Ross Douthat

<h1>From the beginning the presidency of Donald Trump has inspired analogies to the years of Jimmy Carter. Though personally the two men are ever so slightly different, they seem to occupy a similar space in the arc of political history — both outsiders who seized control of a divided, exhausted, yet still powerful political party, both men who tried to push their coalitions into a new ideological formation, both presidents who commanded legislative majorities but accomplished next to nothing with them.</h1>

The term that seems to fit them both is “disjunctive,” from the categorizations of Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek. As Carter straddled the old New Deal-Great Society liberalism and the age of Reaganism and neoliberalism to come, so Trump’s presidency is at once the seeming last gasp for the Reagan coalition and a possible doorway into a future where socialism and right-wing populism contend for mastery instead.

But if Trump is a Carter figure, trying and probably failing to build a new conservative majority inside the decaying institutions of the old one, then who is ready to play Reagan — the ideologically ambitious rival who wins the presidency and actually ushers in realignment?

The correct answer might be nobody, because history doesn’t actually repeat or mirror or rhyme that simply, and because the decadence of American institutions threatens to make every president effectively disjunctive, keeping real realignment forever out of reach.

But if you’re eagerly looking for the repetition or the rhyme, the 2020 primary campaign supplies an obvious figure: The Reagan to Trump’s Carter, the left-wing answer to the first movement-conservative president, can be only Bernard Sanders.

If you doubt me, consider the parallels. Like Reagan following his attempt to primary Gerald Ford in 1976, Sanders is coming off a near-miss insurgent campaign against an embodiment of the party establishment, who then went to an excruciatingly narrow general election defeat.

Like Reagan, Sanders is widely judged too old to be elected president; he is older than the Gipper, but just as Reagan’s age in 1980, 69, roughly matched American life expectancy at the time, so does Sanders’ age of 77 match life expectancy today.

Like Reagan, Sanders is widely considered too extreme to be nominated, and certainly too extreme to win: Some Democrats fear that his nomination would give oxygen to a third-party centrist (with Howard Schultz ready for that role) as Reagan’s prompted John Anderson to run as a liberal Republican; some Republicans hope that a Sanders-led ticket would help the unpopular incumbent sneak to re-election.

And like Reagan, Sanders comes by his supposed extremism honestly, having been ideologically left-wing for his entire public life, preaching socialism in the midst of the Reagan and Clinton eras just as Reagan made himself a spokesman for the Goldwaterite right in 1964, at its moment of epic political defeat.

Of course the analogy is imperfect — don’t come at me with Bernie never governed a major state and Reagan was a New Deal Democrat and had a whole celebrity career before he went into politics, I’m well aware. But it’s an interesting echo, at the very least. And the parallels between the arguments used to dismiss Sanders and the Reagan-can’t-win assumptions of late-1970s pundits have kept me moderately bullish on the Vermont socialist’s 2020 chances.

With Sanders officially in the race, the reasons for bullishness have grown. Whether he is technically the front-runner or not depends on how you assess the impressive poll numbers of the undeclared Joe Biden: Are those a real signifier that the Democratic Party’s moderate wing is ready to have the former vice president as its champion, or just an artifact of name recognition that will collapse once Biden starts having to answer for his record?

But every normal metric makes Sanders a front-runner, and a stronger-looking candidate than all his declared rivals: His fundraising is impressive, his crowds are big, and his early poll numbers give him both the expected 20-25 percent floor and room to grow. (In the weekend’s poll of Iowa, he would claim almost a third of Biden’s supporters if the ex-vice president decided not to run.) And he’s facing a field sufficiently large that the advantages of having a core of unshakable supporters are likely to be magnified.

Meanwhile his campaign so far is suggestive of the ways — again, like Reagan — that a long history of ideological extremism can actually be helpful to a presidential candidate. Precisely because Sanders is a known quantity, because nobody doubts his commitment to left-wing policies, there may be less pressure on his campaign to embrace every idea floated by reporters or touted by activists. (It’s probably a good sign, for instance, that he was just attacked from the left by Julián Castro for insufficient zeal on reparations.)

