Last month, the trade publication Variety was boosting the PBS duo of Jonathan Capehart and David Brooks by describing them as "one progressive and one conservative." That's not true at all.
In the upcoming May edition of The Atlantic magazine, Brooks again cast aside his conservative coloring in a harsh 4,500-word epithet of an essay, “Everything We Once Believed In.”
The online headline deck was more ominous: “I Should Have Seen This Coming -- When I joined the conservative movement in the 1980s, there were two types of people: those who cared earnestly about ideas, and those who wanted only to shock the left. The reactionary fringe has won.”
Isn’t “fringe” an odd word for Donald Trump, someone who not only won the presidency via electoral vote twice but won the popular vote last time out?
Brooks accused Trump of behaving “vilely…toward our friends in Canada and Mexico, toward our friends in Europe" while joining "the rest of the world’s authoritarians" like Russian President Vladimir Putin on an "axis of ruthlessness." He proclaimed "Maybe the best description for what I’m feeling is moral shame: To watch the loss of your nation’s honor is embarrassing and painful."
Whatever sincere points Brooks lands get lost in his self-absorbed congratulation.
The pathetic thing is that I didn’t see this coming even though I’ve been living around these people my whole adult life. I joined the conservative movement in the 1980s, when I worked in turn at National Review, The Washington Times, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page.
There were two kinds of people in our movement back then, the conservatives and the reactionaries. We conservatives earnestly read Milton Friedman, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, and Edmund Burke. The reactionaries just wanted to shock the left. We conservatives oriented our lives around writing for intellectual magazines; the reactionaries were attracted to TV and radio. We were on the political right but had many liberal friends; they had contempt for anyone not on the anti-establishment right. They were not pro-conservative -- they were anti-left. I have come to appreciate that this is an important difference.
“Damn that television and radio!” cries Brooks -- while ostensibly representing the right, on publicly funded TV (and for a number of years as a Friday pundit on NPR). It's an easy swipe to trash Rush Limbaugh or Mark Levin as anti-intellectual. It's also not true. As if they were not "pro-conservative"??
Brooks takes a gentle, apologetic tone on the PBS News Hour in his Friday evening sparring with fiery leftist partisan Jonathan Capehart, and his contempt for the main swath of today’s Republican Party was evident in his commentary during 2024’s RNC and DNC conventions, where he was often indistinguishable from Capehart. But Brooks came out spitting in the pages of The Atlantic, calling out some well-known conservative pundits as “third-rate” intellectuals
Even then I was appalled. Apartheid was evil, and worth opposing. A nighttime raid with sledgehammers seemed more Gestapo than Burkean. But conservative intellectuals didn’t take this seriously enough. In large part, I think this was because we looked down on the Dartmouth Review mafia, whose members had included Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza. Their intellectual standards were so obviously third-rate. I don’t know how to put this politely, but they just seemed creepy -- nakedly ambitious in a way that I thought would destroy them in the end.
Does Laura Ingraham look "destroyed" to anyone? Then he made a "centrist" stipulation:
Of course, the left made it easy for them. The left really did purge conservatives from universities and other cultural power centers. The left really did valorize a “meritocratic” caste system that privileged the children of the affluent and screwed the working class. The left really did pontificate to their unenlightened moral inferiors on everything from gender to the environment. The left really did create a stifling orthodoxy that stamped out dissent. If you tell half the country that their voices don’t matter, then the voiceless are going to flip over the table.
Keep in mind, as you read this string of pungent insults, that Brooks is considered the conservative voice on the tax-funded PBS News Hour. The "stifling orthodoxy" should look in the mirror -- just as it should on Washington Week With The Atlantic!
Trumpian nihilism has eviscerated conservatism….Trumpism trashes moral norms in every direction, riding forward on a tide of adultery, abuse, cruelty, immaturity, grift, and corruption….How does this end? Will anyone on the right finally stand up to the Trumpian onslaught? Will our institutions withstand the nihilist assault? Is America on the verge of ruin?.…Yes, we have reached a point of traumatic rupture. A demagogue has come to power and is ripping everything down…
Not that there haven’t been previous hints; Brooks wrote “Confessions of a Republican Exile” for The Atlantic last year, in which he confessed: "So these days I find myself rooting for the Democrats about 70 percent of the time….I think of myself as a moderate or conservative Democrat."
Watch for Brooks on an upcoming Friday edition of PBS News Hour, where he will again cosplay conservative pundit.
