times and I] had starting after the 2024 election, when it seemed like the world was shifting in various ways and I might be in a good position to host some conversations about it. It wasn’t a full-court “You must do this pitch” from my end, nor was it something that I was insisting that the Times do. It emerged more organically, and I had been very happy doing the group podcast, the Matter of Opinion show, that we were doing before. Both shows, I guess, were trying to do something a little bit different in a pretty polarized informational landscape.

A lot of staunch liberals listen to your show. This feels like a sea change. After 2016, I think most Democrats had this idea that MAGA could be sufficiently defeated with a majoritarian tide, and therefore wasn’t worth interacting with intellectually or otherwise. In 2025, however, those same liberals have developed this desire to, at the very least, ponder Trumpism—to contemplate its appeal, its place in the world, where they themselves have gone so wrong, and so on. It seems to me that a lot of those liberals are leaning on you to walk them through this engagement. Do you feel the same way?

This is a place where interviewing has advantages over writing. As a writer, you are trying to reach and engage with people who disagree with you. What you present as a columnist is your own opinion. And even if you’ve been extremely reasonable and evenhanded, you’re ending in a place of disagreement.

Interviewing is a little different. You’re presenting someone else’s worldview, not your own, even if it’s a worldview you’re sympathetic to, as I am sympathetic to elements of populism. Your job as an interviewer is still to probe it and argue with it and both get the best expression of it but also sort of push it and test it in various ways. That may be just a more congenial way to encounter a set of ideas you disagree with than a newspaper column that tries to make a particular argument or point. It wouldn’t be surprising to me if for some liberals or progressives, it is easier to encounter the ideas of Steve Bannon or Peter Thiel in a kind of conversational or argumentative framework than it would be for me to write a column saying, “Here’s what Steve Bannon gets right and wrong,” or to read Steve Bannon himself.

I think 2024 was a confirmation that something had fundamentally changed, not just in American politics but in the world. I wrote an essay that argued that now that the post–Cold War era is over, we’re in uncharted territory and things are up for grabs. And if there’s a theme of the show, it’s that. There are a bunch of ideas being circulated in the political mainstream—including ideas that I disagree with or deplore—that you’re not going to be able to use a consensus to police, at least for the foreseeable future. And if there’s a way through this landscape that is democratic, small-l liberal, and nondisastrous, it probably involves figuring out why people are attracted to extreme ideas, arguing with them, and treating people that you really, really disagree with as if they were your friends who happen to hold very, very strange ideas. The idea is that they know that you will treat them fairly and give them room to express their ideas, but that they will be substantially challenged as well.

You’ve never seemed especially interested in picking fights as a thinker or a writer. That viral sense of “ownage” in the realm of online political content—cornering an opponent, establishing dominance over them, humiliating them—isn’t what you do. And I think that’s helped the podcast’s appeal. 

Yeah, I’m definitely not interested in owning. I’m interested in arguing with people. In an ideal world, I feel like I would sometimes walk away from the show having persuaded my guests that they might be mistaken on some points. That’s obviously a pipe dream. But that’s the idea of argument that I like, where you’re actually convincing someone of something, or you are adapting your own ideas to someone else’s. And I mean, obviously I have that style. I’ve had a job at New York Times as a conservative for 16 years, so the style reflects the role that I play. What I do professionally wouldn’t work if I was always aiming for maximum ownage.

But also, I feel like I was very accustomed as a teenager and early twentysomething, before I had this career, to hanging around with friends and acquaintances and having long arguments with them just because that’s what you did in 1997 or 2000. There was a young-person culture that existed then that seems to have atrophied under a lot of pressures but is itself useful in a moment when things are spinning further and further apart, at least when it comes to understanding. Maybe at the end of the day, someone comes away from my show and is like, Yeah, I listened to Ross Douthat’s show, and it turns out that conservatives are just as bad as I thought or The far left is just as dangerous as I always suspected that they are or Silicon Valley is in fact going to destroy our humanity. They may think that, but at the very least, they will hopefully have a better understanding of the thing that they fear or oppose.

There’s another element at play here. When you have Donald Trump–aligned characters on the show, like J.D. Vance, Peter Thiel, or Chris Rufo, I always get the sense that they want you to like them. That puts you in rarefied territory, given that you have made your disgust with Trump fairly clear at a time when loyalty to the president remains one of the prime attributes of MAGAdom. Plenty of people who possess your flavor of conservatism have been completely frozen out of this circle. How have you managed to cultivate respect with these figures while retaining your skepticism for the MAGA project?

