Brooks versus Brooks

Here’s a thought. Who are the Conservative anti-imperialists? After all, the British (and before them, other Europeans) capturing and conquering most of the world should be most unconservative…assuming that society is ‘an organism … and that successful government institutions grow gradually from each nation’s unique network of moral and social restraints.’

So Conservatives should be vociferously anti-imperialist yes? After all there is nothing more radical and ‘top down’ and anti-‘organic’ and ‘radical’ than conquering most of the world and imposing alien sociopolitical forms on it yes?

And yes I know about Adam Smith, and what (some) 18th century thinkers said. I mean after that. In the 19th and 20th centuries.

Hey, Brooks “appreciate[s] the crooked timber of humanity”! For as you know, of that material nothing straight was ever made. Damn straight (so to speak)!

First, Brooks was hired as a Republican spokesman. If he ever were to stray far from the Republican path, there would be screams of anger. Brooks knew this when he was hired; the Times was protecting its right flank. He actually got worse when he became the Times’s Republican rep, as compared to what he had been as an independent conservative.

Functionally he is only needed to shave off a smidgen of the Democrats’ moderate support by making the Republican position seem minimally palatable to a few educated non-winger independents. So he can wander off the reservaton now and then on specific issues (like “moderate” Republican Senators) as long as he shows up at crunch time, which he always does. When the chips are down he knows what to say.

Yes, I do believe that the paranoid narrative is the most reasonable in this case.

The good DB writes platitudes wrapped in banalities the bad DB spreads garlands of manure over the rusty lies with which Bush has burdened us.

“it would obviously have been rather more helpful if he had said it, say, back in 2004, when it might conceivably have helped make a difference.”

This seems to suppose that there is someone who gives a damn what Mr. Brooks says. I’ve met those who actually read MoDo, some who are willing to forget Frank Rich’s contributions to the 2000 election, but none who bother with this nattering clown. Clearly he will grace the Times until his dotage, as did Safire before him, but that is not an argument for a large readership.

There’s also the business of his reference to Lincoln as a creedal Republican. He’s been down that road before —

In short, Republicans seem to have gone from believing that culture is nothing, to believing that culture is everything — from idealism to fatalism in the blink of an eye.

Recently, I’ve spilled a lot of ink stressing the importance of culture as we think about poverty, development and foreign affairs. But it’s dismaying to see so many Republicans veer overboard into a vulgarized version of Huntingtonist cultural determinism.

European conservatives from Edmund Burke to Michael Oakeshott usefully remind us of the power of culture and tradition. But American conservatives — from Hamilton to Reagan — have never taken that path precisely because they believe in the power of the American creed, precisely because they have an Enlightenment faith in the power of reason to change minds.

Whether in Iraq or the barrio, history is not a prison. Culture shapes people, but cultures are changeable.

Fortunately, there is a great Republican leader who understood the balance between culture and creed: Abraham Lincoln. In this spring of Republican discontent, his approach and governing method will make a good subject for a future column.

He mustn’t see a Lincoln in the current pool of Republican presidential candidates.

Good Brooks is thoughtful and interesting – compared to what? I’ve never seen anything by him that wasn’t better than pleasant transparent hackery. Imagine what a Sebastian Holsclaw or even John Cole would do with such a platform.

You don’t suppose Brooks’ slow hypocritical about-face has something to do with the American zeitgeist being increasingly seriously and suspiciously perturbed about the whole Iraq thing?
And if say he really was all up on the war as prosecuted but say not for the reasons given at the time, wouldn’t Brooks almost have to be saying what he’s saying? Given that Iraq-as-danger-to-the-world, even the world of its neighbors, is pretty much a done deal now, why waste time and resources opposing that perplexed and suspicious potential/actual readership? Agree with them, sort of.
The American people are past convincing the invasion of Iraq was a good thing.
The real political power he works with and for isn’t done yet by any means. As strange as it looks in hindsight the juggernaut of manipulation Brooks shills for has been virtually undefeated in achieving its surmisable goals, including “an unprincipled grab for strategic advantage” in both the US and the Middle East.
He’s “awful: dishonest and stupid” yet he represents the desired shape of public opinion according to the unprincipled holders of that strategic advantage. That makes his journalism significant at least, even if it remains execrable.
It’s definitely a worthwhile activity to expose and denounce his hypocrisy and dishonesty, but as John Emerson says above the paranoid narrative maps out more than reasonably now. It’s an hypocrisy in service to something, and as profoundly self-interested as David Brooks must be the purpose of his convenient and timely volte face is more aptly linked to something bigger than the Republicans – as too the Democrats illustrate they’ve learned, most of them, quite well.

After The Times reopened their columnists’ vaults, I for some reason elected to bravely reread a bunch of Brooks’ old columns. I thought he was bad then, but he’s way worse with even a smidge of hindsight. He’s pretty much always been a poor man’s George F. Will, the guy who gives pseudo-intellectuals a bad name.

And speaking of Poor Man and Brooks and rereading shit, now would be as good a time as any to enjoy this.

A lot of conservatives are repositioning themselves in the expectation of (probably) a Democratic President and (possibly) a permanently weakened Republican Party. They were willing to ride the bandwagon, but not to go down with the ship. People have been saying “Bush is really a liberal” for about two years already.

