It would be a trivial matter to chalk up David Brooks' latest crime against journalism as yet another bottom-of-the-barrel scraping from one of the most "legacy" of the legacy media's professional opinion-havers who lost what little hold he had on the plot 40 years ago and has been drifting further and further from the gravitational field of actual reality ever since.
And perhaps this was the project all along. Brooks as Sulzberger family sociological experiment like those conducted on the International Space Station on Antarctic moss or freeze-dried mouse sperm or E. coli. to see what effect microgravity, extreme temperatures, the hard radiation of the vacuum of space might have on normally Earthbound biological life.
In this case, the experiment began almost by accident, with the House of Sulzberger buying Patriotism Insurance during the high cotton days of the Dubya administration by hiring not one but two of the Iraq War's biggest cheerleaders from the Weekly Standard stable of neocon vipers: David Brooks and Bill Kristol. Then, as the Dubya administration began to collapse, they decided to hang onto Brooks (and sack Kristol) because, A) sacking both of their peak-Iraq-War diversity hires at the same time would make them look even more craven than they already looked, and, B) as the legacy media mantra abruptly shifted from "Liberals are America-hating, terrorist-loving dupes" to "Both Sides Do It" Brooks was able to show the Sulzberger family his real value by his willingness to transform himself almost overnight from the acid-penned scourge of the Murrica-hating Left to America's most zealous evangelist of Both Siderism.
But then, having set this experiment in motion, the House of Sulzberger just sorta filed Brooks away and moved on to other things, leaving the David Brooks Project to overrun the Petri dish where it had originally been cultivated.
This environment of permissive neglect led Brooks to (pardon the metaphor shift) achieve an opinion-having escape velocity from the Real World's gravity-well of facts, history and consequences where the rest of us live. Now Brooks exists almost entirely in a state of ontological free fall, responsive only to the microgravitational influence of the political, cultural and financial elites who are desperate to believe in the fairy tale world Brooks has invented for them. A world where hippy-punching is still considered great sport, and the *real* Republican party -- the Party of Reagan -- is still out there somewhere waiting for this temporary MAGA aberration to subside.
Typos 3 through 5: a great man liked St. Augustine, the occasionally recklessness, and “great replacement: are bad David Brooks typos for a great man like St. Augustine, the occasional recklessness or occasionally the recklessness, and “great replacement.” cc @jfidelino_nyt pic.twitter.com/7H3CfF1r5y
— Typos of the New York Times (@nyttypos) November 28, 2025
Longtime readers know of my crazy theory that Mr. David Brooks of the New York Times does not write editorial columns twice a week per se, but is instead engaged in a massive, long-range project to assemble an entire, fictional alternate history of Modern Conservationism, which is being created right before our eyes by the slow, steady accretion of one godawful Whig Fan Fiction column at a time.
I make mention of it every now and then --To David Brooks' ongoing, long-range project of radically revising modern history by removing all the Republican treasony bits, you may now add this little gem of falsification which was partially buried under his woozy praise for Hillary Clinton's "muscular" ideas about foreign policy...-- not because I am under any illusion that I can do anything to stop it --These stories are not about the world as it actually exists, but the world as Mr. Brooks wishes it to be. And since he is not a very good fiction writer, there are many, many points where the gears of the real world and his fake Whig World grind and howl, forcing Mr. Brooks to apply gallons of fictive lubricant to keep the keening noise of the real world ripping Whig World off its hinges from drowning out the tepid drone of his writing.
When Mr. Brooks needs an imaginary moral high ground of Centrism on which to stand, he conjures an imaginary army of Dirty Fucking Hippies on the Left that exactly counterpoises the very real mob of Pig People on the Right.
When he wants to redress what he believes to be the immorality of the deficit, he wishes away the entire, debt-drunk Bush Era and instead pounds away at naughty people having sexy sex time in ways Mr. Brooks does not approve of and invents Whig FanFic "grand bargain" and "austerity" sub-genres wherein he expounds on his rustic theories about money and cutting social programs. After which he regularly has his ass absolutely sawed off and served up on the fine china by people like Dean Baker and Paul Krugman and myriad others who actually know what they're talking about....-- but simply because it is sickening to see such a brazen slow-motion theft and mutilation of history --University of Chicago history baccalaureate David "Even David Brooks" Brooks has written a genuinely remarkable and revealing column about the rise and fall of American Conservatism.
What makes it remarkable and revealing it is not its scholarly depth or historical breadth or scathing, confessional honesty, but rather that it is a work of almost pure fiction being passed off as fact in America's Newspaper of Record...
