RIP David Brooks

not really

to be fair, his soul is dead

maybe, someday

http://img2-cdn.newser.com/square-image/64121-20110331221226/david-brooks-gop-senator-groped-me.jpeg

http://i.imgur.com/tSGDs.png

He and E.J. Dionne on NPR are like a shrimp and goldfish floating in a thin gruel.

lol i am ded

I always knew David Brooks was an asshole ....

Bump this thread whenever he dies.

RIP, hell needed a bunch of cretinous demographic catchphrases.

David Brooks epitomizes the kind of career pundit who always seems at least a tiny bit guilty that he gets paid at all. I used to think Frum was like that, too, though I heard an interesting sign-off from him on NPR yesterday, where he announced he was abdicating his point/counterpart position because he didn't feel his views currently aligned with that of "the right."

Frum has more brains than Brooks.

frum is worth a million brookses, which says more about brooks than frum

lol xp

Bobos in mourning.

I only brought up Frum because he's another guy who practically sounds like hand wringing.

Frum's a smart feller but I've never quite forgiven him for:

http://gopbelgium.com/images/booklist/The%20Right%20Man%20by%20David%20Frum.gif

i hate david frum and the things he has historically stood for but at least he's not a total waste of space

Not the right thread, but since we're posting remarks by GOP buffoons here's Douthat's latest dispatch from fantasyland.

So Frum with some hand-wringing seemingly admitted yesterday that stimulus might have been necessary and now Douthat says stimulus would have been ok if it had been done by a President McCain (in a better way of course than the Dems did). Oy veh.

oh douchehatpaws

more like Ross don'tdouthat amirite

my fav douthat moment was when i saw him interviewed on tv and the interviewer read a wonkete quote that called him a something like a misogynist neck beard homunculus and his response was all 'well sometimes you make arguments that work and sometimes they kinda fall flat but you know' and it was like dawg they just called u a homunculus

lol

In November 2009 I saw Douthat on a Friday at noon in the gay portion of Dupont Circle with a man-friend.

haha wow: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/opinion/workers-of-the-world-unite.html

this turdball should write slashfic:

Occasionally you get a candidate, like Tim Pawlenty, who grew up working class. But he gets sucked up by the consultants, the donors and the professional party members and he ends up sounding like every other Republican. Other times a candidate will emerge who taps into a working-class vibe — Pat Buchanan, Mike Huckabee or Sarah Palin. But, so far, these have been flawed candidates who get buried under an avalanche of negative ads and brutal coverage.

This year, Romney is trying to establish some emotional bond with the working class by waging a hyperpatriotic campaign: I may be the son of a millionaire with a religion that makes you uncomfortable, but I love this country just like you. The strategy appears to be only a partial success.

Enter Rick Santorum.

The country doesn’t want an election that is Harvard Law versus Harvard Law.

wait, hasn't david brooks spent years arguing that this is a perfectly good thing??

If you took a working-class candidate from the right, like Santorum, and a working-class candidate from the left, like Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, and you found a few islands of common ground, you could win this election by a landslide.

Brown was born in Mansfield, Ohio, the son of Emily (née Campbell) and Charles Gailey Brown, M.D.[1] He was named after his maternal grandfather. He became an Eagle Scout in 1967. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Russian studies from Yale University in 1974. At Yale, he was in Davenport College, the same residential college as U.S. Presidents George H. W. and George W. Bush

and you found a few islands of common ground

Sometimes he sounds just like Tom Friedman

Has anyone read the Life Reports David Brooks has been running in the nytimes? It's a really good way to make yourself hopeless and depressed.

Otoh, you can probably say that about anything relating to David Brooks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/opinion/brooks-the-materialist-fallacy.html

had to physically restrain myself from ripping the skin off my face as I was reading this.

He really is such a dunce.

what the hell's he talking about

yogurt, I think

He is doing a little kid level response to the standard criticism of Murray's latest book

http://ussc.edu.au/blogs/David-Brooks-apparently-thinks-society-means-white-people

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/02/america-might-be-better-shape-david-brooks-thinks

more like Roast in Piss

Please take a number, if you would like to be the next columnist/blogger/economist etc. to critique David Brooks' latest pronouncement:

Here's Dean Baker

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-denounces-economics-is-biology-next

Brooks also has an interesting theory on the loss of skills. He tells readers:

"The American social fabric is now so depleted that even if manufacturing jobs miraculously came back we still would not be producing enough stable, skilled workers to fill them."

