Source: Wikimedia Commons.
David Brooks, in his column today at the New York Times, writes that he is leaving the New York Times after twenty-two years of conservative derp-mongering.
One of the reasons that Brooks galls me to the bone is that he is incapable of ever doubting that he holds the moral high ground. No matter how wrong he turns out to be, he never questions his conviction that he has the standing to school the rest of us on the righteousness of derp, and to complain about moral decline without a trace of irony.
Yes, Brooks turned on Donald Trump after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. But never for a minute did it occur to Brooks to doubt his reams of derp. Ever an elitist, he never imagined that 77 million non-elites would fall for what he himself had helped sell them for years. The Republican Party would restrain extremists, he said. The sublime moral fiber and righteous judgment of conservative leaders would prevent castastrophe, he said. As it turned out, Trump didn’t hijack conservatism. He only took it to where conservatism will always go unless something stands in its way. The institutions and elites that Brooks thought would make Trumpist extremism impossible in America instead collapsed instantly, and then submissively carried water for Trump, the law and the Constitution be damned.
The work of center-right discourse is a lot like money-laundering. Brooks’ entire career was about laundering the doings of the cunning and deceitful movement that got us to where we are today. He didn’t do that because he is corrupt. He did it because he is foolish.
Oh sure, his tone was always civil. Many fell for it — the idea that good prose equals good judgment. Over and over again, he got away with normalizing the right-wing movement, providing it moral cover, and scolding the left while ignoring the radicalization of the right. To Brooks, moral rot and moral danger were always to the left and never to the right. He probably was genuinely surprised upon finally seeing that it was just fascism all along.
And it’s not just Brooks. The entire center-right project, in all eras, has been the same, from Buckley to Kristol to Douthat. They all met the ongoing need for flattering self-interest and privilege with high-flown language. One could as easily program a center-right derp generator as a postmodern jargon generator.
In fact I asked ChatGPT to generate a David Brooks New York Times column. The first run sounded so much like Brooks that it probably would have made it through the New York Times’ editors with no changes. I asked ChatGPT to please include just enough parody that even a dense soul like David Brooks would recognize that somebody is making fun of him.
Center-right derp generator, David Brooks version
We are once again at an inflection point, which is to say a moment when everyone feels aggrieved and no one is entirely sure why. The left believes history is a spreadsheet; the right believes it is a vibe. Both are missing the deeper truth, which lives somewhere between a well-run PTA meeting and a pickup basketball game where the rules are politely enforced.
In recent years, we have developed an unfortunate habit of blaming “systems” for outcomes that are better explained by the quiet disappearance of virtues like self-restraint, neighborliness, and reading the room. Yes, economic forces matter — I’ve read at least three books that say so — but no society has ever tax-credited its way out of a character deficit.
What’s striking when you travel the country, as I do between airport lounges, is how hungry people are for moral coherence. They don’t want another policy white paper. They want to know why everyone is yelling and whether it’s still possible to raise a decent child without a graduate seminar in trauma-informed parenting.
Our public life has become performative, our discourse shrill, our certainties strangely certain. Social media rewards the dopamine hit of indignation while punishing the old-fashioned virtues of hesitation and mild confusion. We are all experts now, especially on subjects we encountered twelve minutes ago.
History reminds us — gently, but firmly — that flourishing societies depend on mediating institutions: schools, churches, bowling leagues, and whatever it was people did before streaming services. These spaces teach the essential lesson that freedom requires limits, preferably exercised voluntarily and by someone else.
The way forward will not come from radicalism or reaction, but from recommitment: to norms, to decency, to the radical idea that adulthood involves obligations. Progress begins not when we win arguments, but when we remember how to behave at hotel breakfast buffets.