Nor does he need to adopt the strident tone of younger would-be revolutionaries or the politicians pandering to them to prove his socialist bona fides. As conservative writer Ben Domenech noted recently, “the truth is that Sanders, despite his socialist label, seems to have a less harsh vision of politics than many others within the party.” Because his record is what it is, he won’t always have to be the most zealous candidate on stage — and like Reagan, he might even be able to promise certain kinds of moderation while keeping his base secure in his fundamentally revolutionary intentions.

Of course this last possibility is just a hypothetical, and Sanders’ rumpled-professor style of socialism (and all those Soviet-friendly video clips lurking on YouTube) might ultimately inspire more backlash than Kamala Harris running hard to the left or Elizabeth Warren filling in all the policy details that Sanders leaves a little hazy. To argue that Sanders has qualities in common with Reagan is not to argue that he’s necessarily the most electable Democrat, or that in nominating him the party wouldn’t be taking a substantial risk — as Reagan really was a risky choice in 1980, and his victory by no means foreordained.

But it is to argue that if you want a new president to be transformative — as, obviously, many people on the left desire — there are clear advantages in electing somebody whose entire career is associated with an ideological insurgency, and whose victory would shock the more adaptable sort of politician into understanding themselves as inhabitants of a new political reality, in which no matter what poll numbers show on any given issue, it’s taken for granted that the former world has passed away.

You can’t get that change just by electing an ideologue as president; his actual presidency also has to be understood (as Reagan’s was, rightly, despite the vigorous critiques offered by a certain Vermont mayor at the time) as a success. And there are good reasons, conservative and otherwise, to doubt that a President Bernie would be successful enough to run on his own version of “morning in America” in 2024.

But Bernie-ism is obviously where a large fraction of the Democratic Party wants to go, and with Trump weak and Carter-esque the chances that someone will get elected on a very left-wing platform are reasonably strong. In which the case for Sanders will remain simple and intuitive throughout the primaries to come: If we’re going to do this thing, let’s do it with the guy who’s actually spent years or decades planning for a realigning moment.

Sanders 2020: Accept No Substitutes.

This article originally appeared in <a id="74045966-c501-4e9c-a79d-a478d602166a" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/opinion/bernie-sanders-socialism-reagan-.html">The New York Times</a>.

The term that seems to fit them both is “disjunctive,” from the categorizations of Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek.

Bernie Sanders, Socialism's Reagan?

<h1>Since at least the middle of the Obama era, all the energy and activity and creativity in the Democratic coalition has been with people pushing the party away from any kind of centrism — with the journals and zines that have resuscitated something they call socialism, with the activists trying to impose the college-campus style of cultural liberalism on the wider country (or at least the wider internet), with the feminists and intersectional types and Bernie Bros who clash and feud and sometimes absolutely hate one another, but still share a common “to the left, march” purpose.</h1>

Now that energy has transformed Democratic politics. We have a swelling Democratic 2020 field in which a capital-S Socialist is arguably the front-runner, most of the declared candidates are offering maximal ideological ambition, and the last Democratic vice president is hesitating to run in part because of all his long-gone compromises with conservatism.

With Clintonism as toxic as Bill Clinton’s post-#MeToo reputation, even the old Clintonites are throwing in the towel. In a memorable Twitter thread, center-left economist Brad DeLong argued that the time has come for centrists to become, in effect, junior partners in the Democratic coalition, working to sharpen and smarten up the new socialism rather than seeking Republican partners and bipartisan reforms.

DeLong’s Twitter assessment of why the center-left no longer deserves to leads the Democratic Party is worth quoting in full:

On the center … those like me in what used to proudly call itself the Rubin Wing of the Democratic Party — so-called after former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, and consisting of those of us hoping to use market means to social democratic ends in bipartisan coalition with Republicans seeking technocratic win-wins — have passed the baton to our left. Over the past 25 years, we failed to attract Republican coalition partners, we failed to energize our own base, and we failed to produce enough large-scale obvious policy wins to cement the center into a durable governing coalition. We blame cynical Republican politicians. We blame corrupt and craven media bosses and princelings. We are right to blame them, but shared responsibility is not diminished responsibility. And so the baton rightly passes to our colleagues on our left. We are still here, but it is not our time to lead.

