It takes a truly world-class species of cosseted, legacy media asshole to stand atop the smoking rubble of his own decades of failed predictions, ludicrous projections and bad faith Both Siderism and declare that he could never be a liberal because liberals don’t fully grasp reality.
That’s David Brooks: America’s most consistently wrong pundit, gilding and polishing the Turds of Conventional Beltway Wisdom at The New York Times for 21 years. One year longer than I've been here, pick and shovel in hand, at the coalface of the Liberal blogosphere documenting Brooks' atrocities.
And how did Brooks land his sweet job-for-life at the Times? The job that opened the doors to his gigs at PBS, NPR, Meet the Press, the Atlantic, every other make-work featherbed he's enjoyed for the last couple of decades?
He did it by gilding and polishing the Turds of Conventional Conservative Wisdom at Bloody Bill Kristol's Neocon Wehrmacht propaganda rag, The Weekly Standard. Then, in 2003, when the Times felt a sudden, pressing need to appease the Bush regime, they brought Brooks on board as a meat-shield against the slings and arrows from the Right. [Fun Fact: For very much the same reason, the Times also hired Bloody Bill Kristol, and them let his contract expire after one year because his writing was so godawful and he was always getting his facts wrong.]
So...the word of the day is "Reality". OK, let’s talk about “reality,” shall we? What is it? What does it smell like? What does it feel like when kicks your ass?
Because Brooks has been wrong about it in every major way a pundit can be wrong, and still shows up nearly every week, bespectacled and dour, lecture the rest of us about civic virtue and the need to face facts.
Let's start in 2003, when Brooks was a full-throated cheerleader for the Bush administration’s bloody debacle. Liberals who warned it was a disaster in the making were dismissed by Brooks as unserious, soft, elitist, stupid, parochial, unAmerican dopes who refused to “fully grasp” the urgent reality of WMDs that never fucking existed, in a war we never should have fought, brought to us by a regime who lied us into it.
And when it all fell apart, from Brooks, no apologies, no retractions. Just shuffle on along to the next heap of steaming Conventional Wisdom. And the next. And the next...
Like, for example, deficits. Which Brooks not only promised us we would never face again, but chided Dubya Bush for not making his massive tax cuts even more massive, and scolded Democrats as stupid crazies for even suggesting that Bush might piss away the Clinton surplus. Then, well, you all know what happened.
Jump ahead a few years, let a Democrat win the White House and, sure as shit, you'll find Brooks right there, shrieking about the dangers of budget deficits. And when the GOP use the deficits they created as a battering ram to slash social programs, there you'll find Books again solemnly nodding about “hard choices” and “fiscal responsibility.”
Because the truth is, deficits only matter to Brooks when it means poor people might get healthcare.
It's Gonna Be Rubio!
Never forget that Brooks put his entire Beltway reputation behind the prediction that Marco Rubio would be the 2016 Republican nominee. “The future of the party,” he called him. The “savior,” the “bright young thing.” Brooks bet the farm on the notion that a hollow, boot-licking child from Florida would be the face of the new GOP. Then, without breaking a sweat, Trump bug-splatted Rubio, along with every other Republican hopeful, on his way to the nomination. Brooks shrugged and moved on to whatever was next.
Now let us turn to Brooks' perennial snipe hunt for the renaissance of the Conservative movement, and/or the heroic reform of the Republican party which are both perpetually just around the corner and will both be arriving any day now, just you wait and see! Brooks has written a version of this same, self-absolving and ridiculous lie so many times now that there no other explanation for it other than Brooks is a flat-out, to-the-bone liar whose career is kept afloat by the clueless Pollyannaism of his readers and benefactors, or Brooks is completely delusional ... and his is career is kept afloat by the clueless Pollyannaism of his readers and benefactors.
Brooks has built an entire career on the absolute horseshit belief that the Republican Party -- the party of Dubya, Gingrich, DeLay, and Trump. The party of Hate Radio an Fox News -- was just one good stern talking-to away from rediscovering its inner Eisenhower. Every six months he announces that finally, after that last racist meltdown, the GOP is ready to grow up. And every six months, the GOP doubles down on white nationalism, Christian supremacy, and tax cuts for oligarchs. Liberals saw this coming decades ago. Brooks is still out there, dowsing for water in a bucket of shit.
The Trump years.
Brooks' columns during the Trump era have been a masterclass in denial, obfuscation, and finger-wagging at the wrong goddamn people. Faced with open fascism, Brooks scolds liberals for being too mean, too smug, too coastal, too online. “Populists are angry because of liberal condescension,” he opined, as though Nazis needed our hugs. Meanwhile, liberals correctly called Trump an existential threat. Brooks squinted real hard and decided the real problem was college kids on Twitter. For Brooks, this is what passes for “grasping reality.”
