Brooks Writes a Paragraph…
...and I write a bit more than that.
David Brooks has an essay worth reading at The Atlantic, I Should Have Seen This Coming, wherein he talks about long-standing tension in the rightward coalition in American politics. He basically describes a more intellectual conservatism and a reactionary anti-left faction. I think he oversimplifies, but the basic contours of his description are close enough for the basis of a conversation.
The pathetic thing is that I didn’t see this coming even though I’ve been living around these people my whole adult life. I joined the conservative movement in the 1980s, when I worked in turn at National Review, The Washington Times, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page. There were two kinds of people in our movement back then, the conservatives and the reactionaries. We conservatives earnestly read Milton Friedman, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, and Edmund Burke. The reactionaries just wanted to shock the left. We conservatives oriented our lives around writing for intellectual magazines; the reactionaries were attracted to TV and radio. We were on the political right but had many liberal friends; they had contempt for anyone not on the anti-establishment right. They were not pro-conservative—they were anti-left. I have come to appreciate that this is an important difference.
Again, this over-simplifies, but it does have the basis of the start of a conversation about where the so-called conservative movement went wrong, if anything, because it is intellectually impossible to call Trumpism “conservative” in any meaningful sense. But I would hasten to add that a lot of self-styled conservatives are directly responsible for putting the reactionary on the throne.
But this post is not about his central argument, although, again, I recommend it.
I really want to focus on one passage. In reading the piece, a singular paragraph drove me a bit crazy for a number of reasons and led to this post.
First, the full paragraph.
Of course, the left made it easy for them. The left really did purge conservatives from universities and other cultural power centers. The left really did valorize a “meritocratic” caste system that privileged the children of the affluent and screwed the working class. The left really did pontificate to their unenlightened moral inferiors on everything from gender to the environment. The left really did create a stifling orthodoxy that stamped out dissent. If you tell half the country that their voices don’t matter, then the voiceless are going to flip over the table.
Next, a general observation. I find most attempts to talk about “the left” and “the right” as if they are two monoliths as analytically lazy and generally intellectually annoying. I try not to do it, although I am sure I fall prey to the easy language of it all from time to time. But in a piece in which Brooks is talking about at least two major camps on the right (and even that is simplistic), you would think he would be cognizant of not conflating anything not of the right into one blob.
I would further note something I will continue to hammer because it is so important. We are so conditioned by a rigid two-party system that we mistake consistent voting for ideological coherence. We all (or, at least, somewhere around 95%+ of us) force all of our hopes and beliefs into one of two boxes. We have no other effective choice. As such, it is then a huge mistake to think we understand a pure “left” and “right” as a result.
But allow me to go line by line for a moment.
Of course, the left made it easy for them.
As a general matter, I am increasingly tired of victim blaming. If the reactionary wing of the American right has taken over, then maybe the fault lies with both the reactionaries themselves and others affiliated with them who didn’t try and stop them when they had the chance. I am looking at you, Mitch McConnell.
The left really did purge conservatives from universities and other cultural power centers
First, “purge”? What purge? Second, I simply don’t accept the premise. I am not surprised that artists and intellectuals might be more prone to more progressive and, hence, liberal or even leftist views. A core tenet of progressive thinking is, in a general sense, that applied knowledge can make the world a better place. Burkean conservatism suggests that we should cleave first to the established, the tried and true, with change coming only slowly and gradually,
Which vision of the way the world works is more likely to appeal to someone willing to dedicate their lives to study?
Universities are more likely to draw more liberally minded people.
But there are more conservative-minded people, as well as people who probably don’t think that much about politics on our campuses, than the “purge” narrative would suggest. There are plenty of libertarian minded types, if not conservatives, in your typical Economics Department or School of Business.
(This is a topic I need to take up separately at some point).
In regard to “cultural power centers,” I am not sure what this means. The most prominent cultural power center I can think of is Hollywood (meaning film and TV production). Again, this is a huge topic in and of itself. And while there are clear cases and example of the film an television industry being liberal, if not even leftist, it also true that the dominant message of most shows about law enforcement, as well as super-hero movies as a class, are power fantasies about how easy it is to use force to identify and round up the bad guys. That is far more a right-wing than a left-wing message.
