A Pundit's Day of Reckoning -- and Ours
Poor David Brooks. Really. In 2004 Nicholas Confessore detailed the New York Times columnist's maddening habit of oscillating between serious commentary and Republican hackery: In one column, Brooks would stroke his chin like a sober savant, purveying credible analysis; in the next, he'd gyrate shamelessly for ideologues and Bush operatives such as Scooter Libby and Karl Rove.
He pirouettes like this constantly to maintain some intellectual self-respect, on the one hand, and to hold onto his market niche as a conservative Republican apologist, on the other. He has tried to square this circle with forced geniality throughout Republicans' Iraq War lying, torture and warrantless surveillance, borrow-and-borrow, spend-and-spend fiscal policy, bottomless corruption, and, lately, national socialism. But John McCain is stopping Brooks' game.
Ever since it has become clear that McCain is unstable and incompetent as commander-in-chief of his own campaign, not least by choosing his horror show of a running mate, Brooks has been squirming and stumbling furiously toward a reckoning that should be of some interest to every Times reader and would-be public intellectual.
This time, the choice facing Brooks is too stark and time-bound for his usual gyrations. He can maintain his intellectual self-respect only by breaking openly with McCain/Palin in the next couple of weeks.
I wrote here months ago that I could almost imagine him jumping to Obama, as some conservative Republicans have done because they've concluded that more Bush-style governance will destroy both Republicans and the republic. Surely David Brooks, who has made a career of being liberals' favorite conservative, can do likewise.
Then again, breaking so starkly with Republicans would cost Brooks his comfortable raison d'etre and niche opposite Mark Shields on PBS and E.J. Dionne on NPR. I don't think that he has enough integrity to renounce decisively what McCain and, more generally, conservative republicans have become. I think he's gotten himself stuck in that fold.
Brooks can try to dig up new reasons to support McCain/Palin, or he can join neoconservative Field Marshall William Kristol -- who is drawing on his tremendous accomplishments with Dan Quayle and Alan Keyes -- in calling for a thorough McCain-campaign makeover. But trying to rescue McCain/Palin would cost Brooks the respect even of some neoconservatives and conservatives -- from Ed Koch to George Will and even Charles Krauthammer -- who've actually or virtually endorsed Obama for the sake of the republic.
More likely, Brooks will try to wheedle his way out of making any choice at all. He could resort to his default position as a disinterested observer, emitting ever-loftier platitudes about Obama's sagacity and Palin's pugnacity that purport to help us poor partisans see beyond our narrow horizons while leaving him safely up on the hill, watching the battle in the valley below.
That's not where he was in 2004, a total Bush partisan from beginning to end. And this year's election, especially, demands a fateful a choice of every citizen and scribbler. The problem facing Brooks is that everything in his record pushes him to guide his readers as gently and cleverly as he can into the McCain camp, even though that camp now worries and even scares him.
So what has Brooks actually done? Familiar though his see-sawing from Oakeshott to buckshot and back has become since Confessore's article described it, I've had to rub my eyes this past month.
Brooks has gyrated from doubting Sarah Palin's qualifications ("Why Experience Matters, Sept. 16) to virtually coronating her after her debate performance ("The Palin Rebound," Oct. 3); to calling her "a cancer on the Republican Party" (in an interview before an Atlantic Monthly audience on Oct. 10); to explaining why Palin, by playing the class-warfare card so falsely and relentlessly. is accelerating the GOP's self-destruction ("The Class War Before Palin," Oct. 10).
No one who has said this can still endorse McCain/Palin without making himself an object of bemusement, pity, resentment, and scorn, to say nothing of losing his own self-respect as a thinker.
Nor, however, can Brooks try to be professorial and above it all, or to spend the coming days dispensing comic sociology and one-liners, without making himself equally an object of bemusement, pity, resentment, and scorn, to say nothing of losing his own self-respect as a holder of strong opinions and convictions.
Nor can he endorse Obama and expect to be taken as anything but a craven opportunist unless he also renounces most of the people and positions he has shielded or excused for five years.
To appreciate his predicament, consider this sample -- from an old American Prospect column -- of the shamelessness we can expect.
