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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
Thank you for saying this. I really did not want to be the one. Bravo.
This may be descriptive of some Trump supporters. Those were with Trump in the primaries, and, even at that, they are a (sizeable) minority of Trump’s primary voters.
This is not descriptive at all of the Rabble. We do not expect much of Trump; it is just that we fear much from Hillary.
Please help boost Trump’s sorry ass into the presidency. Prevent Madame Hillary from the anti-American race into Marxist Utopia that will be enabled if she is in command of the Progressive weaponized agencies.
It’s not really the essence of socialism. It’s the essence of some anarchists who eventually go socialist, though.
This.
The virtually complete polarization of media is a huge part of our national enstupidation, along with the encouragement of outrage and counter-outrage. The lefties shriek their -ists and the righties get huffy.
When I was student-pastoring a church back in 2002, I had a two hour drive home through parts of Maine that my usual radio station (NPR) did not, for some reason, reach but conservative talk radio did. So two or three times a week, for the first time in my life, I listened to the fabled Sean, Rush, et al.
It was clear I was not their intended audience, their scornful rant not aimed at challenging or convincing me, but at pleasing and, dare I say it, comforting those whom the so-called intellectual elites disdained with evidence of elite idiocy.
Fast forward to the past year; I’ve found Sean, Rush etc. comforting too; their scornful rants included good (true) things said about police officers, and these were balm to my abraded heart.
So I get, at least a little, why conservative talk radio has been so popular…though it shares, with NPR, the distinction of being among the divisive and enstupidating (love it, Oblamov!) enablers of the present mess.
I haven’t heard much of Rush in recent years but I always considered Hannity several notches below him. Rush has a brash and provocative schtick but he always seemed to have some real thought behind what he said and often some true insights. Hannity, on the other hand, even when I just wanted some red meat comfort food was insufferably annoying, seemingly unable to do anything beyond tick off talking points on his finger and interrupt his far-more-interesting-than-he guests.
This is the only place I’ve seen this language used so I guess that means it is made up out of thin air. Most of the sentiment is ‘throw them all out’ rather than ‘burn it all down’. Not a single mention of anything resembling Utopia, anarchy or socialism. The institutions are not what is corrupt, it is those in charge who are doing their best to destroy them. The idea is to restore the republic and Republicans have been a huge failure at that, even helping the destroyers.
I’ve seen burn it down sentiment elsewhere. But the the essence of the “burn it down” sentiment isn’t utopianism it’s at worst anarchic.
There are people out there who look at our government as operated and think that nothing would be preferable to what is currently in place. In many instances I’m not sure that’s wrong.
Hannity just never struck me as particularly bright.
I would not want to get into a debate with Rush. Hannity, I could clean his clock with half my brain tied behind my back.
Bob, I’m sorry to disagree so strongly, but I do. First, the people in the institutions will always be corrupt, no matter who they are. Let’s define “corrupt” here. Maybe it means something different to you than it does to me. To me, “corrupt” means that these individuals, these human beings, will sometimes put their self-interest ahead of the public interest. Well, my friend, if you are hoping for human beings who are immune from this impulse, then you are engaged in exactly the kind of Utopian impulse I was describing in my earlier comment. Because no such human beings exist.
The Founders devised a government based on checks and balances precisely because they expected this kind of corruption. Now certainly, some people are more corrupt than others. In my view, both Hillary and Donald pursue their self-interest exclusively, without a single thought for the public good, ever. Hillary pursues power and money for herself. Donald pursues money and vainglorious adulation for himself. Neither of them has any other motivation. They are both completely corrupt. Completely. One hundred percent, without exception – corrupt. So if your main concern is corruption, there is some reason to wonder how you can vote for either one.
I agree that Hannity is not that bright. But he does have one talent, which serves him well in what he does. He is adept at asking leading questions that have an obvious answer. The reason this works for him is that political operatives of both parties have a compulsive need to never, ever, ever, admit something bad about their side. Watching Donna Brazile illustrates this particular psychosis quite nicely. Even when confronted with the smoking gun e-mail and even after being fired from her job at CNN, she can’t admit that there is any shred of truth to what everyone knows to be true.