Protected as he is by the permissive neglect of his employers and the desperation of the elites for whom he performs, the lies Brooks has to spin to protect his readers from the crushing reality snarling right outside their front door have become increasingly ludicrous and fragile in the Age of Trump. The gossamer-thin fantasies and still require constant maintenance. Which explains Friday's column which began with this declaration:
Members of the two parties have different sorts of pride in their country.
Followed by this truly jaw-dropping bit about the Republican party during the Obama administration, which, well, the word "lie" hardly covers it. It is the complete negation of the reality which every one of us saw with our own eyes, and heard with our own ears.
Republican pride is unconditional. Democrats like Barack Obama and Joe Biden can get elected to the presidency, and it has almost no effect on the pride Republicans feel for America.
From the day of his inauguration until the day he left office, the Republican party and Conservative media spent all of their energies openly rooting for Obama to fail and pulling every lever they could lay their hands on to disrupt and sabotage everything Obama the Centrist tried to do. For example, from The Guardian, February 2, 2009:
When Barack Obama became president there were celebrations around the world. Car horns were honked in Mexico City, thousands gathered to watch the inauguration on big screens in Liverpool and Leeds, feasts were held in Kenya. Yet the festive spirit failed to permeate one small corner of Manhattan, home to the right-leaning cable channel Fox News. While the city's streets were filled with the sound of fireworks and champagne corks popping, the mood in its studios was almost sombre. This is the conversation that took place on air between the two Titans of conservative broadcasting, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity:
Hannity: "So do you want [Obama] to succeed?"
Limbaugh: "I'm so glad you asked me this question . . . No! I want him to fail."
A few days earlier, speaking on his own talk radio show, broadcast from his home in Palm Beach, Florida, Limbaugh had put his feelings even more pithily. Responding to a newspaper that asked him to express in 400 words his hope for the Obama presidency, he replied: "I don't need 400 words, I need four: I hope he fails"...
Our Mr. Brooks Picks His Own Private HistoryUp there on the left, that's Harry Dent, Sr. He was a conservative political strategist of the 1960's and 1970's. He worked for, among other people, the famous wandering and miscegenating penis, Strom Thurmond, and for Richard M. Nixon, who, back then, was not yet history's yard waste. While working for the latter, Dent devised what has become known as the "Southern strategy," by which he attached the Republican Party to the rising white counter-assault on the gains of the civil-rights movement, and to modern American conservatism, which already had done so, largely through the efforts of William F. Buckley and the National Review crowd. Dent begat Lee Atwater, who begat Karl Rove. In today's column in The New York Times, in which he traces the current paradox of modern American conservatism, David Brooks mysteriously overlooks all the hard work Harry Dent and his acolytes did in making sure that conservatism could count on the backing of the supporters of American apartheid.)...
Our country is the one that believes that resurrecting an overtly fascist version of the Confederacy decked out in 21st Century glad rags is a terrible idea. Which leads us to Brooks' second, sweeping declaration:
Democratic pride is more conditional. It dropped a bit during George W. Bush’s first term, then began to gradually decline during the Great Awokening around 2014 and really collapsed during each of President Trump’s two terms.
Textbook Brooksian fatuous argle-bargle coupled with some gratuitous hippy punching, and the Alert Reader will notice how Brooks skips over George W. Bush's catastrophic second term which bore out every critique the Left had about the Right all along, and exposed men like Brooks as the willfully blind, partisan hacks that they are.
Then comes Brooks' reminder to his elite clientele about how much more patriotic he and they and Republicans are than us dirty hippies:
I don’t side much with the party of MAGA these days, but my patriotism is more like the Republican kind — unconditional. ...
At this point I'm guesstimating that Brooks has killed about half the bottle of top shelf scotch I assume he was nursing to give him the Dutch courage needed to grind his way through this codswallop.
Then, killing the rest of the bottle, Brooks decided to go all-in, and lash Abraham Lincoln to Donald Trump and Elon Musk with the binding of love of country
When you love America for its raw energy, you are loving it for a force that also produces crassness, materialism and, from time to time, immaturity. That is to say, the same cultural winds that propel the noble aspirations of an Abraham Lincoln, also propel the gaudy display of a Donald Trump and the occasionally recklessness of an Elon Musk.
Reducing the monstrous shadow Trump has thrown across American democracy to the word "gaudy", and reducing Musk's berserker, chain-saw gutting of the American government to "occasionally recklessness" is wild, but praising Lincoln's "noble aspirations" while criticizing Democratic pride as "conditional" absolutely takes the prize, and is symptomatic of a fetish shared by a number of Conservative opinion-havers: praising Lincoln as a Great Uniter with noble aspirations while carefully avoiding any mention of the actual Lincoln. From me, five years ago:
What's appalling is that Very Serious Beltway Pundits like David Brooks have no love for the actual Lincoln. The guy who is buried two miles from my front door. Instead, they love their imaginary Lincoln just as they love their imaginary Reagan.