On balance, I often find protestations about how liberals dominate universities and the culture to be less about the full dominance of the left, but rather the incomplete dominance of the right in these spheres.
I continue to marvel at the notion that liberal professors are actively “indoctrinating” their students. As my professorial colleagues will readily joke, we can’t get them to read the damn syllabus, let alone bend their minds to our collective wills. Moreover, if universities, especially the elite ones, are dominated by the left, where are all of these extremely conservative attorneys who get elected to Congress or placed on the bench coming from? If universities are indoctrination factories, can someone please explain J.D. Vance? Tom Cotton? Josh Hawley? Kevin Roberts? Russ Vought? I could make a longer list, but the point should be clear.
Indeed, Brooks himself makes a similar case later in the piece.
But although Trump may have campaigned as a MAGA populist, leveraging this working-class resentment to gain power, he governs as a Palm Beach elitist. Trump and Elon Musk are billionaires who went to the University of Pennsylvania. J. D. Vance went to Yale Law School. Pete Hegseth went to Princeton and Harvard. Vivek Ramaswamy went to Yale and Harvard. Stephen Miller went to Duke. Ted Cruz went to Princeton and Harvard. Many of Musk’s DOGE workers, according to The New York Times, come from elite institutions—Harvard, Princeton, Morgan Stanley, McKinsey, Wharton. These are the Vineyard Vines nihilists, the spiritual descendants of the elite bad boys at the Dartmouth Review. This political moment isn’t populists versus elitists; it is, as I’ve written before, like a civil war in a prep school where the sleazy rich kids are taking on the pretentious rich kids.
Back to the pieces of the paragraph from above.
The left really did valorize a “meritocratic” caste system that privileged the children of the affluent and screwed the working class.
I think that the upper class, both left and right, played this game. And the broadly defined left was at least interested in affirmative action, which the right effectively destroyed.
The left really did pontificate to their unenlightened moral inferiors on everything from gender to the environment.
Everyone who thinks they are right pontificates in the direction of those they believe to be incorrect. This is not a trait solely of the left.
Indeed, Brooks has made a career of it himself.
Yes, the leftward side of the ledger has been more concerned about the environment and gender equality and that tends to lead to some moralizing on those topics. Does anyone think that a book called The Road to Character does not make some moral arguments?
The left really did create a stifling orthodoxy that stamped out dissent.
Does it? The whole left?
Some leftists, yes.
But also, lots of other people of varying ideological stripes.
If you tell half the country that their voices don’t matter, then the voiceless are going to flip over the table.
This is where he utterly falls into the trap of rigid bipartism and conflates it with the whole of American politics. There is no unified “left” that its telling “the right” that their voice doesn’t matter. Worse, the reality is that the right (if we mean the electoral right as represented by the Republican Party) has all the advantages in the Senate, and in the Electoral College. Again, the last time a Republican president won the absolute majority of the vote, the best metric for truly measuring support, was George W. Bush in 2004. And that was in his second term, and even then he won 50.7%. The last time a Republican presidential candidate won the majority of the vote in their first term was Bush’s father in 1988. And the last time a Republican won the majority of the vote when it was the party out of power was 1980. And, of course, the GOP won the presidency in 2000 and 2016 without winning the popular vote.
The notion that it is the “left” (again, here defined as Democratic voters) who are telling “the right” that their voice doesn’t matter is more than a little problematic.
Perhaps it is the zenith of “bothesiderism,” but the notion that we can’t just say that the Trumpest reactionaries are bad without first blaming the left feels a lot like a version of “but did you see what she was wearing!”
And quite frankly, I don’t think that the main flaw in American politics is that there are ways to critique the left. The problem is, as I have argued at this site for many, many years, the fact that our institutions are not adequately representative, nor are they responsive. Our politicians do not have to truly compete for power in many cases, or if they do, they are incentivized to cleave to extremes, not to a broader public interest. The incentives are askew, and if we don’t fix them, we are going to remain in this mess.
Indeed, to bring it back to the content of Brooks’ essay: the reason that the Burkean right and the reactionary right were in the exact same political space is because of our rigid two-party system, which is the direct result of our electoral rules. If we had a version of proportional representation, the reactionary right would have been off on their own, and unlikely to take over the whole of government with their 25%-30% of the vote.