Hannity is good at confronting leftist political operatives with facts that they can’t admit, even though everyone knows that they are true. This makes the leftists look like idiots, and gives Hannity a superficial appearance of being quite clever. It would be nice if, just once, someone would respond to him by saying, “Sure, that’s true, but it’s only part of the story…” Hannity would be too gobsmacked to know how to respond.
We agree, I think, on the definition and pervasive presence of corruption on the part of those in government. The OP said the Trump-related turmoil is designed to bring down the hopelessly corrupt existing power structures of government, not the institutions themselves. I think this is true. I also think we are dealing with governmentwide organized corruption by people associated in groups, some of which are just for power or money gain, but others set to transform the nature of the country.
There are two differences I see when looking at the candidates through the lens of corruption as addressed in your response to me. First, Clinton’s corruption in incorporated in a machine already in place, Trump’s is his personal effort, to my eyes, not nearly as formidable. Second, the self-interested corrupt performance records are not equal since Clinton’s has been when she was in public service and Trump’s has been exclusively related to private actions. Clinton has proved she will not serve the public whereas Trump is unproven in the public sector.
Bob, I appreciate your thoughtful response. Where I differ with your reasoning is that it leads to the conclusion that anyone who has spent time in the public sector is automatically more dangerous than anyone who has not. A lot of people would agree with you on that, I suppose. The impulse to throw the scoundrels out is not novel, even among people who recognize that the new people will be scoundrels too. But in my view, a person’s history is not relevant to show how much harm they have done in the past, but rather is a guideline to predicting how much harm they will do in the future. Trump may have no history of running a corrupt political machine, but if he is elected as the head of the Executive branch, he will have that machine at his fingertips. The question remains, what will he do with it?
In my opinion nothing good; but I do think the machine already in place is much more likely to accede to Clinton-directed malfeasance than Trump-directed malfeasance.
I will say something that baffles me is the “we can’t trust X with the Presidency” argument being so prevalent. We shouldn’t trust anyone as an elected official, but demand accountability and transparency as much as possible.
We’d have been much better off if we’d held the GOP Congress and W’s feet to the fire more instead of circling the wagons post 2004.
I’ve said this over and over. Trump was not a cause of friction. Trump is what resulted from a cause: the split that’s been growing in the GOP since the mid 2000’s. The cause was the decreasing faith in the GOP as an institution and its standard ideology. A large chunk of the base began to question the sacred tenets of the three legged stool. I’d say that split began with Dubya’s attempted amnesty, and his nomination of Harriet Myers to SCOTUS. The base flat out rebelled. I’d argue that the Tea party was a further evolution of this rebellion… a revolt as much against the perception of GOP ossification as much as a revolt against Obama’s overreach.
If he’s anything else, Trump has become a catalyst for a further evolution in that split.
And some of those socialists who become anarchists grow tired of the inevitable irrelevance of perfect virtue conservatism and create the fusion of Modern American Conservatism and help bring down the Soviet Union.
I think the post warrants a more precise reading than some are giving it. Throwing the full weight of your argument on one paragraph already gives you the Stonewall Jackson advantage. The post never claimed those wanting to burn down the structures of power were hoping or even wishing for a Utopia to follow.
Most would probably accept a $25/hr job with benefits, a competitive economy which doesn’t privilege those who break the rules at every level, and leadership which doesn’t take every opportunity to signal its unearned elitism.
That’s not the conclusion my premise was seeking but rather anyone who has spent time in the public sector and demonstrated corruption like the Clintons and their machine should be disconnected from government at any level. The normal levels of corruption you cite can be handled as an expected level of nuisance corruption. Not the same thing at all.
