“I’m really not a movement guy. I don’t naturally march in demonstrations or attend rallies that I’m not covering as a journalist. But this is what America needs right now. Trump is shackling the greatest institutions in American life. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” – David Brooks
RIP David Brooks. He is not dead, but after that quote his career sure is.
Before there were “Never Trumpers” there was David Brooks.
Brooks’s niche, his claim to pundit fame, is “moderation.” That is to say it’s positional; he offers himself to the coastal and urban elites as an ideological courtier, defining the outer boundary of acceptable conservatism. For those bien pensants, he offers them the patina that they are not in fact closed-minded ideologues, because they can now claim that they engage with conservatives like David Brooks.
If you listen closely, you can decipher that a major part of the media’s discourse is about why the Republicans cannot be more like David. He’s their type of guy.
Brooks has been playing this game for 25 years, from his book “Bobos in Paradise” to being Safire’s replacement as the house conservative on the NY Times Op-Ed page, to his shtick of being the ideological counterweight to E.J. Dionne on PBS. If Thomas Friedman can claim to know the Arab Street by talking with his taxi driver, then for those who follow the NY Times and PBS Brooks is the guy driving the conservative taxi. Clean, articulate, and reasonable as evidenced by willingness to go with the flow even when it is a riptide carrying oneself out to sea
For Brooks, being an ideological courtier has certainly paid well, but the efforts and contortions involved leave him looking more than a bit ridiculous. His bromantic attempts to mainstream a red-diaper baby such as Obama by realizing that the man would be a “very good president” — based in part on his “perfectly creased pant.” Then there was his attempt to empathize with the plight of the average American dealing with an era of high inflation by bemoaning the cost of his premium Scotch at an airport restaurant.
Then there his latest piece in the NY Times.
Brooks is done with moderation. He has cast it to the winds and he calls for a color revolution, an “uprising”:
“It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.”
Oh, My. If not a color revolution, then certainly a Tea Party — which Brooks was all too familiar with when he was back ironing Obama’s pants.
Leave aside that “universities, law… nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants” and “mass movements” are pretty much mutually exclusive. We need to ask what has led Mr. Brooks to raise the black flag:
“In the beginning there was agony. Under the empires of old, the strong did what they willed and the weak suffered what they must.
But over the centuries, people built the sinews of civilization: Constitutions to restrain power, international alliances to promote peace, legal systems to peacefully settle disputes, scientific institutions to cure disease, news outlets to advance public understanding, charitable organizations to ease suffering, businesses to build wealth and spread prosperity, and universities to preserve, transmit and advance the glories of our way of life. These institutions make our lives sweet, loving and creative, rather than nasty, brutish and short.
Trumpism is threatening all of that. It is primarily about the acquisition of power — power for its own sake. It is a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men, so of course any institutions that might restrain power must be weakened or destroyed. Trumpism is about ego, appetite and acquisitiveness and is driven by a primal aversion to the higher elements of the human spirit — learning, compassion, scientific wonder, the pursuit of justice.”
Back in 2021, Brooks’s pals in “universities, law… nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants” got the keys to government and, instead of strengthening the sinews of civilization, they used their power to promote environmental paganism, universities which serve as racist and anti-Semitic debt traps (when they aren’t plagiarizing), mass illegal immigration, and the use of government power to crush civil liberties including investigating the parents of school children.
I don’t remember Brooks saying much about that, certainly not taking to the streets. It was those excesses, and others that Brooks has implicitly endorsed for the past four years, that led to the greatest political comeback in American political history, the re-election of Donald Trump.
Now, just three months into the comeback that Brooks unwittingly helped to facilitate, he wants to overturn the election because Trump is doing what he promised.
He wants an uprising? Sounds like insurrection to me. Then again, if you think law firms, nonprofits, and civil servants are the cornerstones of Western civilization you have bigger problems than Donald Trump.
