Ross is aware of the differences between American and European conservatism. I wish he'd made more of those differences in his article.
But in the world of politics things are rarely as black-and-white as you'd like them to be. Every movement or ideology has its sects and fringes that make contact disreputable or reprehensible ideas.
Even left and right aren't the complete antitheses people often take them to be. Chauvinism, extremism, and a lot of other unpleasant things pop their heads into any ideology or movement.
And even if American and European philosophies were hermetically sealed and had nothing in common, this guy did spend a lot of time on US sites with a particular take on practical politics.
He took what he wanted from those sites to build up a worldview that certainly diverged from mainstream American (or European) conservatism. So even if there was some deep philosophical incompatibility, you, I, we, still have to come to terms with just what it was he got from American sites and authors and bloggers.
You aren't Ross Douthat's audience. Given that NY Times audience, what it's already read in the paper about the attacks, the assumptions that they have, the conclusions that they draw, Ross does a pretty good job of responding and rebutting to their take on this.
"implying that American conservatism produces cultural chauvinism. That is not true."Cultural chauvinism is a perfectly normal human behavior that has been a part of all viable human societies for millenia. A society expects and has a legitimate right to assert its majority culture among its members, up and including minorities. A viable society has every right to exert normalizing pressure to force immigrants to assimilate into the core culture. By trying to force-feed multiculturalism you create worse problems. Look at where the post Civil Rights America is heading today. Look at the state of the American conservatism today. Always on the defensive, ready to run away and abandon any topic of discussion as soon as the Leftist Masters of Discourse hint you may be "racist", "homophobic" or "xenophobic". Geriatric, toothless, all bark no bite.