David Brooks A) did as much as anyone to create this situation, and B) is long, long past his Use By date.
There was a marketplace of ideas on a more or less level playing field. Conservatism lost. Now they’re trying to simply buy a victory.
Since we’re on the topic of David Brooks, let me offer my own simplistic, broad-strokes explanation (which is what made Brooks in the first place) of why the US is in the shitter right now.
I believe that an important contributing factor is this country’s tolerance for bare-faced bullshit.
In any sane world, Brooks’ career should have ended back in 2004 after his fabulations were mercilessly exposed by Sasha Issenberg.
The man lied and was caught doing so. His reward? Writing for The Atlantic.
Relatedly, Jim Cramer is still on TV, and politicians in blood-red states, where the GOP has been power for at least a generation, are still blaming Democrats for everything.
Now wonder, then, that the biggest liar of them all ascended all the way to the top. I guess that’s what inevitably happens when openly telling lies is not disqualifying.
The left really did pontificate to their unenlightened moral inferiors on everything from gender to the environment.
The left did this. They really did do it. The world was shocked but there you have it: the left spoke about gender and environment as if they believed they were correct and climate change deniers and trad people who seem to vote for an endless slew of rapists weren’t. They did it, by god, the left with its words and ideas, and they made it easy for humble salt of the earth Americans to go fascist. Why? Because people who cared about an issue believed they were correct about an issue.
And about academia, the stuff I’m familiar with—literature, philosophy, art–have plenty of people who have conservative views about their fields. The people purged were more or less abusers of powers, and that means liberals as well as conservatives. Strip away the abuse of power, and conservatives are welcome in academia. The caveat being: you have to be able to handle the 20th century, which includes thinking critically about stuff the left cares about.
The problem with mainstream conservatives is that their philistines who took their cues from television and cheap op-eds. They think modern art is fake and any type of examination of identity is a con. Buckley was one and so was George Will. They didn’t care about the intellect. It’s not the end of the world, but taking this as a model has consequences if you are trying to care about something.
@drj: and Steven, you’re both right. Our government has ceased to be representative, and representatives barely have to compete for office. And of course Left and Right are nonsense in the current context, though I’m damned if I know how to replace the terms. I wrote a comment the other day pointing a finger at our tolerance of slow, creeping intellectual corruption, or tolerance for bare-faced bullshit. It’s a bipartisan, bi-coastal, left, right and center problem.
Civic virtue can keep a weakened underperforming system going along for a long time. But when civic virtue collapses, the system’s weaknesses are revealed. This is where we are, and why I’m harping on an anti-corruption, anti-billionaire message going forward.
But if we are the pro civic virtue party (side, faction, whatever) and we are the anti-corruption party (etc…) then we have to show not just tell. So long as we are nursing at our billionaires’ teats, we can’t say much about their billionaires.
So, again, this is a time for the Dems in Congress to draft an anti-corruption bill, short enough to fit on a postcard, simple enough for even our dimmest spokespeople to recite. Of course it won’t pass, but we need to draw that line and believe it and discipline ourselves to follow it. Every single time a Democrat pol speaks, they should hammer that piece of legislation. But that only works if we mean it. I think Bernie and AOC mean it, but I’m not at all sure about much of our leadership.
@Modulo Myself:
Swell. Now let’s talk about holding on to power, which is the game. This is not an exam, this is not about getting the right answer, it’s about power. Power, power and power. Because you may be right that we should throw a lifebuoy to a drowning man, but if we can’t actually throw the f’ing lifebuoy it doesn’t f’ing matter, does it?
So, here’s an idea. How about occasionally, even when we are right, we STFU long enough to gain the power to actually do something.
Continuing on drj’s point: The entirety of the conservative “media” infotainment sphere has always been utter and complete propaganda BS from the rip. There’s nothing intellectual, reliable, true, or genuine there — the entire project has always been “Republicans r00l, libz dr00l.”
Fox built a studio in Sarah Palin’s house, ffs. Fox News created the fake Brooks Brothers protest in Florida about the Gore election — and so they project what they have to do to achieve a protest onto real, legitimate grievances needing redress.
Trump crashing the economy because he huffed the outgassing of conservative “thought” for too long has always been the stupid, inevitable outcome.