And now, after decades of being wrong about everything -- literally everything -- David Brooks climbs atop his Times soapbox to inform us that he can’t be a liberal because liberals don’t “fully grasp reality.” We're past irony at this point, and have entered the realm of absurdist performance art. This is the captain of the Titanic scolding the passengers for not steering the ship correctly.
Brooks' whole shtick is to position himself as the Sensible Man in the Middle. He’s not a right-wing ghoul, not a bleeding-heart lefty, but the Yale professor of humility who’ll explain America to you. Which is why, when Brooks was faced with a Democratic party that elected an actual Centrist like Barack Obama -- who, for all intents and purposed, might as well have been built in a lab to Brooks' specification -- the Both Sides Do It machine that Brooks uses to extrude his ridiculous columns short-circuited.
Because how can you "Both Sides" American politics when one side is a calm, rational, corruption-free family man who is offering one bipartisan solution after another...
...and the other side are hysterical, racist bomb-throwers who torch every bipartisan peace offering and are very openly running a program of sabotage and obstruction with the sole goal of making Obama a one-term president?
For Brooks it was...
From David Brooks and the Intellectual Collapse of the Center:
But even if you accept this very strange notion of the political alignment in Trump’s Washington, it raises a question Brooks is not prepared to answer. If his objection on the left lies with the “Sanders socialism,” then isn’t there an appealing centrist lying to the right of that? A moderate who favors market-oriented solutions that bring together business and labor, who welcomes empiricism, and is willing to compromise? A politician who has led the Democratic Party for the last eight years and, in fact, is still the sitting president of the United States right now?
One might think so. But Brooks spent the last eight years defining the center as something Obama was not. It didn’t matter that Obama supported a health-care plan first devised by Mitt Romney, or a cap-and-trade plan endorsed by John McCain. Brooks nestled himself into the territory between Obama and the angry, no-compromise Republicans who were shutting down government and boycotting all negotiations with the president. If Obama endorsed the policies Brooks preferred, he would simply pretend that Obama had not proposed them. Indeed, one of the most common genres of David Brooks column was a sad lament that neither party would endorse policies that in fact Obama had explicitly and publicly called for...
Brooks was emblematic of the way the entire bipartisan centrist industry conducted itself throughout the Obama years. It was neither possible for Obama to co-opt the center, nor for Republicans to abandon it, because official centrists would simply relocate themselves to the midpoint of wherever the parties happened to stand.
For Brooks, the problem is that his “middle” somehow always turns out to be somewhere between Republican talking points and Republican lies. He’s spent decades swearing to his readers that, way down deep where only he can see it, conservatives are basically decent, serious people -- while liberals are silly hysterics, and crackpot alarmists. All while relentlessly troweling out the Both Sides Do It bullshit which allowed Trump to exist and MAGA to flourish.
Being wrong at Brooks’ scale is not an accident. This isn't bad luck or a one-off. This is structural. Brooks’ job at the Times has always been to launder conservative failures into “respectable” columns that reassure wealthy centrist readers that nothing fundamental is broken. He’s wrong because being right -- being liberal and grasping reality -- would destroy his career.
And that's the ugly truth behind all the millions of words Brooks has spilled in defense of the indefensible: that Brooks could never be a liberal precisely because liberals were right about the Right all along. Right about Iraq. Right about deficits. Right about the trajectory of the Republican party. Right about Trump. Right about everything. And Brooks can never forgive us for that. His entire identity as the “reasonable conservative” would disintegrate if he admitted, even for a second, that the people he spent his career mocking and dismissing were the ones who saw reality most clearly.
So on he plods, decade after decade, padding out his columns with moral hand-wringing and half-baked, pop culture sociology. Mumbling about character and humility, all while Reality keeps proving him wrong. And on the rare occasions when when he finally owns up to some error, it’s never about the big stuff -- never about the Iraq War dead, or the millions crushed by austerity, or the GOP’s descent into fascism. It’s always vague, bloodless, “I didn’t fully appreciate” nonsense. He fucks up history and calls it humility. He misses the point by a mile and calls it wisdom.
So here we are, more than two decades into the David Brooks Experience: the pundit who’s wrong about everything but keeps his sinecure because the New York Times would rather hire a conservative who is consistently and spectacularly wrong than admit liberals had it right all along.
And today, Mr. Wrong About Everything used his rarified New York Times real estate to look his clueless, Pollyannish readers in the eye and declare, with a straight face, that he could never be a liberal because liberals don’t grasp reality. And why?
Because Both Sides!
I’ve been driven away from the right over the past decade, but I can’t join the left because I just don’t think that tradition of thought grasps reality in all its fullness. I wish both right and left could embrace the more complex truth...
To which I would add this, from Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game:
"The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons."
Which, in this case, actually works out great because, speaking for all Liberals everywhere, words alone cannot express our gratitude that Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times is not on our team.
