David Brooks is a Hack

A Newly Minted Wide Awake or A False Convert?

Bobo Maximus, David Brooks.

Sometimes my grace fails me. Today is one of those days.

David Brooks’ ability to deliver the same drivel for 30 years is a testament to his abilities with a thesaurus and the unwillingness of his employers to recognize he’s incapable of an original thought or any semblance of connection to reality.

Who could forget the infamous 2023 Newark Airport $78 hamburger and fries and his comment, “This why Americans think the economy is terrible.” Don’t mind the scotch in the background, of course.

Early Sunday morning a dear friend of mine sent me Brooks’ latest edition of “I have to write 800 words about something: Oh, look, there’s a bandwagon!”

While I’ve long held him in low esteem, his half-baked contribution to ‘the resistance’ was risible even for him.

How did Mr. Brooks arrive at such a compelling and novel assessment of our current state? Where has he been the last 10 years or even the last five? What triggered his sudden worry for the future of the Republic? My guess? Clicks. He gets paid for people to read what he writes. He gets paid more to give paid speeches offering his ‘wisdom.’ He gets paid more than that to write books about said wisdom.

For decades now, Brooks has been the exemplar of a ‘do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do’ elitism that appeals only to people who read the New York Times Opinion Pages. Playing the alarmed mockingbird, Brooks can’t help but extol the virtues of academia, the wealthy, the insiders, and the establishment as the antidote to Trumpism.

First, like Brooks, all the sectors he mentions had years to decide they’d had enough of Trump and his goons. Time and again they pandered to, ducked away from, or straight paid him off. Expecting them to have any backbone now is like waiting for the sun to come up in the West.

Second, he’s made a career of denigrating, making fun of, and generally disliking those not of his Manhattan cocktail-party ilk. I don’t think he cares whether they’re Democrats or Republicans. If you’re not invited to Aspen Ideas, you don’t rate.

“Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named ‘Padrino’ and ‘Pomodor’ and ingredients like soppressata, capocollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.” - Classic Bobo!

You know why Donald Trump won in 2016 and 2024 (and almost did but DIDN’T in 2020?) Not because, regardless of race, religion, orientaiton or any of the other identifiers we use to divide rather than unite people. He won, and Bernie Sanders is drawing record crowds, because they’re sick of being told they’re less than. They’re sick of being looked down upon because they didn’t win the Zip Code Lottery. They’re sick of The American Dream being a sick joke, fit only for the few, but not the many. They’re sick of the bad guys getting away with it while they’re left holding the bill.

Brooks calls universities the “crown jewels of American life.” Academia has indeed led to some incredible developments and leaps forward. But he’s willfully blind that college students make up 5.5% of the population. As a nation only 38% of citizens have a bachelors degree, just over 11%. That leaves roughly another 300 million people on the outside looking in.

I’d like to ask Mr. Brooks how he expects to ‘turn some of his followers against him.’ Given his long disdain for those not of the Ivy League or Zabars, he doesn’t appear to be any person in touch with the realities of how we came to this place, save an obligatory sop to ‘the establishment[‘s] sins.

Brooks has enjoyed his perch at the New York Times for nearly 25 years, blowing with the breezes, riding the ebbs and flows of American life, all secure in the knowledge that he’ll have a steady paycheck and public persona as long as he wants one, while blind, deaf, and dumb to the idea that he is the guy who writes books about morality and teaches courses about ‘philosophical humility’ while failing to practice either himself.

Americans, all Americans neither want nor need more hypocrites. The ivory towers which Brooks so extols have failed all of us.

He closes his piece, no surprise here, by noting that he doesn’t personally go in for marches, demonstrations, or protests unless he’s covering them as a ‘journalist.’ This what makes Brooks the Bobo he is. Tell his readers what they MUST do, but take no responsibility, nor display any desire to do the work himself.

Some of us, like those of us at The Union, spend little time on high-minded tropes and most of our time on the ground, scheduling town hall meetings, community meet and greets, and getting involved whenever, where ever, and however we can.

Why is it that so many long-in-the-tooth arbiters of American culture and society, most of whom helped bring us to this place, can’t comprehend that for the country and the world to move forward, they’ll need to get out of the way?

That would take a lot of self-awareness. Fortunately for David Brooks that’s never a burden he’s had to carry.