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Home » Blogs » Tim Graham's blog
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Newsweek Profile of David Brooks Reveals His Snooty Disdain For Conservatives, Washington

By Tim Graham | March 05, 2011 | 18:24

A  A
Tim Graham's picture

The March 7 Newsweek (NewsBeast) features an article titled "David Brooks Wants to Be Friends," but there's more bridge-burning than friend-making in this interview with James Atlas. Of course, he came up in Washington through conservative opinion journalism from the National Review, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and The Weekly Standard, but "something has changed." Conservatives are now more uncivil. Well, either that -- or his paychecks are now signed by PBS, NPR, and The New York Times:

But Brooks insists that something has changed in the past decade. Political discourse had grown coarse, he laments. Gone is the civilized era when “you had liberals and conservatives instead of Republicans and Democrats,” a time “before the parties devolved into teams,” each espousing its own “values” in voices grown increasingly shrill. For a high-profile journalist, he seems eager to keep his head down—it’s not a posture easy to maintain when he’s on TV every Friday night and his byline appears twice a week on the op-ed page of The New York Times.

“One of the toughest things about being a columnist is that people hate you,” he said. Hate is perhaps too strong a word; it’s not a sentiment Brooks tends to evoke in people. On the contrary, his balanced views are seen as strengths, not weaknesses.

Atlas and his Newsweek editors seem to think there's no reason for conflict when a former conservative decides to start defending the liberal media instead of criticizing them. In 2000, Newsweek sought out one David Brooks to deny conservatives had a liberal media-bias problem: ""The movement consciousness is based on the idea that we are a band of brave, beleaguered souls under perpetual assault from the liberal mainstream media. These people detest McCain because liberals don't hate him." 

In 2009, NPR All Things Considered anchor Robert Siegel asked Brooks if he, as a moderate, was comfortable with Obama: “Are you getting more or less comfortable or more or less moderate?” Brooks replied candidly: “I'm getting less comfortable. I don't know about my gross ideological disposition these days.” In all of his media appearances, Brooks is allegedly there to provide conservative balance, but he doesn't define himself as anything:

“What’s interesting about David is the part that’s not on the right or the left,” says the liberal author Paul Berman. “He’s a social critic, with a talent for wry, fond criticism of the American bourgeoisie.” But he lacks “a kind of indignation,” Berman notes. He’s insufficiently shrill for Fox News, talk radio, and the conservative welfare state promoted by Washington think tanks—what the writer Andrew Sullivan refers to as “the financial-industrial complex.”

Atlas never talks to actual conservatives in this piece -- a sure sign you're reading the liberal media. Instead, the royal "we" of conservatism is handed off to Andrew Sullivan, the gay-rights activist who's voted for Democrats in the last two elections and stood out in 2008 for making the bizarre claim that Sarah Palin's newest child isn't actually hers. (But then, Newsweek has picked up Sullivan's blog, despite journalistic embarrassments like this. That should stop them from ever complaining about "birthers" again.) It continued:

“He’s in a very tough spot, like a lot of people on the right,” Sullivan observes. “We’ve all had to grapple with some difficult events, like the catastrophe of Iraq and the fiscal crisis, the seeds of which were planted in the Bush administration. David isn’t institutionally bound to the party line. He has to prove to the right that he’s not a New York Times liberal and to the New York Times liberals that he’s not a certified neocon. So why not go study neuroscience?”

There’s no denying that Brooks has fewer conservative friends than he once did. Their main complaint is that he has become too outspoken about the stridency of the Republican Party. He notoriously called Sarah Palin “a joke” (“I regret that now,” he says), and he no longer supports the war in Iraq, positions that have earned him enmity among many on the right. Brooks himself claims to be beyond such distinctions, and identifies himself as a Hamiltonian conservative—meaning that he believes in both strong government and individual liberty. He’s jettisoned “the Milton Friedman idea: that if you get government [to go] away you’ll have spontaneous order.” As for his old conservative colleagues, “I’m not one of the gang anymore. They’re not as much a part of my social life as they once were.”

