I have despised conservative columnist David Brooks for decades. My loathing intensified before the 2016 election when he optimistically supported trump. Then when his idol turned out to have feet of clay shit, he withdrew from political writing for a while and tap-danced around various lifestyle, cultural, sociological topics like he couldn’t admit what was happening, namely, that trump has trashed and betrayed the conservative movement. When an idealist falls, it’s a long way down.
But today in The Atlantic online he emerged into the light, cleansed of his former misguided ways, clothed in the shiny garments of repentance and humility. He spells it out. My hat is off to him. I’ll never like him, but now I have a little respect.
This is a really smart, well-thought-out, and passionate article. It’s l-o-n-g, but that’s what you’d expect when a one-time believer is knocked off his high horse and realizes that he doesn’t have to stay face-down in the dust.
I feel pretty sure this is a gift link.
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Until January 20, 2025, I didn’t realize how much of my very identity was built on this faith in my country’s goodness—on the idea that we Americans are partners in a grand and heroic enterprise, that our daily lives are ennobled by service to that cause. Since January 20, as I have watched America behave vilely—toward our friends in Canada and Mexico, toward our friends in Europe, toward the heroes in Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office—I’ve had trouble describing the anguish I’ve experienced. Grief? Shock? Like I’m living through some sort of hallucination? Maybe the best description for what I’m feeling is moral shame: To watch the loss of your nation’s honor is embarrassing and painful.
George Orwell is a useful guide to what we’re witnessing. He understood that it is possible for people to seek power without having any vision of the good. “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” an apparatchik says in 1984. “We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power.” How is power demonstrated? By making others suffer. Orwell’s character continues: “Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.”
Russell Vought, Donald Trump’s budget director, sounds like he walked straight out of 1984. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains,” he said of federal workers, speaking at an event in 2023. “We want to put them in trauma.”
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Maybe this is the silver lining of Trump’s second term. Things are getting so bad that even people with some ideological alignment with Trump, or people who supported him previously and might be hesitant to be seen changing their minds, will have to face reality.
That’s some serious optimism, but it’s the best we got.
If not exactly the silver lining, maybe the pony in the room full of shit. When trump and Hillary debated in 2016, Brooks was the commentator representing the trump camp. So it’s taken him almost 10 years to “change his mind” and “face reality” as you correctly put it. Ten years… but yeah, it is cause for optimism and possibly even hope.
One for the “Just About the Least You Could Do” files, American Conservatives division.
Still, there are a whole raft of American conservatives who aren’t even doing that, so two cheers for Brooks, I guess?
I see he hasn’t quite overcome the usual tendency of the egg-faced conservative to whiny finger-pointing ressentiment, however:
Not really. The post-sixties conservative movement, especially in its militant '80s-era Moral Majority form, largely purged itself from the institutions where its increasingly radicalized anti-science and anti-egalitarian vision was becoming less and less mainstream.
Once modern academia openly endorsed basic liberal principles like endorsement of scientific research including the study of evolution, opposition to discrimination by race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., and critical study of the institutions and canons established by privileged groups, conservatives started to feel their viewpoints were no longer aligned with their institutional missions. That doesn’t mean that they were “purged” by those in power, or that their specialist research/teaching expertise was suppressed or devalued: just that they could no longer take it for granted that their personal ideology was an accepted cultural norm in their institution.
And, not having had a lot of practice in being a cultural minority that isn’t treated with automatic deference as the default face of leadership, US conservatives started looking for career alternatives. Not coincidentally, this era also saw the rise of conservative think tanks and conservative media institutions. The conservative author of this 2012 National Affairs article is perhaps unintentionally revealing about the attractions of these parallel career paths:
Think-tank appointments for ex-professors: More money, more automatic ideological deference, and no tedious grading, what’s not to like?
Back to Brooks:
No argument there—if by “the left” we mean Clinton-style mainstream neoliberalism rather than the actual “left”—except to point out that Republican politicians were at least as much on this bandwagon as Democratic ones. Globalization, free trade agreements, and all the rest of the wealth-coddling “trickle-down” policies were spun up in the Reagan economic “boom”, and ardently championed from then on by tax-cutting Republicans who didn’t give shit one about the increasingly precarious situation of the working class.
And the social safety-net policies that actually cushioned these economic shocks for the working class, of course, were absolute anathema to conservatives.
“Waaahhh the mean old libs hurt my feelings and disrespected me by being better informed and more ethically consistent about scientific and social issues that I wasn’t ready to understand yet!”
I notice that Brooks doesn’t have the honesty to admit that “the left” of that era were fundamentally correct in their “pontificating” about other issues that mainstream conservatives nowadays mostly do accept, at least nominally. Such as, the rejection of racial segregation, support for sex equality, increasing freedom in personal lives including social and sexual relationships, the decriminalization of homosexuality, etc.
Yeah, surprise surprise, the people who ended up on the losing side of those controversies were in fact generally defending less enlightened and morally inferior positions, as it turned out. But you’re not allowed to remind them of it when they complain about being disrespected. Those issues are stuffed down the memory hole.
