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Go Home The Tragedy Of David Brooks

JONATHAN CHAIT JULY 6, 2010

The Tragedy Of David Brooks

BY JONATHAN CHAIT

This quite good New York magazine profile of David Brooks made me feel sad for him:

"Every column is a failure,” says Brooks. “I always wish I did something different.” Part of the problem is the format. There’s only so much you can do with 800 words. “I’m a 3,000-word person,” he says.

Deadline days end with fourteen piles of paper stacked around his office—printouts, notes, index cards, photocopies—one for each paragraph of the story. If the column doesn’t come together, he resorts to the laundry list, beginning each paragraph with “First,” “Second,” etc. “Usually when I do that, I’ve written another version of the column and it sucked,” he says, “so those are usually acts of sheer desperation.”

Plus Brooks just isn’t that opinionated. “I look at Andrew Sullivan or Jonathan Chait, churning out opinions,” he says. “I don’t have that many.” Brooks’s goal isn’t to change minds, he says. “Do I expect someone with View X on a policy, and I argue View Anti-X, that somehow they’re gonna totally change their mind? I don’t think I’ve ever had that effect on anybody.” He can “strengthen and highlight certain feelings,” he says. But that’s about it.

Obviously, every column Brooks writes is not a failure. But many of them are. Brooks is very good at making observations, but not especially good at making arguments. He's miscast in the role of an op-ed columnist. You can see that in today's column. It's primarily a set of Brooksian observations -- Keynesian economists are very smart and rely upon models, businessmen distrust the government. Brooks presents these observations as an argument against large-scale stimulus, but they really aren't. They could just as easily be presented as an argument for why businessmen are ignorant of macroeconomics.

Brooks says that it's very hard to change peoples' minds. I agree. Very few people have the sorts of minds that base their beliefs upon factual premises building to a logical conclusion, and which can therefore change their minds in the face of contrary evidence. The problem is that Brooks doesn't make the kind of arguments that could convince a person like that. (This isn't ideological: Ross Douthat does make those kind of  arguments pretty effectively.)

Brooks used to be known mainly for his long-form journalism. I doubt anybody read his work and thought, "This man should be writing an op-ed column." But what happened is that the New York Times needed a conservative who liberals would find amenable, and there were few candidates other than Brooks. The role of New York Times columnist is very prestigious and lucrative, so Brooks obviously felt he couldn't turn it down. From the perspective of the Times, he's quite valuable, even though he's in a role that misuses his considerable talents. The sad thing is that Brooks understands the dilemma. Here's something he told Howard Kurtz in 2008:

When Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. offered him an op-ed spot soon after the 2003 invasion, Brooks wanted to turn it down, figuring it would be hard to compress his ideas to column length. But, he said, "I had a failure of courage."

It's easy for me to say that he should quit the op-ed gig and go write 3,000 word reported essays -- that would be better for Brooks' readers but (I would surmise) bad for his income. I don't mean this pejoratively -- when you have a family, looking after your income is not pure selfishness. In any case, he's trapped in the wrong genre.

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21 comments

I have a question: to what extent is David Brooks different from Fred Barnes? I'm seriously asking.

- propjoe

July 6, 2010 at 12:48pm

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Brooks has a sense of decency. I also strongly suspect that he voted for Obama.

- ironyroad

July 6, 2010 at 12:54pm

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Fred Barnes is almost as conservative as Rand Paul; David Brooks isn't anywhere remotely close to that. And yes, Brooks definitely has a sense of decency that Barnes doesn't. Could you imagine Fred Barnes on "Newshour with Jim Lehrer?" That said, I thik ironyroad's suspicion that Brooks voted for Obama is a bridge too far. Brooks knows what team he's on, and it ain't the D's.

- jimbomoron

July 6, 2010 at 1:05pm

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Were you asking that question in all seriousness, prop?

- liberal reformer

July 6, 2010 at 1:18pm

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Is Brooks still a neo-con? Because he was before 9-11. I just wonder about this guy. I find his columns beguiling.

- propjoe

July 6, 2010 at 1:21pm

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Liberal reformer: I was being totally serious. I infer a serious right-wing inclination from Brooks's columns: a faith in markets, a faith in the transformative use of military force that I see in Barnes's writings. Brooks has a different style, but I don't see his destination point as fundamentally different from Barnes's. That said, I stopped steadily reading Brooks a while ago for those reasons, so I'm not sure if those inferences remain true.

- propjoe

July 6, 2010 at 1:32pm

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"Brooks knows what team he's on, and it ain't the D's." Yes, but I don't think he would have seen a vote for Obama in that narrow way. I think he would have regarded it as a kind of gesture toward a potential new configuration in American political culture. Again, obviously I'm just speculating.

- ironyroad

July 6, 2010 at 1:41pm

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You have a problem with discernment, if you can't differentiate between Fred Barnes and David Brooks, prop. David Brooks would never have the fatuity to write a book like Barnes' Rebel-in-Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush and Barnes doesn't have the talent to pen a work like Brooks' Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There.

- liberal reformer

July 6, 2010 at 5:15pm

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Liberal: Thanks for the diagnosis. Mea maxima culpa.

- propjoe

July 7, 2010 at 12:14pm

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From my viewpoint (committed liberal), David Brooks succeeds as a public intellectual. On widely ranging topics, he is excellent at marshaling facts and opinions and presenting them cogently and succinctly. I nearly always read David Brooks; more than occasionally, I agree with him (read: he agrees with me). That NYT continues to employ him is a terrific public service. Hope he doesn't become too discouraged and leave for browner pastures.