On March 16, 2006, when New York Times reporter Michael Gordon and retired Lt. General Bernard Trainor published their devastating Iraq War expose Cobra II, Brooks announced that early critics of the war had been right to doubt the rosy scenarios being fed them by butt-covering Bush Administration insiders:
"Everybody denigrates pundits and armchair generals," he wrote in 2006, "but [when the war had just begun, in 2003] the smartest of them recognized that something unexpected was happening: The US was not in the midst of a conventional war but was in the first days of a guerrilla war."
Brooks lets you assume that he was among those smartest of early war critics. But not only was he actually peddling Bush insiders' rosy scenarios back then; he was going out of his way to lambaste the very people he would later call the smartest of the critics.
"C'mon, people, let's get a grip," he'd written on April 20, 2004. "This week, Chicken Littles like Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd were ranting that Iraq is another Vietnam. Pundits and sages were spinning a whole series of mutually exclusive disaster scenarios: Civil war! A nationwide rebellion! Maybe we should calm down a bit. I've spent the last few days talking with people who've spent much of their careers studying and working in this region...."
In other words, he was giving us the wisdom of butt-covering insiders.
Brooks might claim that when he wrote this "Let's get a grip" column, conditions had come to seem more promising than they had a few months earlier, when the early critics foresaw the debacle that is still upon us. But if conditions had really improved by 2004 and if Brooks hadn't been so caught up in playing the insider, he wouldn't have had any need to assail "Chicken Littles" and "disaster scenarios." He wouldn't have had to write, "Let's get a grip."
The question his columns avoided then, the question they have avoided so far this month, is whether Brooks can get a grip on himself now that conditions in the McCain campaign have discredited his prognostications and political positions as surely as conditions in Iraq have doomed his wisdom of a few years ago.
My expectation is that Brooks is condemned by his own poor judgment and character to keep on sliding around in search of an exit. Only, this time, the sliding will be harder to disguise, and it will be more widely disdained.
Let's hope that Brooks in his slide-around-looking-for-an-exit chooses the one that takes him down the chute to the laundry basket in the basement marked, Has-Beens.
October 13, 2008 2:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's typical of the breed, like th poet says: hr babbles.
And the only intellectual self-respect Brooks has is the completely imaginery quantity you contend he has to lose. I don't think he's even got that.
October 13, 2008 7:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
Brooks' 850-word style is felicitous, and he's a perceptive and witty social commentator. But unrealistically, The Times requires more, a certain gravitas in the writing of its columnists -- thus, on to politics and foreign policy.
Why should any of us -- excepting a few of his friends and his envious rivals -- care a hoot about what Brooks thinks or how his career is going?
October 13, 2008 9:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
Fabulous blog Jim...I and many others go to WaPo and other sites of the Very Serious People of the media like Brooks, Broder, Kraulthammer, Hiatt and others mainly to openly mock them in the comments sections...which are usually more lively, interesting and informative then the original (or not so original) columns and can run for hundreds of pages.
The people who were right about this disastrous war and administration from the beginning are marginalized, and the ones who have been consistently wrong are bloviating on our screens all the Time...
October 13, 2008 9:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
It isn't specifically Brooks you should care about -- it's Brooks as a symbol for intellectual honesty. And in many ways, this election is a referendum on the dishonesty of of far right rhetoric. So much of it has been proven wrong, wrong, wrong. But there has been, for the last four years, a cottage industry of right thinkers patting each other on the back as they make excuses for a failed administration by blaming everything else. To wit, the new excuse for the mortgage crisis: Minorities.
But with the verdict on the Bush years being nothing short of failure by almost all metrics -- save for the lack of another major terrorist attack on American soil -- to prop up the kind of conservatism that has poisoned the GOP is nothing short of intellectual dishonesty. And that's why Brooks in this case matters. He would be a big-time water carrier finally emptying his bucket because his brain (and gut) won out over dogma. He may infuriate the dead-enders, but at least he would revitalize this own voice and strike a blow for rebuilding the GOP.
