David Brooks

After last night's debate, New York Times columnist David Brooks was chatting with a group of people. One of them said: "I hear you hired that conservative Bill Kristol." David Brooks responded: "More like a pseudoconservative."

The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus gets all bloggy in her column today, quoting the Times' Paul Krugman disparaging those who argue that Social Security faces a serious financing problem, then lining up passages written by Mr. Krugman earlier this decade in which he seems to agree that it does.

The attack comes on the heels of Mr. Krugman's spat with fellow Times columnist David Brooks over Reagan and race, in which, in apparent observance of an unspoken Times rule, each delicately avoided naming the other. So it'll be interesting to see whether Mr. Krugman responds to Ms. Marcus, and, if so, whether the rule seems to work any differently when the other columnist writes for a different paper.  read more »

The battle over Reagan and race that had been playing out recently on the New York Times op-ed page appeared to have subsided by the end of last week.  But it received new life over the weekend when Reagan biographer Lou Cannon contributed a guest op-ed asserting that "Ronald Reagan was not a racist." 

Today, Paul Krugman responds, arguing, as he has before, that Reagan used racist appeals for political benefit.  Referring to Mr. Cannon and Times columnist David Brooks, he notes: "Reagan's defenders protest furiously that he wasn't personally bigoted. So what? We're talking about his political strategy. His personal beliefs are irrelevant."

 read more »

The recent Brooks vs. Krugman (with an assist from Herbert) smackdown on the New York Times op-ed page has left a lot of people wondering: Why aren't Times columnists allowed to attack each other by name?  After all, doing so would make these arguments a lot easier for readers to follow.

Well it turns out that, as near as anyone can tell, they are allowed. So why don't they?  We've put in queries to Messrs. Brooks and Krugman, as well as Times op-ed page editor Andy Rosenthal, and we'll let you know what we find out.

A few months back, the brilliant and flawed David Brooks said that blue/red was giving way to a new divide in American society that would play out in ideology and partisan politics: globalist interventionist elites on one side, populist isolationist realists on the other. Hillary Clinton v. Chuck Hagel.

I was reminded of Brooks's great insight watching a panel yesterday on C-Span of a December 8 conference at Yale on the Senate battle between Lamont and Lieberman, won by the wily Lieberman.

The panel was marked by a vituperative exchange between Liebermanite Lanny Davis, late of the Monica wars, and Lamontite Bill Hillsman of North Woods media, the populist genius behind Jesse Ventura. When Hillsman, wearing a striped western shirt, with his gut spilling proudly, called Lieberman a great liar who lacked independence, Davis in his blue suit became agitated and started yelling at the other panelist. When Hillsman accused mainstream Democrats of "sandbagging" Lamont by holding off on information and aid—in essence, dithering over its commitment to the official party nominee—Davis became apoplectic and prosecutorial. "Name names," he kept shouting. A former Connecticut Democratic party chair (whose name I didn't get) then named names, saying that Chuck Schumer and Bill Clinton had vacillated. Davis got even angrier, saying it was hearsay.

A good show. And it hardly mattered that the campaign was 6 weeks old. The wound is raw. David Brooks is dead on.

A few comments.

1. Brooks is an exponent of the globelites (as I am of the isopops); and let's be clear, his elite truly is an elite right now: it's a tiny minority. How many people maybe want to invade Iran? Or continue to rationalize the invasion of Iraq as a smart idea? Show of hands, please. Yet this elite is behind the wheel.

2. Brooks is our most sociological pundit, god bless him; but he is given to indirection, and he did not have the cojones to throw in my favorite metric, Jewishness. Lanny Davis is a classic arrived Jew; he broke ground in the 90s (along with me and Brooks and all the other Jewish meritocrats) and flowered in the establishment under the philosemitic Clinton. I have to assume Davis's view of Israel is diaspora-nationalist. Like the views of the Jewish financial heavies who left the Democratic party to stick with Lieberman. Like the views of Senator Lieberman's new in-law, Harvard's Ruth Wisse (rhymes with Weiss), a Jewish particularist to a faretheewell.

