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David Brooks and the “Conservative Intellectual Crisis”
David Brooks is the New York Times’ least hated non-dead conservative. He is the Left’s go-to respectable conservative, the kind you’re supposed to be able to bring home to meet your mom. He won’t belch at the dinner table and he knows which fork to use with the curly endive and manchego salad with raspberry coulis.
Of course Brooks is a “conservative” only in the sense that, if tomorrow the Senate voted Obama the offices of Consul, Tribune of the Plebs, Field Marshal, Maximum Lider, Imperator, and Dictator for Life, Brooks would quibble that they didn’t make him Pontifex Maximus first. This is the guy who grew all gooey and moist contemplating Obama’s pant crease, a sentiment Brooks has no doubt been choking on for at least the past four years.
Brooks put out an unintentionally revealing column last week that tout le monde is gushing about (check out the comments). What it reveals more than usual, is the extent to which Brooks is a creature of the New York Times and its audience. As with so much of his output, the column is designed to leave NYT readers unperturbed in the comfort of their unexamined assumptions.
The more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger column blames the Trump phenomenon on the so-called “Conservative Intellectual Crisis”. Brooks says:
I feel very lucky to have entered the conservative movement when I did, back in the 1980s and 1990s. I was working at National Review, The Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. The role models in front of us were people like Bill Buckley, Irving Kristol, James Q. Wilson, Russell Kirk and Midge Decter.
These people wrote about politics, but they also wrote about a lot of other things: history, literature, sociology, theology and life in general. There was a sharp distinction then between being conservative, which was admired, and being a Republican, which was considered sort of cheesy.
But then, during Brooks’ middle years, talk radio, cable TV and the internet swept away these genteel, urbane souls, and ushered in the conservatism of the trailer park: Rush, O’Reilly, Breitbart, Coulter, Palin and the rest, with Trump as the inevitable catastrophic result. Brooks looks forward to a Trump defeat that will, according to him, “cleanse a lot of bad structures and open ground for new growth.”
Brooks makes it seem like the decline of intellectual and cultural standards is a conservative phenomenon, but this is just shameless pandering to his liberal audience. As he knows very well, the enstupidation is universal: It is the culture as a whole that has faceplanted into the sewer. It is always a revelation to me to watch TV from the period Brooks is talking about. Go to YouTube and watch Dick Cavett’s 2-hour long 1980 interview with Richard Burton, for example, and prepare to be amazed that something this grown-up once captured prime time viewers’ attention. Going back even farther to the golden era of the Middlerow, observe how Ted Sorensen was able to lard JFK’s political speeches with classical references and expect to be understood by ordinary Americans. That was the era, remember, when Mortimer Adler’s dubious Great Books box set could be bought at your local Piggly Wiggly.
Yes, I too am nostalgic for the Reagan Era. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!” as the poet says. I am a little younger than Brooks, but I too remember fondly that period of my intellectual and political awakening, when Bill Buckley’s Firing Line was a regular feature on Public (!) Television. In addition to Firing Line, during the early 1980s PBS also aired Free to Choose, a program about the free market based on the eponymous book, featuring Milton and Rose Friedman. Another PBS show I remember is The Constitution: That Delicate Balance, a series of a dozen or so Socratic dialogues dealing with discrete constitutional topics that brought together journalists, politicians, cabinet secretaries and former Supreme Court justices, deftly moderated by Fred Friendly and presented at an intellectual level appropriate to a serious law school. I distinctly remember seeing Robert Bork for the first time on that show.
Nothing remotely like these programs exists anywhere on TV now. As these examples illustrate, not only has the general intellectual climate of the country cratered, but, not coincidentally, conservative voices have been systematically purged from the old mainline networks. Today the only “conservative” you will find on PBS is… wait for it… David Brooks! Simultaneously, conservatives were also purged from most university faculties. This ethnic ideological cleansing has not been good for the country’s intellect, resulting in such scientific breakthroughs as gender-neutral pronouns, safe spaces, Queer Theory, Feminist Glaciology, and all the other Stalinist instruments of political correctness, with no one except a few aging cranks left to push back against the insanity.
