Ross Douthat published his final column with The New York Times this weekend, on his way to serve some middling purpose at Bari Weiss’s CBS News. 

Ross, like most conservative opinion types, has always been a bit of a charity case. He went straight from Harvard to writing for National Review, after which he was picked up by The Atlantic and later The Times. He has no substantive expertise, nor will he ever acquire one. Instead, he serves as a vessel through which liberal institutions subject their audiences to their mandatory dose of conservative thought. Without him, a liberal mom in Park Slope might never hear the thoughts of a prep school kid from Connecticut, and it’s unclear whether the Republic would survive. (I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong - the prep school Bret Stephens attended was actually in Massachusetts).

Douthat’s final column is a monument to his particular style of politics. It’s titled “Who Are the Good Guys and the Bad Guys? I’m No Longer Sure.” As you can probably guess, the piece is about how Douthat has spent most of his career opposing liberalism, only to find that the Trump-era reaction was not what he’d hoped. He is a reasonable man sitting between two unreasonable sides, not knowing what to do.

This is the sort of equivocation that soft-MAGA conservatism is built on. Douthat wants to create a moral parity between left and right in the Trump era, which is hard to do. He achieves it by speaking almost entirely in abstraction and ambiguities. Obama-era liberalism, he says, was characterized by a “morally permissive” perspective that wanted to put power in the hands of a “meritocratic elite” (elsewhere he mentions the “downsides of expert-driven policies”). It was “unprepared for the darker effects of technological change.” There was “too much about human nature that it didn’t seem to know.” The Trump era, on the other hand, has been “corrupt and bullying and destabilizing.”

What does any of this actually mean? Who exactly are the meritocratic elite? What “expert-driven policies” is Douthat referring to? Why does he consider liberalism more “morally permissive” than MAGA conservatism, which he admits is corrupt? What are the elements of technological change that the right anticipated better than the left? What is it about human nature that liberalism doesn’t understand? The reader is left to fill in the blanks with whatever they think is reasonable, because if Douthat were to spell out the details it would be clear that he has a feeble grip on reality.