October 13, 2008 9:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
In response to the terminally catty Ellen, the reason to care a hoot about David Brooks is that his New York Times column, which appears twice a week, is syndicated in scores of other newspapers, and that he appears every Friday evening on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer (and was ubiquitous in PBS convention and debate commentaries), and that he is heard every Friday on NPR's "All Things Considered," and that he is therefore read or heard by millions of people.
Obviously a lot of editors and producers consider Brooks a smart, genial conservative appropriate for their audiences. Obviously, therefore others besides his friends and envious rivals should care. Obviously it is useful not only to counter Brooks' arguments but to expose their provenance and to scrutinize his character as a tribune of purportedly intelligent conservative Republican thinking.
And obviously only the terminal kind of cattiness that will present itself again in response to this reply would fail to see the reality and to respond to the Brooks problem critically and constructively.
October 13, 2008 9:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ellen's been pretty helpful to me lately, so I'll step up for her on this one.
With respect: yes, Brooks has a name, a career and a little bit of charm if a gal doesn't set her standards too high. And like rogue elephants or rebellious teenagers, guys like Brooks must be appropriately dealt with/communicated with/explained/upbraided and occasionally praised, because they can be considered annoying and in some cases dangerous if not handled consistently and with a certain habit of respect.
But for crying out loud, once a guy has demonstrated time and again that he'll suck up and spew the dregs of Republican nuttiness over and over rather than offer the sweet libation of commonsense, do we really have to continue to "care" about him? I mean, sure, I'll patiently counter his views to anybody who seems swayed by his arguments--but among ourselves, during our valuable cafe time, do we really have to pretend that what he says matters to us in the long run? How likely, at this point, is it that he's gonna be the only guy to come up with the transformational concept that turns us all into just his type of conservative? It's not bloody likely to happen to me.
I'm a reasonably patient person. I am still convinced that one day, Keanu Reeves will make another movie as good as the Matrix. But Brooks is off my list of guys I read, listen to or talk about as anything other than a disagreeable intellectual chore.
For those who like that sort of thing, that's the sort of thing they like--but those who really disagree with him shouldn't be forced to go to the mat on his every phrase just because he's famous.
October 13, 2008 11:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
. . . the terminal kind of cattiness that will present itself again in response to this reply . . . .
I promise. I'll never say "envious rivals" again -- well, almost never.
October 14, 2008 1:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
So, basically what you're saying is that the McCain Conundrum is spotlighting Brooks as the careerist hack of middling intelligence he's always been. Great! Though if you read the NYT's letters column, I'm not sure that's been such a deep dark secret up to now...
October 14, 2008 11:05 AM | Reply | Permalink
As a liberal military officer who has often put Mr. Brooks’s words to good use before conservative (military) audiences, I find it mildly appalling that those of us who read TPM (or write for it) would want to engage in a conversation to tarnish David Brooks on his ambivalent positions this election season. I admit Mr. Brooks fulfills my need for a “favorite conservative”, but I do so willingly because I believe he’s 1) genuinely—if somewhat ambivalently—conservative, 2) because he’s an intellectual, and 3) because he’s a natural teacher who has the ability to illuminate even the unenlightened minds of our fellow citizens of certain rightward leanings. Yes, he writes the occasional absurd column, but I’m more than willing to chalk up these political panderings to rhetorical flourish. Given the unfortunate dogmas of the Republicans in 2008, I think Brooks has no choice but to pander, at least occasionally, to this unenlightened right. If he were to move unambiguously toward Obama, wouldn’t Brooks lose his credibility as one of our most prominent conservatives? Wouldn’t he give up his ability to influence and persuade our doctrinaire conservative citizens in the direction of thoughtful positions closer to our own? When I served in Iraq for sixteen months, I found Mr. Brooks’s inconsistencies strangely useful in shifting the unthinking positions of a few of my right-wing superiors to positions I think most TPM readers would more appealing. I see little advantage but political one-upmanship in pressuring Brooks to embrace Obama. Fortunately, I don’t think Mr. Sleeper’s arguments would sway Brooks. If he were moved, he’d lose much of his utility, at least for me.
October 13, 2008 10:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
NYT OpEd columnists can't officially endorse anyone. It is the policy of the page.
October 13, 2008 10:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
Fascinating post...
