I don’t get Ross Douthat. People I know keep telling me he’s not a total idiot (obviously, being a conservative implies a certain level of idiocy) but I’ve yet to find any of his words of any value, except perhaps to his own ego.

His most recent New York Times column, for example, extols the “romantic excess” that liberals seem to lack. He claims that “modern relationships have been drained of danger and purged of eros.”

Except he doesn’t think modern relationships are passionless, he think modern liberal relationships are passionless.

Our hyper-educated, socially-liberal elite is considerably more romantically conservative than its blasé attitude toward pornography or premarital sex would lead you to expect.

…

This tameness has beneficial social consequences: When it comes to divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births, Americans with graduate degrees are still living in the 1950s. It’s the rest of the country that marries impulsively, divorces frequently, and bears a rising percentage of its children outside marriage.

…

Better, perhaps, if this dynamic were reversed. Our meritocrats could stand to leaven their careerism with a little more romantic excess.

Ignoring the self-pitying Douthat sneaks into that first sentence, as all proper right-wingers must, it speaks to a massive misunderstanding on his part of the difference between passion and responsibility. To say that I’m not passionate because I’m capable of putting a condom on or willing to not pick up the first girl I see at the bar — not that either of those statements apply to me personally; for the moment, I’m speaking for other liberals with more game — is an utterly foolish thing to say.

The idea that something is not passionate unless is it reckless and stupid and embarrassing, exemplified by countless romantic comedies over the years, is a childish belief that most liberals have grown out of. Put bluntly, passion isn’t a quickie marriage, it’s a safeword.

Piling on, I’m not sure why Douthat is cheering on reckless marriage, frivolous divorce, and bastard children (I’m a bastard myself, so no insult intended) seeing as he’s the conservative between the two of us. But, let’s not get bogged down with logic. There’s columns that need writing.