Conservatives remain in a certain amount of denial about the nature of the challenges facing the middle and working classes in the United States. Upward mobility has slowed down. Wage stagnation has been a real and significant problem for middle-income Americans.

Ross Douthat, born in 1979, became in 2009 the youngest regular op-ed columnist in the history of The New York Times—and he’s a conservative! Here are edited excerpts of an interview in front of Patrick Henry College students.

Growing up in New Haven, did you want to go to Yale University?

Absolutely not.

So, wanting to be away from home, you went to Harvard, 130 miles away. The perfect distance? There’s the laundry factor: You want to be able to have it done at your original home. There’s the second laundry factor: You don’t want your mother knocking on the door to your dorm room unexpectedly when it’s completely carpeted in laundry.

Your dad is a lawyer and a poet, your mother a writer. Lots of books around? Yes, and a very old black-and-white TV that I didn’t watch very much. But over the course of my childhood, we became involved in different forms of both Pentecostal and evangelical ministry. During the week I went to a private school, where every day was Diversity Day, and then on the weekends my parents spoke in tongues. I’ve tried to continue that tradition by being the token reactionary Catholic at The New York Times.

Were there difficulties in connecting those dots? There were huge advantages to having different kinds of cultural exposure as a child: having all of your high-school teachers be liberal Democrats, but then reading C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton on the side.

Did you have some adolescent rebellion? My parents became quite religious but never that politically conservative. Reading National Review was my act of rebellion. Some kids from Christian backgrounds go to a liberal college and try to hide their experience and beliefs, trying to fit in, but I ran across a column you wrote in college about your Pentecostal background, with mentions of faith healing and “slaying in the Spirit.”

You were flaunting this in front of the Harvard audience. Yeah. I’m an argumentative person, and all my friends are argumentative people. Having late-night arguments is part of the college experience: “But wait, what if the world is all just a dream that a butterfly is having?”

You wrote for The Atlantic, National Review, and other publications—and then comes your courtship by The New York Times … A courtship implies that both parties are equal. I always knew that if the Times offered me a job, I would take it. During the interviews I was so nervous that I can’t really remember what was said.

You got the job, and now you’re speaking to an audience that shares few of your own convictions. Where do you find traction? Sometimes I don’t. If I’m about to disagree with liberals about something, a lot of times I will concede something to them.

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