Given these lamentable developments, it is no surprise that Liberals are not aware of the existence of intellectually serious conservatives. But they do exist, of course, as anyone who has ever attended an AEI event or perused a random issue of, say, The New Criterion or the Claremont Review of Books would know. Such a person would be blown away by the richness and depth of these small safe harbors of intellectual sanity: the subtle charm of Joseph Epstein’s literary criticism; the penetrating insight of David Goldman’s and William Voegli’s analysis of foreign affairs; the sensitivity and refinement of Jay Nordlinger’s musical essays; the erudition and humanity of Anthony Daniels; the freshness and analytical vigor of Yuval Levin; and many, many others. Brooks knows all this better than I do, of course, but validating his audience’s prejudices about the intellectual emptiness of conservatism and their own intellectual superiority is what keeps the invitations to those Georgetown cocktail parties rolling in.
Part of the self-flattery involved in being David Brooks and writing for an audience of soi-disant intellectualoids, is the conceit that intellectuals have a large and direct impact on politics. But intellectuals’ relationship to politics is highly attenuated. Trump is the product, first and foremost, not of the dearth of serious conservative thought, but of the fecklessness and political failures of the Republican leadership at the national level. To suggest otherwise is to completely misunderstand what caused the rise of Trump. The people who support Trump do so not because they have misplaced their Russell Kirk, but because they, quite correctly, see the structures of power in this country, including the Republican Party, as hopelessly corrupt, and they want to burn them down. Brooks is so invested in these structures, and so overestimates the political influence of intellectuals like himself, that he seems blind to this.
Finally, I can’t resist the low-hanging fruit. I understand that Brooks is the NYT house conservative and it is his duty to opine on conservative things. But where is his column about the Liberal intellectual crisis? As we know, Republicans are in the midst of a civil war over Trump. There is to put it mildly, a vigorous disagreement over Trumpism and the future of the GOP, both within the party and in conservative circles generally. Democrats, by contrast, are in perfectly synchronized lockstep with Clinton who — as we now know in microscopic detail and beyond any shadow of doubt — is a criminal sociopath. There is no “Never Hillary” movement among the Democrats, to speak of. The fact that this has not precipitated an intellectual crisis of the Left is in itself a scandal. Where is that column?
Brooks’s lament feeds an unshakable article of faith on the Left: that conservatives are misinformed and not very bright. It is beyond tedious debating Liberals on this point, since so many of them, including ones who should know better, fail to grasp that political conflicts are rarely if ever about facts; they are about different values, temperaments and world views. Liberals believe that the basic function of government is to alleviate human suffering, and that equality is the most important public good; conservatives believe different things. Better access to information won’t settle this conflict. David Brooks knows all this and I wish he would stop flattering his Liberal audience’s delusions.
Published in Journalism
What is, “How you know you’re living in a banana republic?”
I’m not sure what is shortsighted about it. The Left, as I said, is in the Vanguard of this decay. The Right is at times resisting and, at times, racing to catch up. Most of the time we seem to be just ceding ground, deciding that the current hill is never the one to die on. The culture in general is sclerotic, Left, Right and non-interested. The difference is that it is the Left pushes this. It is their defined path. We are getting swept along with it.
Meh, I’d say it’s some combination of being fed up with being stigmatized for being white, male, Christian (or seriously religious, with the exception of Muslim), country class, self-made, or anything else viewed as “right-wing,” and noticing that so many are living on unmerited rewards with a sense of entitlement (not just the dependent class, but the Ivy-credentialed elites, too). Yes, there’s some bird-flipping going on, but the contempt has been directed at the Right like a fire hose on a four-alarm fire in a fireworks factory for a while now. We non-intellectuals are sick of it and Trump’s, um, lack of tact is encouraging us to believe it’s still possible to speak openly (even if (especially if?) you’re wrong).
The Left has successfully scapegoated and stifled the ideas/speech of the Right. The mechanism has been political correctness, which is defined as lying so as keep the listener from being offended by the truth.
Brooks writes the following diagnoses:
If David Brooks thinks that conservatives have had nothing to say in the past three decades about “stagnant wages, meager opportunity, social isolation and fragmentation,” then he is pretty darned ignorant.
Or maybe he believes that there are conservative ideas to address these ills, but they don’t get enough attention. Well, a prominent conservative columnist writing in the New York Times could take care of that problem pretty easily.
Instead, he’d rather than complain about talk radio hosts stirring up the passions of their core conservative audience.
Why is this? I can only surmise that David Brooks would rather stir up the passions of his core liberal audience.