I love the retrospection:
Regarding your prediction:
Time will tell. I hope you are wrong. Brooks may be a creative enough thinker to escape the grip of his ideology and do what's obviously right.
Lord knows we can use every voice we can get in the next two weeks. Absolutely nothing is given as we bear down on November. Nothing. Everything must be seized. Brooks would help immensely as your comment at 9:43 fully documents.
October 13, 2008 11:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
As the McCain/Palin campaign sinks to racist ploys, blatant dishonesty, and undemocratic tactics (such as Palin avoiding press conferences), it is astonishing to witness the intellectual contortions and distortions of the Republican apologists like Brooks.
If the Republicans manage to win the White House this time, they will be establishing a new form of republic which should appropriately be called a 'Hypocracy'.
October 13, 2008 11:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
David Brooks will be fine. The New York Times hired even Bill Kristol despite his hackery.
If the neocons were professionals, they would be disciplined for malpractice. In politics, you can afford to be wrong as long as you are powerful.
October 13, 2008 11:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Great post, Jim. I've always thought Brooks was a world-class sophist but the recent Linda Blair-worthy about face he did with Palin was really beyond bizarre. I'm glad you noticed and wrote about it. How can he expect people to take him seriously when he sings her praises in his bemused pseudo professorial style and then days / hours later calls her a cancer? Your post captures the pretzel logic that must be tieing him in knots.
October 13, 2008 11:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
I would not be too harsh on Ellen, she exemplifies--to some extent--a refreshingly contrarian mind.
I agree with the empirical evidence you present against Brooks as a genuine thinker with one caveat: he simply might not be a man of any deep convictions.
Not having any deep conviction can leave you somewhat aimless as to what to do with your life.
Being a NYT columnist is not the worst of lots.
I'm making the assumption that Brooks does not suffer from excessive guile but from a genuine lack of political convictions.
So here he is a contemporaneous soul navigating life in the earliest part of the 21 century as a public figure of some notoriety. And his lack of consistency--nay his lack of commensurability itself--is disturbing for those of us who read him ( I actually don't read him all that much). Apparently you Jim read him quite a lot despite the fact that he is offensive to you. You have made a study of the man.
As I said, I do not dispute any of your empirical observations but I am saying that perhaps it is not so much crass (and thus self-destructive) opportunism that drives the man, but a real lack of enduring conviction. If so, ,Ellen has (sort of) a point. His writing is felicitous to some extent and perhaps we should not expect any sort of consistency from him. We can only surmise if he finds his life satisfying or rather empty.
His effect on his readership is another matter.
I myself am in a discipline that requires extreme and constant self criticism (as Oakeshott points out) and where convictions are always tenuous. But I do not find my life empty but rather exciting. There is always a new way to look at the world!
I doubt that Brook's various takes on the political landscape are due to excessive self examination, so things are probably different for him.
October 13, 2008 11:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
Good column Jim. Thanks.
I usually love Ellen but I find smarmy kinda sexy. I can't agree with her here though. Brooks matters for all the reasons you replied. He merits careful the scrutiny you provided. That said, I still love Ellen.
As for Brooks, I think he writes something sensible every fourth or fifth column. The rest is right-wing noise. The Palin comeback piece is one glaring example, but my favorite is still the pathetic piece he wrote after ABC's last Obama-Clinton debate admonishing we liberals not to whine about the blatantly biased performance of Gibson and Stephanopolous.
I don't know why Brooks continues to play the water boy for the right wing, but I'm glad to see that, at the moment, the water is getting a little too heavy.
October 14, 2008 12:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
Good piece. But, could we please quit misquoting Brooks on the cancer thing?
He didn't say that Palin "is" a cancer on the Republican Party. He said that she "represents" a cancer on the Republican Party. The cancer, in his opinion, is anti-intellectualism. It's not as snappy or as much fun, but there's something to be said for care and accuracy in this time of so much distortion and misuse of others' words.