Atlas just flat gets this one wrong. He blatantly ignores Brooks carrying the banner of McCain in 2000 as he suggested the conservative GOP base was the "Death Star." More egregiously, he blatantly ignores Brooks gushing effusively over Barack Obama, that he has the "same strain of pessimistic optimism" as Lincoln and Martin Luther King, not to mention his "untroubled self-confidence" (or his being impressed by Obama's "perfectly creased pant," a strange new qualification for national office).

His attention seems elsewhere. In Brooks’s view, Washington is obsessed with superficialities. “Our explanation of why we live the way we do is all on the surface,” he says. “Our policies have been shaped by shallow views of human nature. In Iraq, we tried to change the society without understanding it and got it wrong.” He’s openly derisive about the culture of Washington: “This is the most emotionally avoidant city in America.”

Brooks has always been more of a public intellectual than a pundit, driven by genuine curiosity about human beings and the world. The journalist Reihan Salam, Brooks’s first assistant at the Times, recalls his former employer as “an unusual, thoughtful guy, eager to listen. He wasn’t always scanning the room for the most famous person.” The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, whose research Brooks draws upon in The Social Animal, also praises him as “a great listener. He was there [in Damasio’s lab at USC] to learn.”

Writing The Social Animal has been an exhilarating journey. “The scientists I’ve spent the last three years talking to are truth seekers, unlike people [in Washington].

About the Author

Tim Graham is Director of Media Analysis at the Media Research Center. Click here to follow Tim Graham on Twitter.
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Comments

What has changed?

Submitted by Ashrak on Sat, 03/05/2011 - 6:40pm.

The silent majority isn't just remaining silent anymore.

Folks are no longer scared of the cards long used to force them into sumbission.

In other words, people have absolutely "had it up to here" with pollitically correct nonsense and are making endroads into replacing that with actual correctness.

Person A says that 1+1=2

Person B says that 1+1=4

Person C says there must be "balance" in "compromise" and declares that 1+1=3.

Mainstream media champions person C as articulate, centrist, pragmatic and then hails them as a balanced political savior.

That an individual right exists requires that some policy positions be removed from the table of debate.
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Which fits best?

Submitted by Jerry Mack on Sat, 03/05/2011 - 8:58pm.

Rodney King: Can't we all just get along or Sinatra: I did it my way! Needless to say Brooks is only considered a conservative by the Lamers.

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You're make about 100 X's

Submitted by ozarkian on Sun, 03/06/2011 - 1:14am.

You're make about 100 X's more sense than David Brooks ever did.

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Criticism

Submitted by KC Mulville on Sat, 03/05/2011 - 6:47pm.

David Brooks has carved out a career trying to give criticism to conservatives. Fair enough. Everyone needs a little criticism. It always helps to hear someone say, "wait a minute ..."

  • Mark Finkelstein did it to me the other day. I made a comment about a story where abortion advocates were trying to imagine that fetuses were OK with being aborted. In my answer, I focused on the silliness of inventing testimony, and Finkelstein pointed out that the pro-lifers were doing the same thing. I wasted a few egotistiscal minutes trying to come up with an answer ... and eventually I just admitted that Mark was right and I should just keep my mouth shut and leave it alone. 

The difference, though, is that Finkelstein was reacting to something that happened naturally. David Brooks, on the other hand, criticizes conservatives as part of his job. 

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Sullivan not US citizen

Submitted by SMGalbraith on Sat, 03/05/2011 - 6:50pm.

"to Andrew Sullivan, the gay-rights activist who's voted for Democrats in the last two elections  "

Correction: Andrew Sullivan is a British-citizen and not an American and, thus, he's not voted in any US election.

It's very true that he has stated that he would have voted for Kerry and Obama had he been eligible.

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If only-

Submitted by Ashrak on Sat, 03/05/2011 - 7:07pm.

Non-Citizens vote in every election.

Just sayin'

That an individual right exists requires that some policy positions be removed from the table of debate.
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We'll be friends when

Submitted by Van Halen on Sat, 03/05/2011 - 7:09pm.

We'll be friends when Liberals admit that after 27 months of Obama and his policies, they

- ruined the economy

- ruined our foreign policy

- ruined their own Democrat Party with a 700+ seat loss

- have done nothing while gas/food/clothing prices skyrocket

- partied at the White House with corporate millionaire Democrat pals while the Middle East burns

- gave us their crown jewel - Obamacare - a plan so bad that it has been declared unconstitutional and over half the states are suing to get out of it

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and promoted islam while

Submitted by ozarkian on Sun, 03/06/2011 - 1:19am.

and promoted islam while denigrating America every chance he got, up to and including lying about history and saying that muslims helped found America.  