I think that by dismissing intellectual problems on the right by laying the blame at the feet of the left, however correct that may be, leads us to become complacent. I honestly don’t care if the left becomes intellectually unserious – in fact, I’m glad they have! I’m more concerned with maintaining the fount of new ideas that is required for political movements to be effective at addressing new problems.
I guess I see what you are saying. I don’t disagree except to clarify that we need to understand the intellectual roots of the Left so that we can know how and why to fight it. Their philosophies lead them to this place and we ought to be able to articulate that and weaken their positions by challenging their assumptions. Too often we accept their assumptions and focus on tactics over strategy. I don’t care if the Left is unserious either except that it affects the culture overall and I think we need to fight it at that level too. How? I don’t really know except to train our children to understand how we got here and to reclaim the culture on behalf of notions like Truth – pushing back against Postmodern relativism. This goes along with what you stress: we cannot dismiss our own complicity in this intellectual slide.
That is why I like the original post. David Brooks represents the sort of bland sophistry that we need to expose and scorn.
I’m 100% with you there, the problem as I see it is that outside of a small minority of conservative intellectuals – the vast majority of conservatives aren’t very interested in exploring topics outside their comfort zone. They would rather have ideas reinforced than read ideas that run counter to their own.
I think this behavioral difference is mostly a product of the differences in the nature of the participants on the left and on the right. Leftist ideology, in order to be controlling, promotes the destruction of anything in opposition and this we witness as the Left’s primary driving force. The Right, OTOH, acknowledges the primacy of individual liberty, including freedom of association, so has no overarching built-in objective to destroy the Left. This then attracts more effort on the Left’s part, even when not threatened, than happens on the Right, even when threatened. I offer this as explanation, not as excuse. I tend to agree that somehow we must work on our ideas at a level equal to the Left.
You’re not hanging around the proper circles is you don’t have an over-arching objective to destroy the left.
What?
Ideologically, not for me specifically. I don’t hang around circles of anything.
Bravo.
Thoughtful piece. Fun to read. I wrote about David Brooks’ supposed wandering to find truth last December and got a good blistering from the Ricochet gang for daring to present Brooks’ case for remorse and redemption – even if I expressed some doubts myself. Well, turns out his remorse was small and his redemption short lived.
Brooks is an odd duck. He was even odd when he was hanging around Conservative intellectuals back in the heady days of Reagan when being a Conservative Ivy Leaguer had caché. For more reading on this topic of conservative bankruptcy – Matt Continetti offers his two cents, historical view and all. With Matt is more like two thousand dollars – a very good value.
And, I believe false nostalgia and anxious expectations explain the populist phenomenon which is the well researched case presented by Geoffrey Norman.
Being an economist I am often biased toward Norman’s explanation (Preferring Marxian explanations of many things and tMarxian solutions of just about nothing). We are economic animals, spirits or souls at heart. “I eat, therefore I am.” If I fear I won’t eat, I am populist. Hungry, I look back and recall a great meal my Mother once cooked in the past forgetting I was famished and the meat was bit tough.
That is populism’s lens. Remembering things as they never were and demanding they return to what they never were. But, populism is a reasonable human reaction to economic anxiety – nationalism, protectionism, xenophobia, and redistribution.
Speaking for myself.
Perhaps it isn’t Utopia that motivated Republican primary voters to prefer Trump over candidates with superior conservative and Republican credentials. It might have been nihilism. Why choose Trump, who donated to the Democrats like Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton if you are mad at what Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton have done? Why choose Trump, who praised President Obama’s economic stimulus plan in 2009 and praised socialized medicine in the 1st Republican presidential debate in 2015 if you are mad about what Obama and Obamacare have done to the country?
Some are essentially saying, “Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan made me so upset, I chose a Clinton donor to be the GOP nominee.” This is evidence of either a lack of conservatism or a lack of intelligence among Republican primary voters.
I am cautiously optimistic that, after a Trump defeat next week, which I still think is likely, Republicans will come to their senses in 2020 and nominate a candidate who isn’t a Hillary Clinton donor, isn’t a supporter of socialized medicine and hasn’t been caught on tape bragging that he likes to molest women.
They could nominate Jesus himself. With fifteen or thirty million new Democrat voters, Dems may be able to swing Texas blue.
Well, in their new state of Mexas, they’d be nominating Hey-Soos.
