It will become clear by the end of this sentence that I am not bragging about this, but there was a time when I felt like I knew how to read a David Brooks column. This is absolutely not a valuable skill, and not really a skill at all—proclaiming "don't worry, I know my way around in here" after hopping into a dumpster does not make the decision to do so any more justifiable or less upsetting. One way or another, you are very much in the dumpster.
But in my early blogging days, when goofing on influential idiots was both something I had to do for work and something that felt decently righteous, I read a lot of David Brooks columns in search of something that infuriated me enough to write about it. This very old blog is more or less about Brooks describing Barack Obama as having "a kind of ESPN masculinity" in a 2012 column headlined The ESPN Man, but mostly it is about the feeling of having your time wasted by someone who is rich and smug and extravagantly checked out, and who understands his job to be rearranging whatever new events the world hands him into familiar patterns. "Self-preoccupied people hit the right notes, but often so hard that they sound tinny," Tim Marchman wrote about him back in 2016. "Self-preoccupation creates an ego that is at once overinflated, insatiable and overly sensitive."
Brooks made his name as an amateur cultural taxonomist, driving (or not!) around this great country, looking at whatever people were buying or wearing or doing or eating and then writing rich people like to have summer homes in Nantucket, but poor people like to drink energy drinks. He has done this for many years, producing work of no real import on a regular schedule, much of it faintly trailing the stink of The Deadline Sweats. This, maybe, is another reason why I've always been so dismissive of his work—he is more or less doing a lower-effort version of what I do, except my parents actually know where to find his work, and read it. They don't like it, but Brooks has been in the Times long enough and lazily enough that he is just part of the landscape at this point. Provided you don't actually read anything that he writes, there is almost something comforting about knowing that, even as the nation gnaws and hacks itself to bits in a state of blind tantrum, David Brooks is still off in a corner somewhere maundering about charter schools.
But even in that corner, protected by professorial drifts of Eye-Opening New Studies and books about integrity and the ballistic glass of his own self-regard, the churn of this awful, stupid broader moment is visible and worrying. Brooks has always written backwards from the surfaces he has seen, diagnosing the droll cause and effect of reality from the consumer habits and trendlets of the elite, and then endeavoring to explain why and how this means that things are more or less working as they should. His own opinions, such as they have left any kind of mark on his opinion columns, amount to an idle bias toward the class of people who are already in charge, and the sort of things that elite finds interesting—Ivy League universities in particular and a self-flattering ideal of meritocracy in general; dilettante-ish philanthropy substitutes like "education reform;" a full-spectrum confusion between that elite's own annihilating fatuousness and related ennui and civilizational decline; consumer goods.
The cabin from within which Brooks writes these things is pressurized, and any breach—the question of why these people have wound up owning and controlling so much, or what social and political forces are at work making sure that they stay just where they are—would send all those white papers and tasteful finishes rocketing out into a very cold expanse. It is easier and safer, and also something like a precondition of the whole enterprise, for Brooks to look out through that bulletproof glass and describe whatever is going on out there, but that doesn't mean that he is always going to like what he sees. "America’s democracy is under threat," Brooks wrote in his most recent Times column. "President Trump smashes alliances, upends norms and tramples the Constitution. So it’s normal to ask: What can one citizen do to help put America on a healthier course?"
As was often the case back when I read Brooks a decade and change ago, the analysis that follows is both infuriatingly poor and a little bit poignant. The whole Reasonable Conservative bit that Brooks has worked out depends upon him more or less acknowledging reality, and then running it through layer after layer of academic tweed that it comes out clear on the other end. It may be that your list of the things that the Trump administration is doing to push the nation towards cataclysm and shame wouldn't begin with smashed alliances and upended norms, but those things are actually happening. The question of what one person might do about any of that, beyond [redacted] or I guess [also redacted], is a valid one.
It goes without saying that it is also not one Brooks is qualified to answer effectively. The column that results has the channel-flipping fervor of a classic rush job, at times so much so that a reader might feel like Brooks is just a couple of paragraphs of you, frantically typing about charter schools (yes) and Ivy League schools (also yes) and the Unacknowledged Kernel Of Merit behind Trump "[going] after some institution, like D.E.I., the federal bureaucracy, or universities," worrying as all that of course is.
It's a bad column, in short, but what is poignant about it is that Brooks, unlike the less enlightened types busying themselves writing That's Actually Not A Genocide or Thank You For Helping Us WIN, Sir, is aware that something is going wrong. It is just that his deep incuriosity and prissy dismissal of material politics—that is, his whole being—prevent him from proposing or even imagining any kind of solution to it beyond everyone and everything just settling down somewhat, and sending their children to highly selective universities. Also he mentions that there needs to be more room for Trump supporters in "media, nonprofits, the academy, the arts world." Great shit, obviously, but the reason this blog exists is because of the solution that Brooks hits upon in his final paragraph:
Mostly it will require ground-up social reform. The rest of us can do something pretty simple: join more cross-class organizations and engage in more cross-class pastimes. Even something small makes a difference. This summer I’ve been wearing a New York Mets hat. As is their wont, the Mets have been trampling all over my heart for the past few months. But over that time, in places all around America, I’ve had scores of people from all walks of life come up to me to talk about the Mets, which often leads to conversations about other things. My Mets hat has reminded me of a nice reality: We still could be one nation, despite all the ways we’ve segregated it up.
It is probably true that a nation with as many problems as this one does not necessarily need the sort of commentary that David Brooks provides. That sort of thing is a luxury good, a trifle for your less-discerning elites to nibble on between meals, and this broader moment is starving and wild-eyed and desperate, it is always and everywhere absolutely devouring itself. But, again, Brooks somehow backs into something profound. He can more or less see things as they are, everyone further apart and more at risk and everything everyday being shoved further under the idiot bootheels of some of the worst people this country has ever produced, and even he can feel how helpless and awful that is, how fucking pathetic it is that things have fallen so far simply because the people in power—his meritocratic elites, with their values and traditions and institutions—don't know or value or believe in anything but their own status and comfort.
But because he cannot admit or acknowledge that, and because his understanding of the world and the people in it is entirely a matter of affect and aesthetics, Brooks is almost entirely stymied. Almost, but not entirely. There is still the Mets hat, and all the people—some of them clearly from uh other "walks of life"—who approach him to ask him what's wrong with the damn bullpen. This is where it begins: with Americans of every station, the important ones and also the less important ones, coming together to ask each other what is wrong with Mark Vientos, and then go to their respective homes to watch him pop out. Does this moment call for anything less?
