Sweet Neo Cons

"Today, roughly 70 percent of Americans say they don't believe in the American dream. That loss of faith is like a giant bomb detonated in the middle of our society, robbing us of our central, unifying vision. Absent that shared vision of possibility, people revert to a tribal, us-versus-them morality. If the ghosts of the original neocons have anything to tell us about specific policy choices, it's that we need to do what we can to expand social mobility and restore faith in the American dream."

David Brooks at The Atlantic argues that "[t]he neocons were right."

While Chris Ryan at Tangentially Speaking asks, "Just How Cynical is David Brooks?"

Demeritocracy

"If we sort people only by superior intelligence, we're sorting people by a quality few possess; we’re inevitably creating a stratified, elitist society. We want a society run by people who are smart, yes, but who are also wise, perceptive, curious, caring, resilient, and committed to the common good. If we can figure out how to select for people's motivation to grow and learn across their whole lifespan, then we are sorting people by a quality that is more democratically distributed, a quality that people can control and develop, and we will end up with a fairer and more mobile society."

In a 2024 Atlantic article, David Brooks writes about "How the Ivy League Broke America."

While at The Hill, Jenna Robinson argues that "[i]t's well past time to bring back standardized testing" in college admissions.

"Trumpism Has Become a Form of Nihilism That Is Devouring Everything in Its Path"

"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."

The News Talkers runs David Brooks's essay in The Atlantic called, "I Should Have Seen It Coming."

"No Longer the Vessel Into Which People Can Pour Their Discontent with the Status Quo"

"Many voters were desperate for a straightforward alternative to what they saw as the stale establishmentarian liberalism of the Biden-Harris administration. So they projected its opposite, as they understood it, onto their only other viable option—and Trump, ever attuned to the needs of his audience, was more than happy to humor their hopes. But in actuality, the 2024 election was not a traditional binary choice between two coherently opposed political alternatives, the electoral equivalent of the Yankees versus the Red Sox. It was the Yankees versus a flaming tennis ball launched into orbit by a Tesla rocket—a choice not between two teams but between completely different sports. Many voters who thought they knew the rules to the game and would turn out the winners are now discovering that they didn't and won't."

Yair Rosenberg at The Atlantic discusses "[t]he Trump Backers Who Have Buyer's Remorse."

Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg at The Nation give advice regarding "How to Organize Our Way Out of the Trump-Musk Putsch."

At Newsweek, Ross Rosenfeld writes that "Trump Is Creating a Deep State."

David Brooks at The New York Times asserts that Trump "campaigns as a populist, but once he has power, he is the betrayer of populism."

And Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic argues that "[a] president who maintains that the law means whatever he wants it to mean is a constitutional crisis."

Götterdämmerung

"I know Trump voters told pollsters that it was all about the economy, and maybe it was. Eggs and milk are higher. I'm not disputing that, but people like me thought our fellow Americans recognized that the cause of that inflation, and which the Trump administration initiated and the Biden administration continued, kept the economy afloat, and that President Biden steered the nation towards the soft recovery every economist believed was impossible. People like me were wrong."

Michael Ian Black at The Daily Beast reacts to Donald Trump's victory in the 2024 presidential election.

As do David Frum and Spencer Kornhaber at The Atlantic.

As do John F. Harris, Steven Waldman, and other writers at Politico.

As do Mona Charen and Scott Conway at The Bulwark.

As do Robert Kuttner and David Dayen at The American Prospect.

As do Ed Kilgore and Jonathan Chait at New York.

As do Timothy Noah, Kate Aronoff, Greg Sargent, Jonathan Zimmerman, Eric Schmeltzer, and Michael Tomasky at The New Republic.

As does Sophie Clark at Newsweek.

As does Sam Wolfson (in an interview with Richard Reeves), Ben Davis, and John Harris at The Guardian.

As does Ashleigh Fields (in an interview with Sen. John Fetterman) at The Hill.

As do Paul Rosenberg and Jim Sleeper at Salon.

As do John West and Kara Dapena at The Wall Street Journal.

As do Jeet Heer and Joan Walsh at The Nation.

As does David Brooks of The New York Times.

As do John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira at The Liberal Patriot (who earlier argued that "the progressive moment is well and truly over").