This is harsh but (somewhat) fair; if more members of the Western political elite were this self-critical, the Western political elite would be in (somewhat) better shape.

But there is also something missing in DeLong’s self-criticism, a blind spot common to the contemporary center-left, which points to one reason a “durable governing coalition” may continue to elude the Democratic Party’s grasp.

One way to distill the center-left failure that DeLong describes is this: Over the last 15 years, the center-left establishment in the United States separated itself from the Democratic base on two major issues — its support for the Iraq War in the early 2000s, and its support for a bipartisan “grand bargain” on fiscal issues in the early-to-middle Obama years. The first separation was a disaster; the second one was a mistake. And neither ultimately helped the Democratic coalition win elections.

Another way to distill the failure is to say that in the last decade or so the center-left attempted a series of policy compromises — Obamacare instead of single-payer, cap-and-trade instead of a Green New Deal, modest upper-bracket tax increases instead of big attempts to soak the rich — and then discovered that the Republican Party was either still too far away ideologically or too much of an internally divided mess to make a lasting deal on any issue. And meanwhile the compromises were often unpopular with swing voters — as Obamacare was at first, as cap-and-trade or a carbon tax probably would be (just ask Emmanuel Macron) — so there was no obvious political advantage to making them pre-emptively.

Both of these accounts fit DeLong’s narrative; both make a case for letting the further-left parts of the Democratic coalition try leadership instead, and seeking compromises between socialists and liberals rather than pining for moderate-Republican partners who don’t appear to be in evidence.

But then consider a third distillation, a third narrative, in which the center-left’s signal political failure was that it never really sought to preserve a cultural centrism, which meant over time that its party’s approach to social issues has been dictated more and more completely by the left. In this story the political success of Bill Clinton reflected not only his compromises with Republicans on taxes and spending, his tacit nods to Reaganomics, but also his ability to infuse a centrist liberalism with reassuring nods to various kinds of moderate cultural conservatism — the school uniform and v-chip business and the rhetoric of “safe, legal and rare” on abortion, the easy Baptist religiosity, the tacitly center-right positions on immigration and crime and same-sex marriage.

If Clinton had matched this cultural conservatism with decency in his private life, Al Gore would have won re-election as his heir, and the larger story of the center-left might have been entirely different. But instead, from the mid-2000s onward, the leftward flank of the Democratic Party looked at the country’s changing demographics and growing social liberalism and decided that Clinton’s compromises with cultural conservatism weren’t as politically necessary as they had been (which was true), and that therefore they were free to become increasingly ideologically maximalist on everything touching gender or race or sexuality or immigration (which was … not true).

In this sense the story of the Democrats’ struggles over the last 15 years is a story of a party that has consistently moved leftward faster than the also-changing country, and consistently overread victories — on same-sex marriage above all — as a template for how every cultural battle should play out. It’s a story of a new feminism that’s pushing the party ever-further from the center on abortion, of a new cohort of white liberals who are actually to the left of many African-Americans on racial issues, of an activist base that brands positions that many liberals held only yesterday as not only mistaken but bigoted or racist or beyond-the-pale.

And in this part of the Democratic coalition’s story, the center-left’s role has been extraordinarily passive, essentially following the cultural left a tiny bit more slowly rather than trying to devise a more moderate approach. You can find hints of what such a moderate approach might look like in intellectual projects like Jonathan Haidt’s Heterodox Academy, or in the probing, evenhanded culture-war reportage of magazine writer Jesse Singal (whom I hesitate to even praise because it will do him no favors on the internet). But that cultural moderation has no substantial political form, no important champions within the Democratic Party. It has Joe Manchin and Tulsi Gabbard, maybe, but they are eccentric figures; elsewhere among the Democrats there is little interest in considering all the different ways that cultural extremism costs them votes.

Which means that if the center-left abdicates, DeLong-style, on economic policy, the Democratic Party as a whole will have moved to the left on every front, writing off not only the possibility of compromising with Republican politicians (which, for now, might be understandable) but also the possibility of winning over voters who would almost certainly be Democrats if the party still occupied the cultural terrain that it held in 2000 or even as late as 2008.