Five years ago we had two million more people employed in manufacturing than we do today. Has the social fabric become so depleted in this period that these people or others could now not fill these jobs if they came back? If Brooks really thinks that the ill effects of unemployment are that extreme he should be screaming for more stimulus in every column.

brooks recasts real world problems as a morality play in his role as conservative apologist: every david brooks column

tho often i guess they are not so much real world problems as fake made up problems

Today's helping, courtesy of a certain ilx alumnus: http://www.salon.com/2012/02/17/david_brooks_i_have_heard_of_jeremy_lin/singleton/

But even while grappling with the tension between religious values and contemporary cultural values, which is basically well within Brooks’ wheelhouse, he demonstrates a hilarious misunderstanding of sports, and what sports are “about,” because Mr. Brooks has been spending far too much time in his cloistered elite liberal media ivory tower munching on brie and arugula and not enough time among Real Americans in their “Sporting Taverns” watching “The Big Game” over a pint of mass-market domestic lager.

suspect beating up brooks when u need an easy column will outlast "analyzing" linsanity/linreality tbh

A few generations ago, teenagers went steady. But over the past decades, the dating relationship has been replaced by a more amorphous hook-up culture.

a few generations ago, it was legal to marry a 15 year old

a few generations ago, interracial marriage was against the law

a few generations ago, bestiality was legal in Florida

The half-century between 1912 and 1962 was a period of great wars and economic tumult but also of impressive social cohesion. Marriage rates were high. Community groups connected people across class

In the half-century between 1962 and the present, America has become more prosperous, peaceful and fair, but the social fabric has deteriorated. Social trust has plummeted. Society has segmented. The share of Americans born out of wedlock is now at 40 percent and rising.

Ah, the good ol' days..... If only married people had kids, we could have impressive social cohesion and a strong social fabric like we did before 1961, when only men could get decent jobs and we kept those darned negroes out of our good schools, restaurants, and bus seats....

beyond self-parody at this point

The Nation's headline lol: The Smug and Vacuous David Brooks Is Perfect for The Atlantic

i read that this morning, pretty great if you want somebody to tell you things you already know about DB in a satisfyingly derisive way

when did Ta-Nehisi Coates leave the Atlantic? He was their best writer, and there's no way in hell they would have published his comparisons of Gaza and the West Bank to Jim Crow

It's right wing in the sense that Kamala Harris is right wing

she is— anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves.

― a tv star not a dirty computer man (the table is the table), Friday, January 30, 2026 1:19 PM (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Vice President Kamala Harris served in the Senate between 2017 and 2021, providing a legislative record that allows her to be located along the left-right continuum that dominates legislative behavior in the Congress. Based on her roll call voting record, Harris is the second-most liberal Democratic senator to serve in the Senate in the 21st century.

How do we know? For more than 40 years, political scientists have used roll call votes cast by members of Congress, combined with advanced statistical methods, to reliably plot the location of members of the House and Senate on the Liberal-Conservative/Left-Right dimension along which most legislative politics take place.

...

Harris has the second-most liberal voting record. This makes her slightly less liberal than Elizaeth Warren, but more liberal than all of the remaining 107 Democrats, and significantly more liberal than all but a handful.

https://i.imgur.com/NsvKQIf.png

https://i.imgur.com/Boxuu2Z.png

And while it can be argued that the anti-woke stuff from Thomas Chatterton Williams, George Packer, etc., ultimately helps the right, that's not how it's being framed.

― Venus of Willendorf on Golf (jaymc), Friday, January 30, 2026 1:07 PM (thirty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i mean the anti woke shit is just plainly right wing indistinguishable from say something david brooks would write its framed as not that because thats how apologetics works

Byline history helps cover their asses too. George Packer was once a liberal.

not going to pretend that i follow the atlantic closely but a lot of what i do happen to see is right wing troll shit

I started noticing the trend when Conor Friedersdork joined and got heavy social media promotion.

The Atlantic was the first adult magazine for which my parents paid for my subscription. I read it well into the '90s. Thanks to all the booze ads my father used to call it The Alcoholic Monthly.

flopson, if you think “liberal” roll call votes mean anything to me, then you are sorely mistaken.

xp negroni origin story??

Nearly every story currently on their site is anti-Trump in a DLC way. They even have this new columnist named Hillary Rodham Clinton who seems pretty centrist.

as in, she’s still right wing. so is Elizabeth Warren

I think you're proving the point.

xpost Top-notch poetry and fiction back in those days (90s).

They even have this new columnist named Hillary Rodham Clinton who seems pretty centrist.

― "Bengla Desh" LP Deliveries To Meet Santa's Deadline (President Keyes), Friday, January 30, 2026 2:07 PM (forty-five seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

love her work at the saudi real estate conference

Top-notch poetry and fiction back in those days (90s).

― Come On, (Eazy)

My intro to T. Coragghesan Boyle as a story writer and, before I realized he was insufferable, Martin Amis as a critic

as in, she’s still right wing. so is Elizabeth Warren

― a tv star not a dirty computer man (the table is the table), Friday, January 30, 2026 1:07 PM (nineteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think you're proving the point.

― "Bengla Desh" LP Deliveries To Meet Santa's Deadline (President Keyes), Friday, January 30, 2026 1:08 PM (eighteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Keyes OTM. Words have meaning.

"Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren aren't as left-wing as I'd like them to be." Sure, fine. "Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren are right-wing." Come on, man.

Words only have meaning within their contexts, though. You are thinking within the context of the current US political spectrum, which I get, that's what the politicians discussed exist in. But within an international and historical political spectrum, it's pretty intuitive to call them right wing. Table also lives in the US I know, but his reference points are different.

xpost!