No liberal/conservative debates will be acknowledged except for a couple current buzzword controversies where today’s conservatives think they’re still possibly in with a chance, such as “gender” and “the environment”.
Actually, no: for the most part, the post-sixties liberal wing simply made massive gains in public opinion, as more and more Americans got comfortable with the ideas of equal rights for Black people, for women, for non-Christians, for gays, for immigrants. More and more Americans became okay with the idea of official government secularism, religious freedom, scientific research, freedom of information, critical thinking instead of patriotic shibboleths.
And the conservatives picked up their marbles and stomped off to their new safe spaces of conservative think tanks and conservative media, and then whined that the liberal-dominated (and less well-paid) institutions they had walked away from were “stamping out dissent”.
Nah, guys, it’s just that you hated being losers and were too insecure to embark on any genuine process of truth and reconciliation, to see where your principles actually fit in to a more liberalized world. Instead, you cast in your lot with the unscrupulous power-hungry anti-leftist reactionaries you now look down your nose at, because they gave you a populist audience and the illusion of still being winners in the “culture wars”.
Yeah, and look where that’s got you. Sorry, but my admiration for Brooks’s belated and grudgingly partial recantation definitely knows some bounds.
Agreed. It was totally obvious what Trump was about back in 2016 when Brooks was in his camp, especially to someone who lived in NY.
No surprise there. “The libs made me vote for the racist shitbag.”
Yeah, exactly. Brooks can shove his come to Jesus moment where the sun don’t shine. PJ O’Rourke figured this out in 2016 (“Clinton is wrong about everything, but wrong within normal parameters”), where was Brooks? I mean, PJ was also wrong (Clinton was right about most things), but at least he saw through Trump’s bullshit.
Great job, Brooks, coming out when it no longer matters. He gets zero respect from me, and he’s still wrong about everything. Maybe not as wrong as Tom Friedman, but that’s a low bar.
For crap’s sake, no, he hasn’t turned into a liberal. He’s not going to start praising liberals. Don’t expect that.
But he is a leading conservative writer who is calling out trump’s immorality and destructiveness eloquently and articulately– so let’s not dismiss that part, mkay? May others follow suit.
It is fine for commentators such as Brooks to share his Road to Damascus experience. Just waiting for ONE SINGLE congresscritter or Supreme to do the same.
Not really, in that today’s conservatives will totally ignore, or not even see, what he writes. He writes for the NYT and this is in the Atlantic (the bad guys from the Signal thing) and sometimes shows up on NPR. How do you think any of today’s conservatives will even see what he writes?
Maybe if he wrote that and managed to get it on the Fox News website or the WSJ editorial page? But, writing it for the Atlantic? What a waste of paper.
I wrote on these boards before the election that any conservatives that were anti-Trump should have been screaming it from the rooftops, endorsing Harris, raising money, doing whatever they could to prevent him from getting elected.
Instead, you have Bret Stephens saying he’ll probably vote third party and Brooks complaining about how expensive his 5 martini lunch was at the airport.
This is the very definition of too little, too late – after the election, after Trump (probably) can’t run again, writing a piece for a liberal magazine.
I think my favorite part of Brooks is his tut-tutting about morality while dumping his wife for a much younger assistant.
I like Brooks, and have for quite a while. I can readily admit to his numerous moral failings because he readily admits to them (“I’m an average man with above average communication skills”).
If we don’t extend an olive branch to those who have an epiphany and dare to exit the cult, the likelihood of them exiting the cult will be much less.
Better late than never. Better the right thing for the wrong reasons than not at all. I’d rather have Brooks “inside the tent, pissing out than outside the tent, pissing in.”
Never criticize someone for doing the right thing. Don’t say “It’s about time” or “Too late!” or “I told you so!”. Just say, “Good job” and “Keep up the good work”. It’s good policy.
When the struggle is over and your side has won, then you can start holding people to account.
Well, I concede that if I were discussing Mr. Brooks’s recent epiphany with him in person, I would doubtless be a lot more supportive and encouraging.
When it’s just an anonymous online discussion among Dopers, on the other hand, there’s not much reason to pull any punches about the less admirable as well as the commendable aspects of his declaration.
I don’t feel anonymous here. Even though I’ve only met a couple of people in person, I express myself here pretty much the way I would in person. I’m not any ruder or any more polite. I feel that people here know me, or anyway know a version of me, and it’s fairly congruent with my IRL self.
I hope you will. I’d be interested in your thoughts.
One of the things about trump and his ilk that infuriates Brooks is his complete lack of any moral code. At least one that he follows. It’s as if he knows what the right thing is and deliberately does the opposite.
If you read the article, he blames the liberals for making him align with fascists. He mentions when some conservatives at his college physically attacked an on campus protest of apartheid with sledgehammers, he thought the attack was bad, but the liberals were so condescending!
May others follow suit.