And in subsequent week, reactions continue from:

James K. Galbraith, Jeet Heer, and Neil Kraus and Jon Shelton at The Nation.

Chauncey DeVega at Salon.

Jesse Ferguson and Austin Sarat at The Hill.

Jared Abbott, Dustin Guastella, and Sean Mason at Jacobin.

Conor Friedersdorf, Jon Favreau, Annie Lowrey, Ed Kilgore, and Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic.

Andrew Prokop at Vox.

Walter Russell Mead at Tablet.

Bharat Ramamurti at The Bully Pulpit blog.

And Michael Bahraeen, Juan David Rojas, Justin Vassallo, and Ruy Teixeira at The Liberal Patriot.

"The Culture War Gives Life Shape and Meaning"

"Twenty-first-century communalism is a peculiar kind of communalism. For starters, it's very socially conscious and political. Whether you're on the MAGA right or the social-justice left, you define your identity by how you stand against what you perceive to be the dominant structures of society. Groups on each side of the political divide are held together less by common affections than by a common sense of threat, an experience of collective oppression.  Today's communal culture is based on a shared belief that society is broken, systems are rotten, the game is rigged, injustice prevails, the venal elites are out to get us; we find solidarity and meaning in resisting their oppression together. Again, there is a right-wing version (Donald Trump's 'I am your retribution') and a left-wing version (the intersectional community of oppressed groups), but what they share is an us-versus-them Manichaeism." 

David Brooks at The Atlantic warns that "[d]oomsaying can become a self-fulfilling prophecy."

You Are So Good and They Are So Stupid

"In one of the film's most famous scenes, the White folk of Rock Ridge prepare en masse to shoot Bart. But Bart escapes by pretending to be both a ruthless bad Black stereotype and a helpless good deferential Black stereotype at once, putting a gun to his own head and edging away while talking to himself. The White denizens of Rock Ridge confronted with their own doubled prejudices, glitz out like bamboozled robots on Star Trek."

Noah Berlatsky at CNN notes the fiftieth anniversary of Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles.

"Some 60 Years After Its Birth, the Meritocracy Seems More and More Morally Vacuous"

"The only way to remedy this system is through institutional reform that widens the criteria by which people get sorted. For instance, we need more pathways to success, so those who are not academically inclined have routes to social leadership; programs like national service, so that people with and without college degrees have more direct contact with one another; and an end to policies like residential zoning rules that keep the affluent segregated on top. More broadly, changing this sorting mechanism requires transforming our whole moral ecology, such that possession of a Stanford degree is no longer seen as signifying a higher level of being."

At The Atlantic, David Brooks writes about "How the Bobos Broke America."

And Patrick Wyman discusses the "American Gentry."

"Has Done What Neither Clinton nor Obama Could Do"

"'This moment is like 1981, the dawn of the Reagan Revolution, except in reverse,' wrote David Brooks of the New York Times. 'It's not just that government is heading in a new direction, it's the whole paradigm of the role of government in American life is shifting. Biden is not causing these tectonic plates to shift, but he is riding them.'"

John Blake at CNN argues that Joe Biden has "dethroned the Welfare Queen."

"He Was Elected to Shred the Dominant American Culture"

"This establishment, too, has had its failures. It created an economy that benefits itself and leaves everybody else out. It led America into war in Iraq and sent the working class off to fight it. It has developed its own brand of cultural snobbery. Its media, film and music industries make members of the working class feel invisible and disrespected.

"So in 2016, members of the outraged working class elected their own Abbie Hoffman as president. Trump is not good at much, but he is wickedly good at sticking his thumb in the eye of the educated elites. He doesn't have to build a new culture, or even attract a majority. He just has to tear down the old one.

"That's exactly what he's doing."

At The New York Times, David Brooks calls Donald Trump "The Abbie Hoffman of the Right."

"My Brain Has Apparently Decided That It's Not Interested in Devoting More Neurons to That Guy"

"As Joseph Bottum wrote in 'An Anxious Age,' mainline Protestants created a kind of unifying culture that bound people of different political views. You could be Catholic, Jewish, Muslim or atheist, but still you were influenced by certain mainline ideas—the Protestant work ethic, the WASP definition of a gentleman. Leaders from Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama hewed to a similar mainline standard for what is decent in public life and what is beyond the pale.