A final quote:
“So far, the only real hint of something larger — a mass countermovement — has been the rallies led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But this, too, is an ineffective way to respond to Trump; those partisan rallies make this fight seem like a normal contest between Democrats and Republicans. What is happening now is not normal politics. We’re seeing an assault on the fundamental institutions of our civic life, things we should all swear loyalty to — Democrat, independent or Republican.”
Leave aside that he is favorably citing two socialists, adherents to the most evil force of the 20th Century and antithetical to any part of the American founding. Leave aside that he invokes Marxist symbols. Instead focus on the fact that he neatly summarizes, as only David Brooks can, the current position of the Left: that one swears loyalty to “institutions” and not the Constitution.
Thanks for playing, David. Goodbye.
One should remind Brooks et al that if they want to amass against Trump, his supporters might very well respond in kind.
I wonder if anyone has invented a term for that….
(Yes the last statement was a touch rhetorical)
Maybe the most effective counter-movement for Mr. Brooks would have been … I don’t know, maybe something like a Real Democrat Party? An entity which could have promoted policies which would have benefitted the mass of the American people, rather than only the ultra-rich and people who are confused about their gender. A group of real leaders who do not look down on the American people and do not try to divide them by skin tone & ancestry. Maybe that kind of political party could run a candidate for President who was not obviously both senile and corrupt, and then maybe not replace that candidate with a low-IQ woman who had been rejected by Democrat voters in primary elections.
Then get that mass movement to turn up on election day and vote real leaders into office, and then hold them to delivering their promises to the mass of the people, not just to their ultra-wealthy contributors.
things we should all swear loyalty to
Heck no, Bobo. I swore fealty to my God, then to the Constitution, and finally to my family. Anything else is treason to those loyalties.
And Brooks has never been a conservative, properly defined. He is a classic Republican Progressive. So, he still wants Progressivism, just more reasonably and with lower taxes.
I’m not sure we even have political parties any longer, at least not in their previous and long running format. They have become mere fundraising and PR entities. But to the extent that Progressives and Conservatives put forward ideas and the people to carry them out, Brooks should be furious with the Dems. Theirs is an unstable coalition in several senses of the word. Are they more deranged regards Trump (and whoever comes next of course) or against each other? Conservatives sometimes shake their heads over the eccentrics in our ranks. Progressives shake in their beds that they’ll cross the fanatics they need to retain power or at least the illusion of it. Their party is essentially a pallet full of Silly Putty mixed with gun powder, with children and crazy people dancing around it with torches.
brooks is one of those jesters the left deride him, because they know what a fool he is, enabling them, the right property know him as a knave, this was made clear when he called certain leaders in the party, ‘a cancer’ and conversely groveled to Obama in NC-17 ways,
Douthat his other counterpart is just slightly more aware, but not by much, for the late Angelo Codevilla, he might have been a perfect symbol of the age,
the bezos post didn’t have patience for his analogue
https://contrarian.substack.com/
does she know she’s in a nest of scorpions,
Brooks’s career will be just fine. A middling writer with no real credentials or achievements before settling into his sinecure with the NYT, he needs them just as much as they need him.
One of the many problems with the Brookses of the world is that they despise the real uprising — the election of Donald Trump. Leftists never view the world through that lens, because they can’t control elections they don’t manipulate. As a result, they seek an uprising of their own, built on immutable rules of their making, relying on subjugation and violence to achieve their version of “success.”
As a matter of record, I have despised Our Miss Brooksie for at least a decade, for his transparent pretense of being a conservative. He just puts on conservative-face and minces across the stage as the Media Establishments housebroken pet conservative.
A media critter who fell in slobbering love with the crease in Obama’s pants is about a million miles from being a real conservative.
Brooks will be going nowhere, because while we have known for years he is pretty much worthless, he remains. And there is a market for his drivel. Just so the “enlightened” readers of the Times can remain safely ensconced in their little pocket of superiority over the malcontents and rabble rousers that exist outside their perfectly maintained bubble of civility and good breeding. The fact that they stood aside while the very things that Brooks is decrying today were really happening to their political opponents, just goes to show the shallowness of their self-adoration. I hope everything they hold dear is completely destroyed, because it was all a facade. They are fakes, just like Brooks.