3. One of Brooks's professed idols is the late E. Digby Baltzell. The Penn sociologist will be forever famous for coining the term "WASP" in the 60s to describe the then-ruling elite. Forty years later, Brooks came up with his own acronym to describe the new elite: Bobos (for Bohemian bourgeois). Baltzell's acronym stuck, Brooks's is fast fading. Why? Bobos lacked WASP's sting. Bobos was a soft, lifestyle metric: Latte drinkers of the information age. By eliding the Jewishness of the new elite—and yes, Jews are just a component of the establishment, but a significant one—Brooks fell painfully short of his model.

Let's honor Baltzell's great work. In naming the WASPs, he turned on his own people, deriding them as a "caste" that was holding on to status—which Baltzell defined then as corporate exec positions and club memberships—in defiance of the talented. The elite must represent the true talents of the society, Baltzell said. Who were those talents? Jews, he said; brilliant Jews, lamentably camped in "gilded ghettoes," outside the establishment. Let them in! thundered the assimilationist Baltzell. And America did. Baltzell was blunt about the role of religion in elite culture; his 1964 classic was titled, The Protestant Establishment.

In Brooks's book Bobos In Paradise, there are countless reference to WASPs, as the bad old order. 12 lines in his index for WASPs. 0 for Jews (who are only glanced upon in the text). I know why Brooks doesn't want to talk about Jewishness, let alone turn on his elite. He worries, as many of my intellectual friends do, about the pogroms that will take place in Des Moines the minute the media elite say what any boob watching CSpan accepts: Jews are an empowered group, and deservedly.

J'accuse. By maintaining silence on this important matter that is close to their hearts, these journalists have violated their American oath: to inform the people.

As Brooks showed, and the Lamont-Lieberman debate confirms, this is a huge and important divide. Inasmuch as the globelite cannot admit that the war in Iraq was a tragic error, at a time when midstream America has come solidly to that conclusion, the elite is growing estranged from public opinion, and thereby violating Baltzell's democratic principle, that it's OK and necessary to have a ruling elite, but it must be representative. This divide plays out in terms of the Jewish presence in American public life. The Jewish leadership is globelite all the way. It is more implicated in the disastrous Iraq decisionmaking than the realists, and less implicated in the war's grimmest consequences (there are more Buddhists than Jews in the armed forces, as I reported). Lamont/Lieberman was one wedge. Now comes another: Talk to Syria. Any realist will tell you we have to do that; the (largely non-Jewish) Iraq Study Group said so too. But Jewish leadership is against it. Bush will be too—next year. To be continued.

Today's New York Times letters page brings a note (third letter) responding to David Brooks' recent op-ed essay on the Mets:

To the Editor:

Shortly before the start of the 2005 baseball season, after the New York Mets had endured three consecutive dismal seasons, David Brooks declared his readiness to "switch my allegiance from the beloved Mets to the new team of my adopted town." He wrote, "I will become a fan of the Washington Nationals" ("Whose Team Am I On?," column, March 29, 2005).

Now that the Nationals have completed an awful season and the Mets are in the playoffs, Mr. Brooks has thrown a changeup, writing of the tortured life of an angst-ridden Mets fan.

Mr. Brooks now writes of the "true Mets fan." But he can't be "a true Mets fan." For true Mets fans, wherever we are in the world, and wherever the Mets are in the standings, during times of misery and times of euphoria, our allegiance is unconditional and eternal.

Joseph Schick Flushing, Queens, Oct. 8, 2006

I left Israel last summer with the awareness that the people there live in misery. I was moved by a friend's grim summary of the situation: "The Arabs don't want us here, they just don't. So we have to accept that there will be one war after another." One war after another? That's misery.

