Ross Douthat's Fight Against Decadence

Whether or not he was born that way, Ross Douthat is a defeated man. The child of hippie aspiring writers—a father who became an attorney and a mother who became a homemaker (both became published writers late in life: the father a poet, the mother a contributor to the Christian journal First Things)—Douthat arrived at Harvard in 1998 yearning to live the life of the mind and found himself among a horde of grade-grubbing careerists, most of them from affluent families, biding their time until they filled their reserved slots among the neoliberal power elite. This state of affairs became the subject of Douthat’s first book, Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (2005), published when he was twenty-five. The book established him as an insider chronicler of institutions in states of decay. Harvard and its students, he argued, had turned away from the values of its founding (whatever those were) in pursuit of success for its own sake.