The Useless and Vile Mr. Brooks

David Brooks is Exhibit A for what is wrong with establishment liberals. Every vestige of principled, lively intellectual productivity has been replaced by a herd-like subservience to class sensibilities. Every liberal achievement of value, from civil rights to environmental awareness, has mutated into entities that are perverse, anti-human, Luddite and cultlike. Equal rights for women, for example, somehow morphed into mandatory acceptance of a broad range of sexual dysfunctions. But the professional liberal commentariat cannot bring itself to fight the destruction of their ideological and political legacy.

They cannot decry the malignant clown show that urban Democratic rule has become because those mayors are black and have the party imprimatur. The class did not use the actual data and science of COVID because they liked the sciency vibe of masks and lockdowns, and especially liked the idea of the rubes taking orders from the credentialed. Class sensibility über alles! The claim of adherence to The Science was class narcissism run rampant.

MAGA is the ultimate villain for the class in part because of Trumpian rhetorical stylistics, but mostly because MAGA is about saying that which the ruling class cannot say but knows to be true. DEI and wokeness are cultural and institutional disasters. The overt corruption in massive federal spending, the cynical attempt to reconfigure electoral politics with a hideously costly wave of illegals, the suicidal toleration of violence, street crime and insane policies on “unhoused” persons, and boys claiming trophies in girls’ sports are all immune from intelligent criticism by the elite class even as they privately disagree.

A truly malignant instance of how far Brooks has declined as a pundit and an honest broker of ideas can be found in this PBS interview last Friday. It will enrage you:

PBS News Hour 5/30/2025 7:38 PM ET AMNA NAWAZ: David, how do you look at it? What's his legacy, if we know that yet? DAVID BROOKS: Yeah, I'm not sure it was wreckage. There was wreckage if you're at NIH. There are wreckage at certain agencies, but the guy only saved $65 billion out of a multitrillion-dollar budget. So, as a budget matter, you would not say he had a big effect, but he did manage to destroy NIH and USAID. And the USAID one is the one I haven't gotten over. And so there's folks at Boston University who count, how many people have died because of what DOGE did at USAID? And USAID was a very ill-managed organization. That's true. But according to the Boston University folks, so far, 55,000 adults have died of AIDS in the four months since Trump was elected, 6,000 children are dead because of what DOGE did. That's just PEPFAR, the HIV. You add them all up, that's 300,000 dead, and we're four months in. Now, you add, accumulate that over four years, the number of dead grows very high. There are mass murderers in the world, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Stalin. We don't have anybody on the list from America. And I don't think it's the same as committing the kind of genocide they did. But by taking away that agency and being at least semi-responsible for the deaths of probably, by the end of this, hundreds of thousands of millions of people, that's Elon Musk's legacy.

Aside from the dubious statistics from groups likely affected by Trumpian cuts (Trump preserved full funding for all AIDS meds in the Big Beautiful Bill), the image of thousands suddenly dropping dead instantly because of cuts—many of which had not yet taken effect—is almost as sciencey as elite COVID policy preferences.

Comparisons to Pol Pot, Stalin and Mao are beyond over the top. That was pathetic and sick.

A good question for the indignant Mr. Brooks might be how much food and medicine could have been purchased with all the USAID money (perhaps more than half) that never made it past the beltway as the frenzy of complex, interlaced non-profits shared in on the grift? The agency was not merely “badly managed” but verged on being a criminal conspiracy. How many AIDS victims could have received drugs with the money spent on LGBTQ coloring books and the vast array of other woke indoctrination projects?

But it is typical of his class that Mr. Brooks is entirely incapable of acknowledging how extraordinarily out of control federal spending is or that a federal agency could depart so far from its mission as to be not worth saving. Nor can he condemn the grifter class (probably a significant share of the remaining Washington Post and New York Times subscribers). Much like Senator Schumer’s condemnation of the “meat ax” approach, he does not offer a constructive alternative to the work of DOGE while pretending to care about efficiency and accountability.

Brooks' class sensibilities prevent serious discussion as to whether there is an inherent threat from Islamic doctrines and identity, the woke destruction of our universities, the extent to which “victim” doctrines are wrecking cities, insane energy policies, and the not-so-long-term fiscal and economic threat from excessive government spending. The fact that that these and so many other important issues are denied vigorous treatment in the elite op-ed world in general, but Brooks does have time to compare Elon Musk to Stalin, is a strong indication that he is increasingly useless as a participant (much less a leader) of broad conversations about important things that matter. And if, as appears to be the case with the NYT, that originality and depth are not required, an AI can easily echo class sensibilities in 750-word chunks. Cheaper and less annoying than observing decline and decay.