Because the country as a whole has also shifted left since 2000, that kind of writing-off will not prevent the Democrats from winning elections; it probably won’t prevent them from beating Donald Trump. But it will stand in the way of any dramatic left-of-center consolidation, any kind of more-than-temporary Democratic governance. And if the center-left feels itself irrelevant in an age of socialist ambition, then taking up the task of rebuilding a cultural center, and a Democratic Party capable of claiming it, seems like the task that might actually be suited to the times.

Sadly the rest of the DeLong thread didn’t take up that possibility. It degenerated, instead, into a howl against Republican fascism and a post-Protestant sermon about how liberal America can build the true and only heaven, the real shining city on the hill.

Which suggests that to reckon with the possibility that making liberalism a pseudo-church might be a problem, not an aspiration, we need a very different center-left from the one surrendering today.

This article originally appeared in <a id="7ca891a7-6f18-422f-ac40-d0707fb59a90" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/opinion/democrats-liberals-socialists-cultural-left.html">The New York Times</a>.

Now that energy has transformed Democratic politics. We have a swelling Democratic 2020 field in which a capital-S Socialist is arguably the front-runner.

What's left of the center-left?

<h1>Since conservatism became a movement in the 1950s, the American right has understood itself to be defending not just the written American Constitution but an unwritten one as well — a kind of cultural or social constitution, deeply rooted in our national history, that the checks and balances of our official political system help sustain.</h1>

Under this constitution America has three branches of government but a great diversity of power centers — religious and corporate, familial and philanthropic. Under this constitution the most important institutions in our national life aren’t political ones; they’re the institutions of civil society, which have flourished — or so the conservative argument goes — precisely because government has been kept within limits, and the state hasn’t co-opted or crushed all its rivals for influence and power.

Thus when conservatives preach about the virtues of “limited government,” it isn’t just Herbert Hoover’s rugged individual that they imagine themselves defending. They envision a larger communitarian panoply — civic associations, religious denominations, charities and universities and private schools — which needs protection against the jealousy of a centralizing state. And they tend to assume that keeping the American corporation embedded in this communitarian system is a better way to balance productivity and innovation and public-spiritedness than just trying to regulate and micromanage businesses into good behavior.

If you wanted to summarize the intellectual uncertainties of conservatives in the Trump era, you could say that the right is trying to figure out whether the unwritten American constitution it imagines itself defending still exists. And if it doesn’t, or if it’s failing, whether that means that “limited government” as a slogan and strategy is increasingly irrelevant when it comes to shaping the society that conservatives would like America to be.

The latter was the argument that Donald Trump implicitly pressed against his more optimistic opponents in the 2016 primaries. They were defenders of the American dream as conservatives have long defined it, while the dark, conspiratorial tones of their businessman rival raised a set of uncomfortable questions. Is America still a nation of thriving local communities and energetic civic life? Is America still a deeply religious country, with strong churches and growing denominations? Are American businessmen basically public-spirited, eager to compete on equal terms once government removes its heavy hand, and natural allies for a political movement wedded to patriotism and religion?

For years now conservative critics and sociologists and intellectuals have been acknowledging that the answers might be no — that the country’s once-rich associational and civic and religious life is declining and dissolving, that corporate America embraces conservative slogans to keep taxes low and unions weak but otherwise seems post-patriotic and performatively woke, that the “silent majority” of hardworking, pious, culturally conservative blue-collar families is now essentially defunct.

Many of the best conservative books of the last decade, from “Coming Apart” by Charles Murray to “The Fractured Republic” by Yuval Levin, describe an emerging America that doesn’t much resemble the Tocquevillian family-church-community landscape familiar from past conservative descriptions of American exceptionalism. The latest example is “Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse” by Tim Carney, a mix of sociology and shoe-leather reporting that convincingly situates the rise of Trump in the context of Middle America’s communitarian collapse.