I think maybe there's a difference in the way we use these terms: Do "left" and "right" refer to a rigid set of specific ideological positions, or do they refer to relative positions within an always-shifting ideological spectrum?

Like, people say stuff like "If [Mainstream Democrat] lived in Europe, they'd be on the right." And that might be true. But they're in the U.S., so (IMO) they're on the left.

I don't think there are many countries where a politician espousing Elizabeth Warren's views would be considered on the right

i think we're all familiar enough with table's views by now to just let it slide when he says stuff like this

Oh, I know. What originally got me going was unperson calling The Atlantic right-wing. The thing is, I actually agree with Table saying that The Atlantic is Zionist and reactionary. (Or least I would agree that it can be.) But I still think it's center-left within the landscape of U.S. politics and culture publications.

It's also worth pointing out that in the European context "right wing" is actual Fascists and Nazis.

fair enough, but part of the reason why I do this bit is because calling out politicians, publications, etc *as what they actually are* vs what they exist as in the current context is, to me, part of shifting the perspective back to a reality that isn’t beholden to the inward-thinking, deeply conservative, and utterly fucked state of the US. don’t worry, i get that the landscape is as it is— but what i am always attempting to do is to reject that landscape as a false one.

left right axis is a pretty crude way to look at ideology, thing thats notable about it for me is how left field a lot of the atlantic is, who is this shit for it feel very disconnected from the concerns of people who arent paid by im assuming one weird billionaire

I think we'd have to have agreed-on definitions of "right-wing" and "left-wing" for them to mean anything consistent here. I got in an argument with a guy about terminology who ultimately turned out to say that anyone who accepts the idea of private ownership of property is right-wing. Which, I get the political philosophy argument there, I just think it becomes kinda meaningless. Because then you're defining yourself as "the left" as, I don't know, 2 percent of the population vs. the other 98 percent. And it leads to an unwillingness or inability to distinguish between e.g. Harris and Trump, who both certainly have objectionable beliefs and track records from my pov but also are very clearly Not The Same.

It's not like "right" or "left" are very useful terms anyway. I prefer conservative, liberal, nativist, racist, populist, socialist, democratic socialist, communist, etc etc.

I'd say The Atlantic is a globalist/neoliberal/"Classically Liberal" magazine for the college-educated bourgeoisie, and The New Yorker is a liberal/humanist/progressive journal for, uh, the college-educated bourgeoisie.

And that’s why I don’t really fuck with either of them! :-D

The New Yorker moreso, but I am more a NYRB/LRB guy if we’re talking mainstream pubs.

And that’s why I don’t really fuck with either of them! :-D

A reasonable choice!

The Atlantic gave Ta-Nehisi Coates his first big platform, and they ran his huge reparations article, so I think "right-wing" isn't a very useful term for it. On the other hand, I imagine The Atlantic would NOT run Coates writing about Palestine in 2026.

But also all that to say that David Brooks is kind a perfect fit there.

new yorker is funny cause its a lot of sleepy celebrity profiles and factoid laden dinner party conversation pieces punctuated by occasional very important reporting, all nicely written and edited of course

I think the difference in their appeal is that The New Yorker flatters its readers that they are sophisticated, and The Atlantic flatters them that they are serious.

The New Yorker sure does love its thorough profiles of awful Trump Cabinet secretaries.

thing thats notable about it for me is how left field a lot of the atlantic is, who is this shit for it feel very disconnected from the concerns of people who arent paid by im assuming one weird billionaire

Laurene Powell Jobs isn't *that* weird :)

i never check this thread but I got happy and thought he might have actually died with all this activity. Disappointing!

>> I think the difference in their appeal is that The New Yorker flatters its readers that they are sophisticated, and The Atlantic flatters them that they are serious.

This is a really good way of putting it.

Agreed! I'll have to borrow that.

just saw this:

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:m4vee7k6yhxwn3dru6vxs53q/bafkreifcfrzxzh2st44jrndy44zwtn4mmep3g3wkrokrvk466jbt6vfqfy@jpeg

https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/53978-understanding-americans-ideology

not sure wins again

It was funny that the biggest Not Sure was for Susan Collins lmfao

concerned

far is a pejorative

Collins is neither right nor left, but concerned about this message this sends

Cuomo's got something for everyone, very balanced portfolio

“It was funny that the biggest Not Sure was for Susan Collins lmfao”

hahaha i was literally scrolling to post that. the sphinx of the senate. let’s blast off her nose

I always forget about the Atlantic until I see people ragging on this one bad faith "just asking questions ..." writer.

based on this, we can determine that JiC learned the Atlantic existed four months ago, when Jenkins’ first byline appeared, and has not been able to maintain object permanence re: the publication’s previous 169-year existence since

https://i.postimg.cc/wMkTJ6F5/normch.jpg

RFK +20 on GWB for "far-right" responses is pathological

https://i.imgur.com/t5X8fOx.jpeg