This is the seventh and final entry in a series of recycled posts about David Brooks (mostly) and Bret Stephens (once), house “conservatives” at The New York Times. The original posts were published from 2009 through 2019. But I have detected no change in the dynamic duo’s faux conservatism since I stopped wasting pixels on them.
Brooks was unhinged by the election of Donald Trump. He just couldn’t understand it, even though he’s supposedly a conservative. But being a conservative on the payroll of The New York Times means being more polite to left-wingers than Paul Krugman is to conservatives and libertarians.
So here he was, in full flight:
If your social circles are like mine, you spent Tuesday night swapping miserable texts. Not all, but many of my friends and family members were outraged, stunned, disgusted and devastated….
I was on PBS trying to make sense of what was happening while trying to text various people off the ledge….
Populism of the Trump/Le Pen/Brexit variety has always been a warning sign, a warning sign that there is some deeper dysfunction in our economic, social and cultural systems….
Trump’s bigotry, dishonesty and promise-breaking will have to be denounced. We can’t go morally numb. But he needs to be replaced with a program that addresses the problems that fueled his ascent.
After all, the guy will probably resign or be impeached within a year. The future is closer than you think. [“The View from Trump Tower”, The New York Times, November 11, 2016]
Social circles? I ain’t got no frigging social circles. I’ve got family and friends. Only The Crust of Manhattan, Vail, and San Francisco have social circles. Where I grew up a social circle was several boys huddled around a game of marbles.
Which just goes to show you what a clueless twit David Brooks is.
Later —
It’s hard to resist a pot-shot at a sitting duck, which is what Brooks resembled in his encomium to the “liberal world order” (which is the subtext of this post and this one). Specifically, Brooks wrote tearfully that
Americans take a dark view of human nature and withdraw from the world. Wolves like Putin and Xi fill the void and make bad things happen, confirming the dark view and causing even more withdrawal.
Americans (conservatives, at least) rightly take a dark view of human nature, but what does that have to do with “withdrawing from the world”? What serious (conservative) Americans want isn’t withdrawal, it is two connected things: security from military blackmail and defense of legitimate overseas interests, the most important of which is trade with other countries (on legitimate terms).
Those things don’t require meddling in other people’s business, which is what most Americans rightly reject. They do require robust military forces, and a demonstrated willingness to apply them when Amercans’ vital interests are at stake.
Brooks, in his usual way, omitted the obvious and correct view of what (most) Americans want because he is “conservative” only by the standards of The New York Times.