But while accounts like Carney’s acknowledge the role of economic forces — globalization, trade, deindustrialization — in the dissolution of family and community, they also tend to insist, contra liberals and our new socialist vanguard (and also contra Trump), that this cultural collapse isn’t primarily driven by economic policy decisions and can’t be reversed by public policies or programs. Instead they tend to suggest that state interventions often just replace community instead of strengthening it and cast any communitarian revival as a necessarily local project, in which government can play at best a supporting, don’t-make-matters-worse kind of role.

These kind of arguments are still in continuity, then, with the basic conservative posture of the last few generations. But there are also increasingly partisans of rupture on the right, a loose group of state-power conservatives who hint that if the Tocquevillian dream is dying then the cause of “limited government” is increasingly irrelevant — which in turn would require conservatives to become more comfortable using the power of the state, and more engaged in centralized policymaking that has specific social and cultural ends in mind.

This argument is visible in the controversy surrounding Tucker Carlson’s monologue a month ago, which stirred up libertarian backlash by calling for Republicans to use government policy to make American life friendlier to families, and particularly to single-earner households. It also informs the difference between Carney’s book and the other smart right-of-center volume of the moment, Oren Cass’ “The Once and Future Worker.” The two authors share a certain common ground, but in the end Carney concludes that “our current economic and social ills … cannot be solved or even significantly ameliorated by any president, or by the central government at all,” while Cass’ whole thesis is that wiser policymaking could make a big difference to the unhappy heartlanders Carney profiles.

But the fullest case for rupture, for declaring that “the era of limited government is over,” is offered in two recent essays in conservative intellectual journals — Dan McCarthy’s “A New Conservative Agenda” in First Things, and Gladden Pappin’s “Toward a Party of the State” in American Affairs. Both envision a conservatism that is oriented less toward the state-as-enemy or the state-as-danger and much more toward the state-as-shaper and the state-as-harmonizer. For instance, here is McCarthy’s account of how the economic nationalism of Trump can be transmuted into something less inchoate and more effective:

Economic nationalism is not just about tariffs. It is less about “economic” than it is about “nationalism” — that is, it takes account of the different needs of different walks of life and regions of the country, serving the whole by serving its parts and drawing them together. In the past, the challenge was to harmonize farmers, urban capital and labor. The challenge now is to balance those groups with the postindustrial classes as well, and to strengthen the productive economy against the largely fictional economy of administrators and clerks. All of this is for the sake not just of prosperity, in raw dollar terms, but of a national economy that provides the basis for a healthy culture in which citizens and their families can flourish.

Pappin makes a similar argument about how both political coalitions, but especially the right, should adapt to the current challenge from “illiberal” or “post-liberal” forces, both populist and socialist:

Rather than asking the question “What should conservatives/progressives do?” considerable advances can be made through certain purely practical considerations: “How can the integrity of the national political community be assured?” “How can commercial activity and technological development continue to be turned toward the common good, and toward our own strategic advantage?” “What can we do with the reins of power, that is, the state, to ensure the common good of our citizens?”

The likely answers to these “practical” questions, Pappin contends, require conservatives to make practical “use of the administrative state” for right-wing ends, rather than constantly returning to “plaintive, nostalgic and counterproductive calls for its abolition.”

A hostile reader of these essays, libertarian or liberal, might respond that a vision in which right-wing governments seek to reshape culture and mediate between classes resembles nothing so much as early-20th century fascism. A more sympathetic reader would say no, there is plenty of space for more a state-friendly conservative politics in between movement conservatism and Mussolini, and what McCarthy and Pappin are envisioning might be better described as a blend of the American Hamiltonian tradition with a 21st-century update of French Gaullism.

And the most subtle reader might say that they’re trying to provide the theory for a move that the Republican Party once in power tends to make anyway — both of the last two GOP presidents have been, in some sense, “big government conservatives” — but so far without the strategy, seriousness and self-consciousness required to make the project a success.

I have enough of my own skepticism about the efficacy of state power to be uncertain if the project can succeed. But post-Trump conservatives are likely to be drawn to state-power conservatism not just by theoretical ambition but by a sense of political necessity.