The burn it down thing is just frustration talking. Very few want to destroy the country. What they see is a bunch of arrogant elites that are in it for themselves shoving laws that make little sense down their throats. They know it in their hearts it is corrupt, they smell it like carrion hidden in the shadows. Now they have tried to clean out the carrion but the jackals in the government keep stopping them. So they go get Trump because he stepped up for the job and he is a dick in every sense of the word. But you have to understand the working class, the best foremen, the ones that get the hard jobs done no matter what, are dicks with all the baggage that implies. They can live with the baggage if he gets the job done. If he can burn out the jackals and burn up the carrion that is corrupting their beloved country he can be as much a jerk as he wants and needs to be. If Trump does it they will love him for it, and Trump needs to be loved so he might just do it for that reason alone. Thus the deal has been made, by the man that has made dealing an art.
Here you have identified the defect of the conservative movement’s “anti-Washington” mantra. If you get elected to Congress and fight against tax increases, against anti-trade sugar quotas that help the sugar barons, against the farm subsidies that help agribusiness, against the assault weapons ban, in the eyes of some conservatives, you are still a creature of Washington and, therefore, “part of the mess in Washington.”
Enter Donald Trump, who supports trade protectionism to prop up the sugar barons, supports ethanol subsidies for agribusiness, supports socialized medicine and the assault weapons ban and donates to Harry Reid in 2010.
Since Trump has never been a governor of a state and has never been a member of Congress, some conservatives conclude that Trump will advance the cause of conservatism, while rejecting those who have been fighting for conservatism for years while Trump was donating to the other side.
So, now conservatives are stuck with two New York Leftists as the major party nominees. No matter who wins that contest, conservatism loses and Leftism wins another four year term.
This would describe an average politician or bureaucrat. At an enhanced level, this may describe Trump in a political role, we don’t know yet because we have not seen that. If you are suggesting this applies to Clintons I can readily understand where we differ. The Clintons’ corruption is from another world not populated by normal, average human beings.
And please don’t write with John McCain style condescension.
You need to go back and read what I actually wrote instead of jumping on Larry3435’s response as if he is presenting my conclusions accurately. The kinds of corruption I want rooted out are what Clintons have been doing, what Obama has done in the DoJ with Holder and Lynch and the IRS with Koskinen. I won’t call for anyone’s head who will stand up as Ted Cruz has. When ‘rule of law’ is dispensed with and in its place enforcement officials are politically selective, we have corruption in operation.
I quoted Larry3435 because this is something that has bothered me about the conservative movement: the idea that by getting elected to Congress and trying to reduce the scope of government, one is somehow complicit.
But someone like Trump, who for most of his life has not sought elective office, but has donated generously to people like Jimmy Carter, John Kerry, Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid, is considered “an outsider” and therefore a conservative hero.
Anyone can make a speech. Sometimes Trump can even speak in complete sentences if he has the aid of a teleprompter. But take the mask off of Trump and what you have is a Leftist New Yorker, who’s views are not much different from those of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Trump isn’t running against Hillary Clinton because he opposes her policies. He’s running to satisfy his ego.
The piece was derided as “faux-intellectual pearl clutching” by Mark Davis, a Salem radio host, whose work I used to enjoy. The very title of the piece – Crisis of the Conservative Intellectual – made Davis sneer, and it was apparent he hadn’t read a word of it.
A lively debate about pointy-headed conservatives is fine, but when you get the sense that some people are thinking “when I hear the word ‘intellectual,’ I reach for my gun” we have a problem.
(Apologies for Godwinizing.)
Is Goering covered under Godwin, or is that just Adolf?
It was an excellent piece, soundly constructed but it seemed like the author had created a wonderful thought castle but lacked the will to enter it.
Whenever conservatism drifts from an anchor in patriotism, it gets lost and becomes untethered from reality. Progressive are all about the acquisition of state power, so their life is simple. The ends justify the ends. It gives them a firm political platform to take action.
When conservatives abandon patriotism they have no basis to operate in the political world that makes any practical sense to most voters.
Please elaborate, @The Reticulator. You don’t wonder why, but now I do.