Brooks whining about being purged from college campuses is some pretty wild cope.. does he really want a conservative safe space on college campuses?
Not saying it’s wrong at all. Preach it, Brother Steven! We need a more representative government! We need less tolerance for bullshit! We need a way to bring actions against people who try to sell stuff with bullshit on media, including social media.
There’s one thing of note that bother me a lot. There’s a “logic” that goes like this:
1. Person X who believes Y does bad thing Z.
2. Therefore, Y is wrong and bad.
I mean, X needs to experience consequences for doing Z. I endorse that. Most Democrats would like to see Bob Menendez get some jail time and be driven from office.
But the world is chock full of people doing bad things, which might be framed as in service to a cause someone might think is good.
This is the core idea behind Thanos as a villain. He’s in some sense an extreme environmentalist. He goes way beyond zero population growth. He’s insane. His nickname is “The Mad Titan”. I have had many conversations with people confused/upset about Thanos, because he begins with a thesis that they endorse – overpopulation and pollution are a big problem. And then there’s his solution, which nobody endorses.
To me, this is the best kind of villain, but it makes folks uncomfortable. I love it precisely because it undermines a logic of “a bad person is doing bad things to serve this cause, therefore the cause must be bad”.
Because universities don’t have Schools of Engineering, Business, and Science.
This is just the opposite. This is why DEI was pushed by the left. Merit pushed out those from affluent and politically families who were not qualified and it enraged them. I’m still waiting for the executive order from Trump banning legacy admissions.
@drj:
Republicans have had total control in Texas for 30+ years yet still blame the powerless (and Godless) liberal for all the problems.
Brooks is waaaaaay too old to merit anything but derision for the “look what you made me do” argument. Even if there were any factual basis for his assertions about what “the left” did, which there isn’t. The left “valorized a caste system that privileged the children of the affluent and screwed the working class”!? Presumably they did that by championing cheap student loans, organized labor, universal health care, public education, the GI bill, affirmative action, anti-discrimination law, … Y’know, oligarchy.
I’m 80% sure that the first time I committed David Brooks’ name to memory it was preceded by asking myself “who is this dipshit?”
I do know that I sometimes come across his writing or an interview and ask “who is this dipshit?”, discover it is David Brooks, and then sigh the resigned sigh of someone who recognizes that the world hasn’t changed and there are still people who think he has something worthwhile to say.
Anyway, I think we now have empirical evidence of a correlation between the number of people with pronouns in their bio, and the performance of the stock market, and this is at least as the median observation of David Brooks.
(The 1929 collapse was caused by losing just one bio with pronouns! They were very rare at the time, which was why the markets were so much smaller!)
Brooks can sell this drivel to the New York Slimes audience of self-flaggelating, bleeding-heart liberals and MOR fake-contrarions who parrot the patriarchy’s favored narratives.
Myself being a former Republican who grew up in exuberan Georgia around these most-definitely-not-voiceless table turners, I think Brooks is drunk or high.
Trump’s supporters and enablers have never in my three decade plus lifetime been voiceless or unable to dissent. Fox News has been the #1 cable channel for almost all my life. The right has dominated talk radio for all of my life, including podcasting now. It is a verifiable fact of data that rightwing sources have long dominated shared content on social media.
For the entirety of my life, chest-beating conservatives have pontifucated on how liberals are less patriotic and less masculine, on how GOPers are morally superior to pro-choice “baby killers” and “groomer” gays.
The so-called MSM’s cultural powers — including the NY Slimes — carried water for the anti-Clinton vast righwing conspiracy throughout my childhood. Then they assured us Bush was a folksy guy you could have beer with as opposed to aloof Gore. Then the so-called liberal media carried water for Dubya’s Iraq War lies. Dissenters like the Dixie Chicks were canceled by the right.
It took a historic financial collapse for this racist country to elect a black guy in 2008, who in 2010 was promptly rewarded with an obstructionist Red Wave. In 2014, the so-called liberal media helped the right kneecap baby killer Cassandras like Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado, ridiculing him for his warnings about Roe’s fall.