(And described the middle class as "waving tea bags around" when "they ought to be thanking me.:

He's the most unlikeable president in my lifetime. (along with everything else you wrote.)

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He seems like...

Submitted by Tuari on Sat, 03/05/2011 - 7:24pm.

He seems like the type of guy that would sell out his own mother for a paycheck. Conservatives don't need that type of person.

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I can sum up David Brooks and

Submitted by Miss_Me_Yet on Sat, 03/05/2011 - 8:02pm.

I can sum up David Brooks and his identity crisis in two short words.....' has been '.

Liberals ... we can't live with them, they couldn't survive without us ...

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No more liberals and conservatives?

Submitted by T D on Sat, 03/05/2011 - 8:10pm.

People continue to talk about (and against) conservatives all the time (as Newsbusters so often notes), but not so much about liberals.  Could be because so few claim the liberal mantle now associated with failed policies.  Former liberals are busy claiming to be Democrats, Progressives, or even, like President Obama, Reaganesque (minus the conservatism).

And, of course, the Tea Party as a fiscally conservative force stands in stark contrast to the supposed devolution of everything to Democrat and Republican.  Poor David Brooks seems not to have noticed that it's the liberals who have disbanded their team.

Nicely done, Tim.

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 Political discourse has

Submitted by inquiringmind on Sat, 03/05/2011 - 8:18pm.

 Political discourse has grown course over the last decade?!?   Maybe David wasn't paying attention during the Reagan years but the libs were brutal.

Sam Donaldson was simply an a$$.

 

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Actually nothing has changed

Submitted by ArrowSmith on Sat, 03/05/2011 - 8:24pm.

Back in the Civil War Lincoln's enemies protrayed him as an ape in cartoons.

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Yes, but did they wear

Submitted by ozarkian on Sun, 03/06/2011 - 1:28am.

Yes, but did they wear t-shirts reading "Abe Lincoln is a c***"?

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If you are a RINO...

Submitted by gopcongress on Sat, 03/05/2011 - 10:26pm.

If you are a moderate or RINO, you are closer to being a communist than a conservative or a libertarian. Pure and simple.

"The news and truth are not the same thing." -Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER

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To clarify,

Submitted by UpNorth on Sat, 03/05/2011 - 11:37pm.

"his balanced views are seen as strengths, not weaknesses",
means that Brooks has no views, unless it's what he's told, or what he hears someone else say.  "Balance" is not taking a stand, it's just going along to see which way the wind is blowing, then following along.  Sounds a lot like what his favorite POTUS does. 


 
To re-elect Obama would be like the Titanic backing up and hitting the iceberg again.
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Is David Brooks doing drugs

Submitted by eaglewingz08 on Sat, 03/05/2011 - 11:38pm.

Is David Brooks doing drugs with Charlie Sheen? Things are more uncivil now than they once were? Does he even remember the Bork Hearings, the Clarence Thomas Hearings, the incessant vituperation of Reagan? Those were more civil times? Yeah, I guess they were because conservatives didn't have any media outlets to combat these vicious slurs by the liberals, save possibly for the Establishment WSJ and National Review. But those outlets were easily ignored by the leftwing media. Now that conservatives are able to fight back, all of a sudden that's a horror to our Ms.Brooks. He is a spineless idiot and his only claim to readership is that he can be portrayed by the libtard media as a 'conservative' bashing conservative and republican policies. Same as K.Parker and McCain.

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David Brookths

Submitted by Texndoc on Sun, 03/06/2011 - 10:45am.

I've never seen an interview with him where it looked like he wasn't wearing pink-frosted lipstick.

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Shun them

Submitted by Student1776 on Mon, 03/07/2011 - 7:11pm.

The creeps like Brooks, Parker, and Scarborough who basically once were marginally conservative and now grow wealthy slagging true principled Conservatives are scum who should just be shunned. Don't watch them, talk to them, interact with them socially or professionally - just let them slowly involute to the pond scum they are.

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