While Douthat can be super grating and has the most absurd idea of "the left" of anyone I listen to/read regularly, he's not wrong about elites not being the right messengers. This is why Sarah's RVAT messages are so compelling. It's why we need more one-on-one communication and neighbor-to-neighbor, friend-to-friend, parishioner-to-parishioner... We humans can make more of a difference than ad buys and nonsense from campaigns.

Not sure what he meant about driving the left off a cliff, but the Dems are busy keeping the institutions barely running and trying desperately to do government with a bunch of clowns with flamethrowers as their "partners." That cannot work, and the Left will go completely off the cliff eventually too without serious people with whom to deal.

Douthat is getting a lot of bad raps here, but I think his one point about elites scolding people who haven't rejected Trump is correct: we will never win them over that way. Evangelism works best when people want what they see, not by screaming at them that they're wrong, and right now we need to make a human case without being hateful to anyone. I know it's exhausting, and we're all done, but we must save the country and that means we have to do the work for a while longer, then it's time to grow a new party for the reasonable conservatives and probably time to rethink the way my own democratic party works too. All of that is for after the current emergency though.