I think David Brooks would make a great supporting character in a novel, perhaps a Thomas Wolfe or a Walter Kirn.
This is a guy who made his grift on playing the role of the acceptable conservative to Establishment, custom-made for NY Times with that great NPR voice. If he didn’t exist, the Establishment would have to invent him and I would imagine if he suddenly died the news would be suppressed and he would continue to generate content as AI
But Trump broke him. A part of him, probably long suppressed from childhood due to experiences of being bullied out of his lunch money, wants to come out and be Yeltsin on the tank but like the proverbial childhood dream suppressed he long ago gave up on heroism in favor of patio party invitations.
The hilarious thing is that all the “institutions” he wants to rise up are either public sector or dependent on government largess – universities, civil service, non-profits. Even business. We’re not talking small-cap but the type of corporations that are tied into the Establishment through WEF-style advisory boards and large campaign contributions.
What Brooks doesn’t mention is 1) the involvement of the media in creating this uprising, that’s obvious but would give the game away 2) these are the same institutions involved in the greatest public policy disasters in the past 160 years including COVID 3) he wants the institutions to reform themselves but experience tells us that people don’t change themselves, you want change you have to change the people.
The part of our plot to our book that would be most amusing would be the running backstory of the previous 24 months of calling Trump the second-coming of Hitler (or at least Caesar) who would destroy democracy. The critical part of the Hitler metaphor is that you don’t wait until the man takes office to fight, you have to stop him beforehand. So the Left riled themselves up for all those years and let Trump get elected. Then they got riled up but let him take office. Now they are all riled up as a threat to Western civilization and want what amounts to a color revolution but really it comes down to keying Teslas, not deporting wife-beating illegal alien gang bangers, and protecting Harvard’s endowment. Toward the end of the book as our David Brooks character talks about an “uprising” the protagonist relies he is dealing with losers, the ones perpetually on the wrong side of the 80/20 divide and leaves. As he is driving out of town he stops to charge his EV (definitely not a Tesla) and notices across the street a gun shop with range. Curious and with some time to kill, he decides to investigate…
The part of our plot to our book that would be most amusing would be the running backstory of the previous 24 months of calling Trump the second-coming of Hitler (or at least Caesar) who would destroy democracy. The critical part of the Hitler metaphor is that you don’t wait until the man takes office to fight, you have to stop him beforehand. So the Left riled themselves up for all those years and let Trump get elected.
The Left, media and establishment Republicans made Trump. Twenty years ago he was a flake. Now he’s a statesman. But it wasn’t Trump that changed. He’s still essentially a mid-20th Century New York liberal who is traditionally patriotic, personally flamboyant and has idiosyncratic protectionist views. What changed was that the incompetence, dishonesty and corruption of everyone else (and also, in the case of the Left, the anti-American extremism) are now obvious to everyone. Trump wasn’t Hitler in 2005 or even in 2014. He’s Hitler now, because how else can you justify the empowerment of his corrupt, incompetent political opponents?
He wasn’t ironing Obama’s pants, he was looking for his 4th Chakra
Mike…would be perfect for Tom Wolfe!
What BoBo doesn’t understand is that Trump is the civic uprising
“It is a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men.”
This is entirely backwards. It is a multi-front assault to take unearned power away from people who have abused it. People who never built anything themselves have for two decades been strip-mining American institutions. It is long past time for this incompetent (except at self-advancement), ignorant, and grotesquely self-righteous “managerial” class to have its perks and privileges stripped away. And by humiliating and beating down the “new class”–in great part simply by refusing to respect its unearned ‘authority’–Trump is in effect elevating the working- and middle-class Americans that the managers believe they have a right to rule over rather than serve.