David Brooks got the same quote I did, in a column a week ago (September 28) from a "veteran of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war." How long will our war with the Arab world last? "This is forever."  read more »

Surely this is how many (maybe most) Israelis think. But there are two huge problems in parroting these thoughts, as Brooks did, to guide American relations with the Arab world. 1, is the widespread Israeli belief that Israel deserves no share of blame for the 60-year history of violence with "an existential foe," as Brooks says. It's simply wrong: "nationalist propaganda," in the words of Simha Flapan, one of the Israeli "new historians" who have in the last generation transformed historical understanding of the Middle East. 2, and more dangerous, is the conflation issue: Brook's neoconservative claim that Americans should think about the Arab world as Israelis do "who have more experience with Islamic extremism." Why? Why must we recapitulate the experience of an ally in the Arab world?

How amazing that the Conservative Party leader in Britain, David Cameron, is now lashing out at American neoconservatives and denouncing Tony Blair's "slavish" relationship to the U.S. So the neocons are identified there with Labor. As they have found a home in the Lieberman/Hillary wing of the Democratic Party here.

We're all in for a realignment, and not as David Brooks has stated, of warmongering elites versus populist isolationists. This realignment is about how to handle the Arab world, how to handle autocratic Syria as it tries to put a damper on Islamic fervor, how to handle the Israeli occupation, how to put down weapons, how—as Tom Kean emphasized at the National Press Club yesterday—to win hearts and minds.

In his column yesterday on the Lamont victory in Connecticut, Times columnist David Brooks took up his new cause—saving the Democratic Party—and said that Joe Lieberman, and not the "net roots," has the wisdom to see that "The civilized world faces an arc of Islamic extremism that was not caused by American overreaction, and that will only get stronger if America withdraws."

Withdraws? From what? The word "Iraq" never appears in Brooks's column. It used to be that he diminished Iraq as a "single issue." Now it's no issue at all.

P.S. Those on the left who gave Lamont his victory are also concerned about the "arc of Islamic extremism." We differ in that we think Iraq is hugely important: a catastrophic error in foreign policy that has filled the terrorist swamps.

In yesterday's New Haven Register, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a leading management professor at Yale, shows how disaffection with Lieberman isn't some narrow obsession, as David Brooks would have it, but goes to the heart of the misconduct of our foreign policy:

A younger Joe Lieberman would never have condemned citizens as unpatriotic who challenge a bloody war that is built on a false premise that is costing thousands of U.S. lives along with our global reputation.

Last night on the PBS NewsHour, David Brooks defended Sen. Joe Lieberman from attacks on the internet. Brooks is an astute and insightful writer, but he is too often indirect, and last night he abandoned any duty to be specific:

[Lieberman is] also agitated and angry, and anybody would be, by the vitriolic and vicious attacks he's withstood for the past two or three years, which can't be repeated on the television. He's been the subject of an internet assault which is unprecedented...We're talking about the netroots, who are the real problems for Lieberman, people generated by the Daily Kos and other web sites-- I find privately most of the Democrats despise those people because... they practice politics so viciously. [But the Democrats] don't want to get in the crosshairs. And they don't want to offend the liberal base of primary voters.

(This transcript is from Malachite, on Daily Kos.)

Brooks may have a point. But it would be impossible to know that till he speaks directly about what he means rather than employing broadbrush innuendo and referring portentously to "private" conversations. Why can't he tell us on television? What is wrong with television that when the liberal base of the Democratic party makes charges against a leading senator, they cannot be repeated? Is the MSM mere shadow theater?

I of course want to saddle up my hobbyhorse: the Israel issue. I wonder whether Brooks is not referring to strains within the leftwing Democratic party base over Israel. Here's BioPitt, complaining lately on Kos about anti-Israel voices that refuse to denounce terrorism:

It's also becoming abundantly clear why there's a trickle (not a flood, but a trickle) of Jews leaving the Democratic Party, and why few Jews associate themselves with anti-Iraq War protests, even though they, like myself, may feel the same sentiments as you do about that war (except for the "started by Zionists" canard).

By your actions, by your refusal to sympathize with Jews and Israelis without saying "but", by your refusal to recognize the nature of a rejectionist, annihilationist movement, you paint yourselves into a corner that makes you the virtual laughingstock of cyberspace.

