David Brooks must be really raking in the dough. I can think of fifty people in the blogosphere off the top of my head who do a better job than Mr. Brooks of helping people understand American politics. Some are great at predicting what will happen. Others are great at explaining policy or economics. Some have great sociological insights. Others can explain the nuts and bolts of running a campaign. A few are digging around and doing awesome citizen reporting.
David Brooks tries to do those things, but he utterly fails. He is one of the most reliably wrong journalists in the country. He’s also consistent only in his wild inconsistency. If he ever acted on half of what he says he believes, he would have left the Republican Party in disgust at least six years ago. But he had to pay the mortgage. And now he’s really tied to his job as the reluctant conservative. How else is he going to pay the difference between the $1.6 million he got for his old house and the $4 million he paid for his new one?
This man just bought a $4 million house. Do I envy him? No. I just think it’s sick that he is so well compensated for being a complete hack while dozens of people with ten times his talent and insight are providing people content for free, or nearly so.
What a set of jobs this man has. He gets to play the “reasonable Republican” on the pages of the New York Times, on PBS, and NPR, and Meet the Press. He’s never called to account in those forums for being always unfailingly wrong about everything. All he does is construct stupid dichotomies to explain why the country is split between this group and that.
In David Brooks’s world there are spreadsheet people and paragraph people, mechanical and moralistic people, emotional people and reasonable people, people who want to reduce inequality and people who want to expand opportunity, there’s Adam the First and Adam the Second, Sam’s Club Republicans and Country Club Republicans, the president and the kind of guy who can go to Applebee’s without feeling like a dick. Oh, and there are people who will spend $15,000 on a media center and people who will spend $15,000 on a slate shower stall.
He’s really just Peggy Noonan without the 16 milligrams of Lorazepam. For Mr. Brooks, breaking everything into twos is about as complicated and nuanced as he is prepared to be, and his critical analysis reflects this limitation.
Or, as driftglass says:
Honestly, If Our. Mr. Brooks would just stick to subjects about which he can safely maunder on for 800 words without comprehensively embarrassing himself — valuable life lessons he has learned while cheering his kid’s softball team, or flying coach, or how the smell of a freshly opened jar of Jif peanut butter reminds him of his first broken heart — no one would notice or care.
Instead, he constantly tells us how even though the Republicans are wrong if you look at things factually, they’re really right because they see things morally or because they have different ideas of fairness or because people are easily misled and politicians must account for this. Austerity might not create jobs, but what about the deficit! I think Paul Krugman may soon be found crawling up David Brooks’ Cleveland Park lawn in the dead of night with a knife in his mouth, some rope in his hand, and a cinder block strapped to his back.
In America, you can get fabulously wealthy if only you’re willing to make a living making excuses for economic inequality and finding new ways to make fun of people who have empathy.