Udall was right. The Senate flipping red in 2014 led to Roe’s end. Then the pundit class, especially the Slimes, spent 2015-2016 destroying the high approval Mrs. Clinton had enjoyed as Sec. of State, flogging the right’s Emailghazigatepalooza national bitch hunt. Trump was elected. Colin Kaepernick was canceled by the NFL, one of our biggest cultural players.
It took mismanagement of a global pandemic to get Trump out. But for the entirety of Biden’s presidency, people who praised Biden’s job performance and America’s post-COVID economic recovery were shouted down.
The dominant demographic dismissed warnings about MAGA’s neofascism. Now that orange Mussolini threatens more terms, empowers a Nazi saluting oligarch, and disappears legal residents into foreign prisons, those who once cried overreaction are M.I.A.
The farmers who voted in Trump’s first trade war got a bailout bigger than the 2009 Great Recession package, to save them from their poor choice. No big complaint. But student loan forgiveness is greeted with rightwing howling and centrist scolding. Reparations for slave descendants are a total nonstarter.
Voiceless? I don’t think so. The right has enjoyed huge, powerful, influential megaphones my whole life. I give
the oppressors credit for successfully playing poor wittle us victim tho. The NY Slimes set is certainly fooled.
I’ve been waiting for the howling and scolding for
What are the requirements for IRS tax forgiveness?
The Davids (Brooks, Frum, & French) should be kicked in the ass and launched into space.
I would rather be locked in a room with Reynolds lecturing me on how all the things I think are wrong for eternity than read one of their articles. A trio of vacuous buttholes that are directly responsible for the shit we are in. They just don’t want to admit it.
I know I give Dr. Joyner a lot of crap about his conservatism, but at least he’s honest and willing to deal with the screaming lefties here as equals. Maybe it’s just parasocial bullshit.
Dr. Taylor, the same applies to you, except I think you’d be derided as a screaming commie Marxist by conservatives. And I think your largely lefty readers stick with both of you because neither of you seem like your high on your own farts like the Davids.
Seriously, this is just absolutely stupid:
Who, who was pontificating? College students? Teenagers? Or is it that people demanding to be treated as humans is “pontificating”. This says to me the Brooks is a nihilist that believes in nothing.
This is why we’re in the bad place. We lose actual cool people like Val Kilmer while we’re stuck with David Brooks.
Like, this is just Brooks fighting the Left in his imagination. I’m sure Reynolds and I are both in the broadly speaking “Left” and agree on probably 95-99% of things. In general. I’m absolutely sure that beyond most surface level stuff it’s a death battle of disagreement over whether a hot dog is a sandwich or not. But again, I’d rather fight to the death with him, than listen to Brooks whine about the left.
Hell, the majority of the people I know on the Left can’t even agree what “The Left” is. Ask just about any self-identified “Leftist” what we all are here and they’ll say we are ALL reactionaries.
Brooks would 100% rather spend his free time hanging out and living with so called “Leftists” than be given 10 minutes alone with an avowed conservative at a party, maybe discounting someone like Sewell. He’s a fraud and war monger.
That’s nice, but to Hell with him.
@Bnut: What’s even worse, he calls upon the people who ate his food to tell him the runs happened because he didn’t expect it so spicy at the back end. He wouldn’t deem to think that another restaurant might have better eats, even if he’s too white to appreciate it and take a Tums and immodium.
@Beth:
Let’s be fair to Mr. Reynolds. It would only be about 25% of things, and it would largely be a matter of timing — i.e., shut up for now.
If I were to be stuck in an elevator for a week with either David Brooks or MR, I would choose Brooks. I would have fewer compunctions against killing and eating David Brooks. They’re both probably not great eating though.
@Gustopher:
Let’s keep in mind that Brooks was writing/teaching about Moral Greatness or whatever around the time he was leaving his wife at 60-something for his late-20s research assistant.
He’s just a phony who was paid to be a phony because they needed a phony in his style to fill out the ranks.
Brooks: How could I have not seen this coming?
Al Ameda: Good question. I mean Trump has only been a malevolent grifter all his adult life.
Brooks: Yes but, being the out-of-touch institutionalist that I am, I thought that given a 2nd chance, Trump would not make the same egregiously bad choices he did in his 1st term.
Al Ameda: Wait a minute, he instigated a riot and nearly stole the 2020 election, and you thought it would be different this time?