The earlier conservative self-understanding, in which the right was defending nongovernmental institutions against the power of the state, tacitly depended on the assumption that many if not most nongovernmental institutions would be friendly to conservative values. But as civil society has decayed over recent decades, its remaining power centers have also become increasingly left-wing.

Already-liberal institutions — universities, Hollywood, the big foundations and the mass media — are now more uniformly allied with the left than even the very recent past. Corporate America happily donates to Republicans because it fears a Bernie Sanders presidency, but on cultural issues big business courts its younger customers with progressive lobbying and propaganda. In religion, Catholicism under Pope Francis aspires (scandals permitting) to ease its way leftward as well, leaving evangelical Christianity as an isolated bastion with little culture-shaping power.

Yet conservatives can still win the White House and the Congress, which means that the one power center they can hope to control is the one they are notionally organized to limit — the administrative state.

If we assume that people tend to seek power, and devise justifications for seeking power, where it can be plausibly exercised and won, then the state-power conservatives may not need the strongest intellectual arguments to change the way the right thinks about the state. Instead limited government conservatism may give way to an attempt to improve on Trumpism with clearer blueprints and smarter cadres for the same reason that changes often happen in political ideology — because the people whose thinking is changing feel that they don’t have any other choice.

This article originally appeared in <a id="a66840bb-efe5-4cd1-b07b-83412c2994a9" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/opinion/conservatives-republicans-trump.html">The New York Times</a>.

Under this constitution America has three branches of government but a great diversity of power centers — religious and corporate, familial and philanthropic.

The era of limited government is over

<h1>I became a besotted baseball fan at the age of 6, watching the Boston Red Sox, my mother’s ancestral team, march to the World Series against the New York Mets. My parents woke me up near midnight on Oct. 25, 1986, to come downstairs with them and “watch the Red Sox win” — an eventuality that was, at that moment, just a single out away. </h1>

It remained one out away through three singles, a devastating wild pitch and an incident that shall not be described involving one William Joseph Buckner. I wept, slept and awoke a gloomy pessimist, forever haunted by the fall of man.

I became a football fan around the same time, and I figured I should root for the Patriots as well, in New England solidarity. They had recently played (albeit embarrassingly badly) in a Super Bowl, so I was unaware of their long, distinguished legacy of lousy play. But by the time I turned 10 and they were working their way through a 1-15 season, with a 2-14 encore just around the corner, I understood a little better the implications of my choice.

This combination of Red Sox tragedy and Patriot futility defined my relationship to professional sports until adulthood, at which point (as you may have heard) absolutely everything changed for both teams and they became insufferably dominant. And my fandom, forged in suffering and melodrama and “wait ‘till next year” rue, never quite recovered from my favorite teams’ success.

Everyone leaves certain childish things behind, of course. But there is no greater chasm in the remembered continuity of the self than the gulf separating me from the version of myself whose mind was at least 35 percent baseball from February until October and 20 percent football for the rest of the year, who screamed and raved my way through crucial games and crucial months, and who once talked a boss into letting me off work early because of the psychic damage inflicted by Aaron Boone’s Sox-crushing, American League Championship Series-winning home run the prior night.

I remember that person, but I can’t remember how he felt. And trying to raise my children to be New England sports fans in an age of constant New England winning has given me real sympathy with the lukewarmly religious, the Christmas-and-Easter sort of believer who wants to impart some measure of piety to their children without really experiencing the flame of faith themselves.

There are reasons besides Bostonian sports success for the dying of that flame. My current editors probably wouldn’t let me out of column writing after a devastating loss, and normal adult obligations leave less time for rereading Roger Angell’s season-recapping baseball essays for the 847th time.

But the frequent triumphs of the Sox and Pats have been crucial to my loss of ardor. In the old days I was always mystified about how Yankee fans stirred up the same excitement year after year despite their constant winning, and as my teams became increasingly Yankee-like the mystification remained. Indeed, I missed the thirst enough to seek the feeling elsewhere — adopting long-suffering franchises temporarily (until the Kansas City Royals ruined our affair by winning the World Series) to remind myself of what it was like to nourish long-unrequited hopes.

Despite that infidelity, though, I have never taken the step of actually rooting against one of my childhood teams. Which has kept me connected to both of them, however dutifully.