This is overblown. States that have not been impacted by immigration like Washington State, Oregon, Minnesota and Wisconsin are likely to be in Hillary Clinton’s column next week. Those states have not voted for a Republican presidential nominee since Reagan’s 1984 49 state landslide reelection victory. But Arizona and Texas, states that have been impacted by immigration, have voted Republican in every election since 2000 (Arizona) or 1980 (Texas).
But, Arizona is in play this year, and I was addressing your “optimism” about 2020.
I do not share it.
Isn’t this part of the problem?
Intellectually inclined conservatives defiantly label themselves “non-intellectuals.” The left hears this, and cries “anti-intellectualism!”; popular culture interprets it as “[expletive] that irrelevant book-learning!”
I know, of course, that you use “intellectual” to mean “one whose work involves producing ideas,” but ceding intellectual ground is not what conservatism needs.
I would quibble. We are not in a civil war over Trump. Trump has occurred because of a civil war.
It is just proof that we have a lot of low-information voters on our side, too. They are bored with our intellectual arguments, and really tired of the GOP for being so slow to accomplish any good thing. They turned out to vote for brash Trump because he is a celebrity who could get away with saying things that needed sayin’.
David Brooks is not conservative. David Brooks isn’t even “center-right.”
David Brooks is a center-left pundit. The NYT, PBS and NPR Leftists trot D. Brooks out as their pet “conservative,” but that is a lie. He is not there to explain conservative thought. He is there to criticize Republicans using the language of the right, and he is there to interpret conservative thought for the Left, because they are so hopelessly fixed in their bubble that they cannot even understand what we are saying without a filter. The result is that they think they know what we are saying, without actually having to engage thoughtfully with any of our arguments.
I may be inclined to disagree with you. But it’s tough to gather the evidence when I barely read him, yet I mostly remember columns like this one.
No, this is reality — truth. The fact that I don’t personally get paid for ideas I agree with takes nothing away from the ideas. It has nothing to do with defiance, unless you go by that old axiom: In a time of universal deceit…
What you need to know about the Left is, if it’s characterizing conservatives, it’s lying. Who’re you gonna believe? The Left or your lying eyes? For a lot of Democrat voters, they believe the Left, despite knowing smart, good people like you (and me). How do they get away with it? They attach social stigma to conservatism.
The Left is so intellectually bankrupt, their elites won’t even engage conservative thinkers (now that Hitchens is dead). All they have is scapegoating and stigmatizing.
We have to stop playing their game by their rules — stop accepting their premises.
What do we do about the shared premises?
I’m so worried, sleepless re: the Bromance between Putin and Trump. Not.
Good article. This PRESS. The audacity of Muckraking! What a horrible election and choice I’m quite moved by the words and concept of Drain El Swamp and that certainly includes Media. And David Brooks yeah right. Thomas Friedman LOL. We will see will we not.
To all a good night.
Thank you for the brilliant and fun piece.
Suggestion: when posts lag over the weekend, why not replay fine pieces like this in a “Long-Form Post of the Week”.
I sympathize somewhat with Brooks’ lament about the 80s and 90s, thinking “Remember when the “conservative” column at the NYT was written by a sharp, cogent conservative up for the intellectual fight like William Safire!”
Brooks can be an entertaining and thoughtful, if schticky, writer. Bobos was a blast. You read him, laugh, maybe wince with some self recognition, and understand there are far more comic sociological arse pulls than true insights. More insight in a chapter of Jonathan Haidt’s Righteous Mind than Brooks’ Social Animal.
One hopes that the house conservative act is wearing thin for Brooks himself. Not even Garry Wills tried to trade on phony conservatism this long.
Too bad Times readers aren’t presented the philosophical, moral and practical challenges of a real conservative in full like Victor Davis Hanson.
There is a fundamental difference between nihilism and all other isms that believe there is such a thing as truth and seek it. Even Marxists believe in reason and observation even though nihilists seem to end up there and vice versa which is sclerotic as it seems unable to grow and learn. It’s important not to dismiss as sclerotic reasoning from inherited principles which can’t be proven, just accepted based on judgement, faith observation and historical success the foundation of most conservative thought.
Until I see a cadre of conservative doers step forward, to bring new tactics to government which both improve net results and move things away from government control to the private sector, then I will be bothered to give credence to conservatism as a useful force.
Progressives have their cadres, buried in every agency and state, in every classroom.
We need doers. It is time for a muscular conservatism or none at all.
The ideas are well discussed. The struggle is in the action.