"Over the last several decades mainline Protestantism has withered. The country became more diverse. The WASPs lost their perch atop society. The mainline denominations lost their vitality.

"For a time, we lived off the moral capital of the past. But the election of Trump shows just how desiccated the mainline code has become. A nation guided by that ethic would not have elected a guy who is a daily affront to it, a guy who nakedly loves money, who boasts, who objectifies women, who is incapable of hypocrisy because he acknowledges no standard of propriety other than that which he feels like doing at any given moment."

David Brooks at The New York Times is finished with Donald Trump.

And he calls on the CEO of Google to resign over l'affaire James Damore.

"The Educated Class Have Created Barriers to Mobility"

"To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you've got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality.
"The educated class has built an ever more intricate net to cradle us in and ease everyone else out. It's not really the prices that ensure 80 percent of your co-shoppers at Whole Foods are, comfortingly, also college grads; it's the cultural codes."

David Brooks at The New York Times discusses Richard Reeves's Dream Hoarders and Elizabeth Currid-Halkett's The Sum of Small Things.

Osita Nwanevu at Slate responds to Brooks.

"The Myth of the Sharing-Obsessed, Optimistic but Oversensitive Millennial Had Taken Hold"

"Despite skepticism about this fatalistic view of history, Strauss and Howe's thinking about generations—and particularly about millennials—had outsize influence. While promoting Generations, Strauss boasted that 'Al Gore is sending this book to every member of Congress, he believes in it so much.' The Washington Post’s review marveled at the word-of-mouth publicity the book had garnered. The authors expounded their theory in an 18-page feature in The Atlantic, and saw their ideas recycled in endless turn-of-the-millennium columns about the future of the country's youth.
"Perhaps their most influential champion was David Brooks."

Laura Marsh at The New Republic laments that "[t]he media decided what millennial culture and values would be decades ago, before some of us were even born."

"We'll Also Need to Rebuild the Sense That We're All in This Together"

"The author R. R. Reno has argued that what we're really facing these days is a 'crisis of solidarity.' Many people, as the writers David and Amber Lapp note, feel pervasively betrayed: by for-profit job-training outfits that left them awash in debt, by spouses and stepparents, by people who collect federal benefits but don't work. They've stopped even expecting loyalty from their employers. The big flashing lights say: NO TRUST. That leads to an everyone-out-for-himself mentality and Trump's politics of suspicion. We'll need a communitarianism."

David Brooks in The New York Times attempts to understand why he did not anticipate Donald Trump's popularity.

"It's Death by Being Shot or Poisoning"

"Lindsey Graham was particularly piquant in his criticism. He was very clear he didn't like Cruz, who he said was no better than Trump and whom he accused of McCarthyism. He cracked, 'If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.'
"A lot can change in a couple weeks. Graham made his joke about murdering Cruz way back on February 26, which makes it all the more surprising to hear from the South Carolina senator these days."

David A. Graham at The Atlantic reports on Republican leaders coming to terms with settling for Ted Cruz in order to block Donald Trump.

But David Brooks in The New York Times argues against Republicans embracing Cruz.

And Jonathan Chait at New York explores why conservative writers oppose Trump in the first place.

"Tuesday's Results Should Sting"

"Yet she now has a very real reason to worry. Her team tried its hardest to tamp down expectations in the lead-up to Tuesday's primary and will continue to do everything it can to spin the loss into something resembling an inconsequential footnote, a challenge that becomes more difficult the further she finishes from Sanders in the final New Hampshire count. But while Tuesday's results won't decide the nomination, the results can be discounted only so much. Sanders had the wind at his back in New Hampshire over the past few months, but the state can't be mistaken as hostile territory for Clinton. Bill Clinton used a surprise second-place finish in the 1992 primary as a springboard to the nomination that year and went on to win the state in the general election both that fall and four years later. In 2008, Hillary beat then–Sen. Barack Obama by nearly 3 points in New Hampshire, surprising pollsters in the process. This year, she had the backing of the state's Democratic governor, Maggie Hassan, and the state's sole Democratic senator, Jeanne Shaheen. She led Bernie by roughly 40 points this past summer and had regained a polling lead as recently as December."