Brookishness, v. To conflate two disciplines at a superficial level so that dinner party conversations could continue in the spurious belief that matters of moment were being discussed while the port was passed.

The journalistic imperative to constantly crank out “product” is in complicity with the dilletantish mind. It has to be admitted that Brooks is just one of many pundits (and politicians) across the ideological spectrum who have minimal conceptual grip on the political ideologies they wear as badges of honour.

It’s a sign of the times that one begins with policy and then one moves backwards trying to infer high-level principles. Brooks so easily invokes the titans “Burke to Oakeshott to Hayek” in support of a conservative idiom. These thinkers are conservative in a highly qualified and supposedly paradoxical sense: they are conservative insofar as they are defenders of liberality.
Conservatism denotes a diverse range of ideas that are:

a) historically specific;

b) indexical, and;
c) generic

a) Conservatism can be feudal, aristocratic, agrarian, ecclesiastical, papalist, monarchist, authoritarian – only tenuously united their reaction to the French Revolution.

b) Indexical conservatism means that conservatism can be relative to a context – in this sense one could be a conservative in the former Soviet Union by virtue of one wishing to preserve an existing order albeit communist.

c) Generic conservatism turns on five often overlapping features:

– scepticism, the rejection of the politics of ideals, limited government, reliance on tradition, and an organic view of the individual’s relationship to society.

In light of a-c, conservatism (as all ideologies) will not be amenable to pinning down through necessary and sufficient conditions. Furthermore, this is complicated in that there is a lot more fluidity between ideologies than is commonly acknowledged.

Brooks is just a babbling brook.

Like Heraclitus said, in a tortured way, brooks/rivers always contradict themselves. David Brooks is living up to this spirit, torturing us with each utterance he makes.

Have you ever _really_ learned something from Brooks, Henry? I haven’t read him much in a long time, but that’s because when I did I found him, at the best, to be a mix of banality and bullshit. So, I don’t read him anymore. If someone asks, “did you read David Brooks?” I replay, “why would I want to? He never makes you smarter and often is telling a lie of some sort.” It seems to me that the best thing one can do is not so much try to reply to his lies (since he pretty clearly doesn’t care about truth) but rather to convince people that he’s just not worth reading. The best way to do that is to not read him and explain to others why not.

When I read Brooks’s column (online), I googled “Brooks” and “Iraq” and “2003” and came up with a column that suggested that if we stayed the course in Iraq, democracy would flourish, unite the country and remake the Middle East. Oh, and, as they say, a pony.

I like this one from November 4, 2003 because it also has a Friedman unit in it:

Somehow, over the next six months, until the Iraqis are capable of their own defense, the Bush administration is going to have to remind us again and again that Iraq is the Battle of Midway in the war on terror, the crucial turning point where either we will crush the terrorists’ spirit or they will crush ours.
The president will have to remind us that we live in a fallen world, that we have to take morally hazardous action if we are to defeat the killers who confront us. It is our responsibility to not walk away. It is our responsibility to recognize the dark realities of human nature, while still preserving our idealistic faith in a better Middle East.

Good versus evil, with a identifiable turning point. How Burkean. I went to write a letter to the editor, and then went, “Oh, fuck it.”

A friendly reminder from that Poor Man piece, “The Continuing Declilne of David Brooks: An Amateur Anthropologist’s Analysis,” cited above:

What you probably didn’t realize is that this post is very likely anti-Semitic, at least judging by the rather broadened definition offered up by Brooks in his latest piece in the Times “Neo-Conservatives Don’t Exist, And/Or Are A Code Word For ‘The Jews’”. Due to the yeoman’s work done by Bob Somerby, Josh Marshall, and many, many, others, I am spared the task of having to explain why this is a stupid thing to say. This is just as well, as anyone who doesn’t know this without being told is probably not really worth talking to…
For in the final analysis, the sad decline of David Brooks is society’s fault – yours and mine – for tolerating this nonsense for all this time. Because when you come right down to it, we wrote that George W. Bush is “too honest”, that it’s a good thing we didn’t plan for the aftermath of the war, and we have just accused ourselves of anti-Semitism for not agreeing with Dick Cheney or something.

There’s a bunch of links in there too. If you want to read something that is as keenly relevant and precient now as it was then (i.e., the precise opposite of Brooks’ dogshit), then check it out.

manwithoutqualities wrote:

Brookishness, v. To conflate two disciplines at a superficial level so that dinner party conversations could continue in the spurious belief that matters of moment were being discussed while the port was passed.

With all due respect:

1. Shouldn’t the spelling be “Brooksishness?”

2. Isn’t “Brook[s]ishness” a noun, rather than a verb?

A. Brooks (proper noun)
B. Brooksish (adjective; (e.g.) resembling or characteristic of Brooks)
C. Brooksishness (noun; (e.g.) the state or quality of being Brooksish)

Examples: fool, foolish, foolishness; child, childish, childishness.

http://www.msu.edu/~defores1/gre/sufx/gre_suffx.htm

If these observations are correct, a verb is needed to fit your definition.

Your comment is excellent, in my view.

If you think that first exceprt was good Brooks, obviously true even, boy does my respect for you drop. It has nothing whatsoever to do with anything that’s going now, it sounds smart but is semantically meaningless and all it does is fill space. It’s a distraction from what really mattters.

Harry Frankfurt’s book could have been titled On Brookshit.