What Is the Social Purpose of David Brooks?

David Brooks is trash. This is so obviously the case that I will spend no time whatsoever proving it, except to link to his latest piece which equivocates between social democracy and the “alt-right,” or as we like to call it here in the literate world, fascism.

David Brooks being trash leads to an obvious question: what the fuck is he doing on the New York Times masthead? Who is so deeply invested in having him on board that they are willing to tolerate unceasing ridicule for it? It’s impossible to say for certain, of course, but I have a thesis.

Before I get to it, it’s important to point out that Brooks has virtually no qualifications to comment on anything; he owes his current position to nothing more than a moderate intelligence and a talent for social climbing. A child of two comfortable academics, he attended the University of Chicago where he begged William Buckley for a job via satirical sketch (no, really). He worked the crime beat for a local news service for a bit and then interned for the National Review; he also spent some time at the Hoover Institution. His only real job involved being editor of the book review for the Wall Street Journal, after which he promptly switched to the opinion page, where he pretty much has remained ever since. Brooks’ only qualifications for doing so involve being a “conservative commentator” of impeccable lineage, which is to say that he did time on the wingnut welfare circuit just like all the other washouts and losers who constitute the conservative “intellectual class.”

During his stint at the Times, which is ongoing from 2003, Brooks has repeatedly proven himself to be a howling void of thought, incapable of engaging on a serious and direct level with any idea he doesn’t already hold. His sociology is risible, and his lack of self-awareness is legendary; this is, after all, the man who unironically taught a class at Yale on the subject of humility and assigned them his own columns. His one constant is the rhetorical trick of always taking the most centrist position of milquetoast liberalism and the most insane positions of the right wing, splitting the difference, and then planting himself firmly in the “center” of political discourse that he has just engineered out of nowhere.

Again, what purpose does this serve? Who is actually moved by this? The answer, I think, is twofold: one is that David Brooks has the job that he has not because of any special qualifications (as shown above, he has none) or any critical capacity for insight (ditto) but rather because he knows the right people. Brooks went to the same schools they went to, interned at the “correct” magazines (in the upper echelons of boomer liberalism the National Review is incorrectly considered to have intellectual value), and has held the “correct” positions at more mainstream publications. That he is a waste of space doesn’t matter to anyone; once you ascend sufficiently high in this world, you can never fail out of it. No number of terrible columns or terrible books or terrible classes taught will ever disqualify Brooks from his post. His defenders will always shrug and point to his publication record, as though bylines and one’s name on a book jacket were more important than the actual work. In that sense, Brooks’ social value consists entirely of demonstrating how chummy quasi-nepotism and speaking the language of the elites is more important than one’s actual intellectual contributions.

The second answer is that Brooks remains a kind of lodestar for a certain class of Times reader: the relatively affluent, centrist (maybe even center-left) boomer, who of course does not at all go in for the vulgarity of a Trump, but finds protests by black people over their arbitrary murder at the hands of police just a bit too gauche. Brooks is their safe space, ready at all times to validate their fears of the masses they imagine must be assembled with torches and pitchforks right outside their castle gates. This goes double for Brooks’ liberal readers: they get to paint themselves as “openminded” and “willing to listen to the other side” by reading a man who will gently mock their bourgeois-liberal sensibilities while serving as a stalking-horse for your standard loot-the-country-and-fuck-the-poor Republicanism. Brooks provides the illusion of dissent which merely reinforces the circumscribing of acceptable political opinions into a boundary that just barely includes the center-left but mostly caters to the right. This works out very well for the center-left leadership of the Times, which cements its claims to “legitimacy” by employing obvious cranks like Brooks as a sop to the right while at the same time punching hard to the left to avoid any serious criticism of its own role in our coming nightmare. The twin poles of managerial liberalism and center-right culture-shaming generate between them a kind of affective niche occupied by the Times that it then markets to its readers.

David Brooks is trash, but he wouldn’t have a job if some other people weren’t socially predisposed to hiring him for frivolous reasons. Which is also why he’s going to keep that job until they carry him out of his office (real or metaphorical) feet first, and why we’re going to be reading his therapy notes in the form of thinly veiled columns about his divorce throughout the Trumpocalypse.