Davey Brooks, Boy-Pundit

From the horrible, horrible NY Magazine Profile: (h/t the mighty Tengrain at Mock, Paper, Scissors)

Brooks’s charming, levelheaded optimism may be out of style. But he gets to play the voice of reason against a chorus of doomsayers. His moderate conservatism—a synthesis of conservative giant Edmund Burke and Ur-centralizer Alexander Hamilton that has earned him the label of “liberals’ favorite conservative”—may be anomalous, but it allows him a kind of freedom that other, more partisan pundits lack. He’s a party of one, without followers. This is Brooks’s central paradox: He’s both the essential columnist of the moment, better than anyone at crystallizing the questions we face—ones for which there are often no good answers—and also, somehow, totally out of step.
...

He never gets riled, merely concerned. He writes a lot about emotion, but usually in a clinical way. When he says we botched the Iraq War, it’s not, Wow, we fucked up. It’s that our thinking wasn’t sufficiently Burkean. He’s not trying to persuade you. He’s trying to “exhibit a way of thinking,” he says.
...

Teacher: And what do you want to be when you grow up, Davey?

Davey Brooks: I want to be wallpaper.

Teacher: What kind of wallpaper, Davey?

Davey Brooks: Beige wallpaper.

At the end of the day, David Brooks is a lot like any number of other Conservative expatriates: someone who has raised a personality defect -- in his case, a near-catatonic level of emotional numbness and passivity -- into an art form in order to avoid noticing or criticizing the many, catastrophic failures and betrayals of his own ideology.