Obviously these issues figure in the Lieberman-Lamont race. Israel was not mentioned in the debate the other night, but one of my commenters brought it up, all the way from New Zealand. Peter Morris:

Why is it so hard saying it. Lieberman was for the Iraq war because of Israel. He didn't put the country first or even his party first. He put Israel first. There, now that isn't so hard saying isn't it.

Let's try and sort out the complexities: as Kos reports, Jewish voters are generally opposed to the war and not sticking with Lieberman. But as I have argued here, a religious devotion to Israel, in which I was involved as a young man, surely played a part in support by liberal hawks for the Iraq war. And as the Walt-Mearsheimer groundswell has shown, many of the people called upon to wage the war on terror, the military, seem to want to think about this. Especially as the over-identification of Israel's interests and ours plays out in the Iran drumbeat.

Even if these are the views Brooks can't talk about on television, they are important politically. They help explain why right and left are seeking common ground: why the Libertarian Party has joined forces with the Green Party in Maryland to support the antiwar candidacy of Kevin Zeese, the only campaign I have seen on television in which the issue of the identification of American interests with Israel's is brought up. They explain why the greatest concern about human rights in the occupied territories appears in the Nation and The American Conservative (c.f., its coverage by Scott McConnell.

Maybe we are wrong when we say that the U.S. was influenced by Israel in its decision to occupy Arab lands and initiate a cycle of violence as the answer to radical Islam. Or when we say that separating America's interests from Israel's (somewhat) is an essential step in draining the terrorist swamps (as opposed to the neoconservatives and Paul Berman and Ken Pollack, who said that there was no connection between American non-participation in the peace process in Israel and an American invasion of Iraq). Maybe we don't know half the story (as the commenters who say that Israel is buoying the American high-tech economy protest to me all the time). Fine; show us we are wrong in the good old American way. Have the discussion openly.

Afraid of the leftwing insurgency against Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut Democratic Party, the pro-Israel lobby is rallying to the Senator's side, so reports the Forward.

This is further evidence for my political hobbyhorse: That the Israel lobby is one of the strongest constituencies behind the disastrous Iraq war and that the conflict between liberal pro-Israel hawks and populist antiwar left, is dividing the Democratic party, even if David Brooks and other MSM commentators are afraid to talk about it. Though they'll talk about Christian evangelists—people they don't know— till the cows come home.

This underlines the political significance of Walt & Mearsheimer: they may be intellectuals, but their work has had enormous political resonance. High noon.

I wonder if other readers of the Times Op-Ed page are as aware of the mighty struggle that seems to  read more »

In two weeks, Doubleday will ship copies of The K Street Gang: The Rise and Fall of the Republican M  read more »

The introduction of Playboy Magazine in Indonesia demonstrates an important point about the Islamic world. You'll see that the article notes that the magazine is fifty years behind the American edition in terms of what it shows—not even nipples.

The key word here is fifty. The Islamic world is clearly behind us in certain respects, the role of women and free speech most of all. But by and large these societies are third world countries, with third world economies; they're traditional cultures. There is something highly appealing about traditional cultures, but their attitudes on free speech and women's freedoms are just backward. We used to be a traditional culture before World War II shook the daylights out of us and IBM and Hugh Hefner and Betty Friedan got to work. The point is that Islam's attitudes on these questions are actually similar to our patriarchal attitudes 50 to 100 years ago. And they are likely now to change as ours did, and at a faster pace, given the internet...

Islam scares us. The fear was best expressed a couple months back on the News Hour on PBS by the redoubtable David Brooks, when he said that the Mohammed cartoons furor showed that Islam is still in the 12th century. Brooks is simply wrong (and reflecting Crusader-era paradigms). It's not eight centuries off, it's less than one. Sometimes the Other is not that other after all.