Well, number one, I knew the vice president before he was the vice president. So that’s sort of a distinctive case where there may come a point when, as vice president or presidential candidate or something, he decides that I can be written off. But having a preexisting relationship with someone when you’re in conversation with them is helpful. With Bannon and others, I don’t know if I would say, “Oh, people want my respect.” I think it’s maybe more that people who are either further to my right or loyal to Trump in a way that I wouldn’t say that I am nonetheless know that I am in fact a conservative and a deep skeptic and critic of where liberalism has ended up—and that I have maintained that skepticism. In fact, it’s deepened in many ways. I think I’m more skeptical of where liberalism is today, by far, than I was when Barack Obama was president and I was just starting out. So I’ve maintained that through an era where I have thought that the man who is president now is a, let’s say, deeply problematic figure.

And that’s a really hard balance to maintain, and there’s certainly people on the right who just think that I should be really pro-Trump and I just need the respect of liberals. And then there’s plenty of never-Trump ex-Republicans who think that balancing act is itself a betrayal of American democracy. Those are two running critiques of me. But for an interview show, being seen as someone who maintains a certain kind of balance is very helpful to making people want to engage with you. Bannon knows that I’m never going to agree with him that Trump is the savior of the world, but he also knows that I understand why people support Trump and I understand pretty well where populism comes from and that I will give those arguments a fair shake. That’s true of the vice president as well, and true of other people on the right that I’ve had on. I am not confused about why we’ve been in a populist moment. I have a pretty strong theory of it.

There’s a recent episode you did with May Mailman, the lawyer who led the Trump administration’s legal assault on Harvard and Columbia universities, that I think exemplifies this. In the first few minutes of the interview, Mailman delivers her usual shtick. She grouses about adult coloring books, safe spaces, and a million other exhausted clichés conservatives deploy in the college campus fight. But before long, the two of you manage to have a genuinely revelatory conversation about Mailman’s own experience in education and how she came to hold the ideas that she has. Much of the MAGA schmaltz—the artifice—is drained out of the room. How are you able to un-shtick someone like her?

This is why politicians probably don’t love long interviews, because this is not just a MAGA thing. All politicians like to have talking points to stick to. I was a cable news talking head briefly on CNN way back in the day. I know how that business works. But in some ways, it’s unsustainable. If someone agrees to an hour-and-a-half conversation, you’re going to move beyond the talking points.

I do think that as someone who sympathizes with, for instance, part of the conservative critique of higher education, there are often better arguments and more interesting arguments for some of the positions that Trump takes, or that MAGA takes, than the ones that are offered in talking points. And so I’m interested in getting to those arguments, and sometimes it doesn’t work. But one of my basic views that I’ve expressed in my regular column about the Trump administration is that it took power with an actual majority. It won over a bunch of people who were not normal Trump voters, in part because there really was a good case for some kind of reaction against where progressivism had gone. But the basic impulse of Trump himself and some of the people around him is this kind of black-pilled “rally the troops, let’s gather our forces and defeat the liberal enemy” perspective, which I think is just bad politics.

To the extent that I am talking to people in the Trump administration or on the right who have a set of talking points and I’m trying to move beyond them, I think of myself as doing something that’s very helpful to conservatism in those conversations. I figure out what the arguments are that would convince not just a Fox News viewer but someone who reads the New York Times. Hopefully some of the people I’m interviewing find that exercise valuable themselves.

I’ve been on the lefty side of Twitter long enough to see the commentariat grow absolutely furious with some of your colleagues. People hold a special distaste for Bret Stephens and David Brooks. Ezra Klein gets filleted on the regular—same with Maureen Dowd. But for whatever reason, despite your deep conservative background, I just don’t think liberals get mad at you to nearly the same degree. Why do you think that is?

I think in part during the peak of left-wing cancel culture, there was clearly a way in which progressives were interested more in canceling and bringing to heel people who were centrist liberals than they were people who were further to the right. So there was a sense that people were like, “Oh, well, Ross, we know he’s a Catholic reactionary, so he’s sort of beyond our anger and our pressure. We just hope he sort of drifts off into the medieval past once we establish the progressive utopia.”

I think that pattern probably exists. This doesn’t really distinguish me from David or Bret, but I think it distinguishes me from conservatives outside the New York Times. I think everyone understands that as a pro-life conservative columnist for the Times who is not enthusiastic about Trump, I don’t represent any powerful faction in American life. There’s never been a Republican president since I’ve been a Times columnist who I was super enthusiastic about. I think if there was, then many of my readers who disagree with me but respect me would become much angrier at me. Maybe that will happen someday, but for now, there’s a sense that people have really strong reactions to pundits and columnists and essayists who represent some larger political force that they deeply fear. And even though I’m connected to forces that people fear, I don’t think I represent them to people in the way that some other figures do.

And someday that may change. But that’s at least been my experience of the Trump era. Not coincidentally, some of the people who dislike me the most do regard me in that way, in the sense that because I was not for Trump but never joined the resistance, I represent an example of how elites failed to respond adequately to the Trump threat. There are writers for places like the Bulwark who have that view of me: “When America descends into fascism, it will be because people like Ross Douthat were insufficiently alarmed.”

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