And now that the Patriots have ground their way, in a terrible-to-watch game highlighted by punts, to yet another Super Bowl victory, I want to report a change in my sports psychology. In my dutiful connection to the latest run of Patriot Super Bowl appearances, I have begun to feel something different, strange and unfamiliar — not a recovery of the old romance, but a growing appreciation of pure, ruthless effectiveness, an admiration for iron efficiency, a joy at the dismantling of highly touted rivals, a feeling that almost … almost … makes me begin to have a trace of a scintilla of understanding for what it feels like to be a Yankees fan.

I say this as someone who feels no particularly personal sympathy or affection for the two men, Bill Belichick and Tom Brady, who have delivered the Patriots their extraordinary dynasty. Belichick is an unpleasant perfectionist whose cultivated public misanthropy and “look at me, a slob” outfits often seem like an irritating sort of performance art. Brady preferred the supermodel charms of Gisele Bündchen to Bridget Moynahan, the nice Catholic ex-girlfriend (I saw them at Mass together once, so I’m totally in her camp) who was carrying his child — and then succumbed, via Gisele, to a pro-athlete equivalent of the Gwyneth Paltrow-Goop worldview.

And without delving into the arcana of Deflategate, it’s obvious that the Patriots’ search for a competitive edge has taken them to at least the edge of, you know, cheating.

So the old fake-personal bond that I felt for my flawed New England heroes — Yaz! Nomah! Bledsoe! — isn’t there with Brady and Belichick today. What is there, and increasingly as their dynasty has become more improbably extended, is something very different: a zest for on-field excellence simply for its own sake, a forgiveness of personal and even moral deficiencies because the record speaks for itself, a setting aside of feel-good narratives and romantic underdog stories because the sheer force of winning trumps them all.

Oh, did someone say Trump? Yes, it’s appropriate that the Patriots are Donald Trump’s favorite team, but not because they have too many white players or because their consistent, grinding, rigorous success somehow resembles his improbable and often ridiculous ascent. Rather it’s because the Patriots are the actual thing that his grifter’s instincts and “Great Again” sloganeering are constantly trying to evoke — a dependably, reliably excellent American institution, of the kind that people in the pre-Vietnam era took for granted, and that our own era struggles to reproduce.

The Patriots are to football what the Apollo and Manhattan Projects were to military-industrial-complex science, what IBM and General Motors were to big business, what the Hoover Dam and Mount Rushmore were to public works — with Belichick as their Patton-meets-Eisenhower impresario, by turns a jerk and a bore but a winner above all. They are a throwback, a constant rebuke to the decadence visible in every other American institution (their First Fan’s White House very much included), a last bloom of the can-do genius that won us World War II …

… sorry, getting a little carried away here. The point is that unlike my beloved Red Sox, who now win just often enough to make me feel some Catholic-with-Calvinist-ancestors guilt over their success, the Patriots have over the last few years passed into new territory, a new sphere of fan experience. For the first time since I was in college and they were scrappy underdogs, their every victory makes me want them to win more — to boldly go, like Neil Armstrong and James T. Kirk, where no team has gone before …

… sorry, carried away again. The point, the point, is that I am a changed fan, or at least a changing one. With every Patriot victory, I am winning the victory over myself. I am shedding old habits, jettisoning the underdoggery and romance of my childhood, learning to love dynastic rule.

The Super Bowl is over. But next season is coming. Brady isn’t retiring. Belichick is going back to his tapes and plots and schemes. Six Super Bowl rings? That’s nothing.

How did Patton put it? Americans love a winner and can’t tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time …

This article originally appeared in <a id="7a453e2f-b070-4165-a8e4-283ae257cef0" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/opinion/super-bowl-new-england-patriots.html">The New York Times</a>.

How I learned to love the Patriots (Again)

I became a football fan around the same time, and I figured I should root for the Patriots as well, in New England solidarity.

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Ross Douthat

Articles written by the author

Bernie Sanders, Socialism's Reagan?

What's left of the center-left?

The era of limited government is over

How I learned to love the Patriots (Again)