The one they love: or do they? The liberals' David Brooks problem

National Review, August 23, 2004 by Ross Douthat

DAVID BROOKS is every liberal's favorite conservative--or so every liberal says. He is the New York Times's "loveable house conservative," according to Slate; "the in-house conservative pundit of Liberal America," says Philadelphia magazine; the "right's ambassador to the liberal establishment," writes Timothy Noah in the Washington Post; and the Left's "tame conservative, the right-winger without flecks of foam on the sides of his mouth," according to The Nation. CNN's Aaron Brown and Michael Kinsley (writing in the New York Times Book Review) have proffered similar phrases of fond condescension. But Nick Confessore recently topped them all, writing in The Washington Monthly that "to put things in Brooksian terms, he's a conservative, but the kind you'd bring home to discuss politics over $17-a-pound artisanal goat cheese and organic chardonnay bottled by third-generation French peasants."

Yet Brooks is also, according to his cluster of supposed admirers, "a snarky punchline artist ... who translates echt nerd appearance (glasses, toothy grin, blue blazer) and intellectual bearing into journalistic credibility" (Philadelphia)--despite lacking "consistency and intellectual chops" (Salon). At his best, he's "overextended and underinspired" (Noah). At his worst, he's guilty of "embarrassing displays of intellectual obedience," behaving like an "overzealous junior press secretary ham-handedly spinning bad news," or "a second-rate talk-radio host playing tough guy" (Confessore). Oh, and he's a cheat and coward, because he "helped set the table for the wars on terror and Iraq but ducks from their consequences ..." (Slate).

The official justification for this raft of attacks is the publication of On Paradise Drive, Brooks's latest foray into his favored terrain of gentle social satire. On Paradise Drive follows on the very successful heels of Bobos in Paradise, his 2000 dissection of upper-middle-class mores, and some of the recent anti-Brooksian fervor is readily explained by second-book backlash, the mix of envy and unreasonable expectations that drives critics to overpan sophomore efforts.

But only some of it. A few of Brooks's critics--namely Kinsley and Noah--have confined themselves to taking stilettos to On Paradise Drive itself (which is, admittedly, a deeply uneven effort). But the rest have used the book as a prop in a larger assault on Brooks--on his ideas, his skill as a columnist, even his journalistic integrity. For these critics, Brooks isn't just guilty of producing a work that falls short of his previous standards. He's guilty of being a hack.

He's a hack because he can't cope intellectually with the Iraq war, claims Slate's David Plotz, who argues that Brooks has blood on his hands and can't admit it, can't even muster the guts to travel to Iraq to see what his neocon follies "look like on the ground."

He's a hack because he lies and exaggerates, according to Sasha Issenberg of Philadelphia, who humorlessly fact-checks the breezy generalizations in Brooks's 2001 Atlantic Monthly cover story on Red and Blue America and concludes with absurd pomposity that Brooks "satisfies the features desk's appetite for scholarly authority in much the same way that Jayson Blair fed the newsroom's compulsion for scoops."

But it's Nick Confessore's Washington Monthly cover story that best captures the emerging liberal narrative about Brooks, which is that he's second-rate, yes, but only some of the time. "There is Brooks the Journalist," Confessore explains, "and there is Brooks the Hack." The former is the author of Bobos in Paradise, the "keen observer" liberals love to say they love. The latter can barely keep his inner troglodyte in check: He's a graduate of the "Wall Street Journal's famously kooky and fact-challenged editorial page" who is "willing to carry water for his political allies" and "indulges in predictable--and frequently dishonest--caricatures of Democrats."

The absurdity of this line of argument should be self-evident. Brooks may have his hackish moments, but compared with much of his competition in the Times's op-ed stable--not to mention the editorial page's shrill Upper West Side echo chamber--Brooks is the soul of decency, fairness, and journalistic excellence.

But to complain of unfairness in these critiques is to miss what's really going on here, namely, the appalled discovery by a host of liberal commentators that the conservative they adored when he was archly limning meritocratic manners is, well, a conservative.

This wasn't supposed to be such a shock. Brooks's appointment to the Times op-ed page was the latest (and longest-overdue) step in the conservative movement's march toward intellectual respectability, toward a recognition that right-wing thought can be more than a series of "irritable mental gestures," in Lionel Trilling's famous phrase.

But it turns out that such recognition, while real, only extends so far--to the idea of conservative ideas, you might say, and not to the ideas themselves. Oddly enough, it's Brooks-basher Laura Miller (reviewing On Paradise Drive in Salon) who nails what's happening here. "Although they won't admit it," she writes, "most liberals secretly believe that no one sensible and decent could ever seriously entertain conservative ideas, and therefore no one could ever fulfill the platonic role of Acceptable Conservative." So when a conservative as manifestly sensible and decent as Brooks comes along, his liberal fans are forced to take the Confessore approach, insisting that they love only his better half--the Jekyll and not the right-wing Hyde, the Journalist and not the Hack.