(Trump, sadly, has a weakness for celebrities, but we forgive him that, because he obviously has nothing but contempt for all the non-profit executives, activists, judges, lawyers, media mouthpieces, “journalists,” professors, government workers, etc., who desire to lord over us. And although Trump is no threat to democracy, even if he were, we’d rather all be equal under a single orange Emperor than suffer the abuses of a horde of incompetent, dishonest, condescending officials ordering us about while they fail at their enumerated jobs and suck away our sustenance).
Perhaps we should think of David Brooks as a tragedy, in the Greek sense, which offers us lessons.
Columnists are often trapped, by their constituencies/audiences and their past writings, which serve as celestial beings with their own gravitational fields in the forms of reputation.. These fields, their celebrity if you will, attract new adherents which lead to greater professional opportunities but also prevent any evolution in thinking.
The public currency of the columnist is their authority, people turn to them in order to get perspective on a given issue. However any change in opinion, any intellectual opinion or growth creates inconsistencies and call into question the columnist’s entire body of work. Unless a columnist is created as some of omniscient, divine being their past writings and beliefs will prove somewhat inadequate in the future. That’s what intellectual growth is about.
Politicians are masters of this phenomena as they change, chameleon like, to jettison past inconvenient beliefs not as part of their intellectual growth but to exploit new political opportunities.
Columnists on the other hand have an expiration date. Either they become intellctually exhausting, essentuialy recycling old columns to meet new stories to the point where you can easily predict what they will say on a given issue, in the not so distant future George Will and National Review columns will be written by AI without really hitting their P&L.
Think that’s unfair? Well they each like to say their views are timeless and in a sense it is but political philosophy is useless unless it is applied. I pick both Will and TNR because they have run out of useful things to say about the world since 1991 – the destruction of the lower middle class, the rise of a predatory China, the rise of nihlistic postmodernism and progressive manageralism and their respective danger to natural rights.
Oh they have opinions on them, but after a while – say a decade – you realize they offer no practical guidance tempered by experience on what to do about it. They are like the guy in the meeting who has great ideas and when you ask them how they would go about realizing them say those are simply “implementation details”
Or you are a Tommy Friedman who will never, no what matter the growing body of evidence otherwise, will be able to move off gaining insights from tax drivers or a 2-state solution. Friedman, Will, and the TNR – much like Major Kong – are going to ride the bomb all the way down.
Some change, much like an opportunistic politician, say a Bill Kristol because there is money to be made on the “I didn’t leave the Republicans but the Republicans left me” but they are the exception.
Brooks is trapped by the gravitational field of his own writings and fan base. He has promoted the idea for 25 years that there is a reasonable, managerial approach to governance that can be expressed through institutions. When that view is proven by experience to be problematic, he has no professional ability to change his views but instead says those in charge need to try harder. In this way he is like Marxist who dismisses the failed experience of the past century by saying “true Communism” hasn’t been tried yet.
The columnist will say they aren’t trapped int his way, that they are instead trapped by the editor and publisher and if they could just get to the open frontier of say Substack you would see what they are capable of but that isn’t true.
People rarely change, you need to change the people if you want different results. Ideally columnists would have an expiration date. Say a five-year term after which they would go away and do something useful like drive a forklift (I can help, I’m a certified instructor) They won’t because not only is it lucrative but their employers know they come with a ready baked constituency much like that strip on the comic page they keep
So perhaps we should be more forgiving of Brooks and realize that he is in fact the “Nancy” of the opinion world.
Curious and with some time to kill, he decides to investigate…
And then when he opens the door to the gun shop and suddenly notices that there isn’t just one gun in a case but many guns arranged in rows… he involuntarily empties his bladder.
He then goes home to change his underpants and also to write yet another piece about how guns are bad and Trump is Hitler .
And later, under an assumed name and with a fresh Amazon account, he orders some Depends(tm) for a future visit to a gun store.
Someday. But he’ll be ready the next time!
Screw him and the horse he rode in on.