October 14, 2008 12:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
The problem with David Brooks is not that he is inconsistent, it is that he is so consistently wrong. He is wrong in his analysis, wrong in his prescriptions, and most often wrong in his predictions. I don't mean wrong as in ideologically impure, I mean wrong as in empirically incorrect. We ask public intellectuals not only to frame current events, but to suggest what will happen as the result of some course of action. It is astonishing to me how often they are wrong, and how there is no accountability whatsoever. If we held them to the same standard that we hold anyone else with a job that involves recommendations based on prediction, I can think of few who wouldn't have been fired a thousand times over. But then we would have almost no blogs, the New York Times would have no editorial page and Bill Kristol would be homeless. Would that be so bad?
October 14, 2008 2:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
The Republican Party, home of Reconstruction, Trust Busting, Progressivism and small government, carries a curse dating from 1928 when it nominated a quasi-Progressive who once elected, turned into a proto-New Dealer (FDR ran against Hoover's New Deal policies in 1932).
The sin was magnified when Reagan went to Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1980. And then, magnified once more when George W. Bush went to Bob Jones University in 2000.
I sympathize with David Brooks; the sins of the fathers have rendered him incoherent, a grievous failing for any pundit.
October 14, 2008 2:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm throwing in the Brooks as hooker metaphor, pimping his wares on the TV and radio and in the paper. He'll say and do anything to keep the business coming. Convictions? Sure, which ones do you want to hear today? Wit? You betcha - bobos! War? Yes, war and more war! Peace? Sure, why not? Smart? Well, not especially.
October 14, 2008 2:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
Sorry for being trivial, but I don't believe there is any such word as "coronating". People are CROWNED, not coronated.
The substance of your piece was wonderful and true, though.
October 14, 2008 2:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
When I first encountered it in a crossword puzzle, I too did not believe that "coronate" was a word.
An online dictionary is a wonderful thing.
October 14, 2008 5:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
Hi. Thanks for pointing out that source. I haven't investigated it yet, but do you think we should accept dictionary.com as a valid source or is it like wikipedia, where any and all provide its content? Maybe in the world of crossword puzzles "coronate" is a word, but I just can't believe this is a real-world word. This is the second time I've seen "coronate" used in print, though. Maybe it's like "props", which just arose from the streets and now so-called educated people use it to show they're hip.
October 14, 2008 2:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Wow, what a lot of interesting comments here, and I thank everyone for weighing in -- especially Ellen and those who came to her defense. It became an honest discussion.
Look, Brooks matters to a lot of people -- not just the curdled neo-cons to whom he sometimes appeals but also, as a comment above shows, to some who see him as a refreshing alternative to partisan cant. But Brooks is destructive whenever he uses his and our legitimate intellectual doubts to sow needless confusion among people who've been trying to challenge the disastrous governing philosophy and coalition which, on the whole, he has supported.
Well, I say a bit more about this in a follow-up post this morning, after reading his column of today, in which he chooses the "lofty savant" role. His record suggests that between now and the election he'll get back in the gutter once or twice, especially if anything comes along that seems to boost McCain's chances. Let's keep watching.
October 14, 2008 7:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
more simple than that, brooks (and others like him) matters because the center will continue to be defined (inaccurately) as the space between whichever two talking head punditsticks the media puts against one another.
i would hope that if brooks ever had a conviction that approached being sensible - and had the courage of that conviction - and came out for obama over the trainwreck on fire that mccain has barrelling down the tracks (not holding my breath), that npr and pbs wouldn't feel they needed to move the supposed center further to the right and replace brooks with someone even less sensible. but in today's phony 'journalism' of false equivalence, i would not be surprised if they did.
though i wouldn't underestimate brooks' ability to shun mccain by tacitly endorsing obama while still carrying plenty of water from the poisoned well of the republican party.
October 14, 2008 9:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for putting into words what I've been feeling and thinking about Brooks for a while. What a predicament! Poor David, to have tethered himself the Titanic!
Sarah's Subtle Slam against Obama...and the rest of us.
October 14, 2008 9:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
Excellent points. But one thing left out of this analysis is that the "gyrations" can even appear within a single argument. For example, has anyone else noticed the way Brooks drops the metaphor of Palin as a "cancer" on the Rep. party and then quickly backpeddles, not only refusing to develop the idea but even immediately covering it up by pretending to complement Palin's instincts?
October 14, 2008 12:44 PM | Reply | Permalink