- jamesroymorrison

July 7, 2010 at 1:02pm

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I was half-way into composing my comment when "jamesroymorrison"'s observation popped up. It reflects exactly my own opinion. Recognizing that this appreciation is partly a reflection of ego: "Bravo!"

- ArizonaMax

July 7, 2010 at 1:12pm

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'Propjoe' must be on TNR payroll playing discussion board provocateur with his irresistibly absurd question... but I'll bite. Fred Barnes is a laughable partisan, bully and buffoon who feels qualified to give opinions on everything. Brooks is a thoughtful writer, though sometimes glib, who does not feel qualified to give opinions on everything but still does because it's his job. Brooks' strength is his caustic misanthropy, which is hardly ever on view in his NYT columns but practically drips from the pages of his books - in particular when he lampoons the self-satisfaction that people derive from their enlightened consumerism. But again unlike Barnes, Brooks is self-conscious enough to realize that he also matches the description of the groups he lampoons, and from this comes a modesty and awareness that is quite rare among columnists/pundits, given their job.

- jbrennan

July 7, 2010 at 2:21pm

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Brooks thinks that by wrapping his justification of right wing greed with the good names of Burke and Oakeshott by he is elevating his thoughts. It doesn't work. Read Tenenhaus on how Burke would have repudiated Brooks. And isn't it funny how in yesterday's Times article Brooks disparages ideas by referring to their authors as having "high IQ's". His earlier piece on heath reform reveals how he doesn't let logic get in the way of his dog-eat-dog ideology.

- mirpar

July 7, 2010 at 3:40pm

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Mirpar, do you have a link or other reference to Tanenhaus's thoughts on Burke v. Brooks?

- Curran1

July 7, 2010 at 7:49pm

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See eg Tanenahaus' book "The Death of Conservatism" p. 20: "To read Burke and Arendt is to realize how far the movement has strayed from genuinely conservative ideals......." There's much more.

- mirpar

July 8, 2010 at 10:41am

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I find it interesting that David Brooks doesn't think he has changed any minds through his column, and that Jonathan Chait agrees with this assessment. Maybe the problem is that David and Jonathan are thinking in terms of single issues as opposed to broader perspectives and one's outlook on life. Where I think Brooks is most effective is not in changing one's opinion about a particular issue, but in changing one's perspective about how to think about things in general. As Brooks has written about civility (or the lack of it) in today's politics, the need for less partisanship and -- believe it or not -- having a more sympathetic and less hysterical view of the Tea Party movement, I have found that he has considerably tempered my partisanship. And I have consistently found his columns on genius and intellectual achievement thought provoking. Brooks is not a mindless ideologue; this much is true. But do we really need more mindless ideologues in today's mass media? (In all fairness, I know that Chait is not calling for more mindless ideologues because he gave Ross Douthat as an example of what he believes is an effective columnist. But still, every time I read Brooks I feel as though I have learned something; I don't usually feel that way after I have read Douthat)

- matthawk14

July 8, 2010 at 7:01pm

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I agree with the thrust of Chait's assessment about Brook's writing style. Brooks often avoids discernible deductive arguments, which is irritating. (It's also very different from Chait's own structured and logical argumentation style, which a reader is apt to learn quite a bit more from.) Given the subject, though, I was surprised not to read here or in the comments about one of Brooks' more annoying habits, which any regular reader of his would be familiar with: he opens a large percentage of his columns by introducing a false dichotomy, which he never seriously attempts to bridge. "These people (the blank-ists) view the world as such-as-such, while an alternative view (held by the anti-blank-ists) is such-and-such." Instead of closing the argument based on solid premises, he provides a biased characterization of the two extremes in order to stack the deck towards the one he favors. To me, it comes across as writing-to-formula and even laziness. Also, judging from some of his columns, Brooks' incoherence seems to have something to do with an emotional distrust of systematic attempts to solve complex problems, and a Brave-New-Worldish fear of the overreach of intellectuals. He dubiously characterized the health plan, for instance, without giving any particular grounds, as a more complex undertaking than the Iraq War. While he rightly fears that bold actions usually have unintended consequences, he, like many temperamental conservatives, overestimates the inherent stability of systems left to their own devices. Additionally, he doesn't appreciate that there are many good things that he and others of his persuasion gladly support that were bold, even reckless, in their day, but seem totally sensible now, only with the patina of time. And he doesn't appreciate that many of these things, not least the creation of our Constitutional democracy, were the product of bold, hard, deliberate, thinking.

- mikemoise

July 9, 2010 at 12:29am

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I'm told Christopher Marlowe once wrote a very clever essay on why William Shakespeare wasn't much of a playwright...

- dburchell

July 9, 2010 at 1:12am

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The person who said Brooks is "beguiling" in his columns, summed up a lot. Particularly true when I went to the dictionary to confirm the meanings of the word. (PS I sometimes almost feel sorry for him.)

- atlasqq

July 9, 2010 at 12:33pm

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My husband accuses Brooks of, as a relatively standard gambit, starting a column with something that seems to be an idea he has, going for a few paragraphs, and then revealing it's a recycling of work by someone else that he has discovered. Much of his writing is about something he has just read, either new or sometimes from a general legacy of literate writing. I'm suprised no one mentions this. My husband treats it as being close to intellectual fraud, whereas I say, he's a popularizer and it's a useful service. But I agree when he starts out, with that bright look on his face of a new insight (in person), you think he has an idea. It always turns out to be a popularization of somebody else's idea.

- Walpole

July 22, 2010 at 10:34am

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I corrected "suprised" to "surprised" but the correction didn't get into the transmission.

- Walpole

July 22, 2010 at 10:37am

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