Josh Voorhees in Slate reacts to Bernie Sanders's victory in the New Hampshire primary.

And David Brooks in The New York Times writes that he already misses President Obama.

"The Kind of Explanation That Could Only Be Offered by Someone Oblivious to His Own Advantages"

"For Brooks, the problem with poor people is that they’re immoral. It's not because they're structurally disadvantaged, or because their local economies have collapsed, or because jobs have been shipped overseas, or because they attended chaotic schools, or because their parents worked multiple jobs for unlivable wages, or because the material demands of existence occupy the bulk of their time. Nope, it's because of poor 'social psychology.'"


Sean Illing in Slate criticizes David Brooks's writing about Baltimore.

"Our System Isn’t Designed for It"

"Essentially, Republicans looked around when Obama was sworn in and saw political opportunity. They had lost the White House and faced steep Democratic majorities in the Senate and House. In a way, this made them weak; they had no power to advance their own agenda. But it also gave them strength; they had considerable power to stall Obama’s agenda, and with economic anxiety rampant, it seemed logical to assume voters would blame the ruling party if things didn’t turn around quickly.

"The result is that Republicans devoted themselves not to constructively criticizing Democratic proposals, crafting feasible alternatives, and accepting olive branches from the administration but instead to cranking up the hysteria and treating virtually every Obama initiative as a step toward socialism. They matched this with legislative obstruction, tying up scores of nominations, forcing a record number of filibusters, and forcing Democrats to pass their agenda on party-line votes."

Steve Kornacki in Salon discusses the ramifications of rewarding Republican obstructionism.

And Timothy Noah in The New Republic calls out David Brooks for arguing in favor of extortion.

What's the Matter with Mitt Romney's Campaign?

"The truth is that Romney is constantly constrained by what conservatives want him to do and by what they believe. Furthermore, what they want is generally unpopular, and what they believe is far too often simply cut off from the reality that the rest of the nation lives in.
"So Romney cannot have a coherent foreign policy because what his voters want to hear is that Barack Obama sympathizes with terrorists. Most Americans, meanwhile, think of Obama as the guy who took out bin Laden. Romney cannot have a sensible tax policy because conservatives insist that he promote large, self-funding tax cuts for the rich. Most of the nation, however, supports raising taxes on the rich, and reality insists that cutting taxes also reduces revenues. Also, Romney didn’t invent the 47 percent nonsense; whether he truly believes it or not, he was simply parroting back what his voters have been hearing for years from Rush Limbaugh and others like him."

Jonathan Bernstein explains in Salon.

And he expands on this at The Washington Monthly.


"Some people blame bad campaign managers for Romney’s underperforming campaign, but the problem is deeper. Conservatism has lost the balance between economic and traditional conservatism. The Republican Party has abandoned half of its intellectual ammunition. It appeals to people as potential business owners, but not as parents, neighbors and citizens."

David Brooks adds his take in The New York Times.

"As a Description of America Today, Romney’s Comment Is a Country-Club Fantasy"

"The people who receive the disproportionate share of government spending are not big-government lovers. They are Republicans. They are senior citizens. They are white men with high school degrees. As Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution has noted, the people who have benefited from the entitlements explosion are middle-class workers, more so than the dependent poor.

"Romney’s comments also reveal that he has lost any sense of the social compact. In 1987, during Ronald Reagan’s second term, 62 percent of Republicans believed that the government has a responsibility to help those who can’t help themselves. Now, according to the Pew Research Center, only 40 percent of Republicans believe that.

"The Republican Party, and apparently Mitt Romney, too, has shifted over toward a much more hyperindividualistic and atomistic social view—from the Reaganesque language of common citizenship to the libertarian language of makers and takers. There’s no way the country will trust the Republican Party to reform the welfare state if that party doesn’t have a basic commitment to provide a safety net for those who suffer for no fault of their own."

David Brooks in The New York Times reacts to the leaked tape of Mitt Romney talking to wealthy donors.

Timothy Noah in The New Republic looks at how Romney's remarks have divided conservatives.

As does Ed Kilgore at The Washington Monthly.