Brooks: Yeah, my bad.
@Modulo Myself: His personal story makes it essentially impossible for me to take any moral arguments from him seriously.
@Beth:
Wilhoit’s Law (“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”) still applies to Brook’s article. Conservative “intellectualism” is just a debate over who belongs in which of the two categories, and Brook’s sadness is just discovering most Republicans consider him part of the “bound but not protected” group.
What “The Left” ultimately is is the group of people who believe in the corresponding Anti-Conservative Principle: “no one can be protected unless everyone is bound; no one can be bound unless everyone is protected”. All the different shades of “The Left” are just procedural disagreements over how to accomplish the above.
@Beth:
So true.
I’m reminded of a quote by 19th century British Conservative politician and statesman
Benjamin Disraeli, who served a couple of terms as Prime Minister, who once said,
“A conservative government is an organized hypocrisy.”
I know that was long ago, also that British politics are of course quite different from ours
(I defer to our OTB’er John re: knowledge of UK Politics) that until recently a Conservative MP
in the UK was roughly equivalent to a center right politician here, but … I generally agree with Disraeli’s take; today’s American MAGA conservative is anything but conservative, that is unless one considers nihilism to be conservative, which I do not.
@al Ameda:
The ironic context of Disraeli’s speech:
It was in 1845, when he was leading an attack on the Conservative (a term dating back only to c 1834) government of Robert Peel as a champion of the “Tory” faction opposing Peel’s move to scrap the Corn Laws, i.e. agricultural protectionism.
And Peel was relying on Radical and Whig votes to drive through his policy.
Which eventually led to the party splitting, Peel resigning, the Peelites joining the Whigs and Radicals to form the Liberals.
And Disraeli eventually becoming Conservative leader in 1868; and then side-lining his protectionist past in favour of not annoying the working class, who were strongly for free trade.
(The end of the Corn Laws was balanced by rising demand etc; the prosperity of “High Farming” continued till roughly 1875, then rapidly declined.)
When it came to organizing hypocrisy, Disraeli was up there with the best.
He accepted free trade and a expanding franchise, and advocated imperialism, primarily out of ambition and a desire to “dish the Liberals”, and helped the Conservatives solidify their working class vote.
So the man who destroyed Peel, largely out of personal ambition, ended up completing his project.
US “Conservatives” have frequently been regarded by both European “traditionalist” and “modernising” conservatives as a rather whacky variant of liberalism.
And MAGA seem to have kept the “whacky” and discarded the “liberal” in favour of a nihilistic, and rather chiliastic, populism
dominant message of most shows about law enforcement, as well as super-hero movies as a class, are power fantasies about how easy it is to use force to identify and round up the bad guys. That is far more a right-wing than a left-wing message.
What’s interesting is how the left/commie Hollywood also will almost always valorize the maverick/lone wolf as the person who fixes things, while people who actually want to go through the system or perhaps tell the lead character to maybe not break all the rules, are the objects of derision for the story. That has very likely contributed to this fondness for liking ‘outsiders’ or ‘rule breakers’ and thinking they are the ones who will have the solutions.
Looking at the history of his output, his takes and his interpretations… his total shamelessness in not acknowledging his past errors suggests he’s as big a narcissist and as incapable of self analysis as 47. Except of course he can’t destroy the world.
Really good column from Steven Taylor.
—- Spot on. I lived some of “those years” working on my degree at a public university. There most definitely was a context of exploration, seeking understanding of our human problems and possible solutions. No “purging” motive was detected —- except at the very end of my stay (mid-70’s), and that was from reactionary economics professors !!! This was the only time during my entire college career that I encountered bombastic judgment of ideological expression. Apparently these folks were just cranking up for the “Reagan Revolution.”
— Yeah, well apparently slow and incremental, is no longer a thing for this iteration of the Republican Party which defines itself as “monolithic” through its singular, reactionary behavior and knuckleheaded absolutism.
There really are just two sides now: those who want the degree of liberal democracy that we have enjoyed, and those who do not. Forget party labels. Everybody needs to make a decision as to which of those two conditions should exist. The Trump-MAGA-billionaire nexus has forced the issue into that narrow vein.
@JohnSF:
Thanks for the morning Disraeli. Appreciated.