In which your humble Transom editor interrogates—via IM—media editor and Off the Record columnist Tom Scocca regarding the Thursday Styles section of the New York Times. Off the Record It is time to revive an old feature. The Transom Oh is it? Off the Record The frisky new Foer-tified Nuevo Republica is running a takedown of... THIZZURZZDAY STIZZYLEZZ The Transom Oh hell no. Off the Record Oh yes. The Transom WHERE'S MY NEWSPAPER? Off the Record TNR is still behind the curve, since as I reach for Thursday Styles, I am once again distracted by House & Home. The Transom Are you implying that H&H is the new ThurSty? Off the Record I am SAYING it. The Transom WHERE IS MY NEWSPAPER? Off the Record It's not the new ThurSty, it's the new STYLES OF THE TIMES. The Transom I found my newspaper. It was in the trash.  read more »

From Scuttling Toward Sanity, by David Brooks, The New York Times, April 6, 2006:

I had a horrifying experience in the House of Representatives last week. The House Immigration Caucus held a press conference so members could compete to see who was the biggest blithering idiot in the group.
"Anybody who votes for an amnesty bill deserves to be branded with a scarlet letter, 'A for Amnesty!' " one aspiring idiot thundered.

Or, as his friends call him, Congressman Steve King. Related: Senate OK likely with Bush behind guest-worker bill, by Gebe Martinez and Samantha Levine, The Houston Chronicle, April 1, 2006.

"And it's been a long time coming. It showed up in the early eighties as 'the Peter Pan Syndrome,' then mutated to the yuppie, which, let's face it, has had a pretty good run. Later, it took the form that David Brooks called 'bourgeois bohemians,' or bobos (as in Bobos in Paradise). Over in England, they're now calling them yindies (that's yuppie plus indie), and here, the term yupster (you can figure that out) has been gaining some traction of late. And as this movement evolves, something pivotal is happening. This cascade of pioneering immaturity is no longer a case of a generation's being stuck in its own youth. This generation is now, if you happen to be under 25, more interested in being stuck in your youth." - Up With Grups: The Ascendent Breed of Grown-Ups Who Are Redefining Adulthood, by Adam Sternbergh, New York, April 3, 2006.

"But glaciers, it turns out, can move with surprising speed, and so can nature. What few people reckoned on was that global climate systems are booby-trapped with tipping points and feedback loops, thresholds past which the slow creep of environmental decay gives way to sudden and self-perpetuating collapse. Pump enough CO2 into the sky, and that last part per million of greenhouse gas behaves like the 212th degree Fahrenheit that turns a pot of hot water into a plume of billowing steam. Melt enough Greenland ice, and you reach the point at which you're not simply dripping meltwater into the sea but dumping whole glaciers. By one recent measure, several Greenland ice sheets have doubled their rate of slide, and just last week the journal Science published a study suggesting that by the end of the century, the world could be locked in to an eventual rise in sea levels of as much as 20 ft. Nature, it seems, has finally got a bellyful of us." - Polar Ice Caps Are Melting Faster Than Ever... More And More Land Is Being Devastated By Drought... Rising Waters Are Drowning Low-Lying Communities... By Any Measure, Earth Is At ... The Tipping Point, by Jeffrey Kluger, Time, April 3, 2006.

How fortunate that the opinion pages of our mightiest newspapers are open to diverse viewpoints.  read more »

The puzzle is the size and flush capacity of the toilets in what Amnesty International calls "the gu  read more »

On a recent afternoon, the French celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy strolled around Manhatta  read more »

On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense , by David Brooks.  read more »

"David Brooks and I are very friendly," said New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus.  read more »

On West 43rd Street, the 2004 Pulitzer Prize announcement might as well have been delivered by the l  read more »

The alarming rise in liberal aggression is now the subject of regular bulletins from pundits of vary  read more »

In May of this year, The New York Times was in full meltdown over the Jayson Blair scandal.  read more »

Well now, let's bring on the Bobos and see if they can make it in the language.  read more »

It looks as if we shall have to speak of a Weekly Standard school of sociology.  read more »