Their imaginary Lincoln is a Lincoln without Shiloh or Cold Harbor. A Lincoln without the Wilderness or Vicksburg or the Shenandoah Valley.
Their Lincoln is two-dimensional caricature of the actual Lincoln. A gentle redeemer and uniter, and not the man who went through just about every general in the Union Army until he found one that would do what needed to be done: crush the Confederacy completely, regardless of the cost. One that would bomb their cities, burn their crops, slaughter their armies and starve their citizens until, at last, their will to make a traitor's war against the United States was broken and they finally gave up.
There is no place in Mr. Brooks' gauzy cartoon version of American history for a Lincoln who recognized a mortal threat to the nation coming from a despicable confederacy of its own citizens, and who ruthlessly used every bloody means at his disposal to utterly destroy that threat. No place in his idylls for a Lincoln who offered reunion and reconstruct to the South only after they had been beaten to their knees and forced to accept surrender or face extinction.
And if this all sounds weirdly familiar, well it should. I penned something similar when Mr. Brooks reached for that ol' reliable jug of Imaginary Lincoln three years ago ("David Brooks: Controlling The Future By Butchering The Past"):
That's right. To serve his political agenda, Mr. Brooks has very deliberately omitted the entire context for one of the greatest speeches in American history: the fact that there were two sides to the Civil War -- one which was dedicate to destroying the nation in order to preserve the institution of slavery, and another -- led by Abraham Lincoln -- which was determined not to let that happen.And as to Mr. Brooks' claim that "Slavery, Lincoln says, was not a Southern institution, it was an American institution, weaving through our common history for 250 years."? Well for fuck's sake, David, just read the very next god damn paragraph of the speech you are god damn quoting:One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.In Mr. Brooks' Both Siderist version of America history, Lincoln is transformed into a disembodied specter who somehow just floats above all of this, hand-in-hand with Mr. David Brooks, as together they survey the sad and petty squabbles of the wretched Extremes on Both Sides, both in 1865 and 2017...
Among America's elite pundits you see this detaching of reality from the fairy tale they are selling everywhere. This absurd proposition that "America" is somehow unrelated to the attitudes and actions of the actual Americans who make up the country. That "MAGA" and "Republicans" are two different things. In this case we find Lincoln's "noble aspirations" completely divorced from the bloody and brutal war which was the price of realizing some of those noble aspirations: the wholesale destruction of American cities and putting hundreds of thousands of Americans into their graves.
And the dilemma which faced Lincoln is a pretty fair glass-half-empty analog of where Democratic pride in our country stands right now: the sobering realization that, to save the country we love, will require the recognition that millions of our fellow Americans have become enemies of democracy. That their version of "love of country" is founded on rage, racism and paranoia, which has all been relentlessly fueled by Conservative media. And that to save our democracy from our carefully cultivated, home-grown demons, severe measures may have to be taken to pry their poisonous claws away from Lady Liberty's throat.
Having come this far, it will not surprise you that Brooks winds his brief excursion through a modern American political history which never existed, by lighting votives and reciting a praiseful paean at the tomb of St. Reagan, pretending that MAGA is some kind of exotic parasitic disorder which has only recently infected his Republican party and will one day soon be shrugged off, and, of course, as little more gratuitous hippy-punching.
Some Democrats like Gov. Gavin Newsom of California seem to think they can win the White House by behaving more like Trump, by thinking more like Trump, by adopting that dark American carnage vibe. This strikes me as political lunacy.
This from the same guy who, in 2014, crowed that the Republican party had definitely cleaned up its act and was definitely on its way to a bright future and who, in 2016, confidently predicted that the Republican nominee for president was gonna be Rubio!
You, dear reader, could be forgiven for wondering -- loudly -- how the fuck this clown with a nearly perfect track record of being consistently wrong about the one subject the Sulzberger family pays him a king's ransom to know something about...how this buffoon keeps his job at the Times.
And that would be an excellent question, if the Sulzberger family were paying Brooks for his savvy, insider political expertise. But they're not. The Sulzberger family pays David Brooks float far above our mundane world of fact and history and consequence and spin golden, gossamer lies to ease the fears and reinforce the parochial political follies and fantasies of the wealthy patrons who desperately want to buy what Brooks is selling.
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