I've seen columnists obsessed; I've seen them rage or swoon over the objects of their obsessions. But nothing compares with New York Times columnist David Brooks' love-hate fixation on Washington's Ivy Leaguers.

This morning, he wrings his hands over the "system of promotion" that produces these wunderkinder. But recently he was showering the same people and system with breathless admiration. One day, he snarks; another day, he coos -- at the same people, from the same institutions!

I used to wonder if it all depended on whether or not they were returning his calls. But this compulsive see-sawing reflects a deeper personal envy and insecurity that keeps him -- and those who find his column thought-provoking -- from facing the real problem. It's not elitism (a perennial in human nature) but the encroachment of perverse new configurations of capitalist finance and consumption upon American leadership training.

Critics like Brooks can't analyze the Ivy League's capitulation to riptides of global capital marketing, consumer marketing, predatory marketing, and self-marketing -- at least they can't if he and others are swinging manically from Ivy envy to Ivy ingratiation and back. And forth. And back. Watch Brooks swing, and rue the loss to his readers of a better understanding:

This morning, he recycles a familiar, half-valid charge: Yale and Harvard, once crucibles for the certification of a WASPy, clubby, disciplined, and sometimes admirable elite, have become nervous diversitocracies that cultivate too much elitist talent and narrow technical knowledge but too little civic character, trust and contextual awareness.

Not only have we "opened up opportunities to women, African-Americans, Jews, Italians, Poles, Hispanics, and members of many other groups...[note the protective coloration in Brooks' list]; we've changed the criteria for success. It is less necessary to be clubbable. It is more important to be smart and hard-working," Brooks writes.

"Yet here's the funny thing. As we've made our institutions more meritocratic, their public standing has plummeted. We've increased the diversity and talent level of people at the top of society, yet trust in elites has never been lower."

It's not funny, and Brooks hasn't just noticed it now. This is the argument made years ago in the Wall Street Journal by one of his mentors, Charles Hill, a former executive assistant to Reagan Secretary of State George Shultz: Hill lamented that the foreign service had lost its competence by valuing color and narrow expertise over the seasoned bonding of a leadership class.

Hmm, didn't that class give us the Iran of the Shah and the Cuba we have today, not to mention the war in Vietnam? Yet Brooks assures us this morning that, once upon a time, the financial world, government, and journalism were run more effectively by these people, because they valued loyalty and trust more than narrow measures of "merit."

If only more of them had! Brooks insists that, in finance, "well-connected blue bloods" kept things stable, even honorable. In journalism, hard-drinking working stiffs gave us honest, down-to-earth reporting. In government, even party hacks brought more stability than do today's elite graduates of public policy schools.

Well, that's not quite how I'd assess the brokers, reporters, and politicians who gave us the War to end all Wars, the Great Depression, and the 1950s' military-industrial complex, consumer-marketing juggernaut and McCarthyism, not to mention the Bay of Pigs and that coup in Iran.

Brooks isn't wholly wrong to recycle my own argument that the Ivies have lost the principles and rites of passage of civic-republican leadership training and are becoming mere career factories and cultural gallerias for an anomic global ruling class that's accountable to no polity or moral code. The American republic sometimes did get better leadership from the older networks of civic trust, including even the "old" Yale I describe here, than it gets now.

Yet here's the funny thing: Brooks isn't being honest about what has weakened those networks, because he's obsessed with symptoms, not causes. Only a year and a half ago, he was lavishly praising the very same newer, narrower meritocrats whose rise he's now bemoaning. The "love" side of his Ivy fixation on them was surging in a column celebrating an influx of Clinton Ivy Leaguers into the new administration.

"[M]uch as I want to resent these over-educated Achievatrons," he wrote then, "I find myself tremendously impressed....." They're "twice as smart as the poor reporters who have to cover them, three times if you include the columnists." (By 'poor reporters,' does Brooks mean the hard-drinking, honest working stiffs he praised for good journalism, or columnists from the University of Chicago, like himself?)

In 2008, he assured us, the Ivy League meritocrats coming to Washington are "open-minded individuals who are persuadable by evidence..... They are.... hardheaded and pragmatic... They're thinking holistically -- there's a nice balance of policy wonks, governors and legislators." Mirabile dictu, they are "the best of the Washington insiders. Obama seems to have dispensed with the romantic and failed notion that you need inexperienced 'fresh faces' to change things." This time, "Obama is not bringing along an insular coterie of lifelong aides who depend upon him for their well-being."

Tell me if you can reconcile this with Brooks' fine-spun disdain for these same people, not only in this morning's column but, more tellingly, in a gloating, 2001 Wall Street Journal essay, "Bush In, Ivy Out". There, Brooks ridiculed the Ivy Leaguers who were being replaced by Americans "from inland state schools" under the apostate Yalies, Bush and Cheney: "The skills [George Bush] acquired in the Texas oil business [??!!] are suited for a world in which success and failure are measured by tangible accomplishments, like oil production levels and after-tax profits," Brooks wrote.

What a refreshing change that was going to be from elitist Ivy presumptions "suited to a world in which the definition of success is totally unrelated to tangible accomplishment of any kind." Peddling what he would later call "a romantic and failed notion," Brooks announced that Bush was cleansing Washington of the erudite Ivy League bluffing and arrogant insouciance that arouse "both awe and silent hatred" in regular Americans. He noted happily that Condoleezza Rice had gone to the University of Denver, Colin Powell to the City College of New York, Paul O'Neill to Fresno State, and Dick Cheney to the University of Wyoming -- after dropping out of Yale -- and that "Karl Rove, the brains behind the whole operation, has no college degree at all." Yes, the republic would be in better hands from January, 2001 on.

Somehow, though, even then, Brooks remained as mesmerized as he was galled by the Ivy League. In 2003, he devoted his very first Times column, "Bred for Power," to an elegy for the strong, civic-republican leadership training of the old schools attended by Howard Dean and John Kerry as well as by both George Bushes. (All of these were undergraduates at Yale -- as were L. Paul Bremer III, John Negroponte, and I. Scooter Libby, who was taught there by Paul Wolfowitz.)

By 2005, Brooks was getting snarky again. The disclosure of the identity of the Watergate source for Bob Woodward, a Yale graduate, prompted a nasty Brooks column about the compulsive networking of young Ivy grads like Woodward, who'd found his way to his Deep Throat source through just such ingratiation as a young reporter.

But then came Obama's ascent and the return of the liberal, "new school" Ivy meritocrats Bush had swept away. Suddenly they weren't callow and arrogant, but seasoned and broad-minded. Had they all experienced civic-republican epiphanies? Not particularly, although Larry Summers got something of a political makeover. Had Brooks himself changed? Not really. But the country had repudiated the conservative Republican partisanship he'd championed sinuously for all of his adult life until its fiscal recklessness and corruption, its Katrina paralysis, its Iraq War, and its enabling of the financial meltdown forced him to distance himself from most of what he'd been promoting.

What Brooks had been promoting was not the nuanced, Burkean conservatism he sometimes invokes but the riptides of corporate consumer marketing, predatory marketing, and self-marketing that were battering the very networks of trust and civic commitment he now wants us to appreciate -- the civic-republican leadership training grounds of the old Ivy League, the working-class solidarities of labor unions and parish sodalities.

He leaves us to assume what he has often claimed: that diversity-mad liberal relativists have undermined these institutions. But visit any Ivy League Economics 101 course or class in microeconomics, statistics, computer science, or most social sciences. The homunculae economicae and number-crunching "methodologues" at the podium aren't liberals or leftists, as Brooks used to charge, except in the "color equals culture" sense that big corporations embrace for management and marketing purposes.

"Diversity" itself is an industry, and universities themselves are run like corporations whose students and faculty members are "customers," as one unfortunate Yale memo actually put it. But, then, increasingly, students are customers: Thousands of visits per capita to vapid Internet sites and shopping malls before matriculation have annealed them against whatever the campus Marxists or post-modernists might hope to impart.

Just watch the Yale admissions video produced recently by two undergraduates, a paean to a garden of privilege with no palpable sense of its history and mission, and you'll understand the resentment Brooks plays to in his column. What he doesn't challenge is the pervasive ideology of free-marketing, self-marketing, predatory marketing at Yale and Harvard that normalizes orientations that are narrow and arbitrary, indeed

Conservative critics become vocal about this only when campus leftists are the pitchmen, like the Harvard Shakespearean scholar Marjorie Garber, who, in Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety and Sex and Real Estate, swings like a semioticist with marketing that's reshuffling our libidinal and racial decks. Conservatives also have fun howling about hypocrisy when other leftists administer revival meetings for penitent racists and sexists who want to feel better about making lots of money by backing reforms that divide blacks from blacks as well as blacks from whites, and whites from whites and women from women as well as women from men and men from men. That's progress, perhaps; but "progressive" it's not.

The left-liberal follies on campus that Brooks usually cites to explain the emphasis on color and credentials over trust and contextual awareness are mostly reactions to deeper currents that he never names. He calls occasionally for more conservative scholarship to rein in facile, meritocratic elitism, which he blames on the left: America warehouses its "radical lunatics ... in [academic] departments that operate as nunneries for the perpetually alienated." But lavishly funded nunneries for conservative lunatics are sprouting at Yale, Duke, George Mason, Claremont McKenna, Chicago, and elsewhere, and a few of them now hire conservative activists and national-security functionaries as teachers who cast Thucydides as a prophet of the war on terror.

That won't rein in the campus capitalist circus. It won't nurture the down-to-earth leadership Brooks wishes we had -- at least he wishes for it in today's column. It's easy, and a bit cheap, to lampoon and lament the soulless meritocracy that has drained old Ivy wellsprings of civic trust. It's harder to be honest about the causes, when that would require taking a look in the mirror.

Brooks will keep on dancing around that mirror, holding it up to others to make them feel guilty. He'll dispense barbed apercus while careening from Ivy envy to Ivy ingratiation and plucking those same chords in his fans. "[O]ur system of promotion has grown some pretty serious problems," he'll fret. But he won't name those problems' causes; he'll point fingers at their carriers, at least